The Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard are co-sponsoring the annual Military/Amateur Radio Crossband Communications Test in celebration of the 62nd anniversary of Armed Forces Day (AFD). Although the actual Armed Forces Day is celebrated on the third Saturday in May — May 19 in 2012 — the AFD Military/Amateur Crossband Communications Test will be conducted on May 12 to prevent conflict with the Dayton Hamvention®, scheduled for May 18-20.
The annual celebration features traditional military-to-amateur crossband communications SSB voice and Morse code tests. These tests give Amateur Radio operators and short wave listeners an opportunity to demonstrate their individual technical skills and to receive recognition from the appropriate military radio station for their proven expertise. QSL cards will be provided to those stations making contact with the military stations.
Military-to-amateur crossband operations will take place on the dates and time in UTC on the frequencies listed for each station. Voice contacts will include operations in single sideband voice (SSB). Some stations, depending on propagation and staffing, may not operate the entire period. Participating military stations will transmit on selected military MARS frequencies and listen for Amateur Radio stations in the amateur bands. The military station operator will announce the specific amateur band frequency being monitored. Duration of each voice contact should be limited to 1-2 minutes. The Secretary of Defense message will be transmitted via digital modes, including RTTY, PACTOR, AMTOR, PSK-31, MFSK and MT63 from certain stations.
Click here for the schedules and frequencies of participating military stations, including the stations that will be transmitting the message from the Secretary of Defense. Instructions on how to copy and submit the message are also included.
Even though I live in England, I listen to KPFT out of Houston, TX, USA. It’s amazing community radio that I *wish* was MY local radio station. It has a wide diverse programming schedule. At 9pm my time (3pm CET) Leo Gold’s “The New Capital Show” came on. I enjoy listening to his show every week and tonight he has been talking about Steve Jobs. He played the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address by Mr Jobs in full.
Amazingly, inspirational speech that everybody should hear or re-hear if you have already heard/seen it. Below is the video via Stanford University’s YouTube page… (below the video is the transcript)
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
No I do not. Anyone that knows me will say the same about me. I’ve become more and more opposed to it in the past year or so when many States across the USA have been murdering people on death row that *might* well be totally innocent, not to mention the hundreds already murdered that have since been found innocent.
It’s not ok for me or you to go around killing people so why is it okay for a jury and/or judge to decide someone should die and a State to allow the murder. From the jury, to the judge to the executioners and staff in the execution chamber… all have blood on their hands and a conscience that they killed someone… if the inmate was guilty then those people are no better than the killer themselves.
Most of you will have been made aware of the recent Troy Davis case. I hope that movement will bring an end to the death penalty in the United States.
Last night I watched Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, live from outside GA’s death row. Over 35,000 others were watching just online, with who knows how many via the various TV stations in the USA that were showing this. I was appalled that no mainstream media were covering this event anywhere in the World.
I received this in my inbox this morning, sums up everything:
Tonight the State of Georgia has killed an innocent man.
In recent weeks, we fought hard for the commutation of Troy Davis’ sentence. More than one million of your petitions were delivered. Protests, rallies and vigils were organized around the globe. Tonight, we fasted and prayed together as a community.
I have spent the past week with Troy’s family. He wanted the world to know that he understood that this struggle goes beyond just one man. Troy was prepared to die tonight. As he said again and again, the state of Georgia only held the power to take his physical body. They could not take his spirit, because he gave his life to God.
Let’s remember and heed Troy’s words: We must not let them kill our spirit, either.
Troy’s execution, the exceptional unfairness of it, will only hasten the end of the death penalty in the United States. The world will remember the name of Troy Anthony Davis. In death he will live on as a symbol of a broken justice system that kills an innocent man while a murderer walks free.
The world will remember Troy’s name, as the death penalty supporters who expressed doubt in this case begin to doubt an entire system that can execute a man amidst so many unanswered questions.
The world will remember Troy’s name, as death penalty opponents who remained silent in the past realize that their silence is no longer an option.
The world will remember Troy’s name because we will commemorate September 21st each year as both a solemn anniversary and a call to action. The night they put Troy Davis to death will become an annual reminder that justice will not be achieved until we end this brutal practice of capital punishment.
“This movement,” Troy said, “started before I was born.” After tonight, our movement will grow stronger until we succeed in destroying the death penalty in the United States once and for all.
I know you will join me. Together we will secure his legacy, and the world will remember the name Troy Anthony Davis.
Image via WikipediaEight of the largest metropolitan regions in America have seen a decline in the percentage of white inhabitants over the last decade, signaling a majority of minorities in some of the USA’s biggest hubs, including New York and DC. New census data analyzed by the Washington Post reveal that non-Hispanic whites are now a minority in 22 of the 100 biggest urban areas in America. While metropolises such as Los Angeles, San Antonio … Read More
I’ve just posted this on my other blog Prison and Row so apologies if you read this twice, but I think it’s incredibly important no matter what your views are on the death penalty and whether or not you think Mr Leal did the crime.
The US breached international law when the state of Texas executed a Mexican citizen convicted of raping and killing an American girl, the UN’s senior human rights official has said. By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stay the execution of Humberto Leal Garcia. Justice Breyer wrote a dissent joined by three justices.
Read statements from former U.S. Diplomats and Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The following statement is attributed to Sandra L. Babcock, attorney for Humberto Leal Garcia: “Today the United States stumbled in its commitment to the rule of law. Mr. Leal, tragically, will suffer the consequences. He will be executed tonight, despite the fact that his right to consular assistance was violated. If he had had the assistance of the Mexican consulate at the time of trial, Mr. Leal would have had a meaningful opportunity to show that he was not guilty of capital murder.
“It is shameful that Mr. Leal will pay the price for our inaction. The need for Congressional action to restore our reputation and protect our citizens is more urgent than ever.
“This case was not just about one Mexican national on death row in Texas. The execution of Mr. Leal violates the United States’ treaty commitments, threatens the nation’s foreign policy interests, and undermines the safety of all Americans abroad. That is why the U.S. Solicitor General, former diplomats, military leaders, and Americans detained overseas were among those who joined together to call for a stay of execution.
“It is now imperative that Congress promptly act to ensure passage of legislation that will bring the U.S. into compliance with its international legal commitments and provide judicial review to the forty Mexican nationals who remain on death row in violation of their consular rights.”
Sandra L. Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and attorney for Mr. Leal, July 7, 2011
