Sinusoidal Time [309]
Greetings from my living room...
Winter is coming. Hats, scarves, gloves and boots. Hip flasks on a misty hill and dark melancholy pints in front of a log fire.
Bring it on. Let the seasons mark time and the gathering shadows shepherd us toward a warm glow and analogue loving friends.
#TheAction
Nothing like the rhythm of daily dog walks to mark the passing of the seasons. This morning I stood in a chilly field and wondered what we might do with our living breathing pets when we start to favour the Metaverse over our currently far more immersive and higher resolution analogue realities.
Will we train them to mount a treadmill for their virtual dog walks? Or have bots watch over them till they die a natural death and we can upload their rendered virtual representations?
With shopping, banking, playing, working, all in some version of online, it won’t be long now till our attention resides full-time in a world made by humans for humans alone.
Anyway. As boring as it might sound to some, I plan to drag out my interactions with the phenomena of the physical world for a long as possible.
Tuesday night saw me parked on a hill in Cambridgeshire. It was the 2nd of November 2021. Exactly 40 years since the UK legalised the use of the 27MHz frequency for citizens band radio. As it approached zero degrees outside I, like many radio operators around the UK turned on a CB radio and switched to channel 40.
I heard the crackle of radio chatter from far and wide. Back in 1981 I was too young to be allowed a CB, but it didn’t stop me flashing back to the mid 80’s where as a kid I’d sit in LED glow under my cabin bed chatting to strangers with fake names. I did have a few nerdy friends get involved and the strangers weren’t strange for long.
On Tuesday night I relived that time with some folk who’d started this strange pastime in the 70’s. Way before it was legal. They spoke of covert antenna and hiding illegal radio equipment around the house. I made six contacts in all. Clive aka Overlord, Bob aka Houston, Sid aka Guy Fawkes, John aka Dutchman, Dennis, Sportsman and the not so memorably named, 26WT733 aka Jeff.
In other news, if I may use Jeff as a segway, Jeff Pulver asked me if I would talk at Von3. This is of course an honour. I have followed Jeff’s ongoing work/adventures in tech for many years, but I think i’d prefer to publicly speak IRL and not via URL. That’s if there’s room for chat on low power radio comms and a return to campfire storytelling.
I shall raise a glass for my Mum tonight. As I do every year on her birthday. I sometimes wonder what she would have made of all this. She died 14 years ago, 2007. The year Facebook hit 20 million users. The birth of the iPhone and the Kindle and when the Nokia N95 ruled the roost. I.e. just when things started to get interesting.
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