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Date: Tue, 23 Jun 92 14:14:13 -0700
Message-Id: <9206232114.AA11427@lorien.QUALCOMM.COM>
To: tjonz@caliban.corp.sun.com
From: wordy@lorien.qualcomm.com
Subject: Notes from the Bikelab -- #16
Cc: zonker@napa.Telebit.COM
Status: RO

Here's the missing back issue.....

--------------------------
NOTES FROM THE BIKELAB
Issue #16 -- 5/10/92
by Steven K. Roberts
Jeffersontown, KY
--------------------------

Copyright (c) 1992 by Steven K. Roberts.  All Rights Reserved.  
(Intact reposting and free distribution are OK with permission; 
personal forwarding is OK without.)


IN THIS ISSUE:
	Update from a Kentucky rainstorm
	Donahue show and other plans
	Antennas, PPP, SPARCbook, CDROM, and more magic

"Is that Evil Knievel?"
	-- overheard comment from a clueless passerby who, 
	fortunately, didn't stop to investigate further.


Ah, I love it.  Despite cries of anguish from a few who see the 
mothership as a total sellout, this new twist in nomadness seems to 
be working.  How else could I be parked in a lush Kentucky field in 
the rain, jamming to the Grateful Dead, watching email flow in from 
the ether while writing software and sipping tequila in 
comparative comfort?  It ain't all bad. 

I'm sitting on the bike, writing with a Mac keyboard resting on a 
fold-down tabletop and connected to the console's external ADB 
port.  The music recalls fragrant California summer evenings at 
sunset, sharing the Shoreline Amphitheatre with tens of thousands 
of happy Deadheads, crisp articulate guitar and playful rhythms 
setting a sea of bodies into synchronous motion, everything 
somehow right with the world, the optimistic culture of our youth 
still alive after all.  It happens now in a mothership in the 
Kentucky rain, luring me away from software to capture a moment 
and fling it willy-nilly into the vapors of Dataspace.  Such a strange 
world is emerging from our collective technological consciousness...

I've driven across America since I wrote you last, piloting the 
powerful new Ford 1-ton diesel truck with it's towed cargo of 
mobile bikelab over the decaying interstate highway system, 
wondering with every bone-jarring shock if the delicate and heavy 
load will survive.  California... Nevada.... Utah... Wyoming... 
Colorado... Kansas... Missouri... Illinois... Indiana... Ohio... a blur of 
highway lowlife and identical rest areas, motels and campgrounds, 
CB truckers and faraway hams, greasy food and potent coffee, 
recurring daydreams and sweaty T-shirts.  I vowed to work my 
way alphabetically through the CD library and made it a third of 
the way through by the Dayton hamfest, noting which ones really 
must go and which still touch me on some level, evoking overlaid 
images of distant road miles, lovers past, major phases, lifeshaking 
braindances, and sometimes nothing at all. 

In a way it's not like the Road, really -- the Other Woman who for 
years has lured me endlessly onward hides from the growl of this 
7.3-liter International diesel, her soft voice overpowered.  She 
frowns slightly as I pass, an earthy woman annoyed by her man's 
lust for the fast lane.  "It's not that," I try to tell her.  "This is 
business... marketing... I'm on my way to the East Coast for media 
and tradeshows, then I'll come back, you'll see..."  

No response.

<sigh>

					* * *

Kentucky.  Being here is an odd blend of deep familiarity and 
startling discovery -- like rounding a curve on Six Mile Lane for 
the thousandth time to find a house gone and a new intersection in 
its place.  You all know the feeling.  I grew up in this old house, and 
there are objects that haven't been moved since I was barely tall 
enough to be a threat to them.  For a chronic nomad accustomed to 
unfamiliar beds and new faces, this is almost an adventure:  
walking around the property, mourning lost trees and admiring 
new ones; finding in the basement fragments of old projects; 
fighting the infernal footboard on my old bed (still trying to keep 
me from growing tall); slipping into habits of childhood; 
instinctively keeping a low profile by stepping lightly around 
creaky spots on the floor; catching up on 20 years while looking 
into the aging eyes of old friends, who somehow, incredibly, still 
live in J-town.

Spending 3.5 years in Silicon Valley does change your perception, 
though.  I ain't a midwest boy no more -- this evening at a 
Shoney's dinner, and later at the Kroger store, I was so startled by 
the near-100% caucasian population that I caught myself staring.  
And the language... people didn't have accents like that when ah 
was a boy, no-siree.  Shee-it, us folks from Kaintucky ain't even 
GOT no accent; people just thinks we do cuz' they'alls diff'rent, 
y'understand....  

(At the Dayton hamfest, by the way, I received an interesting piece 
of advice.  "Jes' one thing missin' on that crazy bike o' yours... a 
shotgun.  You pull into Hazard, Kentucky on a Saturday night, 
things liable to get a little LIVELY, dontcha know...")

Lest I be guilty of promulgating a dated stereotype, I should 
hasten to add that, as I learned when bicycling through the South, 
"hick" accents are not evidence of slow thought or lack of 
education.   Still, being freshly steeped in the cosmopolitan high-
tech vapors of Silly Valley, this visit to my old hometown is a 
potent reminder that I am, indeed, back on the road.  Despite the 
complete change of format, the 13,800 pounds of mobile 
possessions, and the smell of diesel, I still don't know where I'm 
going to sleep tomorrow night... or where I'll be next month.  

I do know what I'm doing for the next three weeks, though, and it's 
insane....

					* * *

The bike is still the core of all this -- without it, the resources I'm 
throwing at the mothership would be of dubious benefit.  I'm even 
thinking about upgrading to a bigger trailer, but we'll save those 
ruminations for a time when they're realistic -- a time that might 
be nearing if these next few weeks can help correlate the often 
inappropriately associated phenomena known as "fame" and 
"fortune."  The first is by now easy, but in no way does it guarantee 
the second.

The bike was featured in a front-page story in the Wall Street 
Journal on April 21, which is apparently read by a lot of people.  
I'll be in People Magazine next week, and I'm on my way to New 
York City tomorrow to do a full hour with Phil Donahue (cast aside 
those assumptions about the subject matter, oh ye of dirty mind!  
We'll be discussing the encapsulation of IP packets within other 
protocol suites, as well as the daunting power management issues 
associated with distributed battery-based nomadic systems.  
Honest.  He's really into this.  "Is the caller there?"  "Yes.  I've been 
watching your show here in Kansas and I want to know how Mr. 
Roberts deals with the phase distortion and dropouts associated 
with high-speed cellular data transmission.  My husband is a 
realtor, and he complains about it all the time...")

After taping the Donahue show (I did the B-Roll last week), I spend 
a day with my agent and an editor or three, then emerge, hopefully 
unscathed, from the madness of Manhattan (yeah, you got it -- I'm 
driving mothership and bike into Midtown...) and head for DC.  
There, I do an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, film 
with the French TF-1 network, and hang out at Interop for a week, 
doing show-n-tells and hopefully learning something about the 
infrastructure of this network that is fast becoming the basis of my 
information life.  (There are people out there who think that 
simply because I'm a public net-proselytizer, I'm an expert.  This is 
very scary.  Someone might actually ask me to EXPLAIN how a 
piece of mail makes it from a POP client on my bike Mac to a PPP 
daemon in the sleek new Tadpole SPARCbook in  my backpack, and 
thence through the ether to a Sun workstation at Qualcomm and off 
through CERFnet into the hard disks of machines around the globe -
- as if it's not already tough enough to justify why I'd want to do 
such a thing while pedaling down a pretty country road in the first 
place.)

Anyway, after that's over I give a talk at the National Science 
Foundation, spend a day or two with good friends in Richmond, 
zoom off to York for a probable gig at the Harley-Davidson plant, 
motor over to Pittsburgh to discuss a movie deal and hang out at 
CMU, then rumble down to Austin just in time to hit Mad Dog 'n 
Beans and suck down a few well-earned mugs of Tecate with lime 
in the June heat wave before visiting sponsors and dropping in on 
Usenix.

And after that, I swear, I want a break.  I really do.  Think I might 
follow the summer Texas horde to Colorado, lock up the 
mothership, and see if I remember how to pedal this thing that 
even now numbs my rump as I slowly rearrange bits on one of its 
disk drives.  (The bicycle, by the way, now has 644 Megabytes of 
disk space, and somewhere around 34 Meg of RAM tucked away 
here and there.  Some week when I'm surrounded by databooks 
and have absolutely nothing important to do, I really must figure 
out how many transistors are on board.  Being in Kentucky reminds 
me of grade school, when you were pretty cool if you had one of 
the new 6-transistor radios, but REALLY cool if it was a 9-
transistor or even a newfangled 12!  This social scale persisted 
until manufacturers caught on and started using two legs of the 
little buggers as diodes just to crank up the advertised transistor 
count without lying TOO blatantly about it.  I sunk all my savings 
into an exotic Mitsubishi ZX-505, which even had shortwave.  I still 
remember huddling under the blankets and listening to Radio 
Havana at midnight... then sitting in the torpor of 3rd grade amidst 
buzzing flies and droning teacher, drawing secret pictures of it as 
well as my future fantasy laboratory.  I did hang the ZX-505 on my 
bike one day, with a vague sense of prescience.  It had 21 
transistors, I seem to recall -- though I wasn't entirely sure what 
they all did.  I'm afraid I can say the same thing about most of the 
ones in the bike I now ride, 30 years later.  It's humbling to realize 
that I need an on-site network administrator and tech support 
hotline to keep a bicycle running smoothly...)

					* * *

Ahem.  Asides aside (well, in a sense this is ALL an aside, but I'll 
set that thought aside...), I suppose a brief technical update is in 
order, though I'm not really in the mood for that.  If I don't do this 
now, though, it won't happen until June.

In the new toy category (which, if you haven't long since observed 
from earlier reports, is what fuels this -- much more than 
carbohydrates or even cash), we have a pair of ultralight yagis 
from Mesa Antennas in Loveland, Colorado.  The 4-element, 2-
meter model is totally packed within its 1-inch-square aluminum 
boom -- and the elements are aluminum arrow shafts with 
threaded inserts!  All this, including the gamma match, weighs 
about a pound.  The little 5-element yagi is for UHF, and will 
become the ATV big-gun on the bike (my dual-band whip is good 
for about 5 miles before snow sets in).

The other way-cool piece of hardware from Dayton is the Digital 
Voice Module, which is essentially a digital speech recorder that 
can store just over 2 minutes of 32KHz sampled sound in its soft-
partitioned DRAM.  This will find a use in the bike's HF station, as 
well as for demo and security applications in which people 
unfamiliar with speech synthesizers have a hard time 
understanding the bike's present voice.

New CD-ROMS:  Buckmaster's callbook database now includes 
international hams, and I just got the long-awaited Street Atlas 
USA from DeLorme -- every street in the US on one disk, with 
address range data, zip codes, phone prefixes, towns, bodies of 
water, and more.  I plan to try it first under Windows, running 
under DOS emulation on the SPARCbook.  Unknown yet whether 
this disk will allow access via latitude/longitude:  the Trimble GPS 
is up and magical, and I want to automate the mapping function 
ASAP (to cut weight, you understand.  I hate all these paper maps, 
and I suffer from occasional bouts of origamicartophobia).

Berkeley Systems, the folks who brought you After Dark, now have 
a talking Macintosh interface for the visually impaired.   Since I 
suffer from similar constraints while riding the bike, this might be 
interesting -- an internal speech synthesizer vocalizes the entire 
screen environment, naming icons as you step between them with 
the numeric keypad, finding things by name, and so on.  I'll report 
on this when I get to know it better, but first impression is very 
favorable.

I think I wrote in #15 about the bike SPARC -- it's continuing to 
dazzle with its Sharp TFT LCD, and has been working beautifully 
except for a power supply failure (a weird one at that -- the 
aluminum case is 12V hot, dropping to 7.5 in operation, and nukes 
the switcher if I rest it on the solar panels and it contacts the 
antenna mount!) .  I spent a whole week with the energetic folks at 
Morning Star Technologies in Columbus, Ohio -- bringing up their 
PPP software that creates a virtual network connection via a phone 
line.  If you're used to dial-up access only, this may sound like 
coming full-circle, but there's a lot going on here:  PPP provides 
identical functionality (though slower) to a real network 
connection, supporting multiple telnets, ftps, mail, and all those 
other wondrous services over a completely resilient modem link.  
I'm using the FAST new Telebit QBlazer, and we can unplug it right 
in the middle of grabbing a gif file via ftp, plug it back in, and after 
automatically re-establishing the link, PPP continues inhaling the 
same pixel it was working on before being so rudely interrupted.  

It also means that the bike can live right there on the internet, not 
just send and receive mail through a gateway (which is still 
quicker and easier until the SPARC gets repackaged into the 
console instead of the case behind the seat -- I've been using 
Eudora on the Macintosh as a POP client to a server running on a 
Sun 4/260 at Qualcomm).  Given the right permissions at this end, 
you could finger the bike while it's in motion -- though needless to 
say I don't allow this since I still have to pay the cellular phone 
bills...

The very latest addition is the Tadpole SPARCbook, a 7-pound 18 
MIPS color laptop with 120-meg disk, 8-meg RAM, and internal 
fax-modem.  I've had this for about 24 hours, so the learning curve 
is still steep -- but it does seem rather incredible that something 
this little can run unix (Solaris) and Open Windows 3.  It also 
emulates a 386, directly addressing the VGA, and is thus, 
presumably, sufficiently brisk for graphics-intensive applications 
like the mapping mentioned above.  I hear tell it will emulate a 
Mac as well, which should be interesting.  More on this as I get to 
know it....

					* * *

The TO-DO list on the whiteboard beside me carries a frightening 
list of commandments that must be obeyed before I hit the road in 
the morning for the trek to New York, so I'll only tease you with 
oblique references to online romance, high-tech kayaks, head-
mounted gyroscopes and CCD cameras, a new video, and the 
dissemination of passion.  <giggle>  Seeya in Dataspace!

Cheers,
  Steve



---------

Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE           wordy@lorien.qualcomm.com 
NOMADIC RESEARCH LABS

According to the OmniTRACS satellite terminal, I am at:

X-Position: 42 57 31 N 76 5 45 W 
X-Nearest-City: 7 miles SSE of Syracuse, NY
X-Nearest-Town: 7 miles WSW of Manlius, NY



