Selected Daily Notes Archive (Home Page has current notes)
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April 6th, 2004
Last night's three hour special on ABC, Jesus and Paul -- The Word and the Witness (external link, now dead), narrated and co-written by Peter Jennings, highlights a common misunderstanding: faith that Christ exists does not demand complete proof, indeed, uncertainty is required.
Again and again Jennings asked for more and more evidence, particularly about whether Christ rose from the dead. You can not have direct physical evidence, Mr. Jennings, nor should you.
Christ and God want us to make a willing, free choice to accept them, despite our doubts. At some point we must make a leap of faith. We must exercise free will, a voluntary decision, and not be coerced. God wants willing subjects, not slaves. Ideally, we come to the Lord running, laughing, with open arms.
If Jesus Christ were to appear to you now, if He performed miracle after miracle: raising the dead, changing the color of the sky, making it rain off and on at His demand, you would eventually have to accept that He was Lord. You would be forced into accepting this by direct physical evidence. You would have no free will in making your decision. And that's not what God wants.
Skeptics like Jennnings pretend they are looking for the truth when in fact they are looking for a reason to reject Christ as Lord. No evidence, no truth. But there is no amount of evidence that will convince such people. Nor should there be. God wants us to investigate the evidence as well as our hearts. A lack of proof will always remain. And that is why faith is so important and necessary. Despite our hesitation and uncertainty we choose to believe in a message that is worth believing in, a life worth celebrating, a God Most High. No complete proof required.
April 4th, 2004
Bored in the Boardroom with Bluetooth
Sony Ericsson now produces a toy car you control with their Bluetooth enabled phones. Run it around up to 30 feet from your mobile. While certainly cool looking, and obviously a great deal of phun, I think this new accessory points not toward entertainment necessarily but to how we must rethink what we want our wireless phones to do. With Bluetooth and other local wireless technologies our mobiles cease being standalone, voice-oriented devices. They can now act with local computer networks, which in turn can operate with a world of networks. What's next? I don't know. But through wireless we are quickly bringing computing power everywhere. It will be fascinating to see what the coming years bring.
Read a review of this device by clicking below:
http://www.mobile-review.com/review/sonyericcson-btcar-en.shtml (external link)
March 31, 2004
This site made on a Mac. Can you tell?
Q. I want to put in an old style mobile telephone in my 1966 Imperial. I have some parts, namely the control head which contains the dial. Any ideas how I could use that unit to control a cellular telephone?
A. From Geoff Fors, mobile telephone expert:
"I am an Imperial nut. I have had a '67 Crown HT since 1979 which I rescued from the crusher and still regularly drive. It still has a Motorola 'MJ' rotary dial IMTS head in it along with the complete 1966 vintage IMTS radio which I used up until 1995 when Pacific Bell discontinued IMTS service."
"I always liked the looks of the '66 Imperial better than the '67. I plan on getting a black '66 4 door hardtop someday. Any car good enough for Bruce Wayne (Batman) and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. is good enough for me!"
[1966 Imperial pictured below]
"Here's what one guy did regarding your idea. At one time Motorola made a cellular interface which was designed to take a regular mobile cell phone and interconnect it to a standard desktop home telephone. This product was sold mainly to construction companies and mobile offices who wanted a regular telephone but were too far from a conventional phone line. This product dated from about 1989 and plugged into a port on a transportable or installed mobile phone. The guy who had this idea rewired the IMTS control head so that it behaved as a regular home phone (he added the network and some parts from a Trimline telephone.) Then he just wired the interface box to it and there was a cell phone in the trunk."
"Here's the problem with that idea in 2004 - nobody to my knowledge makes an installed mobile cell phone anymore and the carriers will not activate an analog phone anymore either (at least in my area.) You can't buy a transportable phone anymore. So a person doing it today would need to start from scratch. I presume that most modern cell phones have an accessory port (unfortunately, usually undocumented to the public.) What would be needed would be an interface box to amplify and re-route audio from a cell phone into the IMTS control head, and to convert hook switch and dial pulses into commands the cell phone understands. There is a moderate amount of programming involved in doing so, because the cell phone wants to see a 'send' command when you are finished dialing and the IMTS phone has no such provision. That means you would need a program subroutine that would understand certain digits to determine when to engage the 'send' line and when to wait for the next dialed digit. It's probably too big a program to fit in a basic stamp type microcontroller but certain PICs or other microcontrollers might be able to handle the number of conversions needed. As you can see, it's not that simple a project."
"I miss having the IMTS service and have left my fully operational phone in the Imperial out of nostalgia. But I haven't found a cheap solution for still using it other than buying a defunct IMTS base station and running that illegally from my house, another big project which is impractical also."
"If all you have is the control head and no radio, you could always rewire the switches, make an interface board, and use a dial-pulse to contact closure logic circuit, and Frankenstein all that into a cell phone built inside the head itself. But again, the new cell phones are a throw-away item made with surface mounted and proprietary parts, and hacking into one would be not be easy."
"The dual IMTS/Cellular phones Tom mentions were from 1989-90 and are far newer than anything which would look right in the Imperial."
"A final, simpler idea. It wouldn't be much work to patch the IMTS head into the hands-free accessory line of a cell phone. But your dial wouldn't work, and you would have to still use the cell phone to access various modes such as 'send' and 'end.'"
Geoff
March 26, 2004
Housekeeping notes
Does anyone have experience turning an informational web site into a non-profit organization? Let me know through my contact page. I'm thinking of making privateline.com into a non-profit to chase grant money. Corporate sponsorship for this site hasn't worked out; it may be best to look for another solution. Ideally I would like to work on the site full time but I can't do that because it doesn't make much money. The problem for readers is that with less work the site becomes less relevant, instead of a free library with up to date resources, it becomes an archive, a non-living record of the past. I've had a crush of non-web work to do lately but I am still thinking of the website and I do respond to all of my e-mail.
March 24, 2004
Q. I have property on the only high hill around. It's a rural location. Would it be good for a cell site? What other services might be interested?
A. (From Mark van der Hoek)
"A town or a resort of some kind nearby that would drive a business case for building a cell site would be good. A major road, it doesn't have to be an interstate, would also be desirable. Ordinarily, cell sites aren't placed on ground that is too high. But in a rural area, a cell site can be considerably higher than in a suburban or urban area -- it has to cover a certain amount of population to make it worthwhile, so rural sites in, for example, Kansas are on 1000 to 1500 foot towers."
"If you have a hill of that size on your property it could easily be a good place for both a cell site and a microwave link. Another thing you can throw in is telemetry. Utility companies (power, natural gas, oil pipelines) use microwave links to keep tabs on their stuff. It's quite realistic to have a cell site, a microwave link or two from a long distance company, and some telemetry all on the same tower. You could also have a radio repeater for the state police or county sheriff, and ambulance services. If it's really rural, and the best hilltop around, you could have all of that on two or three towers. Add a radio station, TV station, and maybe some private two way business radio (like a plumbing company might use) and you've got an antenna farm. Not unrealistic at all. And don't forget, if it's the best game in town, you could have more than one cellphone company on the same hill."
March 21, 2004
On June 3, 2004, England's Bonhams (external link) will hold an outstanding auction of antique telegraph and telephone items. This is museum grade stuff and although few of us can afford even the least expensive offering, Bonham's web page makes for fascinating reading. I do wish they offered more detail and provided an on-line catalog of items. And Mark van der Hoek points out this auction house is trying to create a demand for communication technology equipment. He hopes the auction fails and thus keeps these goods in the hands of interested people, not speculators. But read on and enjoy Don Kimberin's comments below.
From Bonhams:
"Instruments and printed material from what might be termed the Victorian Internet goes on sale in London at Bonhams in Knightsbridge."
"Bonhams’ historic sale of Telecommunications Memorabilia titled ‘From Morse to Marconi’ on June 3rd will be the first of its kind and will include significant technical instruments, books, manuscripts, and share certificates from the 19th century Information Highway - the telegraph, the telephone, and the wireless. The value of the sale is expected to exceed £600,000. . ."
Continues at their site. If you can't find the auction from their home page, click on Departments, and then Books & Manuscripts. Bonhams (external link)
From Don Kimberlin:
During my short tenure at Western Union International right in Lower Manhattan, I could have had literally tons of old Western Union submarine cable apparatus. As it stands, I did cop a couple of old sounders, and a brass nameplate for a cable reel from their warehouse in Nova Scotia.
One old chap I worked with was the legal officer for all the abandoned submarine cables that had been Western Union's all over the world. His office was full of charts of their routes on the ocean bottoms, and he had literally hundreds of 6 inch long display sections of just about every cable Western Union had ever laid.
I was later told that they finally offered the stuff to the Smithsonian, which declined to store tons and tons of brass and copper, so it all went to a smelter.
Oh, how I wish I knew to buy it 30 years ago! As it stands, when I visited Valentia Island in Ireland several years ago, I found 6 inch sections of the 1866 (first successfully working) transatlantic cable, and gladly paid 60 Punts to get at least that bit!
I wonder how this Bonham's outfit came by the stuff they have. Much if it sounds as though it's Western Union material to me.
I don't know if you know or care much about this bit of history, but the Anglo-American Telegraph Company held Western Union at bay in attempts to purchase its transatlantic telegraph cables for decades. When Anglo-American's cables were getting expensively old (and the British goverment was breathing down Anglo-American's neck about nationalization), they finally sold their plant to WUTCo.
WUTCo built three quite large three-story buildings on the northerly end of Valentia Island. I was amazed when I saw how huge they were. They could easily have been the entire HQ of WUTCo's worldwide cable system operations.
Today, they are largely vacant, with a bit of space rented out to small Irish businesses. Perhaps that's where WUTCo stored their historic archives, and the goods at Bonham's may, indeed have somehow flowed out from those buildings through Irish government hands... Don Kimberlin
March 16, 2004
Been much too busy lately. I always respond to my e-mail but it may take a bit longer for the next week.
What's in a telephone number?
Take a look at this interesting area code look up service. If you want to know about an area code and prefix, say (916) 777-4324, you can easily determine that this number belongs to Isleton, California, along with many more details. Things like its zip code, longitude, latitude, and so on. Good site to bookmark when you're trying to figure out those unknown numbers on your monthly telephone bill.
http://www.areacodedownload.com (external link)
March 14, 2004
Four years ago George Sharrock predicted major problems with WAP, despite the wireless industry's fascination with it. WAP now is now nearly dead if not gone. In this Alcatel article the authors show what works in the wireless market and why, using WAP as what to avoid, SMS as what to embrace"
"Recent years have proved that in the mobile communication world technological innovation can either leave users totally disinterested, or lead to amazing market success. Two cases that epitomize these extremes are the failure of the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) mobile Internet service and the boom in Short Message Service (SMS) text messages."
"In 1999, the major players involved in the GSM market were preparing for a predicted “mobile revolution” that would bring the Internet to every one’s pocket. The promise was strong. Users were offered the ability to browse the Internet from their mobile phones anywhere at anytime."
"Manufacturers and operators made enormous efforts to implement this new feature, which resulted from extensive standardization work in the WAP Forum. It required phones to implement new ergonomic features, such as soft keys, larger screens and specific scrolling systems. . . ." Continues here . . . (internal link)
March 12, 2004
Could we all say a prayer for the good people of Spain? From the Associated Press:
"Panicked commuters trampled on each other, abandoning their bags and shoes, after two of the bombs went off in one train in the Atocha station in the heart of Madrid. Train cars were turned into twisted wrecks and platforms were strewn with corpses. Cell phones rang unanswered on the bodies of the dead as frantic relatives tried to call them."
March 11, 2004
What's T-Mobile's Problem?
Dear Tom:
I have a T-Mobile (external link) cell site on my commercial property in Tempe, AZ. The lease called for a 20 foot by 20 foot site or 400 square feet at $700.00 per month. After construction the site ended up being 30 feet by 31.5 feet or 956 sq feet. That's more than double what they agreed to so I've asked for twice as much rent. They've refused, only offering another $150, and now they've even pulled back that offer. They told me, and I quote, "You're not using that property." Help!
I've been through mediation and trying to evict them will cost thousands of dollars. I'm told this is a "footprint" problem. It seems most landlords do not check the size of the site after construction or if they do find out more land was taken there's little or nothing to be done about it. I think they lied about the square footage to get a lower monthly rate. Now what? Know anyone else with a problem like this? I'm thinking about a class action lawsuit.
Dear Reader:
Check the USENET to see if there are other people with the same problem. Go to Google and select "Groups" from their home page. If there are any lawyers who would like to help this person then let me know. Contact me through my contact page.
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Try snowshoeing! It's a great sport, if a little noisy. (Crunch, crunch, through the snow.) Here I am at about 10,300 feet, on last weekend's hike in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Notice the bare rock. You'd think that the most snow would settle at the top of a mountain but that's not always true. There's usually so much wind that the snow is blown right off. This is a big file and takes a while to download:
http://www.privateline.com/Natasha/Tomsmall.jpg
March 10, 2004
Some very nice pictures of how cell phones are produced. This is an external link to Nokia. It was working when I last checked, but please don't blame me now if it isn't:
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/1,8764,33325,00.html?appId=6
March 8, 2004
Background sounds for your mobile telephone to disguise your real location. "No, honey, I am not in that bar. I'm stuck in traffic. Can't you hear?"
http://cellular-news.com/story/10785.shtml (external link)
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