I am still a Luddite

I have had a recurring nightmare over the years. It seems to have gone away except for very rarely. It usually happens after I have been exposed to an overload of technology or something along there lines.

I spent Friday at the Dayton Hamvention and thought it would occur Friday night. I was honestly surprised when I woke up yesterday morning that it hadn't happened again.

The dream is that I am in New York City of all God forsaken places. I do something that winds up being considered heroic even though it isn't and in the process my pickup gets destroyed.

The Mayor wants to make a big to-do and offers to replace my truck which I consider fair enough. I simply ask that it be replaced with exactly what I lost. I drive a 4 cylinder, manual transmission very basic small pickup, a Toyota.

Instead they try force-feed me with a humongous Dodge Ram with a monster V-8, an automatic transmission and everything you can imagine. 

It is the antithisis of what I am in this life. I am a simple person.
I refuse publicly and simply start to walk off. The humiliated mayor is aghast and cannot understand why I am not interested in 4 block long deer slayer/squirrel squasher. He stops me and tries to force me into accepting it and I flat out refuse. He is shocked and asks me why I don't want it.

I explain that I can't afford the gas, I can't afford the maintenance, the thing is too big for me to comfortably drive. Parking it is a major chore, I don't know how to use half of the accessories and don't want them to begin with.

Accepting it will put me in another tax bracket, the insurance will be astronomical and I'll need a step ladder to get into it.

So the idiot mayor decides that maybe if I had a better job I could afford it and he offers me a job in Manhattan, making the situation worse when I refuse. If I had wanted such a job I would have gone to college and gotten one. Manhattan is the LAST place I want to live or work.

So now they decide something is wrong with me and I wind up talking to some shrink that comes to the conclusion that nothing is wrong with me at all. I'm just a simple, basically happy person.

The mayor finally gives up and gets the Toyota dealer to give me what I want and I drive off in a 4 cylinder, manual transmission, roll-up windowed Tacoma. The cheapest, simplest pickup on the lot and I get into it and haul ass out of New York, never to return.

Anyway, I just left Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio after spending a day rooting around it a world of technology and felt overwhelmed. I suppose a guy can set up two transceivers on opposite ends of the planet and a computer in the middle and talk to himself if he wants.
The technology there was overwhelming and I was astonished.

Much of this is the antithisis of what I want out of the hobby. I am basically a Luddite as far as things go.

Still, I managed because my Handy-Talkie was broken and I have to send it out for repairs and I bought one of those new to the market Chinese HTs to replace it while mine is in for repairs.

I was afraid of programming it, but decided to figure it out. 

Programming it by hand is a bitch so I spent the extra couple of bucks for a programming cord and downloaded the programming software and managed to get it up and running in a little under an hour.

That's not bad for a Luddite like me.

When I got the original HT I had someone program it for me. I had tried for hours and offered some beer to anothe ham. He set it up for me. 

After a while I wanted to add a couple more channels so I bought the cable and software and re-programmed the whole thing. It programmed fast and easy using the laptop.

Still, if I had to program something like that by hand I would be lost. Much of this menu driven ham gear these days is terribly complex to set up. Long time HT guys told me that they program 40 or 50 channels when they get the unit and a couple months later after they want to add another channel or two they have to get out the book and start at Square One again.

I'm just glad I was able to get mine programmed with the laptop. I'd still be trying to figure it out.

Any you guys used to think that setting a clock on a VCR was bad.


To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY