That Damned Boat

 

This is the Tempest, a 68’ motor yacht built for singer and actress Julie Andrews, which she later sold to Hal Hallikainen, who created industrial and scientific instruments for the medical, petroleum and chemical fields, including one of the first heart-lung machines, which was used in open heart surgeries.  Broadcasters will recognize that name, as his son Harold developed the first fully user programmable digital (and network capable) transmitter remote control system in 1980, the DRC-190. 

Why am I posting a picture of a yacht that unfortunately sank over fifteen years ago? 

Because an offer from Harold, for me and a local radio DJ who worked part time for me, to stay onboard for a week during an NAB Radio show at Moscone Center in 1992 - at which point I was so broke I couldn’t afford a hotel room - an offer that saved my company from bankruptcy and dissolution and made that DJ More money in a couple of years than a lifetime in radio  

How?

Well, that DJ, who like all radio talent despised sales, salesmen, selling … it’s a thing you had to be in radio back in the day to understand, perhaps, but there was a “Chinese Wall” of sorts between the sales department and the production side of the business … he helped out in our booth - for free, just a trip to San Francisco and a stay on the yacht - and unbeknownst to him (and everyone else) he was a true, natural born salesman!  Some here will remember the late Kelly Hethcote, who single-handedly averaged $10 million a year in gross sales at NSN. Out of the gate!  It was stunning …

Harold and I were catching up the other day and he sent me this photo of “that damned boat,” as Kelly always called it. “I never wanted to be a salesman. Don’t like them. But a week on that damned boat changed my entire life and now, I can’t go back!”

Sadly, like the Tempest, Kelly is no longer with us, succumbing far too soon to pancreatic cancer 8 years ago. 

We still think of you, Kelly. 

You - and that damned boat.

The Fabulous DanaCam!

… a tiny little bit of internet history…

After a week of post dental surgery hell, I felt pretty good today - I wasn’t vertigo-spinning and could drive - and since my teenage daughter’s boyfriend was in Denver this weekend, we went out for lunch. 

We went to a little place called Nozawa’s over in Avon, at the bottom of Beaver Creek, and literally spent a weeks grocery budget on lunch - sushi, of course. (Oddly, it’s about the same cost as it was the last time I was there a decade ago. I’d forgotten how good it is… omg!)

Some of you satellite folks will remember we were on the internet at the office long before it was commercialized on 8/1/95.  We’d spent at least a year experimenting with different ways to pack TCP/IP into the serial data formats available with satellite modems, using our local vail.net dial up user base as Guinea pigs, to see how much latency they’d put up with and working out ways to reduce the TCP issues that latency caused. 

Our company’s commercial website came online the first day the modern net was alive and it was legal to have a commercial presence online. (There were only about 5000 websites worldwide that were up by midnight that night - commercial and government - and the vast majority were existing NASA, university and government. I remember because yahoo kept a running count back then.) 

We had Kampala Uganda up and online four days later, which made us the worlds first commercial satellite Internet backbone provider.

As far as I know, we also had one of the first live webcams online too - live on our NSN site a month or two later. One of my partners brought it in to play with, and not knowing what to do with the thing, after some discussion, we hung it from the ceiling where it looked at our front office manager and receptionist’s desk. And at her, of course. She was an aspiring actress named Dana Ryan, who went on to earn several film credits and awards, hence the name “The Fabulous DanaCam!” We didn’t have voice mail by policy, we had Dana, and our clients loved the fact they always got a real person when they called … and Dana had fun with it, hamming it up for the webcam, smiling and waving at our callers, most of whom she knew from years of dealing with them, who were a bit blown away that they were talking to and watching this Michelle Pheiffer type on the “new fangled” internet!  

After a few months it was just a part of life. After hours we’d sometimes place a life size cardboard Larry King cutout we’d stolen from a hotel lobby at a Boston NAB show in her chair … it was just a part of office silliness. 

Yes. The early days of the ‘net were Very Different times. Our company would be unrecognizable in today’s buttoned down, keystroke monitored business world. 

But all good things end, right? When a large corporation closed the deal after buying us a couple of years later, they made us take the DanaCam down since, to the big corporate legal suits, a hottie-actress playing the role of a receptionist on global streaming TV on the now big-rich-sueable-company web site was evidently asking for a harassment action - which was amusing since the company was the most harassment-sued outfit in America at the time, but I guess even they had to draw a line somewhere - so I took it down and my IT guy took it over to the then-named-Masato’s sushi bar, where he literally ate two meals a day, and it became the fabulous sushi-cam. (OK, Sushi wasn’t nearly the draw Dana had been, but the customers had fun with it.)

A few years later, Masato moved the sushi joint and took the cam to the new location. A couple of years after that, he sold out to another sushi chef named Nozowa, who’s son runs the place now. And while there today, I looked up and saw, all sad and pointed towards the wall, disconnected, the •original• 28 year old• DanaCam! (Note that it had an RS-232 serial port as well as Ethernet connection. Wifi was years away when this thing was made.) 

So - I snapped a couple of pictures for posterity. 

The current young staff was like, “What the heck is the story behind that thing? What is it? It’s just … there and nobody’s ever known what it is.”  So I told them the story. They had no idea they were working with a tiny but legitimate bit of satellite internet and web history… 😂😂

Photos by author and courtesy Dana Ryan / IMDB.com

 

* Local Slacker Nominated For Major Award!

Life is amusing sometimes. It’s mostly complicated, but there are days...

Statistically, my own life has been nearly impossible. It shouldn’t have worked out as it did.

First Love

I fell in love with radio as a kid. I began working on the air in radio when I was 14, after my father drove me 150 miles to Mobile, so I could sit for the exam for the ”then-required to be a DJ” FCC Third Class Radiotelephone Permit

Two years later, at age 16, I dropped out of school - much to the chagrin of my highly educated teacher/librarian/professor parents, drove myself to Miami and sat for the significantly harder exam for the FCC First Class Radiotelephone Operators License, which I passed, with a Radar Endorsement. I came home and was hired as the chief engineer at my hometown radio station.

My father - still mortified over his dropout son - insisted I take the Florida GED exam in January of 1972, so I did, and passed that too, and that June I sat in the audience at my class’s graduation - my own high school diploma already in hand. It was a little card - not much of a diploma. I put it in a thick book - the ITT Engineering Handbook - where it remained for over 40 years, never once examined by a potential employer.

I went on to have careers in radio, television, satellite communications and the early internet, where I helped set standards and design technology you are using right now.

During the 30 years between 1968 and 1998, when I sold my satellite and internet businesses and retired at the ripe old age of 43, I lived a life as statistically variant from the mean as my success in business was, fathered four children in two marriages, and in many ways, thought I was living the American dream. I traveled and worked in 48 states (I never hit the Dakotas) and 40 countries, including a few that attracted the attention of some three-letter agencies here at home. (The attention of the management - see below.)

The last trip I took for that firm in 1997 found me spending a morning addressing the Board of Hyundai Heavy Industries in Seoul, which I immediately realized needed a network my company didn’t offer, so I spent my time with a white board teaching the full Board what their firm needed, who could provide it and how not to get ripped off or oversold at that negotiation. They could not believe it, an American who didn’t try to sell them something, called me Sensei and even offered to buy my company so I would work for them (it had just been sold, alas, and I liked those guys a lot more than the whistlepigs we’d just sold to).

But - Not bad for a high school dropout with a GED, I thought at the time. Not bad.

Fast forward another 20 years. After serving as a minor elected official and on a few charitable boards, traveling a little and living abroad for a while, developing solar heating and power courses and teaching them from CMC to Rutgers, I have ended up a single father of a nearly 12 year old at age 64.

When my youngest started school, I had nothing to do during the day so I volunteered at the school library. (Living up Sweetwater, there was a lot of incentive to NOT make the drive twice a day, and I grew up in libraries - my mother was a librarian. I knew how to do the day to day work by the time I was 10.)

After a couple of years, I was encouraged to become a substitute teacher, which I did. The application for this position involves a background check and fingerprinting and the production of ... a high school diploma.

A 45 year old card, in my case, that had never once been seen since sticking it in a book in 1972.

A book that was still in my bookcase - its formulae well referenced over time.

Yes! There it was. I got the job.

The first year I subb’ed in preschool (Fabulous! The children are not yet indoctrinated free spirits and I got to sit on the floor and play with blocks), elementary and middle school (if you have kids in this range and don’t buy their teacher a magnum of wine next month, it should go in your permanent record! I could not do what these saints among us do daily) and high school (very much the same as pre-school, except high school kids are growing out of the indoctrination and wear bigger shoes).

After 5 years of mostly high school subbing, where the kids know me as Bill, the dropout who retired to endless high school, or Bill, the guy with just two rules in class: 1. Always look busy, since you don’t want to greet the rapture with your feet up, texting, and 2. Never, ever, attract the attention of the management, I received a letter yesterday saying that some of those kids had nominated me for an efec “Friend of Education” Award!

Like I said, I’m amused. Humbled, too, but amused as hell.

First of all, guys: damn, this nomination has again violated Rule Two. Management had to write the letter. They’ll have to see me (and maybe even a date) at the big Ball and Gala on May 5th up at the Hyatt!

The attention of management has been attracted. I know that’s why you did it, too, since you understand that rules are mostly ... well, guidelines. I think we’ve discussed this. You also know that, in high school, rules have to be rules. So, you have to act like they are. Look contrite, right now. That’s better.

Second, while I naturally suspect the motivation of all teenagers. I heartily accept your nomination since, as my own GED proves, education is the most important thing you can obtain in this life we live. Nobody gives you an education. You have to get it yourself, wrench it from every source you can, snatch it from failure and success, and never stop looking for more of it. Because if you don’t, as I’ve said many times, you’ll end up like me. Retired in high school. Spending your golden years with kids like you.

Don’t be me.

Right?

Be better.

Be you.

Now. Stuff those ballot boxes. I want to win this thing!

The Rules

As a substitute teacher at local high schools, I try to leave the students with a few life skills. Like, There are rules. There really are a few rules in life. One: Always look busy. Two: Never attract the attention of management. Three: If somebody, especially politician or a corporate executive, says “I don’t recall” in a witness box, they’re lying.  Flat out. Lying. And finally, the single thing I remember from my days in high school, a remark made by civics teacher extraordinaire Bill Jones in the fall of 1968: “If a policeman ever wants to know your name, you may rest assured he doesn’t have your best interests in his heart.”

* The Secret To Success

Years ago as I was holding court in my office which, thanks to a window and exhaust fan was the defacto office smoking lounge in our little company (back when smoking was only bad for you and not illegal), someone asked me what the "secret to success" was.  My answer came quickly and without reflection: "Know where you suck, and stay away from there."

A Toast, To Jimmy

In the summer of 1974 I was working my way through college as a master control technician at the public television station in Pensacola, Florida.  This was a long, long time ago in TV years, back when it took two people to run a master control room at a small town TV outlet.  It wasn't hard work.  It did require a brief period of concentration, especially since the various video tape segments within it all had to be rolled 10 seconds before they were aired and the "technical director" (the person doing the source video switching) was simultaneously mixing the sound, inserting audio tags and voice overs while watching the video monitors to make sure the picture finally became stable before switching the next segment to air.  Switching television is a bit like tennis - a lot of concentration, some fast action to get in position and then a slower, carefully placed swing, right back into into fast again; repeat.

While I was beginning a station break one afternoon, I felt a change in my lighting and knew someone was standing behind me, really close behind me, watching my every move. Absorbed in the timing of the switching and other requirements, I didn't look around, but drilled into the routine of calling the tape rolls, watching the monitors and the clock, running the VOs and switching the video and audio sources as I plowed through the two minute local station break.  I knew I had a live TV audience and I didn't want to blow up a break in front of a live witness as well. (It's obvious to the TV viewers, of course, but they are intangible.)

I made it through the station ID and hit the network spot on, took a breath and turned around to see who was in my bubble.

Standing directly behind me was a short man with a good haircut and a gentle, amiable expression of genuine interest in what he'd just observed.  Frank, my tape operator on duty, had been watching him the whole time with a half smile on his face (I could see Frank since the five refrigerator-sized video tape machines were across the control room in front of me).  The fellow looked well kept; he was wearing a very nicely cut dark blue suit with a starched white shirt and a red 'power tie.'  His shoes were shined, but not new. He seemed comfortable in them.

Before I could say a word, he thrust out his right hand and said, "Hi.  My name's Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president."

I took his hand and replied, "That's great.  Of what, exactly?"

* Summer in Perth and A Maritime History of Australia

I had the good fortune to be able to live for a short while in Perth, Australia a few years ago, in a home I rented from a gentleman and his wife who used it when he spent several months a year there as a member of the Western Australian  parliament.  It was (and still is) a remarkable place, with "Australian mahogany" Jarrah wood floors and a big patio overlooking the Swan River.  Only a block up the hill on Mount Street from the central business district, the home felt quite private, with citrus trees in the front garden.  I could walk another block up Mount Street to King's Park and its 1100 acres of nature preserve.  I lived there for months without ever getting into a car.  My next door neighbors were two of the nicest people I've ever met - staunch political conservatives, of course, to afford the neighborhood - who introduced me to their circle of friends, a diverse set of remarkable people.  Now, I still had long hair back then, well down my back, and I worked as a volunteer in an Oxfam shop downtown, unpacking boxes of stuff made by Oxfam's many hand-craft industry co-ops in India, Pakistan, Africa and other places, so the cultural acceptance of these folks was unexpected after life in the USA.  (One of the highlights of my time in Perth was a party I gave on Australia Day 2003, when my "Oxfam hippie" friends from work and my neighbor's mining industry, senior government and university faculty friends (and since no party is complete without a bagpiper in full kilt, they had one, too) all bridged the so-called "Gulfs of Age and Ideology" as we watched the fireworks together and shared a really grand evening on our adjoining patios.  Australia's ideological gulfs just aren't nearly as deep as those we swim in here.)

The home came fully furnished with much finer things than I've lived with before or since; the general house inventory list provided by the rental agent was over 30 pages long (I still have it somewhere) and included two complete sterling silver tea services, a shop-full of English bone chinaware, antique brass beds and an unmentionable (in terms of investment) amount of quite good original art and sculpture.  And books.  A small library's worth of books, many of which I read in the mornings before walking downtown to open boxes in the back room of a small charity shop.  One in particular (that the owner later told me he considered a "shelf stuffer" - an old economics textbook from his college days) was, to me, especially enjoyable.  "A Maritime History of Australia," by John Bach, "describes the sea-borne trade to and from Australia from around 1788 to 1974, which covers the years of European settlement."  It is the only book I have ever seriously considered stealing and, since it wasn't on the inventory specifically, I could have, since it would not have been missed; I know this since I mentioned my close brush with larceny to the owners after coming back to the States and was told I should have, since they were running out of room for "good" books..  I didn't though and I am only looking through it again this evening since it was delivered to me by the home's owners, when they traveled 12,000 miles to the USA in 2006 and gave it to me during a brief visit with me in Colorado.  It's remains one of my cherished possessions.

Why?

Among other attributes, the book contains a lengthy summary of ships logs from various periods and includes a detailed description of the voyages of a 135 tonne brig registered in Sydney between 1845-46.  During this year, the Emma was commanded by her part-owner, "Captain Fox," and Bach's description of Emma's adventures in the onshore trade between Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, based upon the Captain Fox's logs and diaries provides a detailed, clear and delightful insight into life at sea at the height of the great "tall ship" and dawn-of-steam power era.  It's an era I truly wish I had lived within but, since I was born on the cusp of peak oil production, I missed it and won't live to see it return. It will return sooner than later as the planet returns to a solar powered life.

An excerpt from Bach's work:  "One of the most interesting things to emerge from a study of Fox's dairies is the number of other vessels he passed during his voyages.  In the decade before the goldrush, it is clear, there was very active shipping trade around the southeastern corner of the Australian continent.  For a two-month period in 1846 Fox remained in Sydney to get married, spend his honeymoon at Watson's Bay and to arrange accommodation. For three weeks in April and early May the shorebound mariner sat with his wife on the cliffs above Watson's Bay, in a shelter of rocks near the Inner South Head, and he recorded most if not all of the shipping movements in and out of the harbour. It is a veritable catalogue, enlarged day by day."

"For Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania) there sailed the Louisa, the steamer Shamrock, later to be forced back  by a southerly gale, the Calypso, the John, the Waterlily, the Catherine and the William.  In the Port Phillip and Adelaide trade he noted the Dorset, Emma, Mary White, Christina, Palmyra, Vanguard, Martha and Elizabeth, and the Coquette.  Overseas ships included the Saint Vincent from London in 130 days, the brig Giraffe from China and the Governor from Manilla, the British barque Sussex, the Constant for Hong Kong, and the Midlothian and Royal Saxon, as well as to barques taking horses to India.  Several other ships, including whalers, were seen to depart to the south seas."

"Even Fox, experienced mariner though he was, became excited at the sight of so many ships, and on one beautiful day in late April, as he sat with his new wife at South Head, he tried to convey his impression in the following passage:

    'Before us lay the boundless Pacific Ocean now indeed deserving the name, 'deeply, darkly, beautifully blue' from the horizon's clearly defined verge, to the breakers against the perpendicular cliffs immediately beneath our feet.

    Scattered over its slightly rippled surface the meridian sun shining in slendour on their white canvas were seven sail visible of all the various sizes, from the tiny cutter to the 700-tonne ships.

     Three of them (Barques) had left the port this morning, the Constant for Hong Kong, Midlothian for London and Mary for New Zealand.

     It was interesting to see them slowly moving away from the land on their different courses, till they appeared as mere specks on the horizon, and we were led almost involuntarily to exclaim 'how wonderful in its simplicity is that science which guides each of these ships to her far distant haven through such a trackless unmarked space.''"

"How wonderful in its simplicity is that science which guides each of these ships to her far distant haven through such a trackless unmarked space."  Indeed, Captain Fox, indeed.

* Tattoos

My oldest daughter, who ran with the early ‘punk/boarder’ crowd, is now in her 30’s. Like many in her generation, she was and is "into tattoos" and recently told me, again, that they’re her form of self expression, "just like writing is yours, dad." We have had several discussions about tattoos over the years, but she really never "won" one of them, in my 'dad-opinion' of course, until that last observation and correlation was pointed out.

Scary.

Blogging, writing occasional OpEds for the local paper, dropping a comment below an online news item, posts on FaceBook and other social networking places; even just sending emails in a world where every expression of self will live forever, really is electronic tattooing. It's fun, if you're into it, but the net result can't be positive, since one's contributions are fixed in time and people change. And God only know's what's in the ink.

I've been "online" since before the 'Net was browser-capable, thanks to a friend and fellow broadcast engineer who introduced me to early "BBS" systems and the text-based Internet back in the 1980's. Computing itself, at the personal level, was brand new in those days and the ability to network was simply amazing to me then.

The older I get, though, the weirder life becomes.  I'm not sure if all this online stuff is worth a damn anymore.

* DC-10 Engines Really DID Suck

Back in the 1990's when I was flying around the world a lot - three weeks out of four, typically - bringing the Internet to Africa, Asia, Eastern Russia (Siberia) and other far-flung places, the Douglas DC-10 was the business traveller's least favorite ride, for a lot of reasons.  mostly, they were rattletraps with poor ventilation, and there was always a horrible vibration on takeoff due to what pilots told me was, "an 'acceptable' amount of unbalance in the engines."  This was further explained as something "caused by parts of the compressor fan blades breaking off over time, a known issue."

Today, this from the FAA, 15 years later:

Washington (CNN) -- The failure of General Electric engines on four jet aircraft overseas during the past two years has prompted the National Transportation Safety Board to issue an "urgent" recommendation to increase inspections of the engines on U.S. aircraft.

None of the incidents resulted in crashes, injuries or fatalities. But in all four cases, engine parts penetrated the engine housing.

Such "uncontained engine failures" are particularly dangerous because flying engine parts could puncture fuel or hydraulic lines, damage flight surfaces or even penetrate the fuselage and injure passengers.

At issue are General Electric CF6-45/50 series jet engines, older engines found on a small number of jets.
FAA officials said 373 of the engines are in service in the United States, on a fewer, but unknown, number of planes. The engines are used on some Airbus A300s, Boeing 747s, DC-10s, MD-10s and U.S. Air Force KC-10s.

The Hologram

Via: Joe Bageant:

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world’s a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state’s 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape.