I woke up to a disturbing dream the other day. It made me think again about how our days are colored by our dreams – affected more than is anywhere mentioned by adults. Yes, we know that kids can have bad dreams and, because young kids’ dream worlds are so mixed with the real world, we know how much the two worlds influence each other. But we think we “grow out” if such things.

I doubt it.

I’ve woken up laughing from hilarious dreams a couple times over the last year. And, golly, the day sure felt better for such a good start. Oddly enough, one of the dreams was of an airplane spiraling to the earth. What was belly laughable about that escapes me just now, but … well, you had to be there. Anyway, it could have been a simple flying dream and the airplane was doing aerobatics – wonderful, funny, surprising aerobatics.

So, how do you encourage happy dreams, fun dreams, warm dreams?

Verizon is talking about opening up their network to phones not sold through Verizon. Is this the start of something big?

Well, that question leads to this long ramble on the sorry state of personal device connectivity.

First, let’s do the overview:

Personal devices follow PCs by 10 to 12 years. That is, when you whip your phone out of your pocket, you are grabbing a 12 year old PC – adjusting for form factor changes and such.

We can expect what happened a decade ago in the PC world to happen in the personal device world today.

So, what happened 10 to 12 years ago in the PC world?

Easy question. Win95 came out! A working, widely used, multi-tasking OS for PCs. Oh. And the Internet. But, hey, finally, after all these years, on an obscure blog, Win95 gets credit for being the enabler of the “Internet” as it’s thought of today.

Back to personal devices and Verizon.

There are plenty of calls for a CarterPhone decision for the cellular industry. Is the Verizon announcement a step toward the same end goal?

Yep. But, it’s a phone company step. The devil’s in the details. Apparently, the device/phone maker must get the device qualified by Verizon. That could be a step similar to that which land line phone devices must take. (They need FCC clearance.) Of course, that you, the phone maker, need to get the approval stamp from Verizon implies you need the same stamp from N other phone companies. Not gonna happen, folks.

Oh well. Anyway, the Verizon announcement can be cheered as a crack in the wall.

We’ll see the herd of carriers respond. Expect a variant of the Verizon announcement from the GSM guys. If the carriers get in a downhill snowball rolling contest, then things could get exciting. For starters, the GSM guys could, for instance, band together with a single point of device validation and skip individual carrier validation.

BTW, let’s look at CarterPhone a bit.

Before CarterPhone, two things were true:

1. You could not hook a non-Bell phone to the network.
2. You paid for each extension phone you got from Bell.

Usually, when people think of CarterPhone, they think of thing 1.

Consider, though, thing 2 in a cell phone world.

What if you could run 6 cell “phones” on the same account at the same time? Sure, thing 1 would be true, too. That is, you could get these phones from anywhere. But the interesting thing is thing 2.

Now think about the Amazon Kindle.

Never mind its misfortune of having no market (as the gadget geeks’ $400 bills are all going to iPhones at this time).

Never mind its misfortune of not being available for evaluation. (Do you see them at Frys and CompUSA?)

What’s interesting about the Kindle in the context of the Verizon announcement is this: what we’ll be seeing when the dam finally breaks on device connectivity are a lot of “extension phones” – that are not “phones” at all!

Forget thing 1: being able to buy a phone from someone other than your carrier. If you use a GSM carrier (e.g. in the US, not Sprint or Verizon), you’ve had that ability for a long time (except, of course, that you must still buy a phone from the carrier on easy, monthly installment payments – whether you get an actual phone for your payments or not).

What you’re seeing with the Kindle is yet another odd-ball device that can really leverage ubiquitous connectivity. Once the dam breaks, you’ll soon be carrying several of these devices. And your exoskeleton (a.k.a. your “car”, “automobile”, “wheels”) is sure to sport a gob of such devices. Remember that the limiting factor on personal devices is power. Your exoskeleton has unlimited power available all the time, relatively speaking.

Which gets to: why do exoskeletons not provide a device platform? Odd, that. The manufacturers even pay Apple to connect to iPods! The car guys of the year 1910 must be spinning in their graves.

We had good luck with the weather in DC. It was hot but not stifling.

The camera partially croaked so almost all outdoor pictures were badly exposed. Bad timing, that.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in DC. It seems like each time yields a couple of distinct moments. And they are always unexpected.

For instance, I remember from the first visit as a teen the wow feeling when standing inches from unrecognizable brush strokes of a famous painting. And I remember Eric and I running up and down the Washington Monument.

The last time there left only the memory of how poorly signed the roads and streets were. To be fair, a lot of roads were being worked on at the time.

This time around it was an amusement park ride and two memorials that hit the spot.

The ride was in the Air and Space Museum. Heather and I went on one of the flight simulator-ish things. The idea is you’re flying a fighter jet of some sort. The machine has a target you can shoot at. Oddly enough, we scored no kills (enemy kills, that is) with our full-speed, tree-top barrel rolls.

The plan for the last day in DC was to wander on down to the Lincoln Memorial. But I’ve seen it. Nothing new there, right? And, the big-deal, tourist things in DC had already given me a feeling of stand-off aloofness. The feeling was enhanced by people in the hotel elevators polishing their pitches for largess from the Royal Court government.

Right.

Ah, but this was enough to make the last day’s walk worthwhile:

Toss in the 2nd inaugural address etched in the wall of the memorial. Here, we have a major presidential speech given in the middle of the Civil War and it’s shorter than current politicians introducing public relations photo-ops. Bobby and Mr. Carpenter seemed quite nearby.

Then there was the Korean War Memorial. What was the deal? Someone screaming how much he hated the US side of the war? This thing was truly baffling.

Every figure seemed dejected. Zombie sad sacks. Defeated.

And no wonder:

All in all, though, it was a good trip. The wedding was great. Fascinating on many levels. Visiting David was also great: Terabyte data sets that are more complex politically than technically. Egad.

We really should have hit the road with the kids when they were younger.

If history is any indication, the cell phone carriers will keep fumbling their location capabilities, so GPS just hasn’t hit the big time yet. Packages like this GH615 GPS watch could make a dent in things. Given the sub-$10 price of GPS chips, there’s a lot of room for interesting things underneath the mondo, expensive vehicle stuff that’s going out the door now. Oh well.

What I’ve found is that GPS is not as accurate as one would like. Tracks in the city, but not in city-canyons, look like this image from Seattle’s international district:

The wandering lines are when I was walking. Stand in one place and there are lots of random squiggles. Stop at a light: squiggles.

It’s funny how the lines can have you on the correct side of the road, going and coming. But they go all fuzzy when you’re walking around. I figure the bigger the highway, the broader the sky view. Walking, you usually have some obstruction nearby, solidly blocking at least direction.

Trees are a major obstruction in this neck of the woods. Tracks from the driveway are regularly separated by 60 feet, north/south. The driveway runs east/west for about 400 feet and is not 60 feet wide. But then, the driveway has no clear view of the sky except straight up and some obstructed views east and west. Hard to triangulate given that narrow an angle to work with.

Let’s mention the feeling you get when you see a track on Google Maps or Earth (or whatever). Fascinating. Consider this snippet:

Unlike the Issaquah Safeway, which appears to be GPS shielded, the track inside Costco does a cartoonish, but reasonable rendition of the track I took inside the store that day! Is that the effect of the skylights in the store?

Back in the mid/late ’80s, when I calculated that it would cost $3 a day to video record everything you did, 24/7, it’s been intriguing to consider the implications of such recordings.

Here’s one that these GPS tracks brings to mind: They bring the past to mind. Note that there are two squigglies in the street as I was going in to Costco. Yeah. There was a long line of cars turning left, so I had to wait once way back and wait again ’cause the light turned before I could make the turn. Now, being reminded of that day-to-day, background item is not important, but consider how such reminders can trigger the brain to remember more important things. Or, consider how such small things can simply take you back to the past.

Or take another angle: An Issaquah traffic engineer might find information in a gob of GPS squigglies from his turf. One must presume that the traffic guys find the Metro/Seattle bus tracking interesting. Speaking of which: that screen shot was done deep in to a Friday night. What’s with the two buses on an off-street?

Hmmm. Cut. Cut. Cut. Thinking for this blog entry is veering in to product idea land. So it’s time to break off and go to B2.

Google Earth sees the future through true-believer eyes:

Spoiler:

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Someone geocoded a bunch of Ohio towns with positive longitude values.