Hire Brian Chabot as your System Administrator or IT Manager TODAY!

Well, the contract is finally over. So much for job security. If anyone is interested, you can find more info and my resume at http://www.hirebrian.net "This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope."

Two new technologies that are actually interesting!

The BBC is repotring a new 'Brainwave' cap that allows users to control a computer by thought. This is a really good development for paralysis patients and fans of the ubiquitous "neural interface" of cyberpunk fiction. Even better, is that this technology does not require brain surgery to implant chips or electrodes. In other news, PalmSource has announced its acquisition of China MobileSoft. As part of this merger, they will develope the next PalmOS as a layer to run on top of embedded Linux. This really sounds like the best of both worlds to me. PalmOS is known to be a highly efficient operating system for small devices, originally PDA's and more recently, cell phones. LinuxDevices, a news site about embedded Linux and it's products and applications, has a related story that explains the implications a little more clearly, I think.

Another Stone-age HMD

Digital GE DG-TGVD300 - The latest DVD with an HMD. This one looks surprisingly like a Sony Glastron I-visor/i-glasses but at a lower resolution and without the VGA plug. Not very impressive. Next!

Virtual Reality - A pleasant Fiction

Web3D Consortium is the web site for state of the art in Open Standards for 3D web content. The standards are descended from VRML of the 1990's. Looking at the site, it's sad to see such exciting technology reduced to such dry, academic language. Today, Web3d is presented as a specialty application for the academic and medical communities with nods to architectural and marketing applications. The problem is that all of these applications of the technology are either small, specialty fields or continue to develop the final product for a 2d presentation. By late 1996, 3D web sites were becoming the rage, with companies like Silicon Graphics, Blaxxon Technologies, and Sun Microsystems fighting for a foothold in the market. Personal computer hardware was just beginning to have the sheer processing power to present real 3d environments and the Internet was the method of choice for communicating them. At that time, the 3d worlds were just becoming interactive with VRML 2.0 and VRML 97 being developed to add JavaScript to the worlds and several companies were producing their own brands of mult-user interaction. And that's one of the major forces that killed it. In the rush to be the first to be the first to have a multi-user environment, no one worked together, no standards were produced, and no one's software could talk to anyone else's software any more. VRML died horribly. In the aftermath, a small group of engineers gathered the pieces of the VRML Consortium and it became the Web3D Consortium. They managed to continue expanding the standards for 3D content on the Internet and keep that dream alive. Places like the VRMLSite are a testament to how quickly interest tanked just before the tech bomb. In September, 1997, the monthly VR News magazine just suddenly stopped. No reason, no explanation. Looking at the web site makes you think you just stepped back 8 years in time. Most of the off-site links are broken or go to some hijacked domain or another advertizing whatever they are selling this time. Head mounted displays were fetching thousands of dollars and were being installed in cybercafes around the world, where you could drop some cash and have a virtual shootout against a friend or stranger. Today, they still cost a load, but really only the military and some brain surgeons use them. The technology hasn't improved much. In fact, in 1995 you could get a Forte VFX-1 visor that had 180,000 pixel resolution for under $1000. Today they sell on eBay for about half that, but no one has the ancient ISA slot needed to run it. A couple companies have recently begun marketing similar visors for "patient entertainment" so that dental patients can watch DVD's while their teeth get fixed. Now there are "3d shutter glasses" out there. Blah. That's not what we need. We need immersion! In eight years, with all the advances in computer technology, you would think that a head mounted computer display might have come out with a usable resolution or at least that the price would drop a little. A company called EyeTop recently released their ooh, so new wearable DVD player with a head mounted monacle. This thing sports a QVGA 320x240 (153,600 pixels) display that doesn't even handle the resolution of the DVDs it plays. I'm underwhelmed. But at only $599 for the set, it might be interesting to see if I could pipe my Palm PDA's display to it. What we really need is a stereoscopic HMD that boasts at least 1025 by 768 resolution, a head tracker, a VGA plug, optional (or adjustable) transparancy/flip action, and an affordable price tag. Make it immersive. Make a desktop environment where you can manipulate 2d windows, but otherwise interact in a 3d world, like the Unreal Engine. The P5 control glove is selling for an all-time low proce on ebay these days. Glove to manipulate objects, a Nostromo SpeedPad to move about, and the head tracker to look around and you're set. Why, in the name of all that is exciting about computers hasn't anyone done this? Add something like IBM's ViaVoice for speech recognition and you're done. You can but your ancient keyboard away and forget about repetitive stress injuries. I often pine that I went into System Administration rather than programming. I can make things work, but I still need someone else to make them in the first place. The industry has seen the bubble burst and is sticking to really boing things like HDTVs, USB storage media, MP3 Players, cell phones, digital cameras, and game consoles. Sometimes, they go way out on a limb and actually combine some of these. These things aren't exciting. They're marketing boondogles and they're all pretty generic. Do we really need yet another pocket device to lose, drop, or replace in 3 months? If so, then how about bringing back something like the now discontinued Xybernaut Poma? The Poma was the only wearable with a decently usable HMD monacle, but the price was still too high at $1500. So what does the wearable market do? They significantly lower their processor standards while upping the storage and you get things like the iPod. Wonderful. Another MP3 player. Nothing more than a walkman on steroids. Who really needs to carry 20GB of music on a walk in the park? Wearable computing, though is a rant for another time.

Some Background Colour...

The View From The Edge is an excerpt from R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 game. It sums up the style nicely. A more realistic approach can be found in Real Cyberpunks Don't Eat Quiche, though both are a little dated... The first form about 1988 and the second from 1991.

Days of Future Past

Days of Future Past - THE definitive Cyberpunk 2020 timeline....

[alicebot-general] Interest in AI Nat. Lang. Computing... WAS: Loebner 2004 scores and transcripts postedI

[alicebot-general] Interest in AI Nat. Lang. Computing... WAS: Loebner 2004 scores and transcripts posted This is a thread in which I contributed on the ALICE Bot mailing list. It might be of some interest to anyone who wants to learn more about AI and natural language processing and where it might be headed in the future. The ALICE chatterbot has won sever Loebner prizes for the most human-like computer chat program. It's definitely not perfect, but it's probably the best out there.

An old rant from May, 2003 that still seems relevant (slightly edited)

I remember the early 1990's. The internet was just getting cool. I had an email account on a VAX system and another on an Ultrix box. We used a computer lab with real vt100 terminals and the entire school had just upgraded to a 56 kilobit dedicated line. PC's were just becoming affordable and the Mac was showing potential. The web was being born and Archie as still one of the best ways to find information. Mondo 2000 was the pulse of the emerging culture. I remember a couple years later, Wired magazine came out and brought this culture mainstream. I remember the smell and the atmosphere of the first time I stepped into a cybercafe. There was real excitement and awe as we played head to head in real VR systems, chatted with friends in Europe, and ordered our coffee over the LAN. The sense that we were on the edge of some bold new future was palpable. I watched in awe as Netscape and Mosaic sold their web browsers for $45 a pop. New companies were coming up with exciting new technologies every day and it became apparent that anyone with brains could make it now. All you had to do was come up with the right new technology and sell it. And today? I have an exciting and useless past. I have memories of a time I felt excited to walk down a street with my long trench coat flapping in the breeze, mirrorshades on, and I knew I was going places. I miss feeling alive. I miss the sense of being on the threshold of something big. I feel like I'm in the Crash from R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020. I need a reason to get excited about the world again.

Welcome!

Welcome to Cyberpunk Today. My name is Brian, and after about two years of debating, I finally decided that this idea merits a blog. Cyberpunk Today is born of an idea that concepts form 1980's cyberpunk fiction and role playing games are becoming reality. The view of a dark, pre-apocalyptic near future is coming true, and is both scary and exciting. If you need some background, I'd suggest William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to get you started. Also check out R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 (and the original Cyberpunk 2012 if you can find a copy) and WizKids' Shadowrun role playing games. As for myself, here is some background: I started seriously playing with computers in the mid 1980's with a Commadore 64. I brought my second computer, a C64-C to college in 1990. In January, 1991, I discovered the Internet via my school's 56K dedicated UUCP connection through UU.Net. At the time I was working from the computer lab, where they had a bank of real vt100's connected to their Unix and VAX VMS servers. Shortly after I got my second apartment in my post-senior year, I got my first PS, a 486DX2-50 laptop with a whopping 8MB of RAM, a 350MB hard drive, and a 14.4Kbps modem. This is when I discovered dial-up shells and BBS systems. Shortly after that, I made some major mistakes in life and re-started life in the computer field in the early spring of 1999, working for a local regional ISP, TIAC. Thus, I began a career just as the big tech bubble was showing signs of bursting. TIAC was bought out 8 months later. I then went to work for ZipLink, a national, wholesale ISP which supplied the services for many "virtual ISPs" like Yahoo, K-Mart, NetZero, and a myriad of mom-and-pop operations. We supplied dial up connections to over half a million end users by the time the company went out of business almost exactly a year later. Next, I was off to start consulting with Universal Data Stream. UDS was, and is a great place to work. They supplied local, on-site, outsourced IT services, mostly for New England microchip manufacturers and other small, tech companies. And they were the first place to pay me a wage above the lowest 25th percentile. These were the Good Times. But the bubble burst and UDS couldn't keep enough contracts to keep everyone on board. They laid off everyone but the owners. With the economy in shambles, it would be another year plus, before I was employed again, and I still haven't made that much money even though I'm still improving my skills. While at ZipLink, I had created my own web hosting company with a couple friends, called DataSquire. It was DataSquire that kept me busy, if not actually employed during the down time, and kept my skills fresh. In September, 2003, I started a new contract position doing tech support. The company was great but really wasn't a good fit. They needed tech support and a tech writer and I needed something that paid a little better and more in the IT or System Administration area. The commute to the far side of Boston was a nightmare. Some days, I could make it, speeding like a bat out of Hell, in 35 or 40 minutes. Other days it took two and a half hours. As a result, there was no way I could make it there at the same time every day, so I began to be phased out through telecommuting. In January, 2004, I was out looking for a new job before I was let go completely. By this point, I knew my contract wouldn't last long, so I was looking for a life jacket before the boat sank. I was lucky to find a company I had interviewed with a few years previous, and they hired me on for a 6 month trial contract. The deal was that I'd give them 6 months at half what I should be making and they'd guarantee me 6 months of paid work. Ahh, the things I do for job security. So as I start this blog, it's been 10 months and I'm still making half pay as a contractor. The company still hasn't gotten their needed capital and is squeeking by on what they can. It's a shame really, as they're already making an income, burning their capital slowly, and have a solid business. They just need a boost to expand and get completely in the black. So here I am, telecommuting again, and working for peanuts. Three things give me solace at the moment:

1. The company gave me a title: Systems Manager.
2. I have a job in the first place.
3. No other qualified person would work for this little.

These make the job a little more secure than it could be. The fact that I continued without a pay raise for the last four months is a testiment to how crappy the job market is for a self-taught, cross-platform system administrator and all around IT geek. Besides, after almost 6 years in the industry, this is the first company that looks like it has potential to be really big. The executives have all seen the bubble burst, just as I have, and we've all been burned. This company is built on a solid foundation, good cash flow management, and, like DataSquire, the ability to operate on a shoestring till the income improves. So that's me. Expect some tech punditry, rants and raves, links to state of the art in technology, and other essays and things in the future.