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Now that’s something I never thought I would ever write: too much technology… Or did it all start with VCR programming problems? My first car was a 1939 Morris 10 M. I bought it from a policeman for £30 with my first paycheck from the BBC (my initial salary was £480 a year.) The 10 M had a 1140 cc 4-cylinder side-valve engine which could allegedly take the monster of a vehicle to just about 70 mph. I never made it there in mine. One of the least attractive features of the car was the steering. Named Bishop cam (never found the origin of the name) the technology was patented in 1924 and found its way – together with Lucas electrics – into numerous British cars of the day.  Rack-and-pinion steering was not adopted until after the war, during which all motor car production was in hiatus, with metals going only to the war effort. When Bishop cam steering started to wear in the shafts, I learned, it developed a rather nasty “play” in the complete syste...

It never occurred to me, when I was on the industry side of the aisle, that anybody could expect to pay for editorial coverage. It certainly never passed my mind that there might be editors out there who would bend to financial or other pressure to write up a story, whether or not that story was going to be mostly positive or not.It was therefore an incredible surprise to me when I joined Electronic Design and the pressure for coverage – particularly for the coveted front cover story – began within weeks of my finding my desk in the satellite office in San José.The vast majority of the PR urging came in the form of entertainment in one form or another, ranging from an elegant meal to...well, let’s not go there.Fortunately, the clarity of my responses seemed to get the message across to the community that I was not for sale. Yes, a working lunch was a frequent part of the courting ritual but that – as far as I was, and still am, concerned – was as far as things could be all...

Video is changing everything. It’s driving the need for service providers throughout the world to tool up for Broadband 2.0: networks capable of handling HD video and advanced multimedia services at speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s) and beyond. Motivated equally by the need to diversify their revenue streams and to maximize return from their capital investments, the vast majority of service providers are building their Broadband 2.0 networks using hybrid architectures that include fiber for the backbone and significant use of existing copper infrastructure to complete the last-mile connections for their customers. To keep pace with demand, the last-mile copper in these hybrid networks will be powered by a new generation of VDSL silicon and software that delivers dramatically improved capacity and stability over service providers’ existing wire plants. VDSL equipment based on these new chipsets will use advanced techniques like bonding and vectoring to support today’s and tomorrow...

George W. Bush made much, frequently, of the need to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian government. His pronunciation of “nucular” has grated many teeth over the years but it wasn’t until the 2006 State of the Union message when he talked of alternate energy sources where he promised “safe nucular energy” that we realized that it was the word itself, not just the weapons version, that caused him such difficulty in basic English.We have been promised many things by the Obama administration, both during candidacy and sworn office. The assured closing of Gitmo is now overdue by three months; health care reform is stuck in a health insurance mode, with no apparent benefits to the majority of the American public – and certainly with no protection from the greedy self-regulated insurance industry; the stimulus bill has created/saved very few jobs, but has enriched the capital markets for steel and concrete; and bailing out Wall Street has resulted in no changes ...

I’ve been staring at the power outlet for about an hour now. I started about a meter away, but I have now reduced the distance to just a few centimeters. And I still feel OK. Maybe the side effects I am supposed to experience take longer to develop, or grow, inside me. Or perhaps I am just exposing myself to the wrong outlet. How am I supposed to know? Well, of course, I should have invested in a Graham-Stetzer Micro Surge Meter… Every large community in North America seems to have its own complimentary publication – typically an advertising rag with news items that have little to commend themselves. In Victoria, BC, we are lucky enough to be able to opt out of the distribution list of our local Black Press publication (one of over one hundred titles coming from seventeen presses in North America), vastly reducing our paper recycling. The screed for the local rag reads, “The Peninsula News Review has been the Saanich Peninsula's newspaper of choice since 1912…” Ever...

British Airways – and their previous incarnations as British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA) – have tried to kill me a number of times on various flights. At the same time they imbued with me a love of flight from the cockpit. The first time I ever sat on an active flight deck was in a BEA Vickers Viscount en-route from London to Belfast’s Nutts Corner. Seeing the Isle of Man, the Irish Sea and Northern Ireland spread out in front of the cockpit windows was enough to convince me, as an eleven year-old, that I needed to fly.Nutts Corner had a treacherous approach for civilian aircraft: a very steep descent over Divis Mountain onto runway 28. It had started life as a civilian airfield and then became an RAF base during WW-II and was one of the main fields for landing newly-constructed airplanes that had been ferried across the Atlantic from the US. When Belfast City Airport was closed down (too many cranes!) Nutts Corner reversed to civilian operations ag...

Now that’s something I never thought I would ever write: too much technology… Or did it all start with VCR programming problems? My first car was a 1939 Morris 10 M. I bought it from a policeman for £30 with my first paycheck from the BBC (my initial salary was £480 a year.) The 10 M had a 1140 cc 4-cylinder side-valve engine which could allegedly take the monster of a vehicle to just about 70 mph. I never made it there in mine. One of the least attractive features of the car was the steering. Named Bishop cam (never found the origin of the name) the technology was patented in 1924 and found its way – together with Lucas electrics – into numerous British cars of the day.  Rack-and-pinion steering was not adopted until after the war, during which all motor car production was in hiatus, with metals going only to the war effort. When Bishop cam steering started to wear in the shafts, I learned, it developed a rather nasty “play” in the complete syste...

We’re all used to being monitored by others. Maybe for you, as for my daughter, it started in your crib with that innocuous baby monitor; perhaps one of those dastardly early devices that connected rooms through the power cabling and which also picked up activity next door and was so fussy over polarization. Those monitors worked, although we had a cat at the time who was much more intense in keeping an physical eye on the human child that had been thrust into her world, wondering what sort of kitten it could be and what kind of threat it might possibly be to her lead position as head honcho of the household.Now all this monitoring can be done on your iPhone or BlackBerry: aural and visual. You can monitor your home for intruders; have the authorities scan for the location of your stolen car; make a dinner reservation; check on whether you will have space on the next ferry; order a taxi and prepay it; arrange for the ordering and pick-up of that pizza on the way home. All of these things – with ma...