Mike O’Connor

This is an ongoing post that I'm going to use as a scratchpad to document the "put a ham station on top of the ridge" project.

Updated - maps (aerial, topo, elevation)

Here's a picture of "the problem"

The farm is a wonderful place, and the house is in a nifty location. South-facing so it gets lots of sun in the winter, huddled in the valley out of the way of the prevailing north winds, close to the water table so the well isn't very deep, etc. A great spot for a house. But a lousy spot for a ham-radio antenna. The arrow points to a much better spot for the antenna. The question; how to make that work?

Here's the latest block diagram of The Plan

This'll change as I get smarter, but it's a first-try. There are some interesting choices;

- Should there be a PC up there to do the housekeeping on the serial-port, or can I push serial through the transceiver?

I'm going to use a TenTec Omni VII radio, which can push serial out the back -- which may or may not work for controlling the antenna rotor. The cool thing about the Omni VII is that it can be directly controlled via Ethernet, which eliminates a lot of fussiness.

- Where should the WiFi access point be?

Right now, I'm leaning towards mounting the AP up near the WiFi antenna, to keep the coax run between the AP and the antenna as short as possible. That means either running AC power up the tower, or using power over Ethernet. I'm not keen on having 120v power on a steel tower that I'll be climbing around on, so I like POE as the solution. Looks like the distance won't be a problem -- max according to the spec is 100 meters -- I'll only be going about 30.

Here's a picture of the tower

I used to have a wind turbine mounted on this old water-pumper tower. But the whole shebang came down when we moved and it's been sitting in the weeds ever since. This will be a great chance to recycle this 50-foot tower.

Update - maps

Did me some fooling around with the mapping program tonight. Here's the result.

This is an aerial view -- the red line is between the house and the field where the tower could go.

This is a topographical view...

And this is that same line, but showing distance and elevation. It's looking like the 50 foot windmill tower would "see" the house, but only with some tree-cutting.  A 100 foot tower would be a cool thing. Then I would be at 1300 feet, which gives me a line of sight shot into Eau Claire and Winona.  I've got a line on a really neat 100' Pirod tower from my friend Don Overbye.

Here's a wide-area map -- some interesting possibilities. Winona and Eau Claire are about 25 miles, Alma's around 14 miles and Wabasha's about the same. Maybe I could get tied into a repeater network or two... Or get me some high-speed Internet access with a microwave shot...

Here's one of the great maps from the Milwaukee Area Amateur Society site that shows where I set in relation to the repeaters that they're tracking.

I've always wanted to be in the amateur radio type guy, but never had the gumption to pass the Morse-code part of the deal. But the code-requirement went away a couple weeks ago. I was planning to take the test the day after that, but I got skunked by the huge snow storm that rumbled through.

So I took the exam today. Passed all three sections I did, by golly. So today, St Patrick's Day, 2007, I'm finally in the ham gang. No call-letters yet, but this is the "hello world" post of this amateur Extra type guy.

Since my house (at the farm) is way down in a valley, it's going to be a while before I actually get on the air. I've got a boatload of projects to do -- gotta put up an old windmill tower on the top of the hill, figure out antenna-mounting, figure out power and Ethernet up there (might do solar power and long-distance WiFi), figure out remote controlling the transmitter and antenna rotor from down here at the house, etc. The classic ham project. Should keep me entertained for at least 6 months.

Woohoo!

Yep, we got sooo much snow that I had to punt off taking the ham-radio license exam yesterday. We wound up getting about 15 inches of snow, and there's a little more on the way. So that made it a good day to try out Vista on the trusty Thinkpad and see how it worked.

I've got a Thinkpad G41, which is a weird beast -- it's a desktop replacement machine, so it's got a Pentium 4, running around 3 ghz and lotsa memory. But it's also pretty cheap, which means not much oomph on the video card. Which turned out to be trouble down the line. More about that in a minute.

Anyway, I set out at 9am with a copied image of my hard drive (thanks Nate, that turned out to be a great idea) and fired up the Vista Business install.

The only hard part about the installation was the dreaded "Sonic Studio DLA" problem -- Vista scurried around the hard drive before launching the upgrade and said it wouldn't proceed until I removed that program. Only trouble was, there wasn't a program by that name to uninstall. Some rummaging in the registry and I realized that IBM had renamed the program "IBM DLA." They'd also done that with another Sonic product called "RecordNow!" -- I pulled both of those programs off the machine and Vista cheered right up.

The rest of the upgrade was easy -- it just took a long time. I didn't time it, but my guess is around 4 hours. The nice thing is that the upgrade is completely unattended so I didn't have to babysit the machine. At the end Vista popped up, asked me for my password and I was good to go.

I drove around for the rest of the day and just before dinner rolled back to XP Pro by dropping the old drive back into the machine.

There are several reasons why I decided I like XP better on the laptop (which, to be fair, is not listed as a Vista-ready machine on the Lenovo site). The video card is the main hardware reason I rolled back. Vista's graphics made the video card work so hard that the laptop's fans were on pretty much all the time (unlike XP where the fan comes on only when the machine is working really hard).

But the real reason I went back to XP is because there really isn't anything new in Vista. Oh yeah, lots of eye candy, cute new interfaces and navigation. But as one web site says, it really seems like XP with Mac-wannabe clothing on. I'm willing to put up with a lot of pain if software lets me do something cool that I can't do any other way. But I couldn't find that cool thing while running Vista.

Meanwhile, of course a lotta stuff broke -- I'd have to upgrade a bunch of software that I use a lot (like QuickBooks), peripheral drivers were ok but whining about stuff, the usual bother of an OS upgrade. As I said, I'd do it if it were worth it. But it wasn't. Sure am glad it was just a drive-swap to return to XP...

Updates...

Hm... Others share my view. Julio's blog turned me on to this grouchy piece in Forbes. The recommendation? Don't even think about upgrading an XP box to Vista.

This link is running all over the place in blogs that I follow. I'm sticking it in here so I don't lose track of it.

Periodic table of visualization techniques

Completely nifty set of different ways to visualize information. I got lost in it for about an hour this morning. I sure wish they would put the graphics out in a list so I didn't have to hover the mouse over them, but that's just a nit. A great source of new ideas.

I have a gaggle of premium domain names I got a really long time ago. I keep coming up with ideas for them that are either late/lame or too hard for me to do. I've decided that the time is right to sell one and, being a structured RFP type guy, I decided to build an RFP to select the broker.

Here's a list of the domains -- I only want to sell one of them, but I'm going to let the brokers choose which one they want to sell so they can sell it into their strongest market segment.

bar.com -- social networking, beverage industry, legal services

pub.com -- social networking, beverage industry, publishing

grill.com -- social networking, consumer products, humor

cafes.com -- social networking, food and dining

place.com -- travel industry, entertainment, social networking, Internet-destination

shelter.com -- social services, social networking, consumer products, industrial products

I've prepared a couple of documents. Here's an introductory letter (in Word format) that describes the process and timing in detail. If you're thinking about bidding, you fersure want to read that.

There's also a detailed vendor response document that I will cheerfully email to anybody who's interested. The reason I'm not posting the response document to the web is to keep track of who's inquiring so's to make sure that vendors gets invited to the various events along the way. But if you're just interested in a copy for any reason, feel free to ping me (everybody: put "RFP response" in the subject to get through the spam filter)

Here's a timeline (see? I am into structure);

1/8/2007 Issue and publicize RFP
1/22/2007 Vendor conference call (at noon, CST)
2/12/2007 Deadline for proposal submission
2/19/2007 Interviews with finalists completed
2/26/2007 Negotiations with finalists completed
3/5/2007 Announce selection

Update:

Well dang. Looks like I threw a party and nobody came. Lots to reflect on in that, but the bottom line is that no brokers proposed. This isn't the first time this has happened to one of my goofy ideas. It usually means I'm a little ahead of the market. So I'll go figure out some other approach to this problem... I've got some good friends in a related field who bring a lot of marketing and sales savvy to the table -- maybe it's time to roll my own.

Further Update:

Ah! Frank Michlick wrote a piece about this little RFP over at his great DomainEditorial site. Here's a link to his article about the RFP. Thanks Frank!

Hung out with a few old friends and made some new ones last night. I'm heading out the door -- so not much in the way of captioning or explanation. Maybe I'll get back to this one later at the farm...

I just posted a story over at the St Paul Broadband Committee site about my belief that a lot of the municipal WiFi networks don't seem to be grounded in financial reality.

Here's a link to the article and here's a link to the muni-WiFi financial model I built to go with it.

Here's the deal -- let's get these models out of the hands of the VooDoo consulting expert type people and into the hands of the people. "Open source financial modeling" if you will. Let's beat on this model -- or write a new one if this one is hopeless -- and get to the point where we ALL understand the economics that underpin these projects.

That way, we can either rejoice in bridging the digital divide, solving the problems of the world and putting a chicken in every pot (as advocates claim) or we can avoid the mess that comes with yet another technology project that over-promises and under-delivers.

What say you? Let's have at it.

Sure, they've been around forever. Sure, most of you probably already know about this site. But just in case you don't, here's a pointer to GetHuman.com -- a great site if you're trying to get to a human-being customer-service type person.

Marcie was trying to find the path through Northwest Airline's patented "Voice Prompts From Hell" system to book a seat for me on an existing reservation. She finally gave up. I remembered reading about GetHuman somewhere, Googled it, looked up NWA and tried it out. Tarnation! Worked perfectly.

I'm sold. It's even got the incredibly-secret path to Amazon customer-service reps!

Huh. Full-circle time. I've been working on the St Paul Broadband Advisory Committee for the last few months and put up a web page to help us do our work. Click on that link to check it out.

Better yet, register for the site and help us out!

Ok, that title's a bit harsh but I'm pretty tired after rasslin' with a PHP upgrade all weekend and this is my chance to vent now that the worst of the damage has been repaired. And perhaps wax a little philosophical about the open source world's need to get better at figuring out upgrade management.

It all started with an attempt to install (more...)

Sheesh, this one is a slap yourself in the forehead idea.

If you, like me, have a cable connection to the internet and you, like me, haven't thought about your cable modem since the day you bought it and you, like me, bought the durn thing more than a couple years ago -- go buy a new one that's compliant with DOCSIS 2.0. It'll be way faster.

Ralph pointed this out at lunch on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon I had me a brand new Motorola SurfBoard (which, with all the rebates from CompUSA, turned out to be free).

I'm talking way faster... Ralph's getting over a megaBYTE per second sometimes. I haven't formally tested mine. But it's...

WAY FASTER!

I've been grouchy about Qwest in the past, sometimes even way beyond grouchy into the "troublemaker" category.

But today it was reported that they are the only RBOC holdout in the NSA's program to build a database of every dang call made in the USA.

Kudos to Qwest for holding those call records back. Stick to your guns, folks.

The latest project to keep me away from this blog is bringing up the registry for CORP.COM domain names.

This is a project that Edmon Chung and I started back in 2002 when Edmon was the hotrod young entepreneur in charge of Neteka. He did such a great job that they got acquired by Afilias not long after we started our project.

What with Edmon distracted by the acquisition, and me distracted with a series of really interesting InstantCxO engagements, the Corp.com Registry sorta went on the back burner for a few years. But the time seemed right to both of us last year and the project is galloping toward an April launch.

2nd level domains like CORP.COM have been steadily gaining favor over the last few years, which is another reason why it seems like the time might be right to kick things off. Afilias is game, Edmon is game, I'm game, we have our first registrar in NamesBeyond. So off we go.

Les Suzukamo (a buddy of mine) wrote an article about data center outsourcing in last Sunday's Pioneer Press that you might find interesting.

But he got beat up by a reader for the following sentence -- "Tier 1 is considered the Rolls Royce category of data centers. " The reader pointed out that Tier IV is the best, and that Les had gotten his ranking backwards. When Les asked me this afternoon, I gave him the consultant's answer -- "it depends." In this case it depends on who you talk to. Us network geeks tend to think in terms of Tier 1 carriers -- and thus their data centers are considered Tier 1 data centers (or, telco-class data centers).

But data center infrastructure geeks indeed do have a different hierarchy, and by those lights Les's reader is right -- Tier IV is the best. I pushed this white paper along to Les by way of backup.

Dang, that's confusing...

I'm working with Affilias to roll out a registry for corp.com domain names ("did you miss acme.com? you might be interested in acme.corp.com"). We're shooting for early April to have things up and running.

Along those lines, I'm working on a little gizmo to help people look up name-possibilities for free. There are lots of darn good resources, but they're really hard to find so I thought it would be useful to find as many as I can, and perhaps put some automation in front of them to make the searching easier.

This is a scratchpad for me as I locate the free-lookup sites.

Free trademark searches -- US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) -- (note; follow the "Search trademarks" link in the middle of the page)

Free national business yellow-pages search -- Searchbug

Free state entity name search locations (not complete, I'm still hunting them down on the incredibly variable state pages -- you'd think there'd be some kinda convention they'd follow...)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
Delaware
District of Columbia (DC)
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indianna
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Wisconsin