Month: January 2004

CES is taking place in Las Vegas and for the first time in years I’m not attending. The bout of the flu I had earlier in the week scared me off, and now I’m stuck having to do a bunch of other personal things. I tried to convince myself that I would head off tomorrow and just be gone for a day or two, but now it’s too tough to get a hotel. My friend Kris is introducing his company’s newest product, the Gibson Jukebox. This is really a cool device that follows up on his original designs when he was with Ecoustix. I think what I miss most about CES this year is being around all the other companies rolling out fascinating new products (many of which I will buy soon). Intel announced a new VC fund for devices (which is promising) but I’ve got a lot of work to do before I go to them. I guess I’ll just try to meet up with some of these companies when I go out to the Valley next month.]]>

100,000 people, but it didn’t really come across that way. The plane is the middle of the museum, but from the catawalk (which is the only real way to view it) it seems rather quiet. A couple of Japanese tourist took pictures in front of the nose (go figure). The plane is just sitting there, cold and lifeless, a bunch of metal like a thousand other planes I’ve seen before, although tt’s rather shiny being all silvery with no paint. It was just a tool of the pilots who flew, and they, in turn, were just a tool of the miltiary command authority that tooks it’s orders from the President of the United States. If the Enola Gay had been shot down, the other plane (Bockscar) would have carried out it’s orders. If that plane was downed, then another would have taken it’s place (though there is some interesting debate about the existence of a Third Atomic Bomb mission). I guess it is a lot like the guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I know that drives some people nuts, but I didn’t see how protestors could throw paint at this plane yet leave the FDR Memorial or the Truman Museum unscathed. ]]>

the testing on this site.]]>

tough luck and how people are combing the parking lot near the store where the ticket was “”lost””. In another story of loss, there is a guy who was taken prisoner by Morrocan rebels 24 years ago. But his fiance waited for him, never married, and knew he would return. BBC has the story of a long courtship, separated by prison.]]>

the SCAN-DC mailing list about trying to listen to the Spirit Mars probe at home. I was wondering if I could take an old C-band satellite dish, a scanner and a pc to get some of the feeds coming back from Spirit. Here’s some of the replies I got. Answer #1– Given that the transmitter on Spirit is very low power and heavily encoded (notice I didn’t say encrypted), I would think that the dish and amplifier would have to be really large to get a decent signal. It’s doable, but not by the average scannists. You will notice that the first pix from Sprirt were in black and white. This is because it takes much less power to transmit a black and white picture than a color one (due to the larger bandwidth required). I would also bet a heavy amount of encoded telemetry is also on the signal, which is no doubt compressed in some manner. So whether you could receive the signal is one thing, but understanding the encoding might be a whole ‘nother question. 73s Mike —— Answer #2– If you are in to LARGE old satellite dishes, why yes. But not a home backyard sized one – more like one of the big kind that sometimes get surplussed by carriers when they shut down earthstations for overseas traffic or the government when it shuts down stations to listen to such (there are a half dozen such sites that have been put up for sale over the years). I suspect that probably a good 32 or 50 foot dish with the right X band feed would hear the signal from the high gain antenna, though you are hardly talking scanner and PC type hardware here. And apparently some folks at Stanford in Ca have been successful at seeing the signal from the rover with such a dish. There are various university and even private groups who have acquired access to these old monster satellite dishes for SETI or semi-pro radio astronomy experiments – one can be quite sure that at least one or two of these groups is probably trying to look at the downlink as we speak. —
Dave Emery N1PRE, dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493]]>

air pressure leak has been detected in the International Space Station. You may remember last month they heard a “”bang”” which remains unexplained. ]]>

story I suggested about Google’s upcoming IPO. I think that now makes 21 rejections and 6 accepted stories for me on Slashdot. I guess I’m spending too much time browsing the net.]]>