Dateline : Wednesday 8-Sept
Right now I am in the Admirals Club in LAX terminal four. People have never been to one of these should realize what the admirals club is. It is something between a coffee lounge in your local suburban shopping center and the Qantas club – and unfortunately probably closer to the former.
Whereas QANTAS club has free fruit juice, the Admirals club has a voucher for a free drink. Whereas the Qantas Club furnishings are immaculate, the ones here have the occasional stain. Still, like any coffee lounge, it is better than not being there, and I suppose it would be better with some company.
Last night I did not sleep well. I am still getting adjusted to the time change. And it will get worse before it gets better. I have another two time zones today. I think it is only two. We will see
Now, I am on the plane above Palm Springs on the way to Chicago. When I get there I will then grab a flight onto Des Moines. Security was not a hassle – well not too much of one. I did need to take my shoes off to get through the metal detector. Given that 100% of people needed to do this I suspect that the device was too sensitive.
What was not too sensitive was the X-Ray machine. I had accidentally placed my wire cutters in my carry-on baggage. I surrendered these without a problem. They were a junk set anyway. Anyway time to do some work on my presentations before they start the food service.
American Airlines is an interesting animal. There has been a lot of problems in the airline industry in the USA, thanks to savage competition and security issues. The airlines are fighting back, cutting costs.
They are now advertising that their economy seats are furthest apart of any airline. I have now worked out how this is done. First they have removed foam from the seat back, I would be surprised if there is more than an inch of foam on the seat back. I would estimate half that. The seat cushions are similarly bad for my bottom.
The terminal is interesting too. We took a buss from the main terminal to this small out-building that would not look out of place in the Australian bush. This building has a series of ramps that get you to the height of the plane so that you can enter the plane. It is on the opposite side of the airport to everything. It really makes you feel special…
A meal was served since the flight was over four hours. According to the Web Site, it will be about 4 hours and 1 minute. According to the captain, it will be about 3 hours and 20 minutes. Anyway I will now detail the meal
Muesli Bar
Some Raisins
Strawberry Yoghurt
A drink
All served in a paper bag. Oh, and the best bit.
They provided KNIVES AND FORKS!!! A spoon too, but that was useful.
Chicago airport is large. I was frankly amazed. It what makes it more so is that fact that it is all connected. Somewhere like LAX is big, but you don’t get to see the size. O’Hare is just big.
Des Moines is quite the opposite. From what I have seen it is as if someone decided to put in an airport in Orange. Yeah, I know Orange has an airport, but you know what I mean. American Eagle are certainly a low cost carrier. I flew a Canajet Regional Jet from Chicago, and this was surprisingly comfortable. On getting to Des Moines we used the planes own steps which was strange. Then we had to use a set of stairs inside the terminal. I think they were fire stairs, or at least looked like it. Not what I was expecting.
The hotel is only a few hundred meters from the airport so I decided to walk. I know this is the USA, but I walked anyway. Things are not set up for walking, but it was quite a short walk. I had to do more walking inside O’Hare, so this was not a problem.
I have come to the conclusion that Iowa is about to invade Canada to the north. There is an Airforce Air Wing based here, as well as the Iowa Air National Guard. The Air Wing has one or two fighters… And occasionally you hear them over head. But the entire thing is on an Iowa scale – small.
Internet access from the hotel is variable. It is always dropping out which is a pity. When it works, it works well. When it does not it is a pain.
Wednesday I had dinner with Steve Bible. I had Atlantic Salmon and it was really nice. I am glad that I chose it. They also had a beautiful salad bar – maybe not as good as Sizzler, bit close. Steve then showed me some of his toys – one was a prototype of a new PIC board with Ethernet for some Nokia radios that Tapr have been donated.
Upon finishing tea we ran into John and Laura Koster, also of TAPR who had been at the hotel since lunch. After dinner I went back to my room and worked on more of the presentations.
Thursday morning I woke up about 6:30… About 7:00 I went down and started work on my presentations and checked email. Sure, I could have done this from my room, but it was more social to go down to the café and work. A bit later John Ackerman came down and we had breakdfast. John had got in overnight, and had actually got the room next to me. Steve Bible with John and Laura Koster arrived a little later.
Board meeting started about 9:00.., Sort of. Since the secretary was not able to be there, I took the minutes. As much as you can with an all day meeting. There were lots of little things – kits, project and finances.
At one stage we heard a few planes above and also a police siren. By planes, I mean loud planes that we could hear inside a meeting room in the hotel. Planes that were moving much faster than you would normally expect at an airport when coming into land, or even on a missed approach. Late I found out that John Kerry, the US Presidential Candidate decided to drop by Des Moines. The aircraft were actually fighters. That night the TAPR board had a dinner in the hotel which was good.
Following the board meeting we all congregated under the Holidome. For the unitiated, like me, the holidome is a 1960’s or 1970’s concept where the hotel is built around a courtyard, and they build a round roof on the dome, and have the swimming pool semi in doors.
Oh, And just at the start of the Board Meeting, we found out that Roger Barker, G4IDE had died. This was rather sad, but was certainly not unexpected. Just the timing.
Following the board meeting the board met for dinner. The restraunt had a deal where it was cheaper before 6:0. So that is what we did. It was really good for us all to catch up in an informal session.
After dinner we adjourned to the Holidome where we talked and played computers. This was a good informal time. Basically we talked about computer animation, graphics, ham radio, wireless access and just about anything else. I got to meet scott miller who I had been in discussions with about his tracking hardware and protocol. During this time I got a phone call from Jack in Australia from his mobile talking about some work stuff. It was amazing how the world has changed in the last few years.
After a while I went to my room and did some more work on my presentations which I had to have done by the next day. Friday morning I went down for breakfast nice and early and did more work on the presentation. Once I had done a bit of work I was joined by a few other people and we continued to discuss just about anything. I think it was mainly TAPR board.
After breakfast I registered for the conference, and then went into the main venue and scouted out a desk. The important thing was power, and I found an outlet, although the outlet was full. Scrounging I found a TAPR extension cord which worked for a few of us later.
Sitting in there I did some more work on my presentation. An hour or so later it was my turn to present my first talk. Presenting it went well, and I stuck to the time. Phil Karn asked some interesting questions, and despite what I thought, he had changed his views in the last ten years.
One of the reasons I wrote the paper was that he had made a statement about power control and spread spectrum many years ago, and then made comments to the contrary later. I disagreed with these later statements, and I needed to say why. Phil and a couple of others gave me some ideas where I should extend my paper. They were in the areas of
a) Suggesting the use of Forward Error Correction
b) Looking at routing in a mesh where there is a large concentration in the centre of the mesh causing significant interference.
I really was shocked since I have a great respect for Phil and believed he was wrong. I was afraid of hurting his feelings. I don’t think I did.
I get on so well with Phil. He is someone who I would imagine would be so intimidating in a relationship. Someone comments that he thinks about three levels above anyone else. It does not matter on the subject. Phil finally got married three or four years back to the surprise of many people. He is an ex-TAPR board member… More on Phil later…
Then came lunch. My idea for lunch at these things is to find a table with no-one I know sitting at it. Or even better find an empty table. You get to meet some very interesting people that way. After a short lunch I went back to the room to finish my second talk. This one was a general update on some tracking technology in general. The way it was structured was as a whole lot of five minute segments .
My concern with this talk was that it was going to be too commercial, and too much self-promotion. I don’t think I did too much of that. It is a fine balance and I think I won.
Friday night was time for the DCC Social. This is an excuse for people to gossip eating finger food and the like. Lasted for a couple of hours or so. Seems that the conference people do not drink much as a rule, and there was a $100 minimum if we had a bar. We decided on soft drinks, and that worked well.
I had a great talk with Phil Karn. We actually decide to write a paper on using IPV6 with Ham Radio. This will not only be cool but might end up getting my name on one of the RFC’s – and Internet Standard. Discussing this Phil noted that he had finally got one published after many years, and I referred to one where he was mentioned. Surprisingly he had not heard about this one.
One of the things he showed me was the incoming mail to his old email address of
karn@ka9q.ampr.org
He actually just did a tail of the incoming mail log. He warned me that I would be shocked… I was. He was getting about one attempt per second to send mail to the ka9q.ampr.org address. And this has been going on for the last 18 months or so.
Assuming 3600 per hour. This is about 50,000,000 emails that people have tried to send to him…
Strangely most are not spam, but virii… Microsoft put his email address in the Release Notes to Windows XP, and some virii look for email addresses in files. And his email address is on every Windows PC. We also discussed the movie “The Dish” which we both loved.
I went up to my room early since I had a talk to finish writing the next day.
The Saturday was another full day. Slightly earlier start, but it was not too bad. I got to see about 75% of the first talk before I needed to leave for my session – Since it is always a good sign when the speaker is there BEFORE anyone else. I put on a slideshow of some APRS photos that I had collected doing consulting work. And the audience was impressed. I had used this morning session to finish my talk.
Steve Bible suggested I be careful using the mic. Aparently what I try to do is to throw my voice even if I am using a mic. Point taken. The talk was an introduction to APRS, and started off with some cool uses I had put it to, and then worked through the basics. Some of this I admit was a bit out of order, but it was good. People were asking the right questions. Having internet access there was cute. I could demo some of the Internet services available. The entire session of ninety minutes went very well.
One of the standout sessions was from my friend John Ackerman, N8UR. He is the president of TAPR, and very high up in the legal department of NCR. His presentation was on some of the legal situation with software, and particularly Open Source. Basically he gave a talk to us poor uneducated hams that he normally gives as a continuing education seminar and to internal NCR lawyers. I would suspect though that as a rule we got the legal implications better as a group than the people he normally speaks to.
Lets just ignore for the moment the fact that we were here on a weekend listening to a talk about the legal situation of free software, and just assume we really do have a life. Following the talks we had a TAPR membership meeting.
Then quickly followed the DCC Dinner. This was interesting. Before the sit-down part I got to speak to Pete Lovel and discussed the state of airports in the USA. He told of the Chicago minor airport [which I had already heard about] where a federal restriction on closing the airport expired. The mayor brought in the earth moving equipment at midnight and destroyed the runways with huge crosses. But not the taxiways. The taxiways were fine and could be used to get the planes out with special FAA permission.
The dinner talk was given by the guy who wrote the OS/9 operating system many moons ago, and was not the greatest DCC talk I had ever heard. I found it repetitive, having suggested the same thing for many years in the past.
Near the end of the evening, John Ackerman, TAPR president took the opportunity to talk to those assembled about the award for Roger. John read out the text of the award, which appears below.
After reading the citation, and showing the award to those assembled, those in attendance held a moments silence for Roger and his work. During the evening there were conversations on Roger’s legacy to the hobby which were always wonderful to listen to.
Roger’s family have sent out an invitation to any Amateur operators to attend his service if they wish to. Due to some quirk of fate, I will be arriving in London for the first time in my life on Tuesday morning, and will be attending the funeral on Wednesday, representing the international APRS community and TAPR.
You may view the plaque (at the moment) on http://www.radio-active.net.au/tapr/roger.jpg
The plaque reads
“TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions made to the Radio Art by Roger Barker, G4IDE, Lincolnshire, UK. Awarded September 11th, 2004 at the 23rd ARRL & TAPR Digital Communications Conference. Des Moines, Iowa”
The text of the parchment is
“TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award
TAPR is pleased to award a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker G4IDE, of Lincolnshire, UK.
Roger has worked tirelessly for many years to provide quality software for Amateur Radio operators, allowing them to operate advanced digital modes without the difficulties once associated with these operations.
The UI-View software is the benchmark by which all other APRS Raster Mapping software is compared to.
Whilst writing excellent software, Roger has also ensured that users are able to experiment with his software by allowing access to the internal features of his software through an extensive API. Once the software was written, he ensured that the software was extensively supported, starting mailing lists to support his software. To date one of these lists has had 35,000 messages, with Roger reading each one and replying to a significant number of them.
These are just some of the reasons that TAPR is proud to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker, G4IDE, for his services to Digital Communications”
After the dinner there were a huge number of little groups talking and gossiping. Who is doing what. You know the sort of thing. Reminicing. Some people see each other only twice a year. Others see each other every few months. With this in mind it should not surprise you that Saturday was a late night.
Sunday was had to be early but not too early. No talk but there was a session from 8:00 AM to Midday on DSP. This was really interesting. Not much to say apart from the fact that I did some emailing during this time. Other people were speaking through instant messaging…
One thing I forgot to say was that one of my friends IM’ed me and asked about what laptop he should get. My reply was along the lines of “I use a dell, but really since Bdale Garbee is sitting next to me my reply must be a HP running Debian Linux”. What you need to understand is that Bdale is head of Linux for HP, and he is a former head of Debian.
After the session finished everyone quickly went their own ways, until five or six of us went to an Italian restraunt for lunch. Quite nice but I am sure that things will be better when I am in Italy itself though. They tried to give some weird concoction to one of the people with us when he ordered ginger ale. They gave him a pepsi and bitter and something else mix without telling him. Since he did not want to have caffeine, he was not impressed. Not at all.
At the airport I made the mistake of not taking my laptop out of my bag. After all there were no signs. This was not a good move as they did the treatment on the bag including bomb scanning.
John and Tim (From Boston) with John and Laura Koster were the ones left at the Hotel. Then John and Tim left, although Tim did return when he realized that he had left the radio he had won the previous night. The flight to Chicago from Des Moines was pleasant enough.
In Chicago I used the Admirals Club lounge. This is a place that is slightly better than the one in LAX, but not much. Power outlets are hard to find, but I did find the bar even if I didn’t use it. The phone was good enough for my to ring Oz with a support issue I needed to fix.
Then there was the flight from Chicago to DC. This was not as nice as the rest, partially with it being a Braeair from Brazil rather than a canadajet. This Canadajet was set up with four seats in each row with two flight attendants. This one however was three per row, was a packed flight, and I was seated in the back row next to an engine. Not what I wanted.
In flight entertainment is working out where you are by looking out the window and that is all. I do not like flying in these. It is for many reasons. The main is that I am not familiar with them. But worse than they tend to do what feels like tight turns and stupid landings. On the flight into Chicago I thought that the pilot had decided to land 500 feet early, having made this decision about 2000 feet from the runway. The turns for VOR tend to take 30 seconds and pull at least a G. That is what it feels like… Argh.
When I got to Washington DC, Dulles had changed somewhat. It no longer has the glass bricks that can be seen in Die Hard II. Well, not as far as I could see. Also, they are building a new control tower there… It looks as if Dulles is getting rid of the strange busses that transport people from the terminal to the gates.
Coming into Dulles, I was amazed at how many times up and down I needed to go. I think this is because of major work, but you never can tell. Once I collected my bags I called my hotel, and got there without issue. The hotel was actually a motel, and was called “The Hampton Inn”.
It is set up for discerning business people I think. They have a 100 mBPS network cable on the desk for you. Also the place is covered with WiFi. And they provide a lap table for you to put your laptop on in bed. This is cute.
I had been given the plaque for roger in Des Moines, so in DC I took a photo of it and posted it to some mailing lists. A few people worked out that the Callsign on the plaque was wrong – It should have been G4IDE and was G41DE. Not very noticeable, but still a pain. I did not get to bed before about 12:30 AM local time.
In the morning at some stage I woke up and put a face mask on. Then I woke up about 9:45. Not a bad sleep. I rang John Tandler at SkyMate and suggested meeting up, so I grabbed a Taxi to his office. I had a good discussion with him, and he then dropped me at the new Air and Space museum at Dulles.
This museum is hard to describe. Imagine an aircraft hanger with about 150 planes in it, with everything from the first Boeing 707 to the concord to the Enola Gay to the Space Shuttle Enterprise. I only took about 50 photos here… It was really amazing. Everything from commercial aircraft like the concord to experimentals like the Space Shuttle and the Rhutan.
After I had seen much of the exhibition I saw the IMAX film The Magic Of Flight which was cool. Also I visited the observation tower, which was good, but the best part was the Air Traffic Control slave display on the floor below. I was impressed. After all this the staff there called a taxi for me to go back to the hotel to get my bags.
Back at the hotel there was a short wait for the shuttle. The other passenger was a French woman in her late 40’s or her 50’s – a member of the International Association of Jurists. Checking in at the Airport was easy, and I quickly found the British Airways lounge. The Lounge was nice, but has several shortcomings.
There were very few power outlets in the place. There is obviously a design problem since they have fans blowing to circulate the air conditioned air. Wireless access was available, but only through the American Airlines lounge nearby so coverage was variable. This would have been fine, except that the phones were in an area with no coverage. And there were only a few phones too. To top things off, there was no showers. Too bad.
The flight across the puddle was not bad, but it was delayed with takeoff by about 30 minutes. I suspect that some of this was related to the hurricane about to hit Florida.
I rested on the 777 flight, but did not actually sleep. Therefore I got into London about 2:00AM Washington time. At heathrow we needed to use the stairs from the plane, and then take a bus to the terminal. That was not too bad. Passport control was slow, similar to that in Hawaii last time I was there. Still the customs form was really easy to fill in, with very few questions.
When I got to baggage claim one of my bags was getting taken off the carosel by a guy who thought it may have been his. As he was about to put it back I told him it was mine. Fluro orange cable ties work well.
I was amazed at the ease of getting though customs. No-one even asked me any questions – just walk down the green line. I took a shuttle to the airport, getting a phone call from New Caledonia whilst waiting. It took about an hour to get to the hotel.
The hotel is in a good location, but is somewhat down market. It has a single bed in the room, and uses keys. They want you to return the key to the desk when you go out. No internet access, and it is about 4 minutes away to wireless access. They provide a key to a mini-bar, but there is nothing inside it.
After having a couple of hours sleep I visited the British Museum, and then found a hotspot there at Starbucks. Good to be online again. The museum was good – it has been renovated in the last few years. I took some photos but I was getting tired. The highlight was definitely the Rosetta Stone…
I guess that is all for this update… Tomorrow is the funeral which will certainly be interesting to say the least.
Darryl