What's a rushtone?
My Dad (RIP) made stuff. Lots of stuff. Different kinds of stuff. Professionally and otherwise.
He was an electrical engineer and had a long career at a major US company designing and building stuff. Lots of RF microwave stuff. I still remember hearing the doppler shift presented as rising and falling audio tones as the transmitted RF signal was mixed with the received (reflected) signal from the horn antenna sticking out the back of his car as he drove me to school. As a car approached it would fall in frequency as it got closer and slowed. Fun stuff.
Anyway, he also built some electro-mechanical things that were not for work, and
would sometimes playfully put "branding" on them. This being the 60s and 70s, lots
of brands that wanted to sound futuristic would have "tone" in their names, like "Accutone", "Beltone", or, well, I'm having trouble coming up with many examples right now, but adding "tone" to just about anything made it sound cooler. Trust me.
Ask me about the unlimited hydroplane racing start clock he built in our basement (it involved a 1 RPM motor, several solenoids, a Polaroid camera, and a black powder cannon). Or the burgoo pot. Or the garage door opener powerful enough to lift small children with the door (I never said these things were safe).
So slapping "tone" onto the end of our family name is what he would "brand"
some of his creations with.
In honor of him, rushtone.com is my primary domain name.
Radio (Amateur and Otherwise)
Nothing short of magic.
Communication without infrastructure. Where were the ham operators in The Walking Dead?
Satellites are interesting. Hard, but interesting.
Perhaps interesting because they are hard.
Mastodon
I've joined the 2022 mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon.
I first learned about Mastodon and signed up in 2021 when there were some
early rumblings about people's growing dissatisfaction with Twitter,
but I must admit I kind of forgot about it. There weren't a lot of
people on it (compared to today), and I never really found "my people"
there.
But things changed in 2022 November. More people. More toots.
Some of my favorite hashtags:
GIS
Geographic Information Systems.
The GIS community on Mastodon has grown substantially, and as of 2022
November there is a Mastodon instance intended for GIS people,
mapstodon.space.
I like the #GISChat hashtag.