Fred Sandsmark's Blog

Back in June 2000 I wrote an article for California Computer News about OneShare.com I had met the CEO, Lance Lee, at a White Lotus retreat; I was doing a package of stories on online investing, and OneShare made a fun sidebar, I thought.

Not long ago, I saw an article by Mike Cassidy in the San Jose Mercury News. OneShare is still going strong, and Lance is still running it. So much has changed in the last nine years; this continuity made me happy.

Here's my original article. I'm pretty happy with it, almost a decade later.

ONESHARE.COM SELLS BIG-NAME STOCKS A SHARE AT A TIME

By Fred Sandsmark

One of the numbers you often see in stock reports is volume — the number of individual shares of stock that change hands in a single day. With today's huge institutional investors and speedy electronic trading, it's not unusual for the volume to reach a billion — yes, billion — shares a day.

In that context, it seems unusual to sell just one share of stock. But that's exactly what OneShare.com does: it sells single shares of about 100 different stocks, ranging from AT&T to the World Wrestling Federation.

Lance Lee, a former broker, founded San Francisco-based OneShare.com in 1996 and remains the company's CEO. "I noticed that people were trying to transact single shares," Lee recalled. "My brokerage, like most brokerages, really discouraged it. It's actually very costly for the company."

So Lee started a company specifically to sell single shares. Oneshare.com began as a direct-mail business, but has grown into a busy online operation, with two-thirds of its business done over the Web. The company has sold 35,000 shares since it was founded.

Lee estimates that 30 percent of the stocks he's sold are bought for children, by their parents or grandparents, to mark special events or to teach kids about investing. His company serves this market with a colorful "My First Stock" frame and tutorial brochure. Oneshare.com provides its service for about $30 a share (plus the cost of the stock and optional framing). That may sound steep, but when compared with a broker, it's not bad. "If you go to a deep-discount broker, their com-
mission might be just $8," explained Lee. "But their certificate fee might be $25. It can add up."

And in spite of those fees, a broker might not treat the expensive piece of paper with care. For example, many brokerages fold certificates for mailing. OneShare.com ships them flat, since many customers display the certificates like works of art. A prime example is Disney stock (OneShare.corn's best-seller), which features a image of Walt with Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and other characters.

But stock certificates are more than pretty pictures. Each share of stock comes with rights and privileges. For example, every shareholder receives the company's annual report, and can attend — and vote at — the company's annual shareholders' meeting. (In darker days at Apple Computer in 1986, Steve Jobs sold all but one of his shares of Apple stock. He unloaded the shares to protest John Scully's management, but he still wanted to attend Apple's annual meeting.)

Some companies even send gifts to their shareholders — for example, McDonalds has sent coupons for food, and Wrigley has sent chewing gum. Companies that pay dividends mail checks (sometimes for just pennies per share) to shareholders.

And in select cases, a single share can confer the right to invest in the company without using a broker. This is called a Direct Reinvestment Plan (DRP). Shareholders in companies with DRPs (some examples are Campbell's Soup and General Electric) can invest as little as $10 per month, while some DRPs allow monthly purchases of up to $10,000.

But OneShare.com doesn't oversell these programs; its goal remains educational. "Our aim is to teach people about the fundamentals of stock investing," says Lee. "And not to make day traders," he adds with a chuckle.

Labels: clips, fun, money, personal history, writing

I guess the immediacy of Facebook has drawn me away from the ol' Blog. Sorry about that.

I had my first piece published by the CSUEB alumni magazine recently. It's about Assistant Professor Nidhi Mahendra's work with Alzheimer's Disease patients. Hope you like it.

Labels: clips, neuroscience, writing

Some days the Internet delivers wonderful treasure. Today's one of those days, when I got an email from a guy I'd interviewed eight years ago. With his permission, I've posted the email here. The article in which he's quoted - published in 2001 - is below his note. (Remember, this was before WiFi or iPhones or Facebook.)

Hi Fred,

I stumbled over this article on your website while I was searching google for myself haha. It's Friday and I was bored at work...

Emailing just to say hi, as requested in the Afterword of the piece. I remember answering your questions (I must have droned on and on), but wasn't sure of which magazine it was for. In the end I figured it never got published, which I thought was a shame as I never got to read it. Anyway, glad it did get published and I enjoyed your article (even the stuff not about me!), I'd forgotten about using the internet in the Indian chap's little house.

Anyway, thanks for putting it online. I was happy to read it.

Best wishes for your future publishing undertakings.

Graeme
Glasgow, Scotland
(currently in London, England)

World Wide Wandering

Online travelogues are informative and easy to create, even while you’re traveling

By Fred Sandsmark

Most of us create a packing list - at least a mental one - when we prepare for a trip. It has basics like changes of clothes, credit cards, prescriptions, and maps, as well as other helpful things like guidebooks, beach towels, and binoculars. But these days, many travelers are also packing digital cameras and laptop computers to document their trips - and they're posting their adventures on the Web, sometimes right from the road.

Take Brice Wong of Vancouver, British Columbia. Last fall, before embarking on a 10-day road trip with two friends to go mountain biking in Moab, Utah, Wong packed a "mobile office" - computer, digital camera, PDA, several mobile phones, and an inverter (to run 120-volt devices from the cigarette lighter) - in his Mazda B4000 4X4 pickup, along with the bikes. Wong and friends produced a travelogue, hilarious and occasionally profane (this was a pickup-full of twentysomethmg males, after all), and posted it at www.futurelooks.com. The journal's not just for laughs, though; the descriptions of Moab's mountain-bike trails are frequently as vivid as the famous red rocks themselves.

Why did Wong create the travelogue? "People are nosy," he says with a laugh, "so I figured, why not share our fun and adventures with the world? Plus, it gives people who have never been to Moab a true sense of what it's really like. Sometimes travel agents and magazines and promotional materials really don't give you the whole truth, but if you read someone's journal or diary you're going to get the real deal."

What’s my motivation?

Another good reason to keep an online travelogue: It's easier than ever. A handful of Web sites make travelogue creation a simple click-and-type operation that any technophobe can handle. But the motivation for individual traveloguers varies. For Graeme Renfrew - who quit a "subterranean desk job" in Glasgow, Scotland, cashed in his pension, and set out on a 14-monih trip around the world - a travelogue is an easy, inexpensive way to check in with the family (his travelogue can be found at www.travelpod.com). "It's cheaper than phoning home," says Renfrew. "The Web travelogue lets me tell them everything is OK from a distance. And if they aren't interested, it doesn't bother me."

Vanity drives a lot of traveloguing, too. "We refer to it as ego gratification," says J. R. Johnson, chief executive officer of VirtualTourist.com. "It's the same reason that your grandparents sat you down in front of the screen to see their slide show of Europe. There's some bragging involved in showing all the places you've been."

But Johnson thinks most traveloguers who use his service just want to share their knowledge. "For the most part, our members just really like helping other people," he says. "They had a good time, and they want other travelers to do the same." That often means posting specific restaurant and hotel recommendations, sightseeing suggestions, and hard-won "insider" advice.

Some people use a travelogue for capturing impressions, telling personal stories, and flexing creative wings. (Adjective alert: Amateur travelogues frequently contain prose as purple as the final fleeting flares of a simmering sunset over the tranquil waters of a steamy tropical South Pacific atoll.) Other travelers just post a skeleton of their travelogue as they go, recording events in real time, and then flesh out their account with photos, movies, sounds, and Web links when they get hack home.

Bring it on home

You don't need to carry a lot of equipment to create an online travelogue. Even Wong (of the mobile office) tries to be sensible: "I know there are lots of different sorts of gadgets and stuff on the market," he says, "but sometimes you have to really sit and think, 'How practical and reliable is this thing I'm going to be lugging around with me?' Because, man, I tell you, I hate carrying useless stuff."

People who choose to travel light can use public computers in libraries, copy shops, and hotels. There are also cyber-cafes - coffeehouses that sell Internet access by the minute. They're not hard to find in North America, or even abroad. "Last year while in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I saw five Internet cafes side by side," recalls Luc Levesque, who runs the TravelPod Web site. "Just about everyone, from restaurants to coffee shops to public libraries to laundromats, has a PC with a modem waiting for your five dollars."

Renfrew agrees - and says that these spots can often provide a window into the local culture. "There are Internet connections anywhere there are tourists with money to spend and friends to contact," he says. "One of the places I went into to check my E-mail [in India] was just some bloke's two-room house, with blue-washed walls and ceilings so low I had to crouch to get in. There was a shrine to Shiva in the same room as the clunky PC, and his mum and sister were doing each other’s hair and singing behind me. It wasn’t exactly high-tech - but it worked.”

How to create your own travelogue

Many Web sites can help you produce a travelogue. Here are a few of our favorites; all are free and none require technical expertise.

Blogger (www.blogger.com) creates Web logs or "blogs," which are just simple Web sites whose contents are organized chronologically. A blog can produce a serviceable travelogue, but you must provide the Web space to host it.

By Travelers (www.bytravelers.com) lets you link a map from its library with your travelogue. Otherwise, the site is bare-bones, so the focus is on storytelling rather than flashy features.

TravelPod (www.travelpod.com) can send E-mail to a preset group of people every time your travelogue is updated. It also gives the option of assigning a password to a travelogue, so only friends and family can see it. Photos and movies can be added, too.

VirtualTourist (www.virtualtourist.com) is an extensive travel community site that hosts travelogues. It asks specific questions about hotels, restaurants, nightlife, tourist traps, and such to elicit users’ opinions. One clever feature: You can use photos posted by other members (the site boasts more than 140,000 members) as electronic postcards.

AfterWords:

This article appeared in the short-lived Mazda Zoom-Zoom magazine in winter of 2001. It remains one of my favorites, mostly because I had the good fortune of locating wonderful interview subjects. Unfortunately, I've lost contact with them. Brice and Graeme, if you find this, please drop a line!

Copyright © 2001, 2006, 2009 / Fred Sandsmark / Marble Publishing

Labels: clips, email, fun, gadgets, Internet, personal history, travel, writing

I had the privilege of writing a profile of UC Berkeley law student Samika Boyd for the current issue of Boalt Hall Transcript, the alumni magazine of Berkeley Law. She's a remarkable woman; I hope you like the article. (There's a lot more to her story that was left out due to space considerations.)

I have several other pieces in the magazine: an article on global warming and the law of the sea in the arctic region; piece on hedge fund regulation; and a short profile of Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal's Supreme Court Correspondent. To read them you have to download a PDF of the entire Spring 2009 issue of Boalt Hall Transcript.

Labels: clips, law, people, writing

I recently completed my first assignment for the Berkeley Law / Boalt Hall website: a report on FTC hearings held in Berkeley on the patent system and the intellectual property marketplace. A few other pieces are in the works.

Labels: clips, law, writing

I just discovered that, a couple of months ago, I was quoted in the comments section of Brad DeLong's blog. (And no, I didn't post the quote myself.)

My quote ain't about politics or economics, though -- it's about wild turkeys. And alas, there's no link. Still, one takes whatever brushes with fame one can get.

Labels: blogs, clips, people, quotes

I saw an article article in today's paper about the 90th birthday of magician Lee Grabel. The San Francisco Chronicle story, by Carolyn Jones, is terrific and illustrated with some wonderful photos.

I got to interview Grabel and write a profile (much shorter than Jones's, alas) for Diablo Magazine in 2006. My favorite bit from it:

Grabel retired in 1959 and went into real estate. The transition was initially rocky; he recalls an exasperated loan officer asking for a reference “who isn’t a magician, musician, or dancer.”

The entire profile I wrote is here, but the one by Jones is better.

Labels: clips, people, work, writing

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about SFpark, the city's pilot program for market-rate street parking. On October 24 I had the opportunity to interview the intellectual godfather behind the idea, Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, for a short article that will appear soon in Oracle's PROFIT magazine. Here's the piece:

Market Pricing Meets Market Street
SF Uses Technology to Improve Street Parking

Imagine always finding street parking wherever you go. With the help of new technology, this utopian fantasy is being pursued in car-clogged San Francisco.

In a pilot program called SFpark, officials are linking together sensors embedded in parking spots, multi-space parking meters, and information technology, with three interrelated goals: monitoring inventory, managing prices, and spreading information. The idea: to tweak parking prices in real time so roughly 15 percent of spaces—about one spot per block on each side of a street—is always available. It’s market-pricing meets Market Street.

“It’ll be much more like selling other products,” predicts Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA and an advisor to SFpark. And, he says, there’s a side benefit for city coffers: “There’ll be less shoplifting.” (That is, the city will know when motorists park without paying.)

SFpark will publish real-time information about parking prices on the internet and via text message. It won’t send out specific information on available parking spaces, so (at least in theory) you won’t see distracted drivers scanning their iPhones rather than the road. Instead, the goal is to encourage consumers to make informed choices—perhaps, if parking is costly, to travel at another time, walk or take the bus, or shop in a different neighborhood.

It follows that better street parking will result in improved traffic flow and air quality. Research shows that about 30 percent of cars in busy urban areas are looking for parking at any given time, Shoup says, and one study he conducted in the cozy UCLA neighborhood of Westwood Village showed that cars cruising for parking drove the equivalent of four round trips to the moon in a single year. “This is in one little 15-block area,” he says. “The same thing’s happening everywhere in the world.”

SFpark’s pilot program will cover about 25 percent of metered street parking in San Francisco. It starts in spring of 2009 and will run for a year.

In spite of my many attempts, San Francisco officials involved in the project didn't call me back before my deadline had passed, so (assuming the Chronicle article is accurate, which I do) a couple of important details are missing from my article. One, the rates will not change in real time; instead, "The hourly rates would not be adjusted more frequently than once a month and would not go up or down by more than 50 cents at a time." And two, the hourly parking rate could go as high as $18. This last number has prompted a predictable (and perhaps justified) cry of outrage from an aggrieved driver in the form of a letter to the editor, claiming "The future is clear - slowly but surely, auto use in San Francisco will be reserved for the very rich and/or the very politically connected."

Labels: clips, Oracle, San Francisco, technology, traffic

I got a fun assignment at the recent Oracle OpenWorld: to conduct some informal video interviews of people attending the conference. Two of them are posted on YouTube.





I hadn't done something like this before, and I found it a bit intimidating to approach strangers at first. (Especially with a two-page release form for them to sign.) But the interviewees were gracious and funny, and the assignment was a kick.

The videos were shot with a Flip Video Ultra. I was so impressed with the camera that I got my own. Expect more videos soon!

Labels: clips, gadgets, Oracle, technology, video, work

I'm catching up on posting some older stories. Here are two I wrote for Diablo Magazine:

The Illusionist - a profile of magician and Alamo resident Lee Grabel - January 2007. Snippet:

His den is covered with playbills and pictures of Grabel and his wife, Helen, onstage. Files overflow with newspaper reports of their performances in the 1950s, when Lee was America’s preeminent magician.

The Shark Whisperer - a short item about John Valentine, a Pleasanton man who nurses sharks in his huge home aquarium - December 2006. Snippet:

A money manager for wealthy clients, Valentine began keeping reef fish in 1999 to unwind. In 2000, he adopted an 18-inch whitetip reef shark when a customer reneged on a deal with a Danville aquarium-store owner. The shark grew to four feet; Jigsaw now stars at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Labels: clips, writing

I recently got my author copy of Save $20,000 With a Nail, a Reader's Digest book. I researched and wrote the Home Appliances chapter. My friend and colleague Aimée Oscamou also contributed to the book. (Aimée, I know you check this blog occasionally; what chapters did you end up doing? Honk your horn in the comments.)

The book was packaged by Gonzalez Defino in New York, and provided me with a welcome opportunity to work with the brilliant and kind Joseph Gonzalez.

Labels: books, clips, writing

After a brief hiatus, Symantec has resurrected its CIO Digest magazine. for the current (April 2008) issue, I interviewed three healthcare IT leaders, asking them about their challenges with device management, enterprise security, storage, compliance, and communications. The article, entitled Best Medicine, can be found here (pdf).

Labels: clips, health, marketing, medicine, science, technology, writing

The new issue of Boalt Hall Transcript (the UC Berkeley law school alumni magazine) is out, and I realize that I hadn't yet linked to articles from the last issue, published in Spring 2007. I had two:

Does Money Talk? discusses the research of Professor Eric Talley, who's done work linking creative executive compensation to securities fraud.

Patent Trolls Take Their Toll talks about patent reform with Professor Pamela Samuelson.

Please check them out, and share your comments. For the current issue of Transcript (which I'll link to when it's live online) I profiled Howard Chao, a prominent Silicon Valley attorney who does private equity work in China.

Labels: clips, law, technology, writing

There's a funny essay by Giles Turnbull in The Morning News today, discussing author bios -- those little one- or two-sentence blurbs in books and at the end of magazine articles that tell the reader something about the writer. Well worth reading.

I've had a rough time with author bios, but not for the reasons that Turnbull mentions. My biggest problem has been with bios that embarrass me because they list the many defunct publications that I've worked for. Somehow -- I suppose because of cuts-and-pastes from old articles -- Silicon Valley TechWeek still appears in my author bio sometimes. TechWeek hasn't been published for years and years.

My favorite version of my own author bio is the one that appeared in How to Organize (Just About) Everything:

Fred Sandsmark is a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering technology and home-related subjects. Working on this book inspired him to organize his garage, a task that should be completed sometime next week.

Labels: clips, writing

Sam Whiting's article in this weekend's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine about long-distance commuters on Amtrak's Capitol Corridor reminded me of a couple of similar articles I wrote nearly a decade ago. Both of mine were for computer magazines (CCN and Silicon Valley TechWeek) so they focused on the wired road warriors; Whiting's article does, somewhat, too, but has a wider focus. The technology part of the story has changed dramatically in the intervening years, of course; back in the 1990s, simple cell phone service was spotty along much of the Capitol Corridor, but now the trains have wireless Internet access. The computers have changed, too; here's a snippet from my CCN article, talking about the 110v electric outlets on the train. (The "Yard Dog" quoted in the article is one of the colorful conductors.)

Those outlets are important, because not every computer can run on batteries. "A while back, we had a rider who brought along a whole computer on a cart," recalled Yard Dog. "Computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse — he'd hook it all up and go to work," he recalls with a chuckle. "He didn't last for long."

The CCN article can be found here. I'll try to get the TechWeek article up and linked soon. (The magazine is long gone.)

Labels: clips, technology

KTVU News last night had a segment on the wild turkeys at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I wrote an article on wild turkeys for the short-lived MyHomeMyTown magazine in late 2003 and reproduce it here. My friend and boss (at the time) Bill Crosby let this fabulous headline stand, for some reason.

Big Birds Bug 'Burbs

At first glance -- maybe out a car window along an East Bay road -- they look like rocks or tree stumps. Definitely too big to be birds. A closer look reveals wild turkeys, scratching for a meal.

They're a thrilling -- and increasingly common -- sight. The wild turkey population in North America has quadrupled to more than 6 million in the last 30 years, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation. And though turkeys aren't native to the state, some of that growth has been in California; indeed, turkeys can be found in every California county except San Francisco.

Once the birds are established, their population growth is a matter of biology and arithmetic. Hens lay 10 to 12 eggs a year, and the chicks, who learn feeding behaviors from their mothers, can grow to adult size in three to four months. At that rate, the birds can quickly get in trouble with homeowners who find them flocking to yards and gardens, making a racket, and delivering unwanted, ahem, fertilizer to lawns, patios, cars, and even roofs. "Almost invariably, people will tell us that when they saw the first five of them, they loved them," says Scott Gardner, a wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG). "But four or five years later, when they've got 30 or 50 in their yard, they hate them."

California's turkey population has prompted the DFG to publish a Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management this fall. Among its goals is to "minimize unwanted interactions between turkeys and the public." Much of the responsibility for these interactions lies with homeowners who unintentionally domesticate the birds, Gardner says. "The relationship between a human and an animal changes pretty quickly when you start feeding it."

Gardner will be relocating a limited number of "chronic problem" birds from suburban areas (including the East Bay) over the next year and studying the results. But relocating turkeys isn't easy, and the program is subject to California's budget woes, so Gardner also hopes to convince homeowners to admire the birds from a distance -- and not feed them. "The long-term question," he says, "is how we get the turkey population behaving more like wild animals and less like stray cats."

The Strategic Plan for Wild Turkey Management is available at www.dfg.ca.gov/wmd or by calling (916) 445-3406.

Labels: clips, science

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