I'll be travelling for the next two weeks. Yes, there hasn't been an update in months. Apparently that's what happens when I pay for a journal—I don't use it.

Here's my itinerary:

Train – Seattle to New York City I'm leaving Seattle at 4:45 pm on 13-July-2008, arriving Penn Station at around 10pm on 16-July-2008. I'm travelling with Andy Filer, a really neat guy. I plan to offer free wireless Internet service to fellow train passengers, using a cellular modem. It goes almost without saying that I plan to log every bit that goes through the connection. No expectation of privacy and all that. But trains are awesome also.

Chilling – Andy and I are both transit nerds, so I'm sure we'll be able to occupy far more time than we have alloted.

HOPE – Hackers On Planet Earth is at the Hotel Pennsylvania for what may be the very last time. Across the street from Penn Station, the Hotel Pennsylvania has the longest continuously active phone number in New York City. It was originally PEnnsylvania 5000, then PENnsylvania 5000 (in fact it was the first exchange in NYC to transition to 3L4N dialling), then PEnnsylvania 6-5000, then 212-736-5000, and now +1 212 736 5000 in full international format. HOPE has some really rather interesting talks this year. It's also my first convention.

Boston, MA – At some point on 21-Jul-2008, we're going to mosey up to Boston, MA. At 6pm we'll meet with John Covert, whom I met when he visited the Museum of Communications (the phone museum in Seattle where I volunteer). The plan is for him to show us around MIT and then retire for dinner and conversation.

Ellsworth, ME – There's a phone museum in Ellsworth. John and Andy and I are going to visit in the afternoon of 22-Jul-2008. I've been deputized to attempt to convince them of the worth of joining CNET, a thoroughly neat project. I guess I have to put the Seattle museum in the directory, as I am sort of the Responsible Person there.

Flying back – Portland, ME to Seattle We're leaving Portland at around 6pm on Wednesday 23-Jul-2008. As all good things must come to an end, this must too. I don't really like flying. (Some people dislike flying because it's scary or whatever. I like to feel of the plane moving around me. That's a beautiful feeling. I just don't like being cooped up for so long, and I don't like how loud planes are inside. Trains have much more leg-room and walking-room, too.)

Mood: excited

Today I went to the museum (again). The Audichron time announcement machine is working insofar as it speaks the time. Not hooked up to trunks yet, so you can't dial it. The 3ESS has a grand failure, we discovered; the multifreq receivers aren't working. So incoming calls are left high-and-wet. I installed a small PC as a replacement for the teletype. Now everything the cute little switch says is being recorded. Yes, I just called a computer the size of a pickup truck "cute" and "little". :P

I paid for my lunch using dollar coins, but not the Golden Dollar that the Mint is trying to get everyone to use. The bank only had Susan B Anthony and Sacajawea dollars, so I paid with a combination of those and quarters. The cashier didn't even blink; she recognized the SBA dollars as not quarters. Cool.

Perhaps there will be a #tcpa IRC meetup in Portland this July. (spengo take note; I actually mean it. I tried to arrange a meetup on the ticalc.org boards a long time ago, when I was in middle school. It didn't work but I didn't give up.)

I can't leave the house much while I'm recovering. That means that I'm deprived of human contact and all that. It sucks. Please call me on the phone; if nobody does then I'm going to dig into my 250-entry phonebook and start calling people.

Mood: bored

Oh, and I think it's kind of fun to hit on random girls whom I know I'll never see again.

Today I met [name removed] and her friend [name removed] from Overlake School. A fast phonebook search (using Google: rphonebook:[name removed], wa) gives [name removed]'s phone number, though I'll never use it. Perhaps I might, to see if either of them have LJ. I didn't get [name removed]'s last name.

Edit

I facebooked [name removed]. I'm reprehensible.

I just got a call from a boy claiming to be named "jake". He said that if I want to find out his true identity then I should call 206-484-2932. It's a cellular phone number. (It's registered to AT&T Wireless, according to my reverse directory, and Telcodata.us says that it's a Cingular number. IIRC, Cingular just bought AT&T Wireless.) Should I call?

"Jake" sounded drunken, but I asked him and he said "nope". I'm a little confused, but that's fine.

Today I got my first postal spam. Chase Manhattan wants me to open a credit card with them. 8.99% interest after the first year. I don't think I will.

Today, after I came back from the Colloquium, I made myself four new userpics. They're phone-themed. See The Bell System Memorial because it's my "site of the week".

I'm going to post the contents of my poetry journal in the future.

Here's what I wrote yesterday:

NO. 5 XBR SYS TBL RCDR CARD
Memento of an earlier age,
When something goes wrong
in a 5 Crossbar,
it spits one out.
Manila cardboard
cheap grey ink
dozens of meaningful perforations.

It's the chad--the holes--that count.
The writing just shows
which hole
is which
relay
circuit
selector.
The machine would do fine with blank paper.

What happens when you run out?
They aren't printing any more.
Will it matter by then?

This year I plan to use my planner for the first time since eighth grade.

I'm writing the Panel Telephone Switch article on Wikipedia. Anyone care to help?

I'm posting from Oregon. We are visiting a family friend who lives a few miles from Siletz, OR. Just before we left, I had the presence of mind to slap a copy of emacs and my latest code onto my bulla. I collected 13 payphones so far.

44.75531 deg N
123.90110 deg W

My file manager program (latest project) is now to the stage where it displays a list of files with all the goodies (name, user, group, size, mode). The mode is just octal, not -rw-r--r-- or anything nice like that; the size is in unadulterated bytes; and the date is not formatted or displayed. In short, it just looks pretty. :)

Day before yesterday (last day of school), Marie, Collin, and I went to the Seattle Telecommunications museum. It's great. They have four (4) working mechanical exchanges: Step by Step (SxS), No. 5 Crossbar (5xb), No. 1 Crossbar (1xb), and Panel. The brochure says that their panel exchange is believed to be the only working one in the country. (!) All the exchanges are connected together, and every working phone in the building is hooked up to them (but not to the outside world). The museum is in the top two floors of a working exchange in Georgetown.

I found the crossbar exchanges most interesting. It's fun to stand inside a working relay computer. I never thought I'd have the opportunity. You can hear streams of activity shuttling around the space surrounding you, and each stream makes a kind of grinding/chewing sound, even though an individual relay is just capable of making a clicking sound. I plan to organize another trip (or 3) this summer, and need at least ~5 people to get them to open the museum on a non-Tuesday. Since I'm working Mon-Fri, it will most likely be on a Saturday. I hope to go soon. Prospective customers: Collin, Rob, Alex, Marie, parents of above, etc. Reply if you're interested.

Evil: Protel's webesite is only viewable from Internet Evilnator. But only Firefox resolves it on this machine. ???

My mom just discovered the textbox history feature on Firefox when searching on Google. About ten minutes after she made that announcement, she asked me to show here where on the menus the "view history" item is. I think she's going to dig up dirt on my brother's searches.... <grins evilly>

Right now I am at Christopher's house. We went to Medina Beach where we played with the payphone attached to Medina City Hall. (Given the average income in Medina, I would think they would have a larger or at least better-smelling City Hall!) Christopher's cell phone is a Sanyo PM-8200. I couldn't find a way to get into the secret menu. I learned some interesting things about electromechanical exchanges recently. EOL