Radio to the rescue — Ham operators establish link with world after earthquake

By Clark Fair

Photo courtesy of the Kenai Peninsula College Photo Archive. Al Hershberger on a Ham radio during the 1960s. Hershberger and Ed Back helped establish communication with the outside world via radio following the devastation of the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake.

Redoubt Reporter

In 1964, when amateur Ham radio operator Zilla Maile wanted a new, state-of-the-art radio, she knew the man to contact: Al Hershberger, owner of Hershberger’s Radio and TV store in Soldotna.

What Maile didn’t know was the important role that synchronicity and her new radio would play during one of the most memorable events in Alaska history.

Maile owned and operated The Yarn Shop, a storefront that had been built onto her home just across the playground from Soldotna Elementary School. (Her home, which she shared with her husband, Justin, and their son, Larry, also partly consisted of Soldotna’s original post office.) In one section of the house were three small rooms — Larry’s bedroom, a guest room and Zilla’s radio room.

Larry called his mother “sort of a hobbyist” in the radio world. “When we were kids, she used to spend evenings in her radio room talking to people across the country,” he said. “She also made contacts in Europe, but usually those only worked given specific weather conditions that allowed the signal to skip.”

In Zilla’s radio room was a 2-meter Heathkit used strictly for local communication, and an older radio that could communicate only through Morse code and was used when Maile had her Novice Class license. After she moved to the Advanced Class license, she desired a more sophisticated radio — thus the visit to Hershberger, a licensed dealer for Hallicrafters electronics.

One of the best Ham radios commercially available at that time was the Hallicrafters SR-150 Ham transceiver, a radio combining a transmitter and a receiver in a single unit. Maile put in an order with Hershberger and waited for her new radio to arrive.

Caching in on a fun new hobby — Geocachers explore Kenai in annual treasure hunt

By Joseph Robertia

Photos by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Lisa Williams, of Seward, climbs back from one of the scenic caches hidden in Kenai Municipal Park on July 29 as part of the fourth annual Caching on the Kenai picnic. The purpose of some caches are to bring people to beautiful vistas.

Redoubt Reporter

As Scott Sagraves, of Anchorage, looked up from his handheld GPS unit July 29 afternoon, he realized the coordinates he had been following had brought him to more than just a camouflaged ammunition can containing a register of others who had found it before.

At the edge of the bluff of Kenai Municipal Park, Sagraves was also looking over a hillside bursting in bright pink fireweed blossoms, which ended at the sandy beaches of Cook Inlet and the mouth of the Kenai River. Tiny silhouettes of dip-netters could be seen dotting the shoreline, and, farther in the distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Kenai Mountains could be seen rising into the azure-colored sky.

Sagraves knew the reason this location was selected. It was not for how well the ammo box he was searching for could be squirreled away, but so that he could take in this scenic view, a splendor he would not have seen had he not been geocaching.

“I’m totally addicted, and I have been ever since someone told me there was this worldwide treasure hunt going on. It brought me back to being a kid again,” he said.

Classrooms adapt to the needs of tomorrow

By Naomi Klouda

Homer Tribune

Student Katlian Nelson agrees to let her teacher project a piece of writing onto a screen for a writing subject review.

Her hands are the favorite part of herself, she wrote.

“They help me when I am working the hay fields. They help me when I move bales of hay into perfect pods,” she wrote.

Her hands write stories, and her hands wipe tears.

In Emily Putney’s fifth-grade class at West Homer Elementary, students are reviewing a writing assignment for lessons in transitions and “voice.”

They do this in a seemingly old-fashioned way, helped along by the latest in projection technology. The teachers have a “document camera,” a device that sits on a flat surface with a camera mounted to it. The teacher places a piece of paper (or an object) in the view of the camera that she wants to show the whole class and that camera sends the image to the projector mounted to the ceiling.

Nelson’s essay fills the screen, with underlined sentences to show her transitions. Everyone in class can view a single page with ease.

In an age of technology, students in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District are using these tools and many more-sophisticated ones as a matter of course. Blackboards, chalk and erasers don’t cut it anymore as the world turns on a new technological information age.

The challenge posed to school districts is whether they are integrating learning and new systems for learning — the Web — into their lesson plan to prepare students for future jobs.

The technology is certainly in the classrooms or schools.

Robert Porter is the technician serving 15 area schools extending from Chapman School at Anchor Point to Kachemak Selo and across Kachemak Bay to Seldovia, Port Graham and Nanwalek. In that area, there are around 1,500 computers to serve an estimated 2,000 students.

This is important because it means individual schools are in control of instructional tools — how much technology is exposed to which age groups.

Today, that includes desktop computers, but increasingly schools are choosing laptops instead. SmartBoards, the glitziest technology at $4,000 each, may end up in nearly every classroom of a school — as at Homer Middle School. Or, there might be only one, like in the library at West Homer.

The standard LCD protector in use by Emily Putney’s class, which costs less than a SmartBoard, is located in every school and every school uses them, Porter said. These allow the teacher’s computer screen to project onto the board for most any kind of demonstration, Powerpoint or project. They can also use it by simple document format.

The SmartBoard platform is a giant touch screen — picture an enormous iPad.

“What happens with a SmartBoard is that the projector acts like the computer monitor and displays it onto a big screen. Then the teacher or student can interact with the desktop like they normally would,” Porter said. But they use touch instead of a mouse or keyboard.

Plugged In: Upgrades to speed up your photo computer

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

My photo-printing computer was running too slowly, so much so that I often thought that it locked up when post-processing photo image files with Lightroom 3.4.

Clearly, it was time to upgrade that computer. While I was at it, I decided to update the operating system by installing the current 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional.

Although I initially resisted installing Windows 7 until it was proven and reliable, I’ve found that the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Pro is a very worthwhile operating system upgrade. It does more and does so more conveniently and attractively. If nothing else, lockups seem less common with 64-bit Windows 7, and the system at least indicates that it’s still working, even if slowly.

I’m not comfortable using any new operating system for routine business work until Microsoft tests and ships a comprehensive “service pack” of fixes for that new operating system. Even after Windows Update installed Service Pack, not all existing Windows programs worked with the preferred 64-bit version of Windows 7 Pro. Some mission-critical business programs simply refused to run on Windows 7, despite automatic compatibility adjustments. That’s not Microsoft’s fault, at least not this time. That balky program simply needs to be rewritten to a more modern 64-bit standard.

Before you make a leap of faith and convert your entire office to a newer operating system, test any needed business programs on a single test-bed computer system and ensure that they work properly. Vendor salespeople, sadly, don’t really know.

Plugged In: Oh no, not again! Adventures in installation

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

This isn’t the article that I intended to write this week.

Instead of an article comparing photo-quality printing, here’s another white-knuckles computing experience, “courtesy” of programmers who deleted the XP operating system when I uninstalled their software.

It all began innocently enough, on a dark and stormy night. Of course, most of our nights have been stormy recently, so that’s not as much news as a routine weather report.

I arrived at work early one recent morning in order to update a computer at my law office before my first client arrived. Nothing fancy, just uninstalling an old 2003 version of Microsoft Office and installing my shiny new copy of MS Office 2010.

Unfortunately, unlike all prior versions of MS Office, Office 2010 no longer installs on the relatively modern and highly stable 64-bit Windows XP x64 operating system that I use.

Oddly, Office 2010 still installs on older 32-bit versions of Windows, so I decided to install it on a Windows XP computer I occasionally use to process trial exhibits. I didn’t want to try returning opened software or write off the purchase price. Inadvertently, I proved the old maxim about “Penny-wise, pound-foolish.”

Plugged In: Frying your personality with technology

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

Nearly all my friends know that I enjoy using new technology. Technology, used properly, enhances our lives and our productivity.

So, it may be something of a surprise that I’m also concerned about technology’s negative personal and social effects. I’m not alone in those beliefs — many rigorous studies confirm what parents already suspect. Too much technology can dominate your life, rather than enhance it. It’s all a matter of balance.

Over the past few years, quite a number of studies have confirmed the observations of many parents about how excessive technology negatively affects their children and, if they’re insightful and honest, themselves, as well. I’ll not cite the studies here but you can find a great deal of information at http://www.nytimes.com. Search for “Your Brain on Computers” in the June and July 2010 online editions of The New York Times.

Aside from creating a generation of couch potatoes, technology has other real drawbacks. Many studies have shown rather clearly that people do not “multitask” as well as they believe that they do. As we age, our cognitive ability to do sustained, high-quality work upon a single subject improves, but our perceived “multitasking” abilities actually decrease even more. That’s why most of us become frustrated and unproductive when we’re frequently interrupted during a task that requires focus. It’s also why we accomplish more during uninterrupted “quiet time.”

Plugged In: Science of success: Parents should model learning

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

E = mc2.

We’ve all seen this apparently simple equation, but how many of us know what it really means?

Because this is a technology column of sorts, I suppose that it’s arguably relevant, as a lead into this week’s column, to make a plea for improving our basic science and technology literacy.

Both computing and photography are technologically based. Improving your own general technical understanding is key to improving your business efficiency and your photographic technique. I’m not referring here to changing your cell phone ringtone or setting your camera to full auto mode.

Our culture prides itself on its perception of being technologically advanced compared to others. Our economy critically depends upon being in the forefront of scientific and technological advances.

Although American scientific and technological supremacy was obvious as recently as 1990, the new reality, by all measures and surveys, is that the basic scientific and technological knowledge of most Americans now trails the average among nearly all industrialized countries.

While 47 percent of Chinese university graduates take math, science or engineering degrees, only 16 percent of American students do so. At the same time, the April 18 issue of The New York Times reported that, although 20 percent of all American students now graduate with a degree in business, an astounding 45 percent of those graduates are forced to live with their parents a year later. They have no job.

So, here’s my suggestion. Brush up on your own basic science and technology. Then, help your kids improve their own knowledge and attitudes about math, science and technology so that they, and the U.S., remain competitive. Remember, parents can be the most effective teachers of all.

I’ve found two easy-to-read, yet comprehensive, books that give a good nonmathematical understanding of basic science. The first is by Bill Bryson and entitled “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” The second, “The Canon — A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science,” is by Natalie Angier, a prominent science writer. Both books are understandable, fun and, best of all, accurate.

By the way, E=mc2 was first understood by Albert Einstein in 1905 as part of his theory of Special Relativity. It tells us that mass and energy are equivalent and that a tremendous amount of energy is produced when even a very tiny amount of mass is converted into energy.

It’s the equation that explains why the sun can shine for billions of years. It’s also the equation that resulted in the atomic bomb.

Light up the screen — Kenai students breaking in to newscasting

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Kenai Middle School teacher Tyler Schlung runs the computer program that produces his studio class’s “Northern Lights” newscast-style program. Joseph Vicere and Andi Reilly practice reading the day’s announcements.

Redoubt Reporter

Reading the day’s announcements is a routine chore of necessity at many schools — important but not exciting, more informative than educational, certainly not a highlight of anyone’s day.

But at Kenai Middle School, rather than teachers having to tell their classes to pipe down and listen up to get the daily task over with, teachers instead hear a chorus of complaints if the announcements aren’t given the attention they deserve.

“You hear comments from the other teachers, ‘Wow. My students look forward to this every day,’” said Tyler Schlung, a special education teacher at Kenai Middle School.

This response is as atypical as the format of the daily bulletin at Kenai Middle. Instead of an administrator or staff member rattling off dates for field trips, reminders about permission slips and schedules for upcoming events over the public-address speakers, the information is packaged with movie reviews, quotes from famous figures, explanations of wacky phrases and jokes about “Star Wars,” presented visually rather than just read aloud, and created by students, for students.

Every day this spring semester at Kenai Middle, school starts with classes watching the latest installment of “Northern Lights” — a video newscast-style program put together by students in Schlung’s eighth-grade studio class.

A pair of students sit in front of the camera and present the day’s announcements and a feature segment they write themselves in TV-newscaster style, complete with images and text showing up behind and below them onscreen. Each classroom at Kenai Middle is equipped with a SMART board — an interactive, computer-linked, video- and audio-capable device — that plays the “Northern Lights” videos every morning.

“I see how awesome it is for the kids. They learn to present information in a way that’s interesting and fun and not boring,” Schlung said of hisstudio class students. Meanwhile, the rest of the school gets to actually enjoy the announcements. “The students get excited about it. If a teacher forgets to play it, they’ll hear about it.”

Plugged In: Spades are spades, lemons are lemons

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

It’s time to call some spades as spades this week.

Nikon compact cameras — NOT

Nikon is a legend. It makes some of the best digital single-lens reflex cameras on the market and Nikon’s dSLR lenses are usually in the first tier, as well. Nikon’s a top choice of professional photographers, who stake their careers on making the right decisions about pro-grade equipment.

That’s why I find it so surprising that Nikon’s compact cameras are so poor by any current standard. For the past several years, Nikon’s compact cameras have consistently fallen short of the competition. It’s as though Nikon is just going through the motions, emulating last year’s successful Canon models without really making a serious design and engineering effort.

For example, Nikon’s P7000 is a near look-alike of Canon’s 2007 G9, with comparable 2007-level image quality. Canon’s current G12 and Olympus’ new XZ1 have noticeably better image quality for roughly the same price. The XZ1 is smaller, with a brighter f/1.8 lens. It’s no contest.

Nikon’s new P300 compact is, again, a near look-alike to Canon’s very nice S95 pocketable camera. However, even though it’s very small, the S95 uses a relatively large sensor, an excellent lens, has innovative and useful handling features, and includes a RAW format file option. Nikon’s comparably priced P300 uses a very small sensor and does not include a RAW format. The P300’s image quality, as expected from its mediocre specifications, is commonplace. The P300 merely looks serious.

E-mail scam hits home — Assembly, school board members accounts hacked

By Jenny Neyman

Redoubt Reporter

Hal Smalley spent his Thursday night being transported to the magical realm of Neverland while attending a preview performance of the Kenai Performers’ winter musical “Peter Pan” at the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at Kenai Central High School. When he turned in that night, it was to his bed in his Kenai home.

But when Smalley woke up Friday morning it seemed he was still in the land of make believe. He was in London, stranded in a traveler’s nightmare with his bag containing his passport and credit cards stolen. At least, that’s what everyone in his Yahoo e-mail contacts list was told, as they received a message from Smalley informing them of his plight and asking that they e-mail him or call his hotel at the phone numbers provided for details on how to send him money, so he could buy a plane ticket and settle his hotel bill in order to get back home.

Smalley was unaware of his supposed vacation, much less the disastrous turn it had taken, until he logged into his e-mail Friday morning and saw messages from several of his contacts asking if everything was OK, if he really was in London, if he really needed help, or if he was aware that his e-mail account had apparently been hacked.

The message was apparently sent far and wide, judging from the responses he got. Smalley is a member of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly and a previous member of the Kenai City Council, resulting in a lengthy contacts list.

“They didn’t say they were going send money, but there were a couple who were wondering if it was true. They hadn’t seen me for a few days. And some who had seen me at ‘Peter Pan’ were wondering, ‘My gosh, how could you get to London so quickly?’” Smalley said. “I told them I got a little bit of ‘Peter Pan’ pixie dust on me. That will do it every time.”

Plugged In: Reformat for the slow of speed, not faint of heart

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

Better late than never, even with this column, although our “Redoubtable” editor is certainly entitled to a different opinion.

My excuse, of course, is that the computer ate my homework. Well, not exactly ate it. One of my office computers running the 64-bit version of Windows XP finally had its Windows installation go brain-dead after a year or more of me nursing it along and fixing Windows glitches along the way.

The 64-bit version of Windows XP is pretty stable. Although it looks like the more-fragile regular 32-bit version of XP, the less-common 64-bit Windows XP is actually quite good. After all, its core software is derived from high-end 64-bit Microsoft business-network software that merely looks and acts like regular Windows.

Still, after years of adding and deleting programs, and adding and removing hardware, something finally snapped. When you’ve got a system that been altered so much, it may not be possible to regain stability by continuing to tinker with Windows. Rather than spend more time trying to fix the old Windows system, it was clearly time to totally reformat the hard disk and start from scratch.

Doing a complete hard disk reformat because the operating system has gone bad is not warranty work. It’s not a job for the inexperienced or for someone who doesn’t have the manual and driver disk for the computer’s system board and the application program installation disks. If you’ve never reformatted a hard disk and reinstalled everything, then take your computer to a local technician.

Plugged In: Protecting data — choose safe over sorry

By Joseph Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

Data is the principal reason that businesses and individuals use computers, unless you’re a gamer. Having spent New Year’s Day rebuilding my own law office file server as proactive preventative maintenance, data protection is very much on my mind at this time.

Data may be as basic as your e-mail and family photos, or critical to the survival of your business. In any case, protecting your data from loss is one of any computer user’s most critical, yet often-neglected, tasks.

Protecting your computer data can be as basic as locking your house or car to slow down thieves and buying basic insurance to protect you in case of loss. Data security has two components. The first is to ensure that data is not lost through theft, fire or operator error. That’s this week’s discussion.