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My time teaching in college is long past although a lot of photographic reminders were sent to me recently by my senior technician from that time. The building in which I created my own personal television transmitter lab – going a whole lot further than my much earlier amateur TV license as G6AAC/T – has been threatened by demolition but that whole time period is probably the subject of other, future, Editorial musings. When I reached the level of Senior Lecturer I had a total of fifteen contact hours a week, contact time being lectures, tutorials, lab work, etc. With long vacations life in college is a great deal easier than, say, that of a high school teacher: with the added, major, bonus that your students - in my field, at least - actually want to be there! During my copious spare time I wrote a lot for audio and video magazines, polished off two books, designed things like vehicle electronic ignition systems, consulted on RF cavity design, and did a lot of review work for audio manufacture...

Sometimes you can write and speculate about something and be either incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. Other times you can just kick yourself for not following your own instincts properly. Case in point: when the iPhone 4 was formally announced about a month ago I wrote about the case designed antenna: “How that antenna’s propagation characteristics are not completely messed up by the human holding the phone may be explained by the breaks in the metal’s circumference, suggesting that the top part of the case metal is the real antenna.” Selling 1.7 million phones in the first three days of availability was a major coup for Apple – probably a retail landmark indeed. But it didn’t take long for the stories about poor reception and dropped calls to start building up. The first responses from the company were that the RSSI software was screwed up and that the indicated “bars” were optimistic, and had been from the iPhone’s inception. Then came the announc...

When Proposition 13 went to the voters of California in 1978, it was as a result of crooked county assessors who “bent” the rules in property valuations to assist their friends, wealthy donors (assessors in California are, stupidly, elected officials) and, to some extent, in sympathy to elderly homeowners. Once those assessors were caught in their trickery the resulting property re-evaluations (mostly upwards, of course) caused a massive amount of voter anger. The title of Proposition 13 was the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation and its main tenor was to limit property taxes to 1% of a property’s value per year. A formula allowed that value to be increased by 2% per year for inflation. The only ways that a base valuation could change would be at the sale of the property or after major additions or renovations (which you avoided telling the County Assessor’s office about). After a sale the transaction price becomes the new valuation base and is, again, only increased by a ...

You remember those pre 9/11 days, right? At my local airport the station manager for Horizon Airlines would just wave me through security. He knew me and I knew him. In the days after 9/11 that all changed, with a uniformed policeman at the security checkpoint amid very serious-looking faces. That’s when my Leatherman tool stopped traveling with me. It, plus needles and anything else even remotely sharp suddenly became things that you simply didn’t travel with. I could have done with a Leatherman or Swiss Army Knife in the UK a couple of months ago. At a hotel in the north of England the shaver outlet in the bathroom (transformer powered for safety under British wiring regulations) didn’t work. I had the choice, at 7:30 in the morning, of going down to reception and getting a razor, changing rooms just to shave, or, as a nice technical challenge, of rigging up a 13 A ring main socket to the US twin bladed plug on my razor. It was not that easy on a live outlet with just my house key and fob...

Steve Jobs hailed the revised iPhone 4 at the Apple 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference as the best thing since the original phone was launched three years ago. Most analysts seem to have more moderate opinions but that may have been because of the earlier leaks created by Gizmodo when a prototype was carelessly left behind in a Redwood City beer house. The major hype of the new phone i  the additional camera that has been provided on the rear of the casing. This HD (720P) 5 Mpixel camera is backed up with an LED flash – which is permanently powered during video use. It opens up the world of video phone connections in a rather more novel, Skype-like, way than we have seen in the past, using the Wi-Fi connection for communications. Apple is calling the feature FaceTime, but my daughter, about as avid an iPhone user as you can get, thinks such enhancements are quite useless without zoom capability on the camera. The new display offers, apparently, a 326 pixel per square inch resolution to match the...

It has become a de rigueur aspect of the failing, elderly celebrity: television advertising. We have seen Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon and stars from Little House On the Prairie, Mission Impossible, and the like, promoting everything from retrofitted bath units for the disabled to reverse mortgages. It is sad to see these stars – who should have been more financially comfortable in their later years – making a few dollars just to survive. Unfortunately, rather like many who receive their knighthoods in Britain, the very act of pitching products on the small screen seems to be a death sentence. One hopes that is not so for George Takei, the actor who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek, who has taken to the airwaves to promote Sharp’s most recent LCD TV products using their so-called Quattro Technology. The latest commercial, dubbed Seahorse by its producers, tries to sell the idea that a fourth color of phosphor (how old fashioned of me!) in the form of yel...

I’m sure that many of our readers have been required to travel to foreign lands. (The vast majority actually live outside the US, with a very heavy residential emphasis in the Far East.) With that travel comes the opportunity - or inevitability - of experiencing many foods that we would have remained unaccustomed to if we had remained at home. A lot of those food experiences have been very pleasant ones. Some have not. I don’t believe that I could face another sheep’s eyeball, for example; and I will never forget the faces of my Japanese hosts on the first occasion that I tried to eat Uni. It is very expensive and is often described as the roe of the sea urchin although it is, in fact, the gonads of the animal, and its creamy texture is beloved as a sushi item by a goodly proportion of the Japanese population. I must side with that smaller percentage of Japanese in finding uni quite revolting. It is a complete opposite to that other sashimi item from the Pacific Coast of North America, the ...

Rogers Wireless has developed a very poor reputation for customer service in Canada, where it is the largest wireless provider. They have also gained an unfortunate reputation for prices that are higher than the competition: competition that they have tried to keep as far away as possible with quite aggressive lobbying against wireless expansion. I currently have a couple of grumbles against Rogers which have not yet been sorted out. One is the exact opposite of that experienced by Ms. Gabriella Nagy from Toronto. Her wireless account with Rogers was in her own name, her maiden name. The family cable TV supplier was also Rogers, and that account was in her husband’s name. No problem so far. Unfortunately, Rogers decided (and how is unclear) that the wireless account and the cable TV account should be billed together when the husband decided to add home telephone and ADSL service to the cable TV account. There was probably a customer service bonus involved, allowing the company to get closer to that ma...

If you have been around the semiconductor industry long enough you will have seen numerous boom and bust years. Some of the lows have been due to recessions but a great deal more of them have been self-created by the industry. We seem to be in one of those years now. The world in general, and some countries more than most, have been through a major downturn. It would be easy to attribute the start of the whole process as being the reckless lending on real estate in the US: loans of 125% of property appraisal simply made no sense to anybody but the immediate profiteers of those loans, often also made to people who would not have been able to back up their statements of income. That ridiculous period was compounded by the greed of Wall Street in putting all those lousy loans together as sellable assets; getting credit ratings put on them that were totally unjustified; selling the packages to investors whose greed didn’t look, or want to look, into the detail; but all the time insuring those packages for ...

My first computer was an Apple IIe - which, in 1983, was eons superior to the only computer-like device operating in the company I was working for near Santa Barbara, California. That was an IBM word processor which was either mindless, or had a mind of its own, depending on your point of view. The IIe was in production for nearly eleven years – far longer than any other product to come out of Cupertino. It was hellaciously expensive (over $5000 if memory serves), had the most awful word processing program that anyone could ever have devised, and regularly blew a fuse when the NTSC video output socket shorted to ground because of mechanical imperfections. I completely forget what I did on that computer to justify the enormous expenditure, apart from starting a novel about the assassination of a president in a motel in Santa Barbara: a tome that was, quite rightly, condemned to the circular trash can in its floppy format. The 6502 processor with a 1.023 MHz clock seemed fast enough at the time, and wou...