In 1878 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Then came Bell Telephone and in 1885 AT&T connected to those bells. In 1913 they bacame a monopoly. If you wanted telephone service, they were it.

In 1956, Tom Carter won a small victory when the courts agreed that he could make and sell a device that could attach to the telephone. Soon that would allow acoustic couplers like modems where you would place the handset in a device without modifying the telephone or touching the wires.

Then Tom went back to court in the famous Carterphone Decision case which found that devices could be attached directly t othe telephone line, devices not owned by Bell and/or AT&T. This led the way to fax machines, answering machines and cordless phones, etc. I cannot imagine how the would would be if those devices were all owned and controlled by one company.

I was always fascinated with phones from my earliest years. I remember having direct dialing in one town where I grew up and then moving to Princeton where you had a operator answer the phone to direct your call.

Years later I was at a hamfest and saw someone inside selling telephones (Stromberg Carlson as I remember, from Canada). This was a first and I bought 4 new ones a discount and took them out to show friends. I set them on the table and a guy asked me how many more I had and in what colors. That day I sold about 20 by going inside to a buy them in bulk and carrying them outside to sell.

My first answering machine/message announcer was a large thing similar to what we used in the radio station.

When I was a ham radio operator, I hooked up a touchtone pad to my walkie-talkie and made phone calls (we hams were at the forefront of the cell phone revolution).

Once as a demo, we transmitted a telephone call from my walkie-talkie through radio to a repeater to a phone line which dialed COMSAT. There a friend and fello ham linked my call into the upstream data to the ANIK satellite. My audio went up and back and back to me. I showed the Boy Scouts assembled that in an emergency, we hams could even grab satellite time and make a walkie-talkie be heard through 1/2 the world.

Over the years I have had my share of fun with phones, figuring out neat things to do with the equipment and lines. I would get two phone lines, couple them together and dial Operator on both and let the Operators talk to each other wondering what was up. I once took a desk phone apart, wired the switchhook with 110 volts and put a lamp on top. You would lift the receiver to turn on the lamp!

A company I worked for installed an MCI circuit for long distance. MCI was a railway company (or associated with one) and had microwave towers all along their tracks. This was very similar to telephone wires but seperate. They hooked them into phone lines and made their own telephone company. The MCI box sat between our phones and the phonecompany. If you dialed a long distance number, it detected that, intercepted the call, dialled locally into their DC office and dumped the call into their equipment, bypassing the phone companies long distance circuits. The phone company was less than thrilled and did little to quickly install lines to these boxes, even though they were legal.

I started using calling cards to redice long distance charges and found that things like the MCI and other calling cards were 5 cents a minute or less, well below the dollar or two a minute of the AT&T card. I then signed up for a calling plan called Big Zoo, where I dialled a local number (or toll free number) entered my codes and was calling long distance for 2.5 cents a minute.

Then I signed up with a company called Packet8 which used the internet for service. They get you an adapter (or a telephone) that plugs into the internet and gives you unlimited outbound calling for about $20 a month. My inbound number for that service is in Florida so my Mom can call me. Since the inbound number is in her local dialing area, it is a local call for her and free! So she can call me anytime free and I call all over the US for $20 a month.

Just when you think that is a good deal, along comes "soft phones" whereby you load software on your PC and talk PC to PC for free (worldwide). If you want to talk to someone not on a PC, you need to pay a fee to connect to a telephone line somewhere. Yahoo messenger and programs like that have soft phone ability.

Entering the scene is Asterick, a software PBX (private branch exchange or switchboard). This software simulates the telephone company with all of the bells (a bad pun) and whistles. It runs under Linux and allows you to have your own telephone company. You can create extensions, have voicemail, announce the time and weather to users, have music on hold, transfer calls, have conferences, and so on, all without any actual telephone equipment. Did I mention that the software is free. So is the operating system, just supply a PC and if desired, a telephone card to attach to the phone company. You can create a business telephone system and run it yourself! Your users may be in the same building, or they may be scattered around the world. They only need an internet connection and some software and perhaps a headset and mike.

There is a version of the software already configured and supplied with VMware so that you can run under windows! You take your PC, load VMware as a Windows application and within that window, run the PBX software. I set the thing up last night and had it running. I have to admit that I have a bit more expertese than most, but there are some simple directions.

If you want to play, go to http://nerdvittles.com/index.... and download the software. I had to download the older versions as I could not find a "torrent" copy. TRhe hardest part was doing the downloads.

When I upgraded my Packet8 service to a whole-house phone, I was left with the original adapter. I was able to flash the software in that box to create a unit that plugs into my network and connects to this software just mentioned above. Thus I have a real telephone on the wall (I call it a wall telephone :-) that is an extension off my own telephone system. It currently has no regular connection to the telephone company, but rather when it rings, I know it is one of my friends calling.

I could connect the computer to a regular telephone line and accept inbound calls (and use it as an answering machine/PBX) or to make real telephone outbound calls. With the Carterphone Decision, I guess I could let my friends have a local Big Island Hawaii dial tone, not that there are many people here to call. My friend Jeff has a similar setup in Florida and I have an extension off his PBX here in Hawaii, Without too much work we could link the systems together and I could forward him voicemails to pass all outbound Florida telephone calls to his system to be dumped into the phone lines there.

Now if only I had access to that satellite uplink again....

Anyway, communications have always fascinated me, starting with telephones, CB, Ham radio, the internet, satellites and even this blog.

We started out having to pick up a telephone and say "Hello Central", now it is "Hello World" and beyond!

Then I went to Sandras to pick up my dog and fixed her printer.

This morning I go back to work for the day and then again Monday. Then I'm off for 4 days again and can work on the farm.

By the way, for breakfast today, he had:

I bought a pulper a few weeks back and tested it at a friends farm last week. Today was my first opportunity to pulp some of my own beans and it went quite well.

Coffee grows on new growth and when ripe looks like a small cherry. When it is very red, we pick it, wash it off and then pulp it. Pulping is the removal of the outer skin and can be done by squeezing the cherry by hand or in larger quantities by using a pulper. The pulper I have is a heavy box with a wheel inside. The wheel looks like a round cheese grater with little nubs all around it. The cherry goes down a chute where the nubs rip te outer covering off the beans. The outer covering goes down one way and the beans go down the other. The beans look like wet peanuts at this point and are covered by a sweet sticky muscilage.

The beans will be left in a water bath over night where the sugar begins to ferment and break down. In the morning I'll wash the beans off again and spread them out to dry. They have to have a cover over them if it rains. Some people have a permanent roof and others have a sliding one they can draw over the beans. These beans will be left to dry until they get to about 12-15% moisure content. At that point, they are called parchment and if stored property, will be good for perhaps a year and a half.

When it comes time to roast, the parchment will be milled where the outer covering is removed and the green coffee bean is left. You could store the green beans, but they won't store as well and must be used in about a year.

Green beans are then loaded into the roaster and the temperature raised until the beans start to expand. The internal moisture will cause steam, the oils and caffeine and such will come out of the bean and they will darken. Depending upon the roast, they may crack one or twice. The crack is a bit like popcorn exploding except not as dramatic.

Kona coffee tastes best at a medium or slightly darker roast; certainly no where near the type of roast that Starbucks uses. As coffee beans start getting oily and really dark, you begin to taste the charcoal rather than the taste of the origin of the coffee. Why buy a premium coffee only to charcoal it?

Anyway, speaking of roasted coffee, I have some freshly roasted medium roast I'd be happy to ship to you (US only). I just picked it up yesterday at the roaster. Just go to http://ItsKona.Com and buy away!

For those wondering how Koa the farm dog is doing, just fine, thank you! He loves his fresh food diet and this afternoon I gave him an avocado which he devoured! I'll uplod more photos of him to the website soon.

Although Hawaii was prepared and the strike zone was almost directly at Hilo on the east side of the Big Island, we were spared wind and rain. Here is how.

First, the storm began to slow and the winds diminish as it hit cooler water. If you have ever played "rock, paoper, scissors) then you will understand what happened in a contest between a giant mountain and a bunch of wind and rain. The mountain won!

Actually, the hurricane slowed near Hilo and upper winds pulled the top part of the storm northward and the trade winds pulled the bottom of the storm to the south. It soon broke apart and the island got very little of the storm.

In fact, here on the west coast we didn't have any rain or wind until this afternoon and then, just a bit of rain.

While Hilo was poised for the storm, we had a beautiful sunset here on the west coast. KHON TV on Oahu was asking people to send weather photos of the storm. Since we didn't have a storm here, I took sunset photos. It appears there were so few storm photos that I was amazed t ohear that the channel opted for my sunset photo for their 6pm news. I missed seeing it, but then again, I have the original :-)

Another 15 seconds of fame!

Then if you live at the end of the earth, like I do, the time convenient for you to log in to enter said codes, the system is down for maintenance.

Then they force you to have flash, so you can watch the stupid ads and flashy crap on the site. Many of us hate flash and only have it on certain computers. That computer is not always powered up here.

So I have some number of points and I am almost ready to be able to ash them in, and the site says that I have not been back in a while and they deleted all my points! Now I am sitting here with a few 24 packs of codes and I have nothing to add them to.

I send a message to “the powers that be” on their website and ask how I can recover these points. They do not respond while I wait days and days.

Well, the story can now be told. I do not forget! I get even! I will not buy Coke products again. It is not a hollow threat, just a fact. As proof, years ago I was looking for my first credit card and I applied at Sears. They turned me down because I had no credit history. Montgomery Ward immediately gave me a card and just two weeks later I get a call from Sears Credit. It appears that since NOW that I have a credit card with Montgomery Ward, they will now “allow” me to hold a Sears card. I told them I would never have a Sears card because it appears I was not good enough for them. In the decades since (too many that I care to admit to), I have NEVER purchased anything from Sears! As I say, I don’t forget!

So in my own small way, Coke thinks they won when they took my points away minutes before I got my free liter of Coke. They appear to no want my business, so I’ll take it to the competition.

Thanks for nothing! And people wonder why I left Atlanta…