Fred Sandsmark's Blog

I got this lovely personalized greeting in my email in-box this morning:



Oh, my. And the thing is, I know this company has my first name.

I don't hate email marketing. In fact, I wrote an article a couple of years ago on effective email marketing strategies for Cisco's IQ magazine. Maybe the Greenhouse Catalog should read it.

Labels: clips, email, marketing, technology

An item on KTVU news last night about San Anselmo's flood warning system reminded me of one of the first freelance articles I sold, back in lae 1997, to California Computer News (CCN). It ran in the January 1998 edition of the free monthly, and I'm republishing it here. At the end I've added some comments.

Roseville is ALERT to Flood Danger

The ALERT system uses cable television and high-end technology to keep Roseville residents apprised of potential flooding

In recent years, Roseville residents have switched on their televisions during winter storms to see newscasters (and, on occasion, the President) wading through their town, inspecting flooded homes. Now residents don't have to get their news through commercial television. They can simply flip the channel to a local cable station to see exactly what the city's swollen creeks are doing at that very moment.

Roseville has added a sophisticated, complex flood alert system. A network of remote gauges measures creek flow and rainfall, and forwards the data to a central computer. There it is compiled, analyzed and (if the water levels warrant it) broadcast in real time over cable television. Another computer can telephone the residents of threatened neighborhoods and advise them to evacuate.

Most cities in the Sacramento Valley have a flood-monitoring system, but its television broadcast ability sets the Roseville system apart from others in the area and in the nation. "This feature is found in few, if any, other flood warning systems across the country," said Rob Nelson, key operator for the Automated Local Evaluation in Real Time (ALERT).

The system provides about three hours of warning when a creek is about to flood. This aggressive program requires a collection of special equipment. Fourteen streamflow monitors are strategically placed on the seven creeks in the Upper Dry Creek Drainage Basin, an 80-square-mile area that feeds the city's creeks. These remote monitors track the height of the creeks and transmit the information via radio to the ALERT center at the Roseville Corporation Yard. The streamflow monitors are supplemented by 19 digital rain gauges, which also communicate with the center via radio. Eighty percent of the water that flows through Roseville comes from rain that falls outside of the city limits, so the monitors are as far away as Newcastle.

CENTRAL HUB

Roseville's ALERT center is a small, windowless room crammed with computer gear. The sophisticated system runs on relatively modest hardware, including a 486DX33 which features software developed by the National Weather Service (NWS) for recording the data from the remote sensors. A 133 Mhz Pentium analyzes the same data. It runs proprietary software developed by Novalynx of Rancho Cordova (www.novalynx.com), a company that specializes in meteorological instruments and software. This computer converts the numbers to graphics that appear on cable TV and helps Nelson to predict future creek levels.

The QNX operating system makes these humble computers capable of processing a deluge of information. QNX (www.qnx.com) is a very fast micro-kernel OS that bills itself as "the leading real time operating system for PCs." QNX is used in a variety of industrial and emergency situations where real-time processing and high reliability are essential.

The third computer, a 200 Mhz Pentium Pro running Windows NT Server, isn't on QNX. Through an ISDN modem connected to the Internet, this computer receives radar and satellite imagery which is used for predicting and tracking weather. These aren't the same weather maps the public can view on the Web -- those are delayed at least a half hour, while Roseville's are updated every six minutes. The satellite data comes from the Geostationary Operational Environment Satellites (GOES) operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

MUST-SEE TV

The ALERT center sorts the information and—when the city's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the main fire station deems it necessary—the information is transmitted via modem to the city's cable TV channel. A repeating automatic television program—which gives real-time data from the six most critical streamflow monitors—shows a six-hour history of creek levels and indicates via a color code whether the stream level is at a normal, alert, warning or critical stage.

At the alert stage, city staff are carefully monitoring creek levels and weather conditions. When the creek levels reach the warning stage, flooding is a possibility and residents are encouraged to take precautions to secure their property and personal safety. At the critical stage, flooding becomes imminent and residents are advised to evacuate.

As a side attraction, the television program runs when flooding isn't a threat. The city has found that residents like to observe the stream situation even when it's not an official emergency.

CALL OF THE WILD CREEK

The ALERT system doesn't rely solely on people to watch the television broadcast. Flood stages are communicated to all at-risk residents using an automatic telephone dialing system that matches floodplain maps with a database of telephone numbers. It can make 480 telephone calls an hour, and will soon be upgraded to make 1,000 calls an hour over 16 phone lines. A 233 Mhz Pentium runs "Teleminder" software by Decision Systems (www.decsys.com/decsys/tmcare.html). It calls at-risk homes and plays a recorded message describing the flood potential.

The city gets telephone numbers for the database from the local telephone company, so even unlisted numbers are called. The system is tested every autumn and is available for other emergencies in Roseville.

WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE

Roseville's ALERT system has been evolving since a February 1986 storm soaked Roseville, flooding 209 buildings and causing $7.5 million in damage. Initially two monitoring systems only recorded stream levels, so the first improvements were to add radio transmitters to the gauges. Most of the remaining monitoring locations were installed by 1990.

The ALERT center began with just one 80386 computer processing NWS data. The second computer was added a few years later, and both have since been upgraded. The link to the cable station was installed over four years ago, and in 1993 the radar/GOES workstation was added. The city estimates the system's price tag at $500,000. But who cares about expense when you have such a comprehensive system that the World Meteorological Organization tours it as part of its biennial international training program.

The next upgrade of the QNS OS will use an X Windows motif that will allow ALERT data to be networked through the city's Hewlett-Packard mainframe directly to the EOC and the cable television station without using modems.

USE IT OR LOSE IT?

Like an insurance policy, Roseville's flood monitoring system was purchased with hopes that it would never have to be used. But the system has been engaged, on average, every year since it was created. "The potential for flooding is present during every rainy season," the city tells its residents.

Roseville does its best to keep the system idle. It has ambitious civil-engineering plans (costing up to $8.3 million in 1998) to keep the creeks in their banks. Perhaps Roseville residents will someday turn on their televisions during heavy rains to watch newscasters wade through other towns.

Ten years later, I'm pretty happy with the story. One exception: I can't believe I wrote "But who cares about expense when you have such a comprehensive system that the World Meteorological Organization tours it as part of its biennial international training program." I wonder if I actually did write it, or if it was added in. I can see that my sometimes-misplaced enthusiasm for bad-pun subheads and em-dashes was already at work.

CCN still exists, at least online. It was a Sacramento-area regional publication in the 1990s, and because I don't live there anymore I don't know if it's still published in hard copy. A lot of similar free regional computer publications have died. I had a good freelance run with the publication, writing dozens of articles including a handful of covers. Sadly, its story archives aren't online anymore.

I worked with two fine editors there, Michelle Gamble Risley and Justine Kavanaugh Brown. Michelle took a chance and hired me when I was a new freelancer with no clips, and for that I'm grateful. I'm not sure where Michelle or Justine are anymore, but I'd love to hear from them.

Labels: clips, technology, weather

In my first job out of college I wrote user manuals for home-use software. Although the company (called Softsmith, AKA the Software Guild) is long gone, and I never again wrote manuals professionally, I think of manual writers as my brethren -- brethren who likely feel marginalized in an era of online help, message boards, and the like.

But maybe user manuals have their place. An online service called OwnerIQ conducted a survey of 2700 individuals in September of 2007 in which 86 percent of respondents said the user manual is the first place they turn to learn about products they own. It's not just that these folks don't know how to Google; indeed, OwnerIQ noted a correlation between Internet savvy and manual use. (No wonder that RTFM is such a popular online response.) The company says that consumers conduct more than 2 million online searches for product support every day.

OwnerIQ's business is to get a share of those searchers to its site. It compiles and organizes links to "tens of thousands of user manuals from more than 2,200 manufacturers," according to a press release. I looked up a few of the products around my house and found links their manuals on the site. Registration is free. The service could be fun and useful, as long as I can remember how to use it. If only they published a manual ...

Here's a link to OwnerIQ's press release which includes some of the survey data; to get it all, you have to register.

Our friend John S. McDonald is involved in NASA's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) Mission to study the Aurora Borealis.

You know the project has hit the big time now because it's being discussed (ahem) on Slashdot.

The press release for their latest findings is here.

EDIT: Added a link to John's own website; be sure to check out his amazing collection of thumbnail book reviews.

Labels: friends, science

I did a difficult thing today. I dealt with all of Jane's old medications.

I had tried to pawn this job off. I had called the pharmacies we'd used; I'd called UCSF; I asked the hospice. Nobody could or would help, so the task fell to me. You can't dump old prescriptions down the toilet anymore. Instead, I went to Starbucks and got a big bag of old coffee grounds. I put a few cupsful in a large ziploc bag, then started dumping in the pills from their bottles.

Each bottle brought back memories, many of them painful. Some of these drugs were much in the news, either for their astronomical cost or their potential ferocious side effects: Gleevec, Thalidomide, Accutane. Others were old and lifesaving friends: Temozolomide, Gabapentin. Still others were drugs we preferred not to acknowledge: kytril, zofran, and the hated dexamethasone. (The first two are antiemetics taken with oral chemotherapy, and the third is a corticosteroid which many brain tumor patients take but which almost everybody loathes for a variety of reasons.) Some were cute and colorful, like the pink-and-purple capsules of hydroxyurea which Jane took while we traveled in France in the summer of 2006. I tossed in some of Delta's and Fang's out-of-date prescriptions, too.



Only a couple of the drugs -- Ativan and Morphine -- would hold any recreational value.

Once all of the pills were in the coffee grounds, I poured on the liquid meds. Most were digestive aids from the months and months of hospice care, but they included Rapamycin -- another vastly expensive medicine -- which was the next-to-last chemo she tried.

Eventually I tossed in the bottles themselves, sealed the ziploc, and put the whole mess in another garbage bag. The goal in doing all of this is to make the drugs as unappealing as possible should anybody fish them out of the trash. I certainly succeeded in doing this.



Now it's done, and I should be pleased that I've completed a long-postponed task. Instead, I feel rotten. It's almost criminally cruel that survivors are stuck doing jobs like this.

Labels: brain tumor, hospice, Jane

Emma Krasov of Castro Valley, a.k.a. as Editor Krasov, just launched her very own "Art and Entertain me" blog to bring the best of art exhibits, theatre premieres, restaurants and travel destinations in the Bay Area and beyond to the fellow art and good life lovers in her immediate area. Feel free to check out the newest post on the upcoming Berkeley Rep opening of "Wishful Drinking," written and performed by Princess Leah herself. Go to: http://www.artandentertainme.blogspot.com To be timely informed about all the exciting events, bookmark the site and visit often. Next: Marie-Antoinette exhibit at the Legion of Honor, SFMOMA embarrassment of riches, and holiday recipes from Russian cuisine, to name but a few upcoming posts. You can also submit your own relevant information and memorable experiences to: editor.krasov@gmail.com. All interesting stories will be published on the blog.

According to an article in the New York Times, the subprime mortgage mess -- through its financial fallout -- is hurting some small Norwegian towns. The article quotes Karen Margrethe Kuvaas, mayor of Narvik,

... where the season’s perpetual gloom deepened even further in recent days after news that the town -- along with three other Norwegian municipalities -- had lost about $64 million, and potentially much more, in complex securities investments that went sour.

It really is a small world.

Labels: Norway