Taiwan - National Palace Museum, Colorful Plate / Third Phone Test

And this will round it out for the museum posts.  Very colorful, and fortunately the white background enabled a fast enough shutter speed to minimize motion blur.  Even so, depended heavily on sharpening and other enhancements, as it was captured hand-held in a relatively dark room.

Now to other parts of Taipei for the last series of the trip...
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[continued from yesterday's post]
Jason and I learned from Mark that in order to be a disk jockey you had to study a book and take a test to get at least your 3rd-class radio license, called the "third phone".  It was a thinnish, letter-size booklet packed with information on everything from how far your mouth should be from the microphone to some basics on transmitter operations.  It was rumored to be a difficult test, with trick questions mixed in.  So Jason and I each got a book and turned our studies into a friendly competition to see who could learn it the fastest.  We mostly studied alone in our houses, but called to check on each other's progress from time to time.  It was a fun project that potentially had great rewards if one or both of us succeeded.

Finally the day came, and I drove to Beaumont to the Federal Building downtown to take the test.  It was all multiple choice and admittedly there was some fancy guesswork, but several weeks later I got my notice in the mail along with a license to operate a broadcast from a radio station.  It was one of the most exciting days of my young life - a ticket to unforeseen adventures and a new chapter in life.  I didn't take the test on the same day as Jason, but he got his license at about the same time.

So what to do with it?  That part was easy...there was an FM radio station in the Orange market, at 104.5 on the dial, with the call letters KOBS that hired DJs with no experience, offering the perfect opportunity to get started, develop skills, and learn the business well enough to launch into bigger markets if you were good enough.  I eventually did go on to a bigger market (Beaumont), but my days at KOBS provide the warmest memories of my time as a disk jockey.