Numbers

This week the theme of the Macro Mondays group on Flickr was "numbers." I was kind of stumped about what to take a picture of. When I started taken photos, all kinds of ideas popped up including Dianne's thought of the lotto pen, shown at the right, that she gave me many years ago. Point the writing end up and the beads move to an open area on the end of the pen. Shake it, point the writing end down, and the beads fill the slots along the number scale and indicate your lottery picks. As Erika guessed, it hasn't worked yet but it is fun trying. It was a hard photo to take to avoid a reflection on the plastic number scale. Pointing the flash through a white cloth diffuser did the trick.

See my other photos below. The first couple are luggage locks -- and I use the term "lock" loosely. It wouldn't take much to pick one of these.

The next is the radio dial on a hand crank emergency weather radio. The light from a homemade softbox gave a nice reflection on the black grill of the radio speaker.

The last photo is a trigonometry table from one of my high school math books.

Dayton Hamfest

Today I went to the Dayton Hamfest and ARRL National convention (they were combined this year). It is the largest hamfest in the country. Although I've only been an hour away for the last 12 years, I've never been. I haven't been active on the amateur bands, but I thought I'd go to find some power supply and antenna equipment for my low power radio to do some operating when mobile.
It took me all morning just to walk through the indoor exhibits. The picture here is only one of several indoor areas at the Hara Arena in Dayton. The new radio technology has really improved in the last decade. Just like most electronic gadgets, there are more features packed in a smaller space. Unfortunately, I didn't find what I needed. Nevertheless, it was an interesting day. Click here to see a few other photos including a motorcycling ham that had over a million miles on a Honda Goldwing.

There were a lot of people there and folks representing many different countries. It's relatively easy to tell where folks are from as most people wear name badges that also have their amateur radio call sign. The prefix of the callsign tells you what country they are from. I saw people from England, Scotland, Finland, several Eastern European countries, Japan, and of course Canada. There were folks from all over the US.