Fred Sandsmark's Blog

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