How Technology Changed the Trip Out West

Ten years ago I took a long trip in December of 1997 from Chicago to my new home in Portland, OR. I had a couple of extra weeks on a contract as an NT 4 administrator I had to finish before joining my wife, who went out ahead of me. I had no idea how long, scary, boring, exciting, and many other emotions the drive would be. In August of 2007, I made my way back to Chicago to drive with my now college- bound daughter to Northern Illinois University in the car we just bought her to use while on campus. I was amazed by what has happened in ten years.

The purpose of this article is not to have a mile by mile account of what happened but rather to point out how far we’ve come in mobile technology in such a short time. If you think back to how quickly the airplane went from a dream to a commodity in just 60 some odd years, we have come many times faster than that in the area of computing. The disturbing thing about air flight is that it has not improved in speed or character since the 1970’s. I hope we continue to improve in the technology arena because it will affect all other aspects of our life in ways that no other industry can offer.

Equipment

The equipment I brought on my first trip ten years ago was my car and my handheld cell phone which plugged into the cigarette lighter. I had an AM/FM radio with cassette player, but that was it. This year we had our AM/FM/CD player but that was just for starters. I also had my ATT 8525 Windows Mobile smart phone, an Acer Bluetooth/Wi-Fi laptop with a built in web camera, and tons of AC adapters to make them run while driving.

We brought our mini Canon 3 MP camera to photograph our adventures. I even brought an AC inverter in case I needed to charge more than my cigarette lighter could handle. I also had a Bluetooth mouse which was useless in the car but great at the hotels. My daughter brought her laptop but since she did a lot of the driving she only used it at the hotels to upload our digital photos to our blog at http://xanga.com/mcmillentrip

Radio Coverage

Ten years ago the radio coverage was horrible. I ended up playing my cassette tapes until they were warbled.  From Chicago to Lincoln, Nebraska radio was okay, but after that there were only spotty FM stations and one or two AM country stations.  At one point I heard only static on both bands for over a hundred miles in the mountains of Utah. On the trip this year we had FM stations all the way from Portland to Chicago. They did fade in and out but it was so much better. Plus country music wasn’t my only choice. I could have rock, classic rock, hair band rock, and… well, you get it.

Now I feel I must mention satellite radio despite the fact I am on conventional radio on the West Coast. Satellite radio has come on strong these past few years and I think it’s great for people who travel. I think it would be better if they could get it to work when you drive under a bridge or even a group of trees, but there is one thing that would make it truly useful. I believe satellite radio should offer some of everyone’s local home town conventional radio stations to take with them wherever they go in the country.  It’s good not only for the businesses where you shop when in town, but it also takes a lot of the anxiety out of traveling to hear familiar voices telling you what’s happening in your neck of the woods. If you don’t believe me, then ask any soldier how much he would have paid to get home town information while in a fox hole (or sand dune).

Internet

The internet ten years ago consisted of dial up connections mainly through America Online. At their peak they had over 30 million subscribers. Around the year 2000 I had my first DSL hooked up and I was thrilled with the speed and the “always on” connection. Although my throughput was 384Kb, it was miles ahead of dial up. I currently have a Verizon FIOS fiber connection that has 30 Mb speed, which is 78 times faster than my first DSL and 535 times faster than 56 Kb dial up.

But what’s really cool is my Bluetooth connection. Bluetooth is a wireless connection that allows any devices such as PCs, phones, mice, keyboards and more to connect to each other seamlessly and securely. For this trip I had a Bluetooth connection from my phone to my laptop. I then had a cell connection to the internet from my phone to my cell carrier ATT. The theory is that with my web cam and my built in sounds I should be able to get on the internet and log into an instant messenger, in this case Yahoo, and speak and see my wife and our younger kids while on the road. Yes that is the theory.  Well on their end the dog had eaten the web cam wire so there was no way I could see them, but I should have been able to hear them, and they me.

After setting up the Bluetooth connection, which had mysteriously disappeared from previous successful testing, I set up the dial up connection to the phone. I then activated the cell connection by clicking on my wireless modem on the phone and I was on the internet while my daughter was driving down I-84 near the mountains of Cheyenne, Wyoming. I checked my speed and it was pretty slow so I was not sure how we would do using my webcam and our voice, but I logged into the Yahoo instant messenger program with as much optimism as I could muster. 

At first it wouldn’t log in even though I had confirmed I was on the internet by going on Internet Explorer. I determined after a few minutes it was my built in Windows firewall. I disabled the firewall and it finally logged in. There is an exception for programs you don’t want firewalled in the advanced area of the settings, but it was all set right even though it didn’t work with it turned on. Things that make you go “huh?” After logging in I clicked on my buddy list and opened the profile for my wife and kids while going 75 miles an hour through the beautiful mountains of Wyoming.  Don’t worry though, because I was not driving, my daughter was. I clicked the call button and it started ringing like a telephone. I then activated my webcam and sent an invite to share it. She picked up and I heard the most precious sounds, “Eh tha you? I ca ba ley ear you.”

After attempting to make this work for about twenty minutes, we decided to just type back and forth which worked great. The web cam hopped jerkily along with my image looking like a washed out Blair Witch remake. After a while I got sea sick and just minimized it. I did have fun making faces and the camera would just freeze on me with my tongue hanging out or my lip over my nose. The kids thought it was pretty funny.  So after typing for a long time I realized after that it would have just been easier to talk on the phone since we had a speaker phone at both ends, but where is the fun in that? We had more success at the hotels using their 802.11G wireless connections.  The one thing I didn’t count on while actually using my laptop in my lap was how uncomfortable it was after being on for over an hour. It got hot! I never noticed that when it just sits on a desk.

We Made It!

We finally arrived on Tuesday night. After driving the last 600 miles we were smelling more like ourselves than we should have.  The trip took a total of five days, because we did a lot of sightseeing.  Overall I was very pleased how far we have come in just ten years, but to be truly useful we have a long way to go with mobile technology. Speed will always be an issue when connecting to the internet wirelessly. But like a power vacuum we just suck it up as fast as we get it.

Every month we use 15% more internet bandwidth than the month before. Our only hope with mobile internet speed is that we find better ways to compress the data during its stream to us, and that is how technology did and will change the “trip out west”.

Jen writes:

So today’s big thing was meeting Julie, who got Steven’s Johnson Syndrome before she could remember (toddler). She was shy, but cute as a button (entering high school this year, too!). Her mom is very active in getting the word out about SJS even though she takes care of not only Julie but Julie’s little sister who has diabetes. Her younger daughter is 6 (or 7) and wasn’t feeling so good today, or else she would have gotten her picture taken today too. The great thing for dad was not only meeting someone else who survived SJS, but finding more souls with the same distrust of doctors!

Jean is the founder of the SJS Support Organization, and one of the school’s favorite mothers. She fights for what’s right for her daughters and comforts other people from all over the world who call in because they or a relative has SJS. While we were visiting, she must have gotten half a dozen calls. What a busy lady! She’s also thinking about organizing a walk for SJS in New York next year in August, a time when she knows everyone is out of school. I know I’d love to go back to New York…

Anyway, Jean says she’s done press conferences and interviews, but it’s really hard to educate the public about SJS. Pharmaceutical companies don’t want to hear what she has to say, and doctors are hardly educated at all in school about the disease (“You’ll never encounter it” they’re told). As it is, 1 in 100,000 people in the US will get SJS, and there is a 50% survival rate. Perhaps if doctors had more than a one day seminar on SJS (no joke here, Jean told us this after asking around), the survival rate would go up? Just my own musing, of course.

As dad and Julie kept talking, they found a lot of similarities between themselves. For instance, they both have one eye worse than the other; both had skin damage (obviously); both lost their finger nails, Julie’s grew back, but dad only has his nail beds (see picture); they both have a strong aversion to bitter tasting things; both got asthma from SJS; both had ear damage in one ear (apparently SJS attacks one side of your body more than the other); because of their eye problems both have problems with bright lights, dad’s problem though has become milder over the years (and thus, Julie wears sun glasses a lot ). One thing they noticed that was different about their conditions was that Julie has dry eyes (she is medicated with fake tears, in laymen’s terms), and dad’s eyes just never stop watering because “the drains are closed”. Unfortunately, an ignorant doctor “sacrificed” Julie’s tear ducts very early on without telling her mom, so years later when they tried to open up her tear ducts, her new doctor discovered they were sewn shut beyond help. Julie’s mom was not a happy lady when she heard about that.

Well, after many goodbyes, and pictures, we left Julie and Jean’s house. (By the way, sorry the pictures are kind of washed out. I couldn’t use flash or else dad and Julie’s eyes would have hurt, so I did what I could in Adobe Photoshop.) On our way to Omaha, Nebraska!

I actually had a list of places I found on the internet to go see in Nebraska. Kudos to Nebraska, they had a website dedicated to the cool places to stop on I80 that was easy to read. Unfortunately, we weren’t on I80 the entire time, so we missed a few exits as we were getting to I80 from Julie’s house. We missed the fudge shop!!! Oh well. The two places we did stop at on I80 were a bust. The first was Buffalo Bill’s ranch (see pictures of me outside the car). Notice how there’s nothing there but the tumbleweed and me (at first I thought tumbleweed was cool, until it starts tumbling in front of the car on the interstate while I was going 80mph. Then it was just scary.) After that little stop, we figured we drove about 20 minutes out of our way, let’s stop at the Buffalo Bill museum. Dad describes it as a garage sale, and I tag on the description “from at least half a century ago”. I thought the old pianos were cool, and dad was most fascinated by the real authentic Iron Lung. When we arrived at the museum, it was empty but for an older woman at the cash register. We said we came to look around, and she said, “You’ve got five minutes. We close at five.” Oh. Yeah, we didn’t realize that we had already passed into another time zone. So we took a glance around. It wasn’t worth $6, in my opinion, so I’m glad the lady at the register didn’t charge us for looking around for five minutes.

After that adventure, the last thing on my list of things to do in Nebraska that we hadn’t already passed was a crane migration observatory. On the website, it said that 90% of the world’s crane population flies over to this place. Well, it was closed when we got there, and all we saw was weeds. Woohoo. At least it wasn’t a 20 mile diversion like Buffalo Bill’s (it was only 2 miles).

Getting back on I80E, a storm started gathering pretty quickly. I wasn’t really very happy about that because I volunteered to drive after the first hour or so, for the rest of the day. I was tired, hot and sticky, and there was a bug stuck in my windshield wiper that made a mess of my side of the windshield whenever I tried to brush off the rain drops. Cool lightning though. According to the TV, there’s supposed to be a flash flood somewhere, but I don’t know what county we’re in, so I don’t know if it’s by us… I’m just glad we’re in a nice hotel on the second floor.