What if we put our own pleasure higher up the list – instead of at the end of the long days of work, or as a reward for toil? Julia Paulette Hollenbery asks, and elegantly and practically answers this in her new book “The Healing Power of Pleasure: Seven Medicines for Rediscovering the Innate Joy of Being”.
This is a poetic and kind book made from a life of learning and experience. It brings together science, spiritual tradition, embodiment and philosophy — many many references and ideas, into a pleasure and body-centered way of being.
It was a joyful read for me. As I read, I enjoyed feeling the connections come together — practices I knew, ideas I believed, ways I’d learned to help myself — converging into something bigger. Pleasure as a birthright, a force, a way into my body, a way into relationships, a way to see the world.
Julia starts with Mess — the way we are in the world around us, right now, then proceeds through the seven “medicines” we can use to shift ourselves and our world in the direction of pleasure. Each “medicine” can be seen as an antidote for the crazy disconnected way we all seem to live . There are practical exercises for each medicine to bring home the ideas, maybe to adopt as personal practices for bringing out the pleasure in life.
I like this book a lot. It champions our right to pleasure. It gives practical ways in. It does this in a gentle, inspiring and poetic way. It reminds me of all those wise things I ought to remember about how to enjoyably take care of me.
I moved to live on a narrowboat full time from late March 2021. That involved packing up a house-load of things — some had to go, some to a storage container, and a few things onto the boat.
Why a narrowboat? I’ve been wanting try the narrowboating life for 20 something years. I had a taste for about six months over the winter of 2019-2020 and even with the cold of winter and a beautiful but not ideal boat, I was hooked on this life. I’ll dig into the Why of Narrowboating in a separate note.
Sometimes things work out the way you want them to. I spent most of 2020 and early 2021 looking for the right boat. That mostly meant browsing Apollo Duck and the boat broker websites and falling (temporarily) in love with boats that sold to somebody else before I was prepared to buy. Narrowboats have become very popular during COVID times, prices are up and the supply of boats for sale was and continues to be very limited.
Finally ready to buy, the right boat showed up and as the barriers to owning her dropped away smoothly, I ended up falling in love with, and then actually buying the narrowboat Caparina from ABNB.
That’s the beginning of the story. I’ll write more of the Why and How in later posts.
Mediation. That’s a thing you do where you sit cross-legged, straighten your back, and clear your mind. Well yes, that’s the idea we start with.
I remember starting out meditating, and it was hard to see beyond that. Hidden behind that structure of sitting there was a real aim — this thing we do in meditation we want to happen in our daily lives. Over time new ideas are revealed… I can meditate while walking, I can meditate lying flat on my back on my bed, at the bus stop, on the bus.
That concentration of form and approach is needed at the beginning. Once we get it a bit, we can keep that awareness, mindfulness, and take it more into daily life. And this idea is neither radical nor that interesting — this is moving from conscious incompetence through conscious competence to unconscious competence.
Okay, so the point of writing this is to explain a bit where I’ve gone with coaching. The metaphor above holds true, it seems to me. I started out in that “let’s sit down and do an hours coaching” and I’m now much more in the “How do I take this coaching behaviour into my normal day job, where I’m a somewhat technical senior manager working with a lot of people?” kind of direction.
So what am I taking from my coaching into my day-to-day work? Some thoughts:
There are many opportunities for high-quality 1:1 talks with people, especially working virtually. We don’t have to try and find private spaces in a busy office. This helps.
Good open questions really matter. It is easy to get stuck in confirmatory questions – they are useful for building a shared idea, but don’t get to where people really are. Good questions are an invitation to get the full story, the full experience, not to just get something that confirms that we’re all “okay”. Good open questions take time and space. I have to be able to handle the answers, hold that space. Good senior management is all about holding the space anyway.
My position matters. In all my interactions, on a video call, in person, whatever, I need to hold you in high regard, I need to see you and want you to grow, become, succeed. Basically these are Carl Rogers’ Core Conditions: empathy, authenticity, unconditional positive regard. Straight from coaching.
I need to see and hold the bigger picture. Beyond the tasks, we are all beautifully flawed humans, doing what we can given what we’ve got. Business is a vast collaborative multi-player game. It is a team sport. I want to “win” and have fun doing it — with others. I try and share this view with others.
I’m upset about a lost opportunity for an actual ending, a ritual. Endings matter.
It seems like events got a bit out of the hands of our government here in the UK, and the opportunity — at a nation-wide scale — for us to feel something together was lost.
The “we’re all in this together” frayed into “us and them” over lockdown breaks and the whole lockdown then started to decay as an idea that people could get behind. Governing isn’t easy, I’m sure, but I think this loss of an ethical leadership on the rules allowed the lockdown to fray at the edges without the chance for any sort of useful ending.
Endings matter. Being in sync with others matter. And holding the current situation matters.
Imagine this had happened: we’re getting to the point where lockdown is relaxed. A special government briefing is held to announce relaxing lockdown conditions according to the new threat number. At that briefing, whoever is presenting for the government speaks carefully with gratitude to all of us about how well we’ve handled lockdown.
This spokesperson proceeds:
“Here in government, along with our experts, we’ve had to make minute-to-minute decisions as this virus arrived and as we went into lockdown. Looking back, we got some things wrong. We did our best. Together, we’ve got this to a good place for now.”
“We need to keep working together .. so here’s how we go on from this. Remember that these nine weeks have been hard, harder on others than ourselves, and we don’t want to go back there and lose more lives. By working together we’ll keep lowering that curve.”
“The next time you see somebody out and about, keeping their distance, give them a smile, acknowledge them. Know that we lowered this curve and saved lives together.”
That would do it. We’ve marked the moment, and made a sign, an action, that we can use in remembrance of working together.
This would leave us all with something shared as we move forward and help to leave us with a grateful narrative for the past. The government didn’t do it this way, but you can do it yourself, with friends and family:
Tell the story of your lockdown, your frustrations and gratitude, your fear, your sorrow, your loss, your joy.
Tell those stories to each other.
Mark the change to being less locked down — with others.
Move forward together. Use your smile to thank others.
I was at Schumacher College at Dartington in Spring 2019 — at a few days of course called “Exploration of Eldering”. We talked a lot about the role of the Elder in our societies and how to be an elder. There was a lot to learn. One thing really stood out, something that I use almost daily within teams and leadership.
We have a common idea of the leader being the one person, the decision-maker, the one with the knowledge and expertise. That makes for good stories for the movies but isn’t the way things best or often work in actual life. Good leaders need to be good at leading, not necessarily subject experts or best at everything.
As a leader, I need to hold a group, show vulnerability, listen, take advice, tell stories, discuss, and make decisions. I might have the expertise but I don’t have to use it, and I think it tends to work better when I don’t.
As an elder, or leader, I’m holding a group or situation. I might tell stories from the past about how this sort of issue has been resolved in the past, I might talk about what I don’t know or need to understand. I’ll listen to opinions and help diverse voices to be heard.
Holding, telling stories, listening. These are the key things I’m doing. I’m listening to experts around me and together we’re planing our actions. The group is doing something and can be meaningful to the participants. Showcasing my expert knowledge — if indeed I have any — will break this working ground. Letting others show their expertise or try out their ideas allows them the chance to develop and grow.
In practical day-to-day things, I may know how stuff works but allow others to do things. Again this is developing others. Projecting it-will-all-be-ok is useful, but solving all the problems, less so. Playing the fool can relieve tension too – it can be great in an interview situation to take the pressure off the candidate. Being more fun and just slightly less bureaucratic-professional can relax and mitigate for power, allowing people to shine through fear or nerves.
Listening, holding, stories, and being warm. That’s enough.
I spend a week walking a part of the Bibbulmun track – a long distance walking track in Western Australia. I knew there were a couple of SOTA summits nearby. Turns out there were four summits pretty much right on our track. Over a week of walking, I activated three of them, and activated one of them for the first time ever. Thanks to Phil VK6KPS for planning the walking — it made it nice easy hiking.
This was proper hiking. We carried all we needed for a week (food, cooking gear sleeping gear, tent/bivvy). There are track shelters a days’ walk apart but sometimes a tent is needed if the shelters are crowded.
In addition to all of that, I squeezed in my KX-2, a SOTABeams end-fed 40m wire, a 6m fibreglass fishing pole, and battery and solar panel. It all felt a bit heavy but after a few days, I was used to it.
I’d be using a callsign like VK/G0WCZ/P. Is that enough of a mouthful? Hooray for CW keyer memories 🙂
Now, to the summits:
VK6/SW-039 Mt Randall
I grabbed the gear and walked the 1km to the summit in light rain on the Friday afternoon. Quite windy and showers coming and going. Got to the summit and the rain and wind intensified. Not really getting-the-radio-out weather without a bothy bag or something to hide in. I decided to go back the next morning before we set off walking South.
Grey and rainy Friday up Mt RandallLooks like an Elecraft advert. KX-2 out where it belongs.
The next morning was much better. I was back up at the summit and set up. The summit is a bunch of big granite slabs and massive boulders. I set up on a rocky slab and jammed the fishing pole in a crack between a couple of boulders. Got my four contacts easily enough: 2 on CW, 2 on SSB, and all of these on 20m. Conditions seemed a bit strange, is it just that I’m not used to how 20 metres sounds in VK6? I worked into ZL1, VK3, VK4 and W6!. That W6 was a surprise. I just got my four contacts, bagging two points and moved on. I needed to get back to the shelter, grab the backpack and walk to the next shelter to keep our walk on schedule.
VK6/SW-031 Mt Cooke
Mt Cooke was right on the track, just after the Mt Cooke shelter. The morning of our third days’ walking we climbed Mt Cooke and settled in for a little SOTA from the summit. Was a bit of a slow start our of the hut so it was late morning (0300 UTC) and the bands seemed pretty quiet. Two contacts only, both into ZL1, on 20m. Nothing else. Activated, yes, but missed out on the 2 points.
Settling in on Mt CookeTrying out SSB. Didn’t help.
VK6/SW-037 Boonering Hill
A hot day. Again late morning. We stopped at the spur trail to the summit and it seemed like it was going to be a bit of a tough one, given the time. Also wanted to conserve batteries for Mt Wells that was still to come. Decided to not activate this one and just keep walking.
With an earlier start, it is only a short detour from the main track – perhaps a 1km round trip and 100m vertically to get to a nice granite top. It is worth considering if you are walking by.
VK6/SW-034 Mt Wells
Mt Wells had never been activated so it felt worth saving battery for. I’d brought a 5W panel and a rechargeable battery with me. However, the battery and the panel weren’t quite in agreement on how once should charge the other so not a lot of fresh battery from the sun. The night’s shelter for walkers — this time actually an old cottage — was also well within the activation zone. There was an old fire lookout tower as well which looked like a great place to operate from.
The fire tower — there’s a platform half-way up (just above the tree).
Our walking had got a bit quicker. We were leaving the shelter earlier and were now mostly arriving at the next shelter before lunch. So a quick lunch and time to set up.
The tower looked obvious as a place to operate from. There is a convenient platform half-way up complete with a couple of plastic chairs. I set up the end-fed half-wave with the counterpoise going down to the ground and the main 1/2 wave wire heading off to the 6m pole in the garden beyond the cottage. Having a chair to sit on and one for the rig made this a bit of a cushy operating position.
After getting a couple of spots out there, a few CW contacts 😀
Again, contacts weren’t coming that easily. There was QRM from the comms tower on the summit and that was making 40m a bit hard to work on. I’d got an idea that CW contacts were few and far between so started out with SSB on 20m. I tried to break in to some QSOs and did a lot of calling CQ after spots. Nothing happening.
Finally I spotted on 20m CW (14.062) and got rolling with QSOs. Three fairly easy contacts (ZL1, VK4, ZL1) got me nearly there. By now the battery was dwindling so moved to 40 and spotted again. VK7CW came back after a few calls and as the battery percentage counted down to zero, we had a brief signal report exchange and I had my four. A dit .. dit and I looked down at the battery. Still delivering 2-ish watts receiving, and reading a barely possible 0 percent charge. Hooray for over-specced batteries!
End of fourth QSO, 0% on the battery!
Mt Wells activated for the first time, and I get my 2 points. Just.
That ended SOTA for this trip. The rest of the walk was enjoyable and after 8 days we emerged off the track into the town of Dwelingup for a beer at the pub.
Was definitely work carring HF gear with me. Huge thanks to Phil VK6KPS for hiking guidance, antenna wrangling, photos and enthusiasm.
A few lessons learned I might as well document here:
Generally, keep calling CQ and keep spotting. QSOs seem a bit more scarse in VK6 than in Europe. Guess that makes sense.
SSB is hard work sometimes but can surprise. So being able and happy to do all CW activations really helps.
I’m now pretty happy and confident with CW QSOs for SOTA after a few activations. Now I don’t have to think so hard, will be easier to do quick activations.
I need to do more work on Solar charging before the next long-distance plus SOTA walk. It ought to be easier to charge either a KX-2 internal battery or an external one even without full direct sun all the time. Possibly a KX2 battery box plus charge makes sense.
Thanks to all the chasers. See you again from a summit soon I hope.
Oh, and I think I have a new lucky charm. The little SOTABeams mug that travelled with me:
At the Online Radio Club, we have a D-Star XLX reflector with SmartGroups. This is XLX944, and the smart groups TORC1, TORC2, and TORC3. We want to bring more people to this online watering hole, so we hatched a plan to add a transcoder to/from DMR. This post is about how I went about getting that organised. The transcoder needs to sit on a fixed IP with access to physical hardware to add some AMBE hardware encoder/decoders. While all the rest of reflectors can live in somebody’s cloud, there’s a need for something physical to plug the AMBE USB sticks into.
I grabbed a Raspberry Pi 3B as the server for this. I got a Pi 3B, loaded the latest Raspbian lite onto it. I ordered a pair of DV Mega DVstick30s. These are AMBE3000 chips, so you need two to do transcoding (on in each direction at once, full-duplex, I presume) You may be able to get the
Now, let’s get some software organised on this. The transcoding software is called ambed and it is a part of the xlxd software. I’m just running ambed on the Pi 3B, the actual xlxd is running in the cloud somewhere.
I found I needed to configure the DVstick30s to have a different USB name to be detected properly by ambed. I did that using FTD Prog to re-program the USB Product Description from a generic FTDI serial name to USB-3000. See how to do this in this message by KB2EAR.
I’ve written before about trying to use CW while commuting. I was looking into a bunch of different ways of achieving commute CW operating via the Internet.
And going back to 2016, I started thinking about how to send/receive CW via a lossy datagram-based internet connection. Lossy, because us hams can do error correction and deal with QSB already with our operating practices. And it is more like real radio if it is a bit unreliable.
The protocol
So back in 2016, I wrote down an on-the-wire protocol for this — called bitoip. Each end would send and receive packets of carrier-on and carrier-off events to communicate the CW with real timing (and therefore hand-key “fist” dynamics) — without needing to run up a pile of audio channels and all of that. I assume it this ought to be low-bandwidth and reasonably reliable but not too reliable.
Okay, so how about the equipment needed for this? There are two components:
A station – that turns keyed morse into packets, and receives packets and turns them into a tone in headphones or can drive a separate oscillator.
A reflector – that creates a number of channels that stations can connect to. This really just broadcasts to connected stations what it hears coming in. Plus other enhancements if needed later.
So now let’s look at equipment options:
Station
My minimal station would be a tiny box that can wifi to my phone hotspot and has a key and a headphone jack. Optionally a volume control and channel selector. That’s a minimal option. That’s a Pi Zero W with a couple of parts to add a headphone output. Other ways would be — a PC or Mac (Linux, Windows, OS/X) with a serial interface for key and using the built-in audio.
I’ve built basic Go code for a one-channel station client that will compile for most platforms. This includes the serial and Pi GPIO I/O for key interface (in/out) and PWM audio. That’s in the repo. See https://github.com/G0WCZ/cwc/tree/master/go
There’s a basic single-channel reflector server running on cwc0.nodestone.io:7388
Initial Testing
CWC Pi and serial development
Over this Easter break, I’ve writing Go code and have been doing some tests of the basic station and reflector. It works. I suspect some more work on time sync is needed but for now, it seems to capture, transmit, receive and reconstruct morse okay.
More on Github
I’m going to keep working on this. Feel free to join and collaborate over on GitHub at https://github.com/G0WCZ/cwc or leave a comment here.
This CW thing is curious. My sending seems to have gone to pieces, and it seems to happen mid-QSO. So this is what I see: I get part-way through a QSO fine, then make a couple of errors, and the nerves mount and my sending goes to bits like I’m unable to put a single word together without the errors accumulating. Same for straight key and paddle. Ugh. I don’t like it at all.
So… More practice. Keep going. I’ll get better.
Given that I could send okay before, I’m wondering whether this is something to do with moving my sending from conscious to unconscious, and I’ve got two mechanisms in my head/body fighting over which mechanism is doing the sending. Some stress and it gets all out of whack.
So, apologies if I work you and I end up beating a hasty retreat with garbled sending. I’ll get better with more practice.
I want to get more comfortable with CW QSOs. I can do a 599 contest or special event QSO without thinking but I bumble around, feel the nerves and basically suck at sending nice clean Morse in a more conversational QSO.
I need more learning and more practice and it feels like that learning needs to be social.
So I’m setting myself a goal.. I want to make at least one real CW QSO per day in 2019. The more rag-chewy the better. So here are my rules:
Speed doesn’t matter. Good sending does matter.
Focus on the art of a good conversation, warmth and connection.
If I miss a day then make it up in the following couple of days. This allows for days away from radios completely etc.
Contests like CQWW or CWOps CWTs count as one QSO the only.
The point is to enquire and learn about myself and improve my CW. No slavish adherence to rules is needed.
Other CW learning
I also need to do sending practice. I’m still thinking too hard about straight key and paddle sending. And I’m still enjoy doing an ARRL Morse practice mp3 file at 25 or 30wpm every couple of days for receiving practice.
