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May 22, 2001

I've been going through the latest edition of Jade Clayton's telecom dictionary. I think Jade and I have a good opportunity to help his readers. Write me or Jade if you find a definition that is confusing or unclear, and we will do our best at privateline.com to get you an alternative, coherent explanation. So, rather than have another static, unchanging book in hardcopy, we can have it change on the net in a way, by updating certain definitions as needed, keeping people aware of changes here. Sound good?

May 21, 2001

A good but tiring weekend. I spent Saturday hiking to the top of Ralston Peak, a 9,300 foot mountain which overlooks Lake Tahoe. The trail was still covered by feet of snow, and the going was sometimes treacherous. Still, a beautiful day and the view from the top was tremendous. Spent Sunday doing yard work in the 100 degree temperature of the California's central valley. Kind of strange, struggling through ice and snow one day, then boiling in the sun the other. Welcome to California! Redid the graphic on the different kinds of multiple access below. Am on the hunt for a sponsor.

May 17th, 2001

I've completed the article I was writing for the Japanese magazine Mono. Now that this deadline has passed, I will work on cleaning up my house and yard, responsibilities I've neglected in the last three days. I will be back to the site soon. Thanks for the patience. Make sure to read the A.P. report below:

Welcome to the Future

SAN FRANCISCO, May 16 (AFP) -

Computer chip giant Intel said Thursday it has succeeded in creating a computer chip that includes the core circuitry of a cell phone and a hand-held computer etched into its surface.

The components are embedded onto a single silicon wafer using a single manufacturing process, the company said.

Traditionally, these different components are incorporated separately in a cell phone or hand-held device, and manufactured and assembled in different plants.

The company said the cell phone circuits will be five times more powerful than existing, stand-alone cell phone circuits, while consuming a fraction of the battery power required for today's devices.

The company hopes the chip will power next-generation ultraportable hand-held computers and cell phones with fast Internet connections, a market the depressed computing industry has been rushing to capture.

"Within the next five to 10 years, we should not be surprised to see devices such as wearable computers or even video watch phones become widely available," said Ron Smith, senior vice president of Intel's wireless division. "We believe Intel's new process technology will extend this trend."

Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, was to unveil the chip at its developers forum in Amsterdam Thursday.

May 10, 2001

I'm continuing to write the article described below. After I've completed that piece, within the next ten days, I'm going to start looking for a sponsor for this site. I plan to look for at least a month. If that doesn't go well I might make this site into a modified subscription service. All of what you see now and use would remain free but all new writing and updating of files would be done at the subscription based site. The old site, in other words, would become an archive, but a very good one. Let me know if you have any ideas on this, I would much rather find a sponsor than go subscription.

May 8, 2001

I have nearly all pages at privateline.com converted to a uniform look. There's still much to do on the site but I must put that work on hold until I complete an article I'm writing. It's on the development of American built personal communication devices for military and civilian use from World War II to the present day. So, if you have any experience with military radios, especially hand held or portable rigs, please let me know: privline@pacbell.net. Thanks in advance.

May 7, 2001

Now this is line of sight communications! NASA reports they've picked up a signal from Pioneer 10, now 7.3 billion miles from Earth, 78 times the distance from the sun to our planet. The power of the received signal? A billionth of a trillionth of a watt. This points out why power in the high frequency radio bands, such as cellular or point to point microwave, is usually secondary in importance to having both radios within sight of each other. If one radio isn't fairly close to line of sight, and five watts won't make the connection, well, fifty watts probably won't help. To make the point, if the antenna on board Pioneer wasn't facing Earth then a thousand watts would do nothing, the energy would simply be on its way to another part of the galaxy. As radio frequencies get higher, as they approach visible light frequencies, their waves act more and more like light; you can focus and direct that energy in a narrow fashion. Picture a flashlight and its directed beams, that's how to imagine radio waves at higher frequencies. Here's was the URL for the well illustrated NASA story:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast03may_1.htm?friend

734 external links here at privateline.com? That's the current total. I've put in these links so that people can go further with their learning. But now they've become a big problem, too many of them expire too soon, leaving people disappointed when links to sites and pages I've recommended don't work. Some people estimate 3% of the links on the web die every month. So in a year more than a third of this site's external links will no longer operate. What's worse is that many sites kill pages, not just move them. So good telecom information is lost. In the future I will start archiving pages here, with a link back to the originating site. I don't want to infringe on copyrights but I also don't want the information to disappear.

May 5, 2001

Hiked along Horsetail Falls today. Spectacular. And dangerous, but a good hike never-the-less. If you haven't seen them, here are photographs of the hike when I walked it two years ago. This tour page gives you a good idea of what awaits you in the Desolation Valley Wilderness Area.

May 3, 2001

Slow but steady progress on converting pages. I have divided up the clip art collection page and the Vintage Telephone Equipment museum page into several smaller pages. This makes the pages quicker to load for people with slow internet connections. But it is boring and I am tempted to stop the web work today and concentrate instead on reading.

May 2, 2001

Work continues on revising the site. Oh, a new monthly record, over 92,000 hits for April. Thanks much. Niki Taylor, arguably the most beautiful white woman in the world, lies badly injured in an Atlanta hospital room, the victim of a car crash. The driver who caused the accident appears to have been distracted by his cell phone. Good grief. We don't need more laws or regulations to save ourselves but some of us do need more common sense. This must be terrible on Taylor's parents, they lost another daughter, Krissy, a few years ago to a severe athsma attack. Taylor used to have a website but it has gone off the net; I am unsure how one would send a get well message. The A.P. relates:

"Supermodel Niki Taylor, whose lithe good looks have landed her on countless magazine covers since she was a teenanger, was in critical condition with internal injuries Tuesday after an auto accident. . . At a news conference, Lou Taylor said Niki Taylor suffered severe liver damage. "That seems to be the primary worry," she said. She said the model was awake but was heavily sedated and that no surgery was planned. Driver James Renegar, 27, told police he looked down to answer his cell phone and lost control of the 1993 Nissan Maxima. Police said they did not suspect drugs or alcohol contributed to the accident."

A Tribute to a Transmission Tower?

The tiny town of Walnut Grove sits halfway between the major cities of Sacramento and Stockton, in the California Delta. Over the decades many television stations have sited towers near the town, so much so that the Walnut Grove Rotary club put up a nice sign board to commerate them and explain them to visitors. If you can't read the type, the shortest tower is 1549 feet, well above the height of the Empire state Building, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statute of Liberty. It's just one of many unusual things you'll see while going through this country. On Monday I drove through the Delta to go to Rio Vista, picking up medicine for my cat Montel, from my long time veterinarian. Below is a typical Delta slough, this one on Ryer Island. It is a beautiful place.

Misc. Thoughts

Read an article on WAP or wireless application protocol yesterday. Some say the name should mean Wrong Approach to Portability. I think the criticism will subside when data rates get higher, but when that happens I do not know. I do wonder why a separate coding language was required to produce WAP enabled web sites.

Before the graphic based Mosaic we used text based browsers like Lynx to surf the web. Some people still use Lynx and it is very quick. And before internet browsers were designed we had programs like Gopher, that used hierarchal text based menus to navigate large university and library data bases. These were also speedy. But now we re-invent the wheel to come up with a new wireless friendly, small screen format. Which is textual, just like Lynx and Gopher. I remember reading an early article on WAP two years ago in the Ericsson Journal and shook my head. The protocol seems geared for e-commerce from the start but I still had questions. Which I am not answering now! Will write about this subject when I get done with the cellular series.

MIT's Technology Review; WAP Phones

MIT's Technology Review is an excellent magazine and available nearly everywhere in America, including many large supermarkets. The September/October issue features two good articles, a general piece on coming wireless services and a detailed story on the true inventor of television. Pick up a copy for some enjoyable reading. I have one point in passing, since the wireless article mentions WAP, or wireless applications protocol.

Many people write at length how web masters must code web pages differently, so that their sites are WAP compatible. Not necessarily, WAP is fairly friendly, thanks now to http://www.google.com. As I understand it, if you access a web page through Google.com, first finding it in their search engine, Google will then convert that web page into WAP form once you click on the link to view it. Neat, eh? It may not support every feature of the WAP protocol for web pages but I should think it handles enough. Let me know if you view TelecomWriting.com through a WAP enabled phone, I would love to hear a report.

A Global Perspective

Doing so much writing that I look and feel just like Bill the Cat, pictured on the left. For my wireless history series I am trying to include as much as I can on telecom companies from around the world, I really don't want to write another exclusively American oriented piece. Doing this, though, requires the original two page article to balloon to at least ten or twelve pages; there is so much to cover and discuss that I can't make it any shorter. Although it may seem like I am neglecting the rest of the site while I am writing this that is not the case. I continue to answer my e-mail and to do corrections and additions as usual. And if you have any recollections or experiences with radio-telephony and these companies: Alcatel, Siemens, Ericsson, Nokia, NTT, let me know.

Our Future

The coming short range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, will let inanimate objects: a vending machine, your bookshelf, your sweater, communicate with each other, with computers, and with you. As Negroponte pointed out in Being Digital, machines need to talk to each other to better serve people. Low powered transmitter chips would permit each book in a library, or every product in a warehouse, to "talk" with the shelf they were on, letting a distant computer know its location. Putting the book back in the wrong place, say a shelf on the third floor and not the second, would trigger a trouble report, letting the librarian know where the misfiled book was, allowing easy reshelfing and saving much time. This wiring of objects will complete the communication cycle. Previously, optical and electrical telegraphs enabled communications only between telegraph stations. The telephone permitted direct contact between people. The internet, laid over telephone lines, lets computers talk with each other. Now, we will see communication not just between people and computers but also between any object requiring attention.

Selected Daily Notes Archive (Home Page has current notes)

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