bryan wann :: binary fury

Gather round, it’s time for the old person to tell a story about how things used to be!

Mid-Late 1990s: no such thing as mobile, I stuck in my 3com PCMCIA card and dialed somebody like CRIS or long distance into my own ISP’s modems. I have flip phones through US Cellular and they frequently fall back to AMPS.

Late 1990s: I get an AT&T “One Rate Digital” TDMA phone for the low price of $99/month. I can text but I don’t see the point. I saw one fancy US Cellular data modem plugged into a flip phone and thought “not bad”. My cutting edge friends in Silicon Valley had Ricochet modems which was the equivalent to a wireless dialup modem. For work I carried an alphanumeric pager to which NOCOL/Nagios sent short messages to like “%SYS-1-UPDOWN: Frame-Relay1/0/13.0 is DOWN” when shit broke. At the movies I overhear some girl behind me ask “why would anyone carry both a phone and a pager anymore?” I think for a while I may have even carried two cell phones, one on US Cellular (CDMA) and another on AT&T (TDMA/GSM).

Early 2000s: I move to Tulsa, have TDMA voice phone service. 802.11 wireless arrives! On the road, still no internets. Here I had a Nokia 6300-something. I started actually texting people for real purposes. For Nagios I try out this e-mail to SMS text message thing and become conditioned to breaking out into a panic when I hear the Nokia text tone at 2 AM. When I was at TU, I bought a Handspring with an Omnisky Minstrel modem. I don’t even remember what data service I subscribed to, but I could see greyscale internets! It was really cool to sit on my friend’s couch, proceed to use my wireless modem and ssh to one of my ISP’s modem banks and feed it AT commands to make an outbound phone call to my friend’s house phone, then giggle while he answered the phone and realized what I had done. Other friends replayed parts of the Matrix, messaging their friends on Yahoo or AIM moments before knocking on their door and scaring the shit out of them.

2004-2008: 802.11 wireless/ethernet in most hotels. Mobile internet consisted of a USB dongle connected to a small external antenna, war driving and camping out in parking lots leeching from whoever was around. State of Texas offers free wifi at most/all interstate rest areas, brilliant thinking to get tired travelers off the road; I frequently used them on my many road trips across the state. Theoretically my Nokia 6310i could do data, but it was so old I don’t think anyone supported it. For work on-call duties I used a Verizon CDMA data card in a Panasonic Toughbook which worked pretty well all around Austin. Here I learn the amateur radio nerds have been bouncing TV off satellites and packets off the moon since forever. Go to Amsterdam to work, slap in a new pre-paid SIM at the airport and now I have a local number.

2008-2009-ish: sometime I got a 3G iPhone and had an unlimited data plan. Mobile use consisted of taking photos with my camera, downloading to my laptop, connecting my phone, emailing to flickr or whatever. Somehow this was better than leeching wifi with a special antenna. Wireless is everywhere. Going deep into the Nevada desert meant my phone dropped all the way down to GPRS, with the little “o” icon for data connectivity. Pretty impressive that I had at least minimal data in the middle nowhere.

2009: now I have an iPad and iPhone with a camera, still no way to tether data. At least now I can plug my compact flash cards from the camera into the iPad, upload photos that way. I can go pretty much anywhere except rural Oklahoma and get some sort of 3G or EDGE data service. Voice? what’s voice?

2010: I needed tethering for on-call duties, got a Verizon Mifi thingy. This is actually pretty cool for laptops, press a button to turn it on, throw it in your bag, open up your laptop. I think I even get AT&T 3G service in parts of Death Valley, if not EDGE in Furnace Creek. Oddly enough in Oklahoma I can get Verizon CDMA service for Mifi, but zero cell service for my AT&T iPhone. I get a AT&T pico-cell thing for my parent’s house, full voice+SMS+MMS service. I have enough 3G contraptions I don’t even care if places have wifi or not. Work causes my text usage to explode, making me get an unlimited text plan.

2011-2012: everything is mobile. There’s an app for everything. I never talk to anyone except my parents on the phone. I consume lots of email but never send any. I write blog posts about how I used to sit in the parking lot with 802.11 antennas.

I can’t believe it’s Friday again already. I feel like I’m swimming through the week now. I don’t really understand what’s going on the past few weeks. Am I so busy that I ignore half the day, is it so routine there’s nothing to remember, or is the universe contracting?

I can’t believe it’s already August. AUGUST. I’ve lived in California for 6 months now and time has just flown by. I’m having trouble accepting that. I feel like I need to be out exploring all the time since it’s all new, but man, it’s nice sitting out on the balcony in the sun and staring at a laptop (and not thinking about work). I’ve been putting off a trip to Death Valley for a couple of months now, it’s always some procrastination or excuse. “New cat” “vet appointment” “need oil change” “woke up too late”…

I adopted a new cat, Charlie, a couple of weekends ago from the Hayward Animal Shelter. He’s a black and white tuxedo cat, white paws/feet and white chest, and about a year old. He was a stray from the rough streets of Hayward, but super friendly. Him and Felix are still battling out who’s dominate, Charlie is certainly not shy about pouncing and rough play. One day I think one has the upper paw, the next day the other one is in charge (my bet is on felix). Felix is much quieter now, he doesn’t flop down to vocalize his boredom, he’s usually off doing other things now.

Firefox is dead to me. In the early days, Firefox was leaps and bounds better than anything else out there, and that was fantastic. Now it feels incredibly slow and every time I turn around I’m being nagged about wanting to apply an upgrade. We’re jumping major version numbers like some sort of Microsoft Office product. Somewhere we went from version 3 to version 9 to version 13. I have an old MacBook Pro maxed out with 2 GB RAM and an SSD, and I basically have to restart FF each day to be able to watch a video or load flash. Even then, it eats all my RAM and works the CPU enough to kick on the fans.

I’ve moved on to Chrome. It’s not a favorite, but I have yet to restart it after two weeks. I can (so far) reliably kill off out of control rendering processes if they do happen to leak a ton of memory. It’s helping stave off upgrading to that new shiny Retina display MacBook Pro, at least for a few weeks!

A couple of weekends ago I happened to catch Richard Misrach’s Oakland-Berkeley firestorm exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. I was only vaguely aware of the firestorm since it happened in ’91, long before I met anyone here, so it was interesting to learn some local history. Basically something started a fire, and intense, dry hot winds turned it into an extreme wildfire that completely scorched the hills. A curator explained some of the stories he had collected, how some of the staff lost their homes, how people dumped valuable belongings in swimming pools as a last ditch effort to save them. (TIL Wil Wright of SimCity fame lost his house in the fires and used the experience of rebuilding as an inspiration to make The Sims.)

It was amazing to see the level of destruction of the area. There were no smoldering charred ruins left, it was all gone. If it wasn’t brick or metal, it was completely turned to ash and blew away. Cars and bicycles stripped of all rubber, melted tricycles, staircases and decks leading nowhere, trees turned to ashy stumps. In the exhibit hall was a book where people were free to write their stories. One entry written by a child said it looked like “another planet, like the moon”; that was an accurate assessment.

What really made me sad was that among the photographs was one of food+water dishes that somebody had left out presumably for their pets. There were several “missing cat” photos posted and it made me realize that lots of beloved pets lost their lives too. I like to think people were able to evacuate with their pets, but I know there were many people who were unable to return home. There would have been nowhere for animals to run, and I imagine even if the front door were left wide open many pets would be too scared to flee. :(