Biking and Hiking and Kayaking: Be Careful Out There

Hams Are Always Ahead of the Technology Curve: Hacking Telegraphy in 1903

I got interested in radio when I was about 8 years old and Santa Claus gave me a 27 mhz walkie talkie for Christmas. Luckily, Santa also  gave the same thing to a few other kids in the neighborhood, so there was someone to talk to - that Santa really knows what he is doing.

Fun to talk to my local friends but I immediately wanted to talk far away, so I opened up the back of the hand held radio and figured out how to disconnect the telescoping whip antenna and connect a wire to the inside of it. I then unscrewed the twin-lead connection my father had for our TV antenna, and connected the walkie talkie to our TV antenna. I could immediately here fishing boats out in the Middle Bay and out in the Atlantic off of Jones Beach. None of them would talk to me, but I did annoy a bunch of cab drivers I found on other frequencies - who said "turn off your Christmas present and shut up kid" when I tried to order a taxi.

I also annoyed my father, who climbed up on the roof to see what was wrong with the TV antenna... From there I could have easily moved towards a life of crime and hacking but I fought off the dark side and went the ham radio path.

New Scientist magazine has a neat piece on how another radio-enthusiast hacked one of the earliest demonstrations of wireless by Marconi - all the way back in 1903: here.

Snow and Ice Ixnay Skyline Drive; Interpid Hikers Divert to the Snowy Appalachian Trail from Gathland to Weverton

The weekend began with going to see the Charlize Theron movie "Young Adult" with Jim/Jacqui. Another "eh" movie - great acting, but a story that went nowhere. Plus, any movie that has Charlize Theron acting like a boy is wasting Charlize Theron's many assets. We did learn that Jim has a phobia that causes him to avoid any new restaurants employing searchlights for publicity.

Saturday was for putting up the outdoor Christmas decorations and for doing the final battle with the leaves and banishing as many of them as possible to the woods behind our house. It is amazing that each year when I take the lights down I very systematically wind them in a certain order to make it easier to put up the next year. But the next year it always appears I have done so in the way to make it as hard a possible - basically, the exact opposite of easiest. This year I will pull a Constanza.

The next day Carole was having her annual cookie bake, where our house is invaded by hordes of women bringing bottles of wine and bags of flour, so to avoid the estrogen equivalent of the Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf incidents, Carl and I had planned to drive down to Skyline Drive and activate some Summits on the Air in the Shenandoah National Park. But a call to their road condition hot line revealed that the first 65 miles of Skyline Drive was closed due to snow and ice, and a peek at their webcam verified that. It time for Plan Bravo.

So, we diverted to an oldie but goodie: hiking seven miles from Gathland State Park to Weverton Cliffs on the Appalachian Trail. It was partly cloudy and in the thirties, with traces of snow on the ground when we started. This hike is pretty level until the descent from the cliffs at the end, but there is a bit of an uphill at the start. Climbing that caused me to get a bit toasty, so I took off my hat and gloves, but when we got to the top it became completely overcast and started to snow steadily. There was no wind and it was a very polite and scenic kind of snow, but it was actually accumulating and made us wonder if the roads would be covered when we got back to my car.

However, when we reached the Cliffs, the sky cleared and the snow skedaddled. We had the usual fine views of the Potomac from the cliffs - and the cold weather meant no stinkbugs, which is always a plus. We ran into a few more hikers as we made the switchback descent down to my car, but not a lot of people were out on the AT that day. We mused about the vagaries of dying Korean despots, plans to shut down post office buildings full of rude postal workers, whether Julianne Margulies had ever been on "Mad Men" (nope, it was "The Sopranos") and where Carl had seen Marugulies' boyfriend's wife (in "Young Adult") before (on "The Good Wife) and the vagaries of different types of berries their suitability pie-wise. Hmmm, maybe I did get hit by some random estrogen blasts as the cookie women were approaching my house.

We hiked down to my car, shuttled Carl up to his Jeep and drove home, as usual listening to the radio to hear the Redskins find another way to lose an actual way to beat the evil NY Giants. As I got closer to home I began to hear the high pitched whine of a dozen women fighting over two ovens and began to get whiffs of a mixture of Jessica Mclintock, vanilla, shiraz/syrah blend and cardamom. Now, that might have been pretty exciting if they were having a lingerie show when I got inside, but while a dozen women wielding knives and wooden spoons covered in flour and chopped nuts might be fantasy material for those Iron Chef wannabees, for me it meant grabbing a few handfuls of food and fleeing to the basement...

A Mostly About Carole Weekend, With a Bit of Hiking Thrown In

This weekend was Carole's birthday, so first we went up to Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore and had a great meal. They asked if it was a special occasion and I, of course, said yes - so when they brought out Carole's dessert they had written "Happy Birthday Carole" in drizzled chocolate on the plate (the pumpkin baklava briefly occupied the blank space you see below that in the picture above...) From there we drove to Canton and spent the night at the Inn at 2920, a great B&B in the eclectic waterfront Canton area.

After an breakfast of fruit/yogurt/granola and cranberry walnut bread, followed by a pumpkin pancake deal, we went over to the Canton Club to work out - probably burning about as many calories as in the fruit we ate. The Canton Club is an odd health club, located above the Bo Brooks seafood restaurant. The health club is nothing special - but all the walls are glass, with Baltimore harbor views looking over multi-million dollar yachts and across to Ft. McHenry.

From there it was off to Carole's favorite Baltimore chocolate shop, Rhebs. The chocolate shop is basically in a tiny little house that was jammed with Bawlmer women waiting in line - we took number 50, when they were serving number 21. You could just grab some pre-made boxes right away, but nooooooooooooooooooooo - a big part of the fun for chocoholics apparently is sloowly choosing each individual piece of chocolate from the hundreds of different choices. During the hour and 15 minute wait, I tried to speed things up by helping the staff walk a 90 year old woman to her car with her bags of chocolate - I could have really sped things up by just stealing her bag, but Carole ixnayed that.

From there we headed into Pennsylvania and the picturesque town of Kennett Square, where to wash down the chocolate we had a fine lunch at the Half Moon Restaurant and Saloon in the roof-top atrium. Then off to Longwood Gardens, which is some huge-ass ex-Dupont estate with an enormous conservatory with miles of greenhouses with everything done up for Christmas and even more miles of trees and gardens all lit up for the holidays. Several hours of walking around and I figured I had earned the maximum possible SNAG points just before causing complete and permanent loss to my testicles. So, we hopped in the car, drove the 100 miles back home where I drank orange juice from the carton, left the toilet seat up and did my nails  burped and spit a lot.

On the drive up up MD Rt. 1 to Kennett Square I had noticed trail heads for trails along the Big and Little Gunpowder Falls areas that I had never seen before. So, the next day Carl and I did the Little Gunpowder Fall trail, which entailed a manly stream crossing that I masculinely trod across quickly, while Carl analyzed it for several hours, getting in touch with his feelings about different potential crossing points before daintily making his way to the other side.

After about a 3 mile hike we came to the olde towne of Jerusalem Mill which was apparently the site of lots of macho battles during the Revolutionary War and had a big mill that aggressively ground corn and stuff into flour that women would bake with and men would use to polish their muskets and probably polish cue sticks or boxing gloves.

We added a 1 mile loop through the woods to the cutest little a solidly constructed covered bridge. On the way back we tried the Blue Trail which diverted from the river to follow an old logging road up the hills and through the dales until it joined back with the Little Gunpowder River Trail. After chopping down some trees with axes, killing some deer with our bare hands and planting apple seeds along the way for future generations of manly hikers, we got back into my Subaru HumVee and drove back home.

Hamming From a High Point While Precariously Balanced on a Three Legged Bicycle Seat

Global warming has once again brought gawgeous fall weather to the Maryland area. Saturday was for yard work and Saturday night was for seeing the "pretend George Clooney and Beau Bridges are Hawaiian" movie, "Descendants." Eh - not a bad movie, but not a great movie. The dual premises of George Clooney's wife cheating on him with a schlemiel, and Clooney being the heir to the King Kamehameha fortune are a bit hard to swallow. But I have to say: I admire the cujones it took for them to put out a movie where one of the leading characters is continually shown dying realistically (but slowly) in a hospital bed on life support...

Sunday Carl and I did another radio nerd hike - a Summit on the Air radio/hiking extragavaganza. This time we hiked up the Appalachian Trail from Smithburg to Mt. Quirack, often called High Point (for reasons that will soon become apparent). The start is about a 700 foot climb straight up, passing a nice waterfall along the way. The temperature had been in the high 30s when we started but between the sun coming up higher in the sky and the exertion of the climb, we were plenty toasty.

After the initial climb, you reach the junction for the Raven Rocks shelter, a .1 mile detour off the AT. We decided to take a look and it is impressive - nice picnic tables, loft area for sleeping, outdoor fire pit, composting latrine, valet parking, etc. We were very tempted to just set up the radio gear here but that wouldn't have been kosher since we weren't at the actual summit. So, on we hiked and Carl told me all about the shortcomings of his Kindle, the complete history of the TV show "The Good Wife" and his adventures making a cranberry pie. Turns out slicing a bag full of cranberries in half is a pain in the ass, and boiling them up makes better glue than pie filling.

We reached the summit at High Point, which used to be a hang gliding launch platform but in recent years has been taken over by graffiti artists who aren't good enough to show their stuff on city buildings - these guys are definitely not in the league of Banksy.  We admired the view and soon got to work finding a place to string up the antenna. There really wasn't a very good clearing so my first shot with the slingshot resulted in me getting the weight stuck in the wrong tree, so we went back to pipe elbow mode - we quickly had the 20 meter dipole up a whopping 20 feet in the air, in the middle of branches.

Now, in our previous adventure we had only hiked .5 miles to the operating site, and Carl was able to carry his portable Barcalounger. Since this was a 3.5 mile uphill hike, Carl had to use my portable three legged camping "stool" which is really more like a bicycle seat on a folding tripod. I find it very stable but I'm used to kayaking. Carl settled down very tentatively and started screaming he was falling and would roll down the hill and off the cliff. He finally got settled in and worked stations in Canada, New England, Oregon, Virginia and many other places.

Carl sloooowly and creakily got up after a while and I took a turn operating, and worked stations in Belgium, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. It was starting to get cold, so we broke down the setup, packed everything up and hiked back down the mountain. On the drive back we listened to the Washington Redskins find yet another way to lose - ah, the rituals of Autumn...