{"id":3422,"date":"2017-06-20T07:52:13","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T11:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=3422"},"modified":"2017-06-20T08:37:25","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T12:37:25","slug":"tuesday-20-june-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2017\/06\/20\/tuesday-20-june-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday, 20 June 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>07:52 &#8211;<\/strong><\/span> It was 59.0F (15C) when I took Colin out around 0620 this morning, damp and overcast. Barbara had to leave at 0630. She&#8217;s volunteering all day at the charity golf tournament that benefits the Wellness Center.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s official, or will be when it shows up in the FCC database, probably later today. I&#8217;m again a licensed amateur radio operator, after a gap of 40 years. And, for the first time in my 64 years, I failed a test.<\/p>\n<p>Since the FCC had completely forgotten about me, I had to start by taking the Technician Class exam. I blew through that in about eight minutes, at which point the examiners handed me the General Class exam. I blew through that one pretty quickly as well. <\/p>\n<p>After she graded the General Class exam, one of the examiners said I&#8217;d passed it as well, congratulated me on doing so, and asked since I&#8217;d aced both Technician and General if I wanted to try taking the Amateur Extra Class exam. At first, I demurred. The other two guys who were taking their GC exams had already finished, it was already 2030, and I said I didn&#8217;t want to hold them up. She and her husband, the second examiner, assured me that they weren&#8217;t in any hurry, as did Sam, the third examiner and the guy who&#8217;d taught the class. So they talked me into it. I hadn&#8217;t even glanced at the Amateur Extra material or test questions, so I knew going in that there was a very small chance I&#8217;d pass. But what the hell, why not try it? So I did. And failed it. Oh well.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve mentioned, the only one I cared about was the Tech exam. I don&#8217;t intend to use anything other than 2 meters and 440, so that&#8217;s all I needed. The only reason to get Amateur Extra was if I wanted to qualify as a Volunteer Examiner who could administer tests for all three classes. And I may still do that at some point, but I&#8217;m happy for now with what I have.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>I started seeing this message a week or two ago on the conservative sites Hotair and Townhall. The message is identical on both sites.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You are seeing this page because ads cannot be shown<\/p>\n<p>Ads allow us to pay the content creators of this site.<br \/>\nWhy is this happening?<\/p>\n<p>One of your browser extensions is blocking ads or scripts<br \/>\nHow to fix this:<\/p>\n<p>Which ad block extension do you have installed?<\/p>\n<p>Adblock Plus<\/p>\n<p>Click the red octagon with \u201cABP\u201d on the upper-right hand corner of the screen.<br \/>\nSelect Disable on to allow ads.<br \/>\nRefresh the page.<\/p>\n<p>AdBlock<\/p>\n<p>Click the red octagon with the hand on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.<br \/>\nSelect Don&#8217;t run on pages on this domain to allow ads.<br \/>\nIn the \u201cDon\u2019t run AdBlock on\u201c dialog box, select Exclude. The AdBlock icon changes to a \u201cthumbs up\u201d image.<br \/>\nRefresh the page.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ve unbookmarked both sites because they don&#8217;t follow my acceptable site policy, which simply stated is:<\/p>\n<p>o It is unacceptable for any site to run any type of ads whatsoever under any circumstances whatsoever.<\/p>\n<p>o It is unacceptable for any site to interfere in any way with the functions of any ad-blocker, popup blocker, or script blocker.<\/p>\n<p>o It is unacceptable for any site to use a paywall to limit access to some or all of its content.<\/p>\n<p>o It is unacceptable for any site to require any form of registration, including even an email address, and whether that registration is free or paid, to access the content on that site.<\/p>\n<p>o The only acceptable form of monetization is for a site to implement a micro-payments system that allows users of that site to pay a clearly-defined and readily-visible amount for each article or page that user views. Breaking articles into multiple pages to increase the cost to users of viewing an article is unacceptable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>07:52 &#8211; It was 59.0F (15C) when I took Colin out around 0620 this morning, damp and overcast. Barbara had to leave at 0630. She&#8217;s volunteering all day at the charity golf tournament that benefits the Wellness Center.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s official, or will be when it shows up in the FCC database, probably later today. I&#8217;m again a licensed amateur radio operator, after a gap of 40 years. And, for the first time in my 64 years,<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2017\/06\/20\/tuesday-20-june-2017\/\">&nbsp;&raquo;&nbsp;Read more about: Tuesday, 20 June 2017 &nbsp;&raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-radio","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}