Last night at the annual Los Angeles County Disaster Communications Service general membership meeting April Moell, WA6OPS, spoke about the Hospital Disaster Communications service in Orange County. Her brief lecture was informative and spoke about the nature of hospital communications in an emergency situation. To my knowledge, DCS doesn’t do anything like this. But it is what I’d hoped to be doing when I joined DCS. Emergency communications. So far we have not had one single activation in which I have participated in the 3 years I have been with DCS. April pointed out that there are two basic structures: the RACES/DCS/ACS structure in which hams are tied to a particular government agency, and the ARES structure, in which ham groups form agreements with entities and are not tied to one specific served agency. I believe the latter has a greater chance for growth. The big difference is that the former requires some sort of administrative official to request activations, following which hams are sent to assignments, and the latter allows hams to self-deploy according to established protocols, thereby saving valuable time. It’s a top-down vs bottom-up approach. I think I will look for an organization that utilizes the latter, if merely for my own sanity: I cannot stand the bureaucratic nonesense that gets in the way of actually doing what we want to do: get communications back up in an emergency situation where minutes count.

Sunday was the 21st annual Los Angeles Marathon. The first one across the finish line won $100,000 + $25,000 + a new car. But this is a person who runs everywhere. Howabout 1,000 pairs of shoes instead?

There has only been one other time in the history of the L.A. Marathon when there was a fatailty. This year there were two. This year there was also the highest number of runners—over 26,000—so statistically it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I did not run the marathon but I was on my feet all day. (Note to self: find more comfortable shoes.) I was downtown at the start/finish area Command Post and vicinity shadowing the director of security for the marathon, Bob Taylor. This was a ham radio event. We didn’t do much all day except deal with the fatality situation and fix a couple of security issues. The folks at the marathon generally know what they’re doing thanks to the many years they’ve done it.

Knowledge should be shared, not stored, thereby alleviating the tiresome and absolutely annoying incumbrance of having to remember everything at once.

It’s about this cold, detached, online “connection” thing. Does it really bring people together or does it just make us think so? A friend of mine—yes, someone whom I know in real life—recently posted his addendum to one of those bulletin surveys making its way through myspace (which, by the way, is a messy, clunky, slow website, but I digress), and the bulletin asked people to semi-anonymously reveal how many of their “friends” they had actually met in real life. Only one of those people had actually met all of his friends. All 121 of them. Now I can’t say how close he is to these people but I can speculate on the fact that 79 of the 80 people on that bulletin had not actually ever been in the same room as a fair amount of the people on their lists. And I mean brick and mortar room, not chat room.

So Pope Benedict XVI unwinds listening to an iPod, huh? Okay Catholics, make my AAPL stock rise. 🙂

I received 33 e-mail spams yesterday. Three of them the mail filter missed, and the other 30 were automatically placed in the Junk Mail folder. My thought is, if you’re going to send me unsolicited buik e-mail, at least use something halfway resembling grammar. I don’t respond well to phrases like, “Me and Dre had sat with himsrqfkov kicked it and had a chat with him.” Also, if spellings like “0ffffer,” “0nlllline,” L000king,” and “clllickk,” are supposed to get past the mail filter and trick me into believing in your product, it ain’t working.

Web sites that play sound with them. Either audio files or MIDI files. They give you no warning and frequently play loud and/or obnoxious sounds. And they usually have nothing to do with the content of the offending page(s). Frequently I catch myself asking, “where the hell did that sound come from?” Obnoxious web designers out there, do me this favor: save the sounds for multimedia files. Or at least let us turn them off. Or at least give us warning. Or at the very least, try to use good sounds that contribute to the web page (is that even possible?).

CAR SALESMAN
(to a customer inepecting an SUV)
Yeah, the whole Bronco line is being discontinued. We’re trying to get rid of that whole fugitive-on-the-run image. This baby is called the Escape.