[SOC] Carpe Diem

[Bill Cunningham]

Hi to all,

Started to make subject "Gaudeamus Igitur," but thought that might be
inappropriate.  Point remains, however, that life is short and we should
seize the opportunity to enjoy each day -- one of the great benefits of ham
radio.

So, a reminder the glass is also at least half full.  We had a very very
lucky non-incident this week.  Workmen in our house plugged in an air
compressor to run pneumatic tools.  The motor stalled (failure #1) and the
circuit breaker did not trip (failure #2).  This resulted in a  wire acting
as a fuse (failure #3), INSIDE THE KITCHEN WALL.  Fortunately, no fire
resulted, just a smoked up wall box.  Took a while to find the failed point,
but there was enough slack  wire to reconnect without fishing a replacement
or tearing out wall.  My guess is that the wire had been nicked when
insulation removed, providing the flash point.   Failure #4 occurred when I
replaced the failed breaker.  In true SOC fashion, I did not check to see
that SWMBO's computer was off, managing to trash the boot sequence on her
machine when restoring power.  It took more effort to fix that than the
wiring.  We feel pretty lucky.  These are the kind of things you read about
in the paper when investigators report source of a nasty fire.

And now a possible discussion thread. For non US/VE hams, the ARRL
Sweepstakes info exchange is in msg preamble format where the CK number is
the year first licensed.  I haven't dumped recent log into a spreadsheet to
check statistics of the received CK numbers, but my gut feeling is that
there were very few in the 90-04 range, perhaps 1% -- certainly fewer than
the 50-59 range.  The phone SS is coming up, providing an interesting
opportunity to compare the statistics of received CKs for phone and CW.
Anyone care to predict the difference in year's licensed for the two
populations?  Phone ops, prepare to collect data.  This dinosaur don't own a
mike and a DX-60 on AM wouldn't make much of a data collector. :-)

72,
Bill C