Tag: radio

The War of the Worlds

There are some things that I would like to do and nothing in particular stops me from doing them, but I still don’t do them for some metaphoric reasons, which aren’t even good enough to blog about. One example of the thing that I wanted to do was to listen to the original “The War of the Worlds” radio show. I could have downloaded the mp3 at any moment and listen to it, but something was stopping me.

Today I finally did it though. “The War of the Worlds” mp3 was tossed into a bunch of other stuff that I was getting for my growing podcast hunger, and so it ended up on my phone and as a next item in the playlist.

By the way, if you don’t have a slightest idea of what I am talking about, you should probably read “The War of the Worlds (radio)” Wikipedia entry. If you want to listen to the show yourself, then you can get it from The Mercury Theatre on the Air website. If you have a feeling that the title sounds familiar, but somehow doesn’t fit the content, then you are probably thinking about the “The War of the Worlds” movie, which I’ve also seen some time ago and reviewed in this post.

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New hobby on the horizon

It looks like I am about to engage in a new hobby – HAM or Amateur radio.

I’ve been reading up about it for the last few days and the more I read the more I find it fascinating. It also appears that there are a lot of people in Cyprus who are into HAM. Surprisingly, I even know few of them pretty good. I just never new that they were into it.

I talked on the phone to one guy, here in Limassol, and he was very helpful and showing me the way. Basically, I need to ask for an application form from the Ministry of Telecommunications. (I am planning to do just that on coming Monday.) The application will cost about 10 CYP. It’ll take about a month for the Ministry to respond. Usually they say ‘yes’ to everyone.

To get the license, there is an exam. Ministry holds the exam twice a year, so it can be anywhere from 4 to 6 month until the next one. This will give me enough time to study. I was told that if it was 10 years ago, I would have to buy a few books. But these days, all the information is availble on the Web.

Another good thing is that until August of this year, there were two levels of certification. One was for the beginners and was rather limiting in frequencies and actiosn that were allowed. Another one was for advanced hobbiests and professionals and required passing the Morse code exam. In August though, the law was changed and now there is only one exam that, when passed, gives access to everything there is.

The license costs 30 CYP for the first year, and 15 CYP for all consecutive years. Beginner’s equipment costs are somewhere around 100-150 CYP. Sound affordable to me.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-11-22

Jazz all the way

Usually, when I work I need absolute silence. Especially when I write code. Any sound disturbs me. Those which have to do with human voices (phone calls, talks, music) are the most harmful. I never turn the music on or anything else when I program. I also prefer to leave all my development tasks for my night shifts.

But toda I found out that I can actually listen to music while writing code. I was looking for some new radio stations at Shoutcast to add to my music player and stumbled across some Jazz stations. I decided to try one before adding it to the list. I wasn’t yet programming, so it was OK to liste to it for some time.

It was only in the morning, 8 hours later that I noticed that I’ve programmed and did everything I had to do and never switched off the Jazz music. It didn’t disturb me even one bit. In fact I have a suspecion that it actually helped me. I will be repeating the experiment, but until than I’m surprised anyway…