Yesterday, I had two somewhat related things happen. This is so weird that I’m not even exactly sure what to call it. I thought writing about it might make some sense, though.
First of all, in researching the Phillips Code, Google directed me a a web page posted by Warren, K6TG. The page looked like a work in progress, so I sent Warren an email, but it bounced with the error message “Recipient address rejected: User unknown.”
Next, I had some snail mail returned to me that I had sent to Johan, N3RF. I had found Johan last August while paging through an old 73 magazine. In that issue, he ran a classified ad touting his Morse Code course, “Method to learn Morse Code fast and without hangups.” All you had to do was send you if you sent him a dollar and an SASE. I looked him up on QRZ.Com, and found that he was still offering this course. I sent him $2 ($1 adjusted for inflation), but the letter never got to him.
Since I was still interested in finding these gentleman, I sent an email to both the slowspeedwire and CWOps mailing lists. One of the guys on the slowspeedwire list, sent me a link to an archived copy of the Maritime Radio Historical Society Newsletter #53.
This newsletter not only confirmed that K6GC is a silent key, but it contained a very nice article on Warren. As it turns out, he was very instrumental in keeping KPH, the historic historic ex-RCA coast station on the air.
Finding information on Johan, N3RF has proven to be a little more difficult. His QRZ.Com page has a link to a website for Svanholm Research Labs, a not-for-profit organization that he founded in 1966. On this website, he documents some of the disputes he’s had with state and federal authorities in the early 2000s.
His QRZ.Com page also gives a cell phone number. I tried calling that yesterday, the woman who answered said that it was her daughter’s phone number, and that she’s had that number for six months now. I can only surmise that N3RF is now a silent key as well.
All this has gotten me to thinking about how I’d like my websites to be handled once I become an SK. Should I ask that they be taken down or left online? I’ll be gone, but perhaps some of the content will be useful to someone. What do you think?
Thom W8TAM says
I’m thinking we should setup a paywall and cash in. :)
73 Dan!
Bob K0NR says
Thom,
Good idea. We really need Dan to write a lot more stuff before he goes.
Rob W4ZNG says
This is one of those things like a will that I hate to contemplate. But now that we’re already there, I’m going to jump in and say that it’s probably best to designate someone to tend to these things and to leave instructions to either (a) continue with the site, (b) post a farewell notice and preserve things in place, or (c) pull the site entirely.
I’ve seen (a) applied to things like textbooks, and your “No Nonsense” guides deserve this continuity. They’ve been a huge help to prospective hams for a while now, and like textbooks they will need periodic updates. The rest… news and personal notes can go away or do with a farewell post (depending on if the web hosting is free or not), but the best technical content should be somehow be compiled and maybe even published. QRZ pages and the like should probably run a farewell notice for a year or two, then evaporate into the ether.
Oh man Dan, I didn’t mean to get this serious in a reply. Here’s hoping that we all see you with many years of posts and book revisions ahead. The only thing else that I can add is that you’re a week late in posting this. Halloween / All Saints / All Souls days were last week!
Dave New, N8SBE says
The issue of what to do with your ‘digital life’ looms large these days, especially for baby-boomers and others reaching or already having reached the ‘golden years’. I recently got a LastPass account, with the intent of cleaning up my login/password usage. A couple of weeks later, I found that I had almost 200 sites I had logins for, and I keep discovering ones I haven’t heard from in a while, usually when I receive an email from those sites.
Interestingly enough, LastPass has a ‘man down’ feature (my name, not theirs) that allows you to designate someone that will be allowed to request access to your password ‘vault’. You can set a time limit (48 hours is the default) so that if you don’t block the request in that time period, they get access. LastPass has also introduced ‘family’ accounts, where you can easily share login data with someone else in your family, like online banking logins for joint accounts, etc.
After getting over a bit of a learning curve, I find the service to be most excellent. They also allow you to store all kinds of other things in your vault, including passport numbers, insurance policies, etc. So, it can become like a digital safe deposit box that you and your significant other can share, and they can get access to everything (and vice versa) if something happens.
This is no small feat, because lots of online entities have no plan for survivorship for any of their customers. Usually, they just lock or delete the account, and even if presented with copies of death certificates, most still refuse to allow access. This happened to us when our grown Veteran son committed suicide (post-Desert Storm PTSD), and we wanted to get access to his AOL email account. No matter what we tried, no soap. AOL simply had no policy for situations like this, so they took the conservative approach and simply locked the account, and eventually erased all the information (well, at least that’s what we were told — the email may be on a backup tape in some vault, for all we know).
Please take charge of your digital life. The government is way behind on legislating this, and companies will only do what they think is in their best interest, which is usually decidedly not helpful.
Steve C - KE8HXM says
The thoughts of the great teachers in history have been preserved for all time;
Plato – To do is to be.
Socrates – To be is to do.
Sinatra – Do be do be do.
%^)
All kidding aside, Dan, you are somewhere in the mix of great teachers, and amateur radio needs your tutorials to continue on into eternity. You have a gift of making the techno-speak understandable for so many, I think it would be a shame to let it simply evaporate once you go SK. Please pick a young person to continue your work who has your talent and drive to keep information exchange fresh and alive for future generations. This old technology should be kept going as long as it can be done despite the relentless progression of electronic communications gear toward more complex and vulnerable technological devices. Our generation of builders, repair technicians and other skills that require actual physical work and knowledge of how and why these technologies work is becoming relegated to the archives. Society is far too eager in my opinion to discard things that cease to function, and there seems to be an ever increasing number of devices that have designed obsolescence life cycles – probably as a means to sell the latest and greatest version more than the actual functionally obsolete.
I wish I could recommend a candidate, but at 63 I myself am just a beginner and have a lot to learn. Elmers like you don’t grow on trees, which is what makes your value and contributions to the Amateur Radio community so great.
Besides, I’m still working toward that Extra class license – so stick around, will you?
73!
Bob K0NR says
Dan,
OK, here’s a less snarky response after thinking about it some. I think the topic is relevant to all of us that publish content.
You have written some really good material. In the big scheme of the universe, most of it is time perishable. Most of it won’t have that much value 10 years from now because a lot of it is set in the context of “now”. Blogs tend to be like this. On the other hand, you’ve got some content that is evergreen which raises the issue of how to preserve those items (e.g., CW Geek’s Guide to Having Fun With Morse Code). I’d suggest you focus your efforts there. The question becomes who takes ownership/responsibility for an item like that when you are gone? Maybe there’s some generic resting place for ham radio content but it seems like it will get lost without some sense of ownership.
73, Bob K0NR
Dan KB6NU says
Just ran across another example this morning. A friend of mine sent me a link to a CW website. One of the links on the CW page was a link to W0UCE’s Learning Morse Code as a Language. Unfortunately, W0UCE is now a Silent Key, and the link no longer worked. Fortunately, I had a copy of that document and am posting it here.