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Great view, bad DSL: it's easy to see why I can't get good DSL. First, there's the view. Our office is in our house, and our house sits 800 feet above Bay level, with a rather spectacular view of Silicon Valley, which used to be Santa Clara County, but now includes everything South of Market — all the way to Morgan Hill. But, perversity being what it is, the view comes at an infrastructural price. Draped over the hills between our home and the nearest phone company Central Office (CO to in telco lingo) are thirty-eight kilofeet of old copper phone wire. "Kilofeet" is another PhoneCo term. Translated to customerese, that's 38,000 feet, or about seven miles. Coincidentally, that's the difference in elevation between my ass and Redding, California, over which I am currently flying to Seattle for a meeting at Linux Journal. I'll ignore the fact that the Central Office is exactly 2.5 miles by car from the router in my garage, since it's obvious from here that anything faster than telegraph is a miracle over the seven miles of copper I imagine hanging between here and Redding. So clearly, wireless is the way to go. My current fantasy rotates around TeraBeam, a company David Isenberg brought to my attention at PC Forum in March. Here's what David writes in his Smart Letter #37: TeraBeam has developed point-to-multipoint gigabit laser technology and intends to offer broadband last-mile service. Laser communications is completely unregulated and unlicensed — this, by itself makes TeraBeam disruptive to the 18, 24, 28 & 38 GHz technologies. It doesn't have to pay kilobucks per pop in an FCC auction. It just sets up its equipment and transmits. I generally don't follow stock prices, but the spelling of the symbols to sell (or short) should be obvious to the skilled practitioner. So here's the hmm: I have a view. Surely there must be a wireless solution to my problem, which goes by the name IDSL. This is the slowest DSL you can get. Mine is provided by Concentric, which was the only affordable provider at the time I had it installed, about two years ago. It runs over lines the phone guys condition for IDSN, but run as symmetrical DSL. The nominal speed is slightly better than ISDN: 144kb. Not that I've ever seen that speed. According to Concentric's own test, the best I get is about 104kb with text and 64kb with graphics. Not too swift for an office with seven computers hubbed off that one router. And no bargain at $149/month (which I see goes to new customers for $124 — not that they ever told me that: I'm still getting billed $25/month more than that). Pac Bell's ADSL is a multiple of that speed (at least to the click side), for $39.95/month. Maybe I should be grateful, since it took months for Concentric, Covad and Pac Bell to cooperatively provide the IDSL in the first place. From what I gather, most of the delay owed to guys on poles, de-kinking that 38 kilofoot line to the CO. I'll have to give Concentric a call about it. And that overbilling matter, too. Meanwhile, this view is spectacular. Across the plane and out the right side I see Mt. Shasta, California's own Fuji, one of the world's prettiest volcanoes. Its peak is framed in window. I'm sitting here in 4A, looking out an unusually clean window to my left at a view to the Pacific across the Trinity Alps and Humboldt County. I know I'm supposed to be a jaded flyer, but I'm like a dog in a car, pushing his nose against the window. But where dogs get high on all the smells (which is what that nose-in-the-wind stuff is about, by the way), I get high on views. I even carry along the same FAA sectional maps that pilots use. I forgot mine this morning, which bums me out because I want to know about everything out there. Ring of Fire: It's 6:59am the next morning and I'm southbound from Seattle to San Jose at thirty-five kilofeet over Portland, looking back at the blown top of Mount St. Helens, which looks very different than it did twenty years and one week ago, when it stood 1200 feet higher than it does now, and manifested the near-perfect cone shape of its neighbors. It's an improbably cloudles morning, and I can see four big volcanoes out my window, running north to south: Ranier, Hood, St. Helens and Shasta. Among them are smaller ones: Jefferson, Washington, Bachelor and others I don't recognize, together looking like nature's version of the Pyramids. All but St. Helens are pointy cones; and all of them are active. Right now the sun's reflection slides across Spirit Lake, which lies hundreds of feet higher than it was before the blast blew away Harry Truman (no relation) and his place, Spirit Lake Lodge, on May 18, 1980. Harry was damned if he was going to leave, which is why he's in heaven now. I notice that the cooling tower at the nuclear power plant northwest of the mountain produces the only clouds in the region, filling the surrounding valleys with a waffled comforter of fuffy white. I remember seeing this weather trick once before, flying over the Southeast. This one plant produced a cloud layer that filled a long river valley and the surrounding hollers. Do the locals care? If anybody knows, tell me. Redundant magnificence: Now we're passing Mt. Shasta to the west, where I look down on my old friend Larry Tuttle's house, which is somewhere on the Rogue River, a silver ribbon of reflected sunlight below my window. I'm surprised to see how high the mountains to his south really are. The whole range is still covered in snow. His is the northern prow of a massive and mostly roadless range that starts just north of the Wine Country, at Mt. St. Helena. A surprising number of peaks in the range are still painted white, none more than the Trinity Alps, easily the most spectacular part of California that isn't a visual cliché. I've seen them many time from the air, but never from the ground. They rise about 50 miles nothwest of Redding and the way they hug Trinity Lake reminds me — from the air, at least — of Lake Louise in Alberta.
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