Nice things from Getty Images

Getty Images has a new program that lets you use some of their large supply of professional images for free for nonprofit purposes.  It's called their "Embed Images" service.  It's less flexible than you might want.  You can scale the image, but apparently can't crop it. You have to use their embedded viewer. (They give you an "iframe" to insert in your HTML.)

Still, there are possibilities.

Can I embed in a blog post? Let's give it a try:

Best spam lately

Today's Spam

My candidate for most educational spam is above.  Checking with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_numbering_system and current exchange rates, I find I am being offered something like US $ 1.5M.

I won't bite.  They seemed to have missed their demographic. (Note to Centurylink!)

Ham Radio and Ngram

Google's new service "Ngram" is cool.  It lets you search for any word or phrase through all the books Google has indexed, displaying the count versus year.

Here is the graph for "amateur radio":

and here is the result for "ham radio":

The significance?  Ham radio (in books) didn't start until about 1950! The Ngram view page also gives links for the books in particular year ranges.  I looked up some of them prior to 1965 and found lots that were in the "popular" category: Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Boy's Life, etc.  Amateur radio, however, has a book record back to 1900 if not before.

It's alive!

The brand new long-in-coming ARRL website is up! It is at www.arrl.org, naturally.

I had a tiny role in preparing some of the pages. Hopefully you will not see my fingerprints anywhere.

It has been a very ambitious project. Like war plans, we will see if the site survives contact with the enemy. (= users!)

It looks pretty good to me, and we can only expect it to improve.

Bing!

Try Bing.com, the new Microsoft search site, on "ham radio". Interesting results, especially the videos at the bottom.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ham+radio

New Year's Thoughts

Paraphrasing my favorite bookstore bookmark: Danger, the next year may be odd.

Steve K9ZW has a posting that brings home a good question. Is your on-line data secure? (Also, the post from K9JY.) What if your hosting service melts down? Some folks have been able to migrate their blogs and web sites when that has happened. But if you're like me, using a proprietary service such as blogger.com, you may not have that option.

That's an argument for putting anything of long-term value onto a site using industry standard software - preferably open source. But even open source solutions will fade after a while. You can always go back to bare HTML, saving your own off-line backups. (Even then, what are your choices for archival backups?)

It's something to think about.

Blogger.com vs AA6E

This blog was dead for about 24 hours thanks to obscure issues with how blogger.com deals with "custom" domain names. Or, maybe readers actually prefer seeing a big "Error 404" message instead of the normal drivel?

For better or worse, we're back. Thanks very much to the rapid advice provided through the Blogger rump blog called "The Real Blogger Status".

The ARRL Web Site

There is an interesting discussion over at KB6NU: http://kb6nu.com/what-do-you-think-about-the-arrls-website/.

Upgrading the Blog

I finally made the leap into the new Google-authenticated scheme on blogger.com. It was a good thing I did, because I found quite a number of user comments for the blog that were pending. All moderation requests were going to an obsolete email address.

Apologies to readers who made great comments along the way. They should now be posted.

-Martin

Updated aa6e.net site

The ham and family web site at www.aa6e.net is now updated and reformatted with CSS styles. Unfortunately, upgrading the content will take a while longer...

Optimal Callsign Lookup Page

If you want a quick and minimal callsign lookup, you could do worse than www.aa6e.net/lookup.html.

Ham blogging

After working with web sites for quite a while, I am just easing into the blogging world. WA1LOU had an ARRL Web Article (June, 2004), but it took a while to bubble up to my keyboard.

I did a search recently and turned up a number of interesting sites. See my links at the right. There's a lot of room for growth here!

From an email to Dan, KB6NU:

... Interesting what you come up with on http://www.globeofblogs.com/ when you look at their "amateur radio" category. I did register there, and now you can find me among the SWLs, podcasters, and what-not...

This is really cutting edge stuff, I have to say -- ham blogging. Ham
radio, for me, has morphed into 10% on-air and 60% Internet, with maybe 30% non-Internet reading and building. (I've been retired for a couple of years.)

Ham radio as a literary form! Unfortunately, [a lot] of hams can't relate to that. I recently looked at QST's guide for authors. Their advice about avoiding high falutin' language is quite charming. Or maybe I could find another adjective.