Congratulations Tom! Happy, prosperous and healthy New Year to you and all of
the other nuts.
Wes Stewart, N7WS
On 12/31/2020 10:02 PM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
Hello time nuts,
Ah, it is 2021-01-01 (JD 2459215.5, MJD 59215) which is nice because that
means it's not 2020 anymore.
One reason I've been looking forward to 2021 is that it's now officially the
20th year of the time nuts mailing list. So this is a note to say *thank you*
to everyone for making it so amazing over the years. I get comments all the
time about this mailing list; its depth, its high SNR, its focus, its vast
archive of quality postings, and especially, the community that evolved around
the list.
On the web the phrase "time nut" is now a proper noun, sometimes an adjective,
or occasionally a diagnosis or disease. Never in my wildest dreams did I think
any of this would happen. I thought my early interest in nixie tubes, clocks,
electronics, and precise timing might be a passing phase, and that the
frequency of eBay purchases would fade. But no. This turns out to be an
incredibly wide, deep, interesting, and rewarding hobby. The mailing list
started with 6 people (half of whom are still active) and we now have 1850
members. [1]
Speaking of history, and also to put time-nuts into perspective, I'd like to
mention that leapsecond.com (tvb) and febo.com (jra) predate Y2K (2000),
wikipedia (2001), facebook (2004), youtube (2005), twitter (2006), reddit
(2006), iPhone (2007), duckduckgo (2008), gmail (2004, 2009), eevblog (2009),
instagram (2010), snapchat (2011), outlook (2012), and literally millions of
other web sites and mailing lists.
When this all started for us it was WWV on short-wave, ACTS by phone, Loran-C,
GOES, WWVB, GPS, Win98, dial-up, and my search engine was altavista.dec.com.
It's scary to think how much has changed in 20 years. Fun fact: I started
leapsecond.com so I could post the results of a Y2K Colorado visit to NIST. If
the world was going to crash I was going to be at ground zero, with a camera. [2]
Anyway, stay safe, stay healthy, stay timely. Here's to a new decade and a
happy new year to all of us.
/tvb
[1] http://leapsecond.com/time-nuts.htm#history
[2] http://leapsecond.com/y2k/
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