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From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan 7 17:30:14 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-26
EL CAMINO REALITY
#26 in the second online CAA series
by
Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
Palo Alto, CA; 11,870 miles.
(c) April 5, 1987
Ah, Stanford in the Spring. LCD characters wafting through a beery haze,
articulate guitar riffs penetrating my head with exquisite pain, flawless legs
in the early stages of seasonal tan splayed everywhere in sweet abundance. The
first belly buttons of spring -- and the flowers, those too. Outdoor jazz, a
crowd around the bike, ragged student union coffee counteracting the excesses
of a fraternity lawn party. This is a vicarious glimpse of college life: I
wandered over here to meet the solar car folks and ended up staying all day,
addicted to beauty and music and the whole hedonistic scene. People actually
LIVE like this!
("What was your major?" students always want to know. They never seem to
like it when I say I'm a dropout.)
It's been a while, I know. What, three weeks since my last update? The
prodding GEmail messages have been increasing in frequency: "Hey, Wordy,
where's 26? You still ALIVE out there?" Well, yes, but you wouldn't want eight
weekly chapters about life on Middlefield Road in Palo Alto...
Actually, though the layover continues, the journey's as crazy as ever.
The bike gets smarter by the week -- packet data communication is working now,
allowing on-the-road e-mail -- and the business of this eccentric non-business
continues to grow ever more stable (in a twisted parody of the MBA
sensibilities being programmed all around me). The next haul will be a long
one, you know, and pedaling away from these Silicon Valley resources isn't
going to be easy. So why hurry? Not only is the "wizard hemotocrit" higher
than anyplace else I've ever been, but there has developed a critical mass of
brilliance that yields R&D facilities unmatched elsewhere. Toys, toys, ah,
such exquisite toys...
But there's a longing, a deep one. I walk into our host's ping- pong room
(now a Winnebiko shop), and see on my machine a layer of road dirt, the miles
Out There still reflected in the digital odometer and the patina of loving use.
It's impossible to ignore, this tire itch of mine, but still there is the
relentless allure of TechMecca. Conflicting addictions. I wire a 4-pole filter
for the new speech synthesizer and fantasize about hearing it whisper in my ear
as the Sierras drift slowly by...
There have been a number of specific treats worthy of mention since last I
wrote, the kinds of things that have kept me from feeling too dangerously
settled (despite being able to set the temperature of the shower without
depending upon thermal feedback). Last weekend was a good one: the West Coast
Computer Faire.
Fellow denizens of GEnie, you should know that this is one online company
that really knows how to party! Rather than settle for the typical trade-show
hospitality suite, the folks from Rockville chartered "The City of San
Francisco."
The CAA team -- RAY-ROLLS, CAABASE, MWANGER, WORDY, and offline Maggie --
boarded from Pier 33, instantly coming face-to-face with familiar name tags.
It's a sensation that always intrigues me: seeing for the first time someone I
already know from brain-to-brain contact. There in the eyes: the spark I
recognize from a year's accumulation of words. There in the smile: something
of the warmth that came across in all those electronic emotion tokens... :-)
and <grin> and *>--.
Friday night on San Francisco Bay, there were are a lot of exclamations.
("Wow! YOU'RE Bonnie? I had no idea...") I walked around the cruise ship,
doubly wobbly from the waves and tequila mockingbirds, squinting past
napkinfulls of bacon-wrapped scallops at adhesive tags bearing names I've known
for years. Talk flowed; the night was breezy with the exchange of business
cards and the energetic war stories of a new industry. Everybody seems to
know, or know of, everybody else.
And ah, the night. Outside our floating bubble of gently inebriated
tale-swapping there drifted the city of light: a hillside glittering with the
sparkles of a partying populace, headlights prowling Mt. Tam, renegade
nocturnal gulls soaring ghostly against crisp sky, The Bridge overhead at once
as graceful and solid as the land itself, dark Alcatraz bursting larger than
life from the cold swells. A sudden sense of silence. The captain turned his
spotlight on the old prison, his beam lashing hot through the night as if from
watchtowers of decades past, probing the craggy rock for the desperate furtive
eyes of those with nothing left to lose.
Hours passed, afloat. RT's took on substance, the politics of the online
world evident in the turnover of sysops and slow boil of schisms and alliances.
I felt at once a native (with 7 years online) and a visitor (just passing
through; wanna see my bike?). We are the rich protein stew of a growing
network consciousness, the beginning of a whole new culture.
San Francisco itself, by contrast, was maddening. We wobbled happily off
the boat with handshakes and hugs all around, and found our way back to the
famed Regency Hyatt on Embarcadero Square. $184 for our CAA slumber party
(about the size of a Motel 6 room), plus $57 for 24 hours' worth of parking
(two vans). Muffins and O.J. for two, twenty bucks. All this a few blocks
from the birthplace of countless cliches about street poverty and public
depravity. ("Are you dramatizing the plight of the homeless," asks a tourist
in a recent cartoon, "or are you just another bum on a heating vent?")
Anyway. The West Coast Computer Faire was delightful, once I maneuvered
my odd exhibit past the suspicious guards and onto the carpet. I actually had
my own booth, arranged through a PR swap, but it seemed much more interesting
to join GEnie's display. So...
There it sat. The doors opened, and in swarmed the computer aficionados
of the Bay Area, all million of 'em it seemed, slow- swirling like a viscous
fluid through the miles of aisles, forming eddy currents and backwaters,
torrents and blockages. I seemed to be responsible for one of the latter, as
they passed enroute from one row of screens to the next and suddenly found
themselves staring at something that recalled the early days of this
industry... you remember... back before power users and corporate volume buyers
and IBM and hard disks and... right. That's it. Fun!
All day we watched faces set in traditional trade-show stress patterns
light up with various blends of delight, ridicule, humor, relief, astonishment,
and inspiration. "This is the neatest thing here!" gushed one fellow, and I
handed him a flyer. All day they came, and all day I explained. Ray, Maggie,
and Kelly worked just as hard, describing the handlebar keyboard over and over,
pointing out the information flow and the connection to GEnie. And time and
again we watched it happen: that lovely transition from "what's THIS crazy
thing?" to "Ohhhhh, I see!" In that sea of technology, this was the one
exhibit that expressed the FREEDOM that can be had through portable computers
and network communications.
GEnie loved it, of course, this unexpected addition to a booth whose
theme, appropriately enough, was discovering new horizons. And I loved it as
well -- finding the company to be much more energetic and imaginative than the
typical conservative "torporation." I think this system will be around awhile.
* * *
So much for Saturday.
Sunday, did I rest? Ha. I got up at 4:15 and spent the entire day riding
33 miles through a 2-square-mile area in Marin County (Nicasio). Beside me
rolled a Clean Slate Productions van with a platform-mounted Ikegami, 5 crew
members, and 2-way radio. This is the start of a new project -- a 10-minute
network-quality video about my strange life, to be underwritten by the
companies who have the most to gain from the association...
Being on camera, even on a bike, isn't always easy. "OK, now ride out of
frame," crackled the voice in my ear as we we started up hill. "I'm working on
it," I huffed, knowing they were looking for a smooth acceleration. An
electronic sigh. "OK, OK, let's go around and try that again." I explained
that my 1/5 horsepower body and 400- pound loaded weight are precisely
equivalent to a 3-horse Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine pushing a 3-ton
mini-motorhome... and they let up a bit.
We got some magnificent road shots, as well as a goosebump- raising sunset
scene on a cliff over the Pacific. While the script read, "I can conjure a
home anywhere at all," I tugged on the end of my flattened porta-condo and it
sprung to hangar-size, all 108 square feet of it. I hunkered down on the grass
and pseudo-wrote in my pseudo-camp while the director shouted "QUIET ON THE
SET!" and the producer made notes and the associate producer took production
stills and the gaffer squinted at the sinking sun and the cameraman bent over
the Big Eye... Through it all, Maggie looked on from the sidelines, thinking
about her new unassembled DeFelice recumbent and her old Infinity lying in
pieces, taking my spotlight very well -- all things considered.
Oh yes, a bit of video-related humor. Friday night I rode to Menlo Park
to address a local ham radio club, and arrived at the community center to find
a swarm of dance-bound teenagers, junior-high age. Lost, stuck on a narrow
sidewalk with no way to turn around, I was surrounded. The questions came
rapid fire:
"Hey, you talking to the pigs on that radio, man?"
No, silly, I'm talking to my girlfriend.
"You are not!"
"Hey, weren't you on TV?"
Yes. Evening Magazine.
"You were not!"
Yes, I was.
"Alright then, who was the host?"
I haven't the slightest idea.
"You see! I told you."
And so on. Rather exhausting. The hams, with a median age of about 50,
were much more reasonable, and tended to elicit more detailed commentary.
"Maggie here, KA8ZYW (Zesty Young Woman), also has an H-P Portable, and in the
tent at night we interface our serial ports and download to each other..."
(By the way, I wanna toss in a plug for ham radio. Things are changing
fast: new novice rules allow 10-meter voice as well as a host of other new
privileges, and packet radio is reaching the appliance level -- which means
that anyone who's into digital communications can now do it from a briefcase.
Old hams, long the lifeblood of the hobby, are dying off, and if we don't
revitalize this thrilling endeavor it's going to start losing spectrum space
and degenerating. If you're interested in tinkering, global communicating,
public-service, datacomm, portable TV transmitters, bouncing signals off the
moon, probing the limits of anything electronic, meeting people, or making
phone calls from your jacket pocket, then check it out!)
* * *
Before I end this rambling, long-overdue article, I should make a bit of
cultural commentary on life in California. It covers a huge spectrum, of
course (imagine an amplified Gaussian distribution with hairy asymptotes... the
THING that ate San Francisco), and there seems to be quite a bit of new-age
activity -- including everything from simple vegetarianism to hard-core
pseudoscience. I was poking fun at crystal-worshippers one day, and a friend
sprung to their defense: "Just because it's not part of our Western paradigm
doesn't mean it isn't true!"
Yeah, but that doesn't automatically mean it IS true, either.
One has to wonder. I met a beautiful lady this evening who made deep eye
contact, explained that she is a nomad as well, and then noted that her travel
style is by air. "Someone I'm MEANT to meet always sits next to me," she
explained. "Do you have an in with the ticket agents, or is it more cosmic
than that?" I asked.
Everyone seems concerned with their energy, and not in the physical sense.
People SEE something, and make it clear that they don't just meen "see."
Amateur high-ticket self-psychology is as robust an industry as ever, with
organizations like Lifespring charging big bucks to teach new meanings to old
words and give your life perspective. Almost everybody seems to
non-electronically network, channel, or interface. An eccentric blimp fanatic
calls himself the "flavior savior." Christianity is still miraculously alive,
along with countless profitable variants. And the AIDS scare remains in the
news enough to obscure it's true proportions, so mixed in with all the rest is
a new and strangely perverted morality -- increasingly linked, almost
defensively, to spiritual matters. Most disturbing.
But hey. That's California. In this area, the multiplier of nonlinear
terms is itself nonlinear; it's a place where anything you want can not only be
found, but expanded beyond all recognition. Therein lies the fun, and the
ENERGY <grin> that sparks all those new toys after which I habitually lust.
Conservative attitudes do not heavy magic make.
And so the layover continues, about another month. Number 27 will be slow
in coming, too, so we don't have an overload of stories from one place. And
then... east? Maybe. The options are many and confusing... so let us get
these machines ready for the next phase and then figure out where they'll roll.
Cheers!
-- Steve
NOTE: If you'd like a free flyer with a picture of the bike and description of
available print products, send a GEmail note to my publications manager in
Chico: RAY-ROLLS.