Crossing the bridge into 2018

©Mark Ollig


We’ve survived another fast-paced year, consumed with technology, political changes, and lots of online social media drama; notably, the presidential tweets.

One of the things many of us do at the end of each year is to look back at our achievements and memorable experiences.

I recall hearing my father say, “It’s nice to look back on your accomplishments, but then you need to turn and look forward, so that you can create new accomplishments.”

What you are reading is the 53rd and final column for 2017, and the 608th column since Dec. 15, 1997; not that I am keeping track of them . . . well, maybe I am.

The complete list of Bits & Bytes columns are on my Facebook page; in case any friends or family members are interested.

I’ll now take Dad’s sage advice and turn myself forward and get back to today’s topic.

A US government census website guesstimates the world’s population at the start of the year was 7.36 billion, and has now risen to 7.44 billion.

It’s a matter of days before 2018; and yet nearly half the world’s population is unable to access the internet due to economic, geographical, or technological reasons.

Visit the US government’s population census website at https://www.census.gov/popclock.

Back in the day, we addressed personal computer memory mostly using terms like megabytes.

Today, computing data storage is spoken using gigabytes and terabytes.

I foresee in the not-too-distant future, when a petabyte (one-thousand terabytes, or one-million gigabytes) worth of computing data will be commonly accessible on personal internal/portable data storage drives, or through externally-hosted cloud storage.

According to Scientific American, the human brain, using all of its neuron connections, can store 2.5 petabytes, which is equivalent to remembering 3 million hours of television, or 2.2 trillion of those cute kitty pictures seen on Instagram and Facebook.

I won’t even guess the year when we will be routinely using exabyte and zettabyte memory capacity.

It’s difficult for us to wrap our minds around such large numbers, but our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will probably be using these virtually limitless, computing-storage terms.

In January, I wrote about the conversion from Frequency Modulated (FM) radio to Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) in Norway, which resulted in the shutdown of all their FM radio transmitters.

DAB provides greater regional reception coverage, lower operating costs when compared to FM, and superior listening quality.

Norway’s FM spectrum allowed five national stations to be operating on the air, whereas 22 are currently being supported using DAB technology.

Their conversion reminds me of when all US television broadcast stations were ordered to stop transmitting analog signals over-the-air, and switch to all-digital television signal broadcasting, June 12, 2009.

This past year, we also learned about Emma, the robotic masseuse.

The Expert Manipulative Massage Automation (Emma) is a technologically-advanced robotic arm equipped with a soft silicone, human-mimicking palm and thumb, used for giving massages.

Emma practices the traditional Chinese therapeutic massage called Tuina.

This robotic massaging system uses proprietary cloud software intelligence supported by Microsoft and developed by Albert Zhang, founder of AiTreat and NovaHealth Clinic.

Emma’s advanced electronic sensors and diagnostic functions precisely measure the exact stiffness of a particular muscle or tendon.

The robotic arm’s hand palm and thumb are warmed; so you needn’t worry about any cold hands on your back.

A computer server located inside the internet cloud receives the massage patient’s data. There, an artificial intelligence (AI) software program quickly computes the exact pressure to be delivered by Emma during the massage session.

The AI program continuously tracks and analyzes the progress of the patient’s robotic massage.

Some folks were surprised when I wrote in a May column, that after five years, I was abandoning Apple’s iOS, and returning to the Microsoft Windows operating system, with the purchase of a new HP notebook computer installed with Windows 10.

The one anecdote I recall from the column is talking computers with the youthful-looking computer sales clerk, Robert.

“You talk a lot like my dad did when I was growing up. Many years ago, he worked in the computer department at his office,” Robert smilingly said to me.

I smiled back at him and nodded; feeling a bit unsure of how to reply.

Of course, Robert meant it as a compliment. It was the “many years ago” which caught my attention and gave me pause for thought.

I began the Aug. 25 column with “Greetings from the Coco Moon Coffee Bar, located in the heart of downtown Brainerd.”

Columnists need to write; even while on vacation in the relaxing Brainerd Lakes area.

I enjoyed revisiting the Coco Moon Coffee Bar, where I had written my Oct. 2, 2006, column, while seated in a comfortable wooden booth next to the large window facing 6th Street and Laurel.

It was a satisfying and memorable day in Brainerd; and, for the most part, so was 2017.

Let’s turn and look forward as we cross the bridge, with hope and optimism, into 2018.


(Above image is from Clipart Of LLC based in Southern Oregon, USA. Royalty
user-fee paid for by Mark Ollig)

Why NORAD tracks Santa’s journey

©Mark Ollig

 
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, will be using its advanced technology to track Santa and his reindeer team as they travel around the world bringing gifts to all the good boys and girls.

For the record, I’ve been a very good boy this year.

The story of NORAD tracking Santa began in 1955, when NORAD was CONAD (Continental Air Defense Command), with its headquarters located in El Paso County, near Colorado Springs, CO.

CONAD’s confidential, air-defense telephone hotline was used for national emergencies; such as alerting CONAD personnel of any imminent military attacks against the US.

A December 1955 Colorado Springs department store newspaper advertisement mistakenly printed the wrong telephone number for children to call and talk with Santa on Christmas Eve.

Yes, the telephone number in the ad was the hotline which rang the red desk phone of the central operations center at CONAD.

Christmas Eve 1955, the red phone began ringing.

The director of operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, immediately picked up the handset.

“The red phone ringing; it’s either the Pentagon calling or the four-star General Partridge. I was all shook up,” Col. Shoup recalled years later while telling the story.

“So, I picked it up and said, Sir, this is Col. Shoup.”

He heard silence from the phone’s receiver.

“Sir, this is Col. Shoup,” he repeated.

“Sir, can you read me alright?” asked Col. Shoup, who believed a military general was calling the hotline telephone.

Imagine Col. Shoup’s surprise when he hears a little girl’s voice ask, “Are you really Santa Claus?”

Col. Shoup recalls looking around the room at the faces of his office personnel and sternly saying, “Somebody’s playing a joke on me, and this isn’t funny!”

“Would you repeat that?” demanded Col. Shoup into the phone, believing it was some prankster randomly dialing telephone numbers.

“Are you really Santa Claus?” the small voice on the other end of the telephone line sincerely asked.

While Col. Shoup was on the phone, he learned of the local newspaper’s advertisement mistake.

Upon hearing this, Col. Shoup’s behavior quickly changed.

Instead of disappointing the little girl calling for Santa, he decided to answer her as Santa would, asking, “Have you been a good little girl?”

The now happy little girl’s voice on the phone said she knew Santa would be coming down the fireplace at her house, and she would be leaving some food there for him and the reindeer.

“Oh, boy! They sure will appreciate that!” Col. Shoup told her.

Col. Shoup listened as the little girl read off the items on her Christmas list she hoped Santa would bring her.

He then asked to talk with her mother so that he could inform her of the items on her daughter’s Christmas list.

After saying goodbye to the little girl and replacing the handset back on the red phone, Col. Shoup instructed his defense operations center to act as Santa’s helpers whenever a child called the hotline.

Children calling were provided radar updates by CONAD defense operation team members regarding the location of Santa Claus, and his globe-circling reindeer sleigh team.

Santa’s sleigh travels faster than starlight, “but this is nothing that our technologies can’t handle,” a commander at CONAD reportedly said.

In recent years, because of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s brightly-shining red nose, NORAD can easily track the speed, direction, and location of Santa’s sleigh as it journeys through the sky.

NORAD monitors Santa’s trip with the same advanced space satellite technology used for following any airborne object approaching the Northern Hemisphere.

Santa Claus was issued an official clearance to fly throughout the skies inside the Northern Hemisphere.

Christmas Eve, NORAD will be using its classified radar tracking command station to monitor Santa and his reindeer sleigh team, as they make their journey around the world.

Follow the official NORAD Tracks Santa website at https://www.noradsanta.org. There, you’ll find the Santa Tracker Countdown clock, videos of Santa’s North Pole headquarters, interactive games, movies, a library, holiday musical tunes, and the history of NORAD’s involvement in Santa’s annual holiday journey.

Visit the official NORAD Tracks Santa YouTube channel at http://bit.ly/2CFjsd0.

Follow the official Twitter page of NORAD Tracks Santa for up-to-the-minute information on Santa’s journey using @NoradSanta.

Col. Harry Shoup became known as “The Santa Colonel,” a nickname he cherished until his passing March 14, 2009.

A special "Merry Christmas" to my mother, family, friends, and those of you who read my column.

Let’s go see and smell a movie

©Mark Ollig



People attending the 1981 movie premiere of “Polyester” received a numbered scratch-and-sniff card.

The movie watcher smelled what was being shown on the screen of this “Odorama”-promoted movie when prompted to scratch and sniff a specific card number.

The history of dispensing theater movie and stage-play related aromas before an audience goes back to the beginnings of the 20th century.

In 1906, Samuel Lionel Rothafel, who worked at The Family Theater in Forest City, PA, came up with an idea.

While a motion picture newsreel film of the 1906 Rose Bowl parade played inside the theater, Rothafel took a wad of cotton wool, soaked it with rose oil and placed it in front of an electric fan directed towards the seated audience.

The fruity fragrance of roses wafted throughout the theater amid the now delighted seated patrons.

It seems as if Rothafel used good-old Minnesota ingenuity – in fact, he did. Samuel Lionel Rothafel was born in Stillwater in 1882.

By 1933, Paramount’s Rialto Theater on Broadway had installed an in-theater “smell system” using fan blowers which released various aromas during a movie.

After the movie was over, it took hours (sometimes days) for the odors to disappear from inside the theater building. This particular smell-system eventually proved unpopular.

During the late 1950s, Hans Laube invented a scent-dispensing machine.

Laube’s machine discharged a variety of smells coinciding with the events occurring during a theater movie or theatrical play.

Various mixtures and dilutions of liquid scented perfumes; including a scent neutralizer, were also dispensed.

Nov. 19, 1957, US Patent number 2,813,452, titled Motion Pictures With Synchronized Odor Emission, was awarded to Hans Laube’s odor-dispensing device named Smell-O-Vision.

“Scent of Mystery” is a 1960 movie using Laube’s new Scentorama machine with an updated version of Smell-O-Vision.

The Scentorama machine could circulate up to 30 different smells towards theater seats using scent emitters activated by signal code markers on the movie’s film.

Unfortunately, the results audiences experienced were not well received, and no future movies were shown using Smell-O-Vision.

I uploaded a photo of the Scentorama machine at http://bit.ly/2z97KJ0.

Not long ago, the successful mixing of smells with your favorite movies, gaming, and television programs became a reality through a French company called Olf-Action.

The company name is no doubt a play on the word “olfactory,” referencing the sensory system used for smelling.

Olf-Action uses Odoravision for the delivery of odors or particular scents to an audience throughout their viewing of a motion picture film.

This method of scent-delivery is called smell-synchronization.

An in-home version of Olf-Action’s Odoravision System is capable of administering 128 unique scents and up to three simultaneous scents over the course of one motion picture film.

A movie player’s video output connects to an Olfahome model 4045 scent-dispensing rectangular box unit weighing 44 pounds.

The box unit is attached to the ceiling approximately 10 feet in front of, and above the movie viewers, and has 40 individual, open-air nozzles, with individual scents stored inside cartridges.

Some of the scents listed included cakes, gasoline, flowers, roses, wood, sea water, smoke, candies, fabrics, trees, and one I like; the smell of freshly-cut grass.

Olf-Action listed several movie film titles available in Odoravision, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

The human nose can differentiate a large number of unique scents.

Ernest Crocker, a chemical engineer, and MIT graduate, used a mathematical rating system and came up with 10,000 as being the number of recognizable smells a human can detect.

It might be surprising to learn scent marketing is an industry unto itself, and is used by stores, restaurants, and hotels to promote customer satisfaction and increase revenues.

Statistics show carefully selected scents will attract and influence consumer spending, and make a product more easily remembered.

Possibly, Smell-O-Vision will make a comeback.

So, the next time we watch a movie and tell people it stinks, they won’t know whether we meant the acting or the smells in it.

Do I hear laughter from some of my readers?

Nostalgically speaking, one unforgettable scent I do fondly recall while seated in my hometown’s movie theater, was the enticing popcorn aroma floating in from the front lobby’s popcorn machine.

Sometimes, I wonder if a fan was purposely used to send those freshly-made popcorn smells into the theater seating area to tempt us to buy more popcorn. If so, it worked for me.

Pre-web: The BBS online community thrived

©Mark Ollig


Years before web browsers redefined how the internet is used, many of my generation were going online locally by way of a dialup computer Bulletin Board System or BBS.

In the late 1980s, computer hobbyists (such as this writer) were avidly reading Boardwatch magazine, which contained articles dedicated to BBSs and their human system operators, known as SysOps.

Computer hobbyists were spending many hours (and dollars) installing BBS software and hardware onto their computers to communicate and exchange information with other computers over modems and traditional analog telephone lines.

At that time, I began with a text-only interface BBS software program developed by Galacticom, Inc.

It was not a simple “plug and play” process installing and programming BBS software and the additional components and hardware on a computer.

The name of my bulletin board system was WBBS: OnLine!

WBBS (Winsted Bulletin Board System) sounded like a radio or TV station; making it easily remembered – besides, yours truly thought it was pretty cool.

I placed local newspaper ads, wrote an article describing the features of a BBS and how to log in, and created paper flyers advertising WBBS and posted them all around town.

My car’s vanity plates read WBBS, which got a few stares while driving down the road.

ProComm was a telecommunications software terminal program commonly used for accessing a BBS, as were Kermit, PC-Talk, and Qmodem.

Personal computer users began getting the BBS bug and soon were participating in the WBBS online community.

I discovered being a BBS SysOp was keeping me busy.

WBBS user members could send and receive BBS email messages with other members, text-message with each other in real-time in the discussion (chat) rooms, play games, and send and receive software files shared within the BBS community.

Internet address emails were sent and received to WBBS members via a UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) remote connection program through a telecom carrier I knew.

Some hobbyist BBSs had many telephone modem lines, which allowed a larger number of simultaneous users.

WBBS used six telephone lines connected to six modems, so six dialup users, plus your humble SysOp controlling the central computer BBS console, could be online at the same time.

Many of the WBBS members were from the Winsted and Lester Prairie areas, where the telephone number to reach the BBS was a free, local call.

I later updated WBBS with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for a more visually-friendly, easily-maneuverable point-and-click experience for its members who downloaded the GUI client software.

Regular members of the BBS might stay logged in for hours chatting with others, and some would stop by to play games, check their messages, or just to say “hello” and “what’s new?” to folks in the virtual community’s chat room.

In addition to the enjoyment of being on the BBS, many also discovered the camaraderie taking place in the BBS community’s chat rooms.

In early 1992, I gave a presentation of a BBS during the Winsted Civic and Commerce Association lunch-in, below the American Legion Club in Winsted.

I used my new OmniBook laptop computer and a desktop computer which hosted a BBS program for the demo.

The desktop computer was set up to represent a business BBS, and the laptop as a customer’s home computer.

Each computer connected to a dedicated telephone line, which I installed for the presentation.

While the local business people ate lunch, I explained what a BBS was, and then demonstrated how a person could use their home computer to call a telephone number and connect with another computer operating a BBS software program.

I showed how a BBS menu program could be specifically designed to enhance their business with an online presence for communicating, selling, and providing product and service information to their customers.

This working demonstration must have made a good impression, because I was asked a lot of questions. Many business people also came up to the presentation table to see how I had the computers set up, and to get a closer look at what was displayed on the monitors.

The local business people reacted very favorably to the idea of online consumerism and the benefits it could provide for interacting with customers. Remember, this was nearly 25 years ago.

By the late 1990s, BBS users wanted internet web access.

Some BBSs obtained direct access to the internet by leasing a dedicated 1.54 Mbps T1 facility connection from their local telephone company.

A member could then access the internet through the BBS, which acted as an internet gateway.

BBSs were becoming ISPs (Internet Service Provider), and thus needed to charge its users an internet access fee to pay for the expensive monthly T1 internet connection charges.

Eventually, people began leaving the dial-up BBS world, preferring to traverse internet web content through commercial dial-up computing servers providing internet access.

Popular online servers included CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL (America Online), who charged hourly or monthly rates for online access.

Sadly, many of the local dialup BBSs (including WBBS: OnLine!) shut down and went offline, while others relocated their BBS community to an internet website.

A "cut and paste" flyer I used in planning 

the advertising for my Bulletin Board System.
(submitted photo by Mark Ollig)

Upsurge in holiday shopping spending

©Mark Ollig


Thanksgiving is over, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for the holiday shopping season.

The National Retail Foundation (NRF) reports consumers will be spending, on average, $967 during this holiday season.

The dollar amount breaks down as follows:

• $608 on presents for family, friends, and coworkers;

• $218 on holiday purchases such as decorations, food, and candy; and

• $141 on other “non-gift” purchases for their families and themselves.

With its headquarters in Washington, DC, the latest NRF survey revealed 164 million Americans shopped during this year’s Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Sunday, and Thanksgiving Day.

This week’s Cyber Monday online shopping revenue was estimated to have been $6.6 billion.

Anticipated total holiday retail sales revenue this year is predicted to be nearly $679 billion, which is $23 billion more than last year.

NRF states 73 percent of the shoppers will partake in charitable giving during this holiday season.

Individual state retail associations, such as the Minnesota Retailers Association, are a branch of the NRF; its website is http://www.mnretail.org.

“Retail in Minnesota is so much more than inventory and cash registers. Minnesota retailers don’t just sell a product, they sell a whole experience,” states a message on their website.

In Minnesota, 69,575 retail establishments support 782,000 jobs. Our home-state retail business revenues provided nearly 16 percent of Minnesota’s overall 2016 gross domestic product (GDP), which was $296 billion.

Minnesota provided 1.81 percent of the 2016 US GDP, ranking it 17th out of all state economies.

Here’s an NRF fun fact: All 20,000 Mall of America parking spaces could fill with Minnesotans supported by our state’s retail businesses.

A brief video from the National Retailers Association regarding retail business in Minnesota is available at http://bit.ly/2A9sukJ.

In the US, 3.8 million retail establishments provide 42 million jobs, with combined GDP revenues of $2.6 trillion.

The NRF November survey reports 46 percent of younger consumers, age 18 to 24, said they plan to spend more this holiday season.

Out of all consumer age groups, 54 percent said they would spend the same, while 16.6 percent said less.

One often-purchased holiday gift is the ever-reliable gift card; for when you just can’t come up with a gift idea for that hard-to-buy-for person.

Most holiday shoppers will end up buying four gift cards, averaging $45 each.

I was surprised to learn the total spending on this year’s holiday gift cards is estimated to be $27.6 billion.

NRF’s November survey breaks down the percentages of the type of retail holiday gift cards consumers will be purchasing this year:

• restaurant – 36 percent;

• department store – 33 percent;

• various dollar amount credit cards – 24 percent;

• coffeehouse shops – 21 percent;

• movies/music/entertainment – 18 percent;

• online retail business – 14 percent;

• electronics store – 14 percent;

• bookstore – 12 percent;

• grocery/gasoline – 11 percent; and

• individual gas station – 9 percent.

I learned the NRF has the most members of any retail trade association on the planet.

Follow the National Retailers Association on Twitter at @nrfnews.

Be sure to visit my Bits & Bytes online webpage at https://bitscolumn.blogspot.com.

(Below Clipart Of LLC royalty user fee paid for by Mark Ollig)