Strange Lede

This article in Business Insider was making the rounds on my Twitter feed last week for its dystopian lede: The title and content have shifted around a bit, from being “– and it was worth it” (Narrator: No, it was not) or, more recently, taking a nuanced “If I could go back through time and […]

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Lion Rock viewpoint taken on 2021-06-25 while geocaching.

Using Slack for CW Academy

During the latter part of my Basic class, when students were becoming more engaged, we ran into several problems with the email and text messaging. As an experiment, we used Slack in my intermediate class the most recent term.  Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  In the spirit of trying to give back, I thought it would be

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Hot as heck

During the last week of June, there was a crazy forecast. Sometimes the app, using Dark Sky, has an instability problem with far-future dates, but this wasn’t changing: For context, the normal high this time of year is 79. Low temperatures are typically 50s to low 60s, thus allowing us to use “Seattle Air Conditioning”,

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Morse Runner

Morse Runner is one of a handful of tools (Morse Runner, RufzXP, CW Player, G4FON) that CW Academy uses in its curriculum, primarily with the Intermediate and Advanced classes (though I did try with my Basic), to help them acclimate to rapid head-copying calls they might hear during the event. Since they will be eventually

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N1MM+ and CWT

There is also a walkthrough of N1MM+ here that I did for my intermediate class earlier this week. Some definitions CW – stands for continuous wave, a simple method of communication where a signal is either on or off. It uses Morse Code, consisting of dots, dashes, and spaces. A dot is a tone emitted

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CWA Basic: Sessions 14 – 16

Sending in-class: Compose two “Dad Jokes” to send.  For example: “Two guys stole a calendar.  They got six months each.”   (Or: “What do you do with an elephant with three balls?  Walk him and pitch to the rhino.”)    We’ll practice more sending of longer passages.  Revisit the Wikipedia front page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and pick a couple of

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CWA Basic: Sessions 11-13

We’re at the two-thirds/homestretch-ish point in the class.  The speed creeps up 1 wpm for each the next few sessions, eventually hitting 13.  Remember the overall goals are: having fun, making friends, and picking up a new skill for a lifetime.  Absent from these goals is “beating yourself up because you didn’t hit flawless 13wpm

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