I drove to Raleigh yesterday and did some shopping. I didn't get what I had in mind of buying, but I got what I got. Basically a new telephone. It's just a regular phone that requires a cable for my home. It's a neat little Panasonic jobbie I got from Best Buy. Mostly because a salesman came up and explained to me what I was looking for, and to recognize how speaker phone icons are placed on the packaging. It's a wireless phone, but only to it's base, but that's better than the old style handset with the coiled cable that keeps getting tangled up. I'm sending out e-mail messages for people to call me so I can find out if it works. Especially the speaker phone feature. I can't talk long with getting tired of holding the phone to my ear.
I may be a dollar short and a day late on that. Just after I'd bought the phone, and on my way back to my car through the huge shopping mall, I saw a booth out in the walkway about Clearwire's WiMax systems. I've read about WiMax moving into Raleigh, but I didn't think it would reach my home town for a while. But still, any information about what was going on might give me some insight about whether it might eventually get here. I opened my psyche to receiving, and the young black dude working the booth was on me in a flash.
He seemed hesitant, and I knew that was about my age and what would normally represent a certain digital ignorance (there's plenty of that) and was preparing to launch into a watered-down version of his sales rap, when I interrupted him and began asking questions about WiMax and how soon it would be here. When all was said and done, maybe by Christmas!
¿Cuánto? When I asked him the price just for internet without a telephone, he told me that would run about $30 a month for 768 mbps upload. He said packaged with a phone it would cost $50 a month. According to the pamphlet, it would cost me about the same thing it's costing me now. So, that's a bummer. I was looking forward to the competition lowering my rates.
I'm not going to change anything for a while yet. I wanna see how well WiMax works first. It IS wireless, and EVERYTHING affects wireless systems. The ambient weather to start with, and then there is solar flares and other astral events that affect wireless. Ideally. wireless is the way to go because when it's working right a person could move around anywhere they pleased without a dropped call. Like a iPhone done right.
The news I read this morning about Microsoft's exploration into White Space is in the works. That may mean that some work is being done to take advantage of the public frequencies to be used for what anybody wants. Like the frequencies used by most wireless devices including routers presently.
"White space is a term that's become popular to describe the frequencies analog TV broadcasts used, that got auctioned off to the highest bidder by the FCC. The bidders had to agree to let the general public use part of the frequencies for whatever they wanted. Pretty much like the cell phone frequencies mentioned above. The difference in the White space frequencies and the present cell phone frequencies is that the old analog TV frequencies penetrated obstacles like trees and walls like analog television signals did.
I don't know the deal on what's happening with the White space frequencies currently. The auction was held with drum rolls and fanfare, but it's only been a few months, and these things naturally take time. I think I remember that most of the bandwidth was acquired by commercial interests like the telcos, but Google has been involved with all the negotiating and are the main backers of getting the guarantee the public will get some of the bandwidth to use as it likes. The public, of course, includes Microsoft and Google. They're gonna do something, and whatever these high-rollers do is gonna affect the cost of what we do digitally together as a country with political boundaries.
I think a big part of why Obama got elected has to do with his age and the fact that he's fairly new in the political process. The leadership of the country under the conservatives resulted in a huge slowdown of the digital world, because it represents progress and taking chances on the future, and conservatives are.... guess what... conservative. By the time they get re-elected into office (yep, it's inevitable), then whatever progress can be made in getting the United States connected digitally, government and all, that's all that gonna happen until the liberals are brought back to catch up as catch can. The WiMax technology can do that, but so can it's competition.
Maybe it'll be a combination of all the viable technologies that are being implemented now or maybe some new invention will reorganize the entire communication effort into a result that's at least three orders of magnitude mo' bettah than we can yet imagine. It won't make much difference to the old people. They're slow to adopt to the existing miracles, but as we die off and each succeeding generation is more digitally aware, then analog will only be around as a relic, like rotary-dial phones are now.
My friend Rainey is teaching an on-line basic chemistry course or at least he's trying to. It's new at his department. He seems discouraged about the software programs they're using to make it happen. They were created by Microsoft, so that's a major stumbling block. Have you ever seen the science guys on TV try to make science interesting. They patronize. They condescend. They spoon-feed science like medicine that's good for you. The very guys who would entice you to be-co-me like them are not enticing. Bill Nye is not famous for his notorious following of sexy female groupies.
Why would Bill Nye's male students not notice that he is not a role model that's gonna solve anybody's sexual angst, much less their own by seeking to be-co-me like him? Young men wanna be like the bad boys who get the girls, not the flattops that preach about saving the world while they deceptively build bigger, more destructive bombs in their DARPA bought and paid-for research laboratories.
They oughta have musicians teach chemistry with long hair and pretty women clinging to their muscular thighs that the kicked-back professor has to drag around the lectern just to move or gesture. Science will never be sexy, but scientists need to hire sexy proxies to lure the lonely into their ranks. Surely nature has the equivalent of the ol' bait and switcheroo trick they can put under a microscope and learn to mimick?
Rainey might be able to make on-line science courses more successful. He seems to have all the right talents to make it happen. He's a power-user on the computer, and his new girlfriend Autumn seems to think he's sexy enough, at least for her. Rainey put me on the phone with her the other day, and though I couldn't actually see the stack of Bibles she stood on to say it over the telephone (not yet anyway), I could almost swear she swore it.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
