Upstate New York

More about the iPhone and WiFi soon but first a final travelogue for the summer. The total Trike ride was 550 miles. The first day got us up close to Utica where my brother lives. Utica is situated in the Mohawk Valley and is the county seat of Oneida County. Like many industrial towns and cities in the northeastern Rust Belt, Utica has seen continuous reduction in manufacturing activity during the past several decades. It is sad to see a beautiful area with open space and clean air be suffering economically.

The next morning we met some friends and rode 100 miles up to Sackets Harbor, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the eastern-most and smallest of the Great Lakes. The lake flows into the St. Lawrence which then flows northeasterly through Canada connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the strategic position of Sackets Harbor, it played a key role in protecting America’s northern frontier during the War of 1812. Had it not been for Sackets Harbor, the majority of the day’s motorcycle ride might have been Canadian.

The ride back to the Utica area was beautiful and educational. We saw huge wind turbines — 195 of them — that produce 2% of the New York state’s residential electricity. I had seen the giant turbines before from a distance but a visitor center allowed us to stop for a closer look and hear the whooshing sound of the giant blades.

As we came across the Tug Hill Plateau, we could see tens of miles to the Adirondack Mountains. There are extensive park systems throughout the state of New York, but . Adirondack Park, with six million acres (half of which is private), is the largest by far. In fact it is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined.

Riding back to the lake the next day through rural New York and Pennsylvania was a treat. There were clouds and sprinkles on the first day’s ride but the last two were perfect blue sky and warm. The scenery included a lot of great views, mountains, hills, rivers, streams, farms, tractors, cows, and American Flags.

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Postal Parking – Redux

The story about the shortage of parking at the U.S. Post Office in Ridgefield brought some reaction, as expected. Some people feel the electronic alternative is nice if you have time to learn how to do it. Fair reaction but it strikes me that even more time is spent in line to park and even longer in the other line waiting for service inside. I also feel there are much better uses for public capital than building post office parking lots.

Robert Braathe at galaconcierge.com points out that the Backus Avenue post office near the Danbury Fair Mall has 20 parking spots and is very convenient. They have an automated machine and a lobby that is open 24/7. Robert says "I only ship through the automated machine and on off peak hours".

Robert also pointed out that there is something worse than waiting in line for parking and service at the post office — waiting in line "behind people who still write checks in the grocery store or department store".  Quite a few people might agree with him, especially when a person buys a handful of items in the grocery store and then takes their time to fumble around to find a check book, write a check, and then make a detailed entry in their check register. People in line behind them give up their time and the check writer gives up cashflow, points, and rebates on their credit card.

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One Summer Night

There is more to say about the iPhone and an update on WiFi, but this posting is to share some information about summer music. One aspect of blogging is serious business and technology information but another dimension is just archiving some of life’s experiences and creating something that the grandkid’s kids may enjoy reading some day.

The Pocono Mountains in Northeast Pennsylvania area is where we hang out in the summer and some weekends during the year. There is a lot to see and do on the lake, on the trails, and riding the trike. Earlier in the month we went to the Wildflower Music Festival at the
Dorflinger-Suydam Wildlife Sanctuary in White Mills. The concert was performed by three young musicians who call themselves Time For Three. All three were trained at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. It was an amazing performance which blended bluegrass, classical, jazz and original compositions from Brahms to the Beatles. The talent and creativity were electrifying.

Not sure I had ever been to Stroudsburg, PA other than passing by on Interstate 80. It is a small Northeast Pennsylvania town not far from the Delaware Water Gap. Parking on Main Street was no problem and the Gaelic dinner at the Siamsa Irish Pub was outstanding. A bonus on the way to the Pub was seeing a benchmark placed in 1958 in the concrete base of a cannon in a small park a block from Main Street. Speaking of 1958, that is when of the evening’s performers were rising stars. Built in the 1920′s, the

Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg, was host to "One Summer Night" a "Doo-Wop Spectacular featuring classics of the 50s & 60s. It was a real trip down memory lane with The Passions ("Just to be with You"), Kenny Vance and the Planotones (“Looking for an Echo”), Vito Picone and the Elegants ("little Star", The Del-Vikings ("Come go with Me"), and Cleveland Still and the Dubs ("Could This Be Magic?"). Amazing how these guys keep going, some of them have been singing for more than fifty years!

The Origins of Doo-Wop are debated but most would agree that it evolved from a merging of pop, gospel,
blues, jazz and swing elements in the late 1940′s and early 50′s. Doo-Wop music is innocent, joyous, romantic and, some would say, almost spiritual. The harmonizing is awesome.

Watching these performing groups on stage was inspiring. A little arithmetic can quickly show that most of the performers were in their late 60′s — at least — and some more than 70. Some looked it, some did not. All of them had great voices and rhythm. If you look at their concert schedules on the web sites you can see that they are performing almost constantly — one group claimed 208 concerts last year. Why are they doing this? Why don’t they stop and retire? It is possible some lived past their means or did not invest in their future during the hay days and now need the money. Others may do it out of loyalty to other members of their group. Some may not know what else to do. I believe the vast majority however, are doing it because they love it. You could see the sparkle in their eyes and the spring in their step. As the audience raved, the performers were inspired, and the cycle continued. It was a great night.

The next night was a change of pace at the Mountain Laurel Center for the Performing Arts in Bushkill. In spite of the cold and rainy night, thousands of people came to enjoy Keith Lockhart conduct the famed Boston Pops in favorite tunes from Hollywood and Broadway. These songs were not by my favorite composers nor was this the kind of music I like. Nevertheless, the performers and conductor were outstanding as usual and the standing ovations brought two encores and a wrap-up with Stars and Stripes Forever. Hard to top that!

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Speed Demon

I felt very fortunate to turn 62 earlier this month but I would feel even more fortunate if I was Sigbritt Lothberg. Not because she has reached the distinctive age of 75 but because she has the world’s fastest Internet connection. Ms. Lothberg — of Karlstad, Sweden — has a 40 gigabit-per-second connection. That means that, if she was so inclined, she could download a full-length movie to her home computer in less than 2 seconds! That would be 75,000 times faster than what most of us get from a cable modem. Lothberg’s son, Peter, worked with a town official to install the connection which uses a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers — the specialized computers that move packets of ones and zeroes around the Internet — placed up to 1,240 miles apart. Although this is not a likely scenario, it does show the possibilities for Internet speed. Peter says "she didn’t even have a computer before." Apparently she isn’t exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers, but that is not the point.

The point is that — especially in America — there is not enough competition. While Ms. Lothberg is enjoying lightning speed with her Internet connection, AT&T and Verizon are each spending more than $20 million per year on lobbying. Unfortunately, much of the lobbying is aimed at preventing competition, especially in the wireless area. There is a perception that wireless is inherently much slower than "wired" connections. Actually, the ones and zeroes do not care whether they are moving through copper, or glass fiber, over the power grid, or through the air. The issue is not technology, it is about having widely available and open wireless networks with lots of competition. Some people worry that Google is the next juggernaut, like IBM in the 1960′s and Microsoft in the 1990′s, but if it was not for Google, the spectrum that will be made available for new wireless networks when TV goes digital in 2009, that spectrum would all be gobbled up by AT&T and Verizon to be parceled out according to their (limited) vision of what is possible and in a very proprietary way. If Google and others get a hold of that spectrum we will have an open approach and likely see some breakthroughs in speed and coverage for the wireless Internet.Stay tuned for a WiFi update in the next few days.

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Postal Parking

In the town where I live people don’t like the shortage of parking at the U.S. Post Office and so a proposal was born to tear down a nearby house and create an expanded parking lot. A debate has now arisen over the merits of tearing down the house, whether it is historic or not, and what alternative uses could be made of the house. To me, the focus is on the wrong issue. Why are so many people compelled to drive to the Post Office in the first place?

For the foreseeable immediate future, there will be a need for postal offices but of all the things that people go there for, many of the needs could be fulfilled by alternative means. I suspect nearly all the people who visit the post office have a computer, an Internet connection and a printer. Both the U.S. Postal Service and Stamps.com offer very easy to use online postal services. You can print your own labels and your own postage, including Priority Mail and even international shipping. You can add delivery confirmation which can then be tracked at usps.com and you can request emails whenever status of package changes. You can also buy all the labels, boxes, and tape online. A simple food scale can provide the weight. For larger packages you can stand on the bathroom scale with and without your package and with some quick arithmetic you get the package weight. After preparing your package you make a request at USPS.com and the package will be picked up at your front porch. For a feee you can even have it picked up on demand. If you do a lot of shipping you can get a nice digital scale and a Zebra thermal printer that makes the 4" x 6" labels you see on your inbound packages. If you put your mind to it you can avoid 90% of your trips to the post office. If we all avoided even a much lesser percentage of trips, I am sure we would not need a new parking lot. I have been using online postage for more than five years and have been more than satisfied with it.

There is also more that the post office could do to alleviate the parking problem. Two weeks ago I sold my Palm Treo 700P phone (replaced by the iPhone) on eBay. On the day the package was to be shipped I was in New York City for a board meeting. I took the package along but wasn’t watching the time and suddenly I realized it was just past five PM. The bellman at the hotel told me about the 24×7 post office at 421 8th Avenue. The cavernous building had machines resembling ATM banking machines but with a scale. You place your package on the scale, swipe your credit card, and follow the instructions on the screen. After the postage is printed out you place your package in a bin and you are finished. 24×7. Although not all 24×7 there are many automated postal centers in Connecticut with extended hours. (There is even an Automated Postal Center at an Albertson’s supermarket in Las Vegas). If there is a will, there is a way to put one of these automated machines in the Ridgefield post office building.

Between usps.com, stamps.com, and an automated postal machine Ridgefield should be able to easily avoid building another parking lot. Long before our tax dollars would be amortized for the life of parking lot, most people will do most transactions online. The technology is available now. Just think how good you will feel putting a stamped and ready to go package on your front porch and then do something else you want to do instead of driving downtown and waiting for a parking place.

IBM Happenings: July 2007

The month of July at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The announcements included excellent earnings for the first quarter, continued moves with the company patent portfolio, some very large contract signings, the establishment of a Center of Excellence for Nuclear Power in France, a “Global Citizen’s Portfolio” for IBM employees, and a project which will enable the company to consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System Z mainframes running Linux. On the people side of IBM a significant change occurred this month when
Dr. Paul Horn, senior vice president, IBM Research announced his retirement from IBM after 28 years.  Succeeding him is Dr. John Kelly, III, most recently senior vice president, Technology and Intellectual Property.


I first met Paul Horn in 1994 when we were both members of what was then called the senior management group. Paul was head of IBM’s Almaden Research Center and I was just beginning some grass roots efforts around the Internet. Two years later Paul took the helm at IBM Research and began a series of changes that were as profound as the evolution of the Internet. As had been the case for decades there continued to be major breakthroughs for IBM and society but Paul’s major impact was transforming IBM’s R&D and innovation model. IBM Research was already world renowned but Paul took it to the next level by increasing the focus on customer problems and speeding innovations to market that mattered to them. He also integrated exploratory work with more mature research, launched new strategic areas of huge importance such as computational biology and nanotechnology. Paul also opened up the labs to external influence and partnering with newly acquired companies and with clients.



Part of Paul’s legacy will surely be the defeat of a chess grandmaster by the famous Deep Blue chess playing supercomputer, but the more important move was placing a big bet on a totally new kind of machine called Blue Gene that could solve previously unsolvable problems. The deep computing programs that Paul developed have had a profound effect on IBM’s bottom-line while driving society-changing research programs in exploratory systems biology — work that is aiming to tackle some of the toughest problems in healthcare, like battling cancer or understanding how drugs interact with the molecules inside the human body. One of the side benefits was IBM’s entry into a multi-billion dollar life sciences business.

The best known business created by IBM Research has been around chips — prior to Paul’s reign, mostly used internally. The many advances of IBM scientists in chip design have lead to leaps in power, energy efficiency, and performance. The radical new design processes and exotic new materials pushed the limits of technology and made it possible for IBM PowerPC technology to be chosen by all of the top three game makers for the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3. .



Paul is a big thinker and introduced many new research disciplines including Autonomic Computing, an entire new academic discipline called Services Science, and the Global Innovation Outlook. He also built two new IBM Research labs in the emerging markets of India and China — now the two fastest growing labs in IBM.

In short, Paul Horn has turned IBM Research into an engine of growth for IBM’s software, services and hardware businesses. As Paul moves into e-tirement I have no doubt that he will continue to contribute a lot to the greater good. He has already taken up the position of Distinguished Scientist in Residence at New York University, where he plans to lecture, do research and explore book ideas.


Here are all the other announcements made by IBM during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

iPhone – Update No. 5

After another couple of weeks using the iPhone, I remain captivated, especially with the brilliant user interface. I also continue to discover some shortcomings. One glaring example is the lack of copy and paste, something I took for granted with the Palm Treo 700P which I sold last week on eBay for $320). There have been many occasions when I wanted to copy something from an email or SMS text message and paste it into a "Note" which I could then sync with Outlook and subsequently paste into a new web page or email or whatever. Copy/paste is the duck tape of a computer but the iPhone does not have it. This is a non-trivial limitation.

The big issue — and possible solution to the lack of copy/paste — is applications. The Palm has thousands; the iPhone has just the basics — so far. If you watch the video interview on Podtech of some of the 300 who turned out for the iPhone developer’s conference you could get very optimistic. Developers are building applications that follow Web standards and which can utilize the unique user interface of the iPhone and work with the Safari browser. I took a look at one of the applications already available called AppMarks. I was quite impressed. It allows you to create icons on a web page — in other words it gives you a web page with an icon for each iPhone web application. The icons look just like the icons that are on the iPhone home page and you can add, delete or edit them..

If nothing else, the iPhone is calling more attention to the fact that most people will be using web applications from a handheld device. The leader at this so far appears to be Opera Software of Norway with it’s new Opera mini browser which works on nearly any mobile phone. A very positive story about surfing on your phone appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. I recommend reading it. The point of the story was that people using a handheld device will expect to be able to have full access to the web, not just the content and applications that Verizon or AT&T or Sprint have "approved". The operators argue it is "for your own protection" and there is an argument there but somehow we have thrived with full access to the web with our PC without getting approval from our Internet Service Provider when we want to add something new. That is how it has to be for handhelds.

Apple has taken a good step in the right direction but by not opening up the phone to developers like Palm and Microsoft have done, the iPhone is totally dependent on web applications. In addition the iPhone has no local storage which means your data has to be on a server somewhere. It is very much like the "thin client" model that Oracle, IBM and others tried some years ago. It was not successful because the network was not as reliable, ubiquitous, and fast as assumed. Now with the iPhone we have AT&T — without a doubt the weakest part of the product. It will be a horse race to see if AT&T can improve it’s slow and spotty network and if WiFi can continue toward ubiquity in time to make the iPhone a superior choice to Palm, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, et al who have handhelds with local storage, multiple networks to choose from, and an application interface to allow building local applications.

I already miss the Treo where I had quite a few applications. For example, an application called Worldmate acted as my travel assistant — it converted currencies, times, and all units of measure, kept track of weather and flight itineraries, and provided many other useful tools. Another application called Healthfile allowed me to store all my medications, doctor visits, blood pressure, blood chemistry, tests, etc. Both of these appllications stored data on the storage card on the Treo and allowed me to synchronize the data with my ThinkPad. The applications are available on more than a dozen different phone brands. The iPhone does not have them. Could it have them as web apps with the data stored on a server somewhere? Yes, definitely, but only if WiFi or AT&T are available. In the long run I am optimistic. In the next year or two I am not so sure. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

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