Author Archives: Scott C. Lemon

About Scott C. Lemon

I'm a techno futurist, interested in all aspects of humanity, sociology, community, identity, and technology. While we are all approaching the Singularity, I'm just having fun effecting the outcomes of the future!

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Planned update of 80211.net Wasatch County network
On Saturday morning, August 30th, 2003 we are going to perform some updates to the Wasatch County network that might impact users in Wasatch County. These updates will allow us to provide better and broader coverage throughout Wasatch County and the Heber Valley.

We will be starting our work on Friday evening, and begin the major work around 8:00am Saturday morning. We plan to complete the work by early afternoon on Saturday. The current work plan does not involve any work that will cause network problems, however as usual issues can always arise. In these cases, we will work to minimize the time that the network might be down.

None of the updates that we are performing will have any impact on our Salt Lake City locations or Internet Cafe’s.

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Major Qwest outage disrupts 80211.net service!
Once again, Qwest communications had a fiber-cut accident in the Park City / Summit County area that knocked out all phone and internet services in Summit and Wasatch Counties.

The outage lasted 6 to 8 hours and was not fully recovered until somewhere around 6:00pm last night. After that time, we were able to work on our systems, resetting the appropriate servers and services to get things back up and running by this morning.

We apologize for the problems, and please feel free to contact us about credit for lost time!

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Out of communication …
Wow … it’s been months since I spewed a single post! Way too long.

There are several excuses that I could create, however it just comes down to what I’ve been committed to lately. I have been on a push to finally complete the remodel of my building up in Heber City. I bought the place years ago … started the remodel to build out offices on two floors, and then the tech crash occurred. Things sat for a long time, and so about 6-8 months ago I chose to get it complete … and we are almost there. I’ve now completed the electrical and plumbing, we insulated and got the sheet rock done. After the taping and texture, a friend and I painted the entire place. As of yesterday, we got the finish electrical and plumbing complete. I’m down to a lot of finish painting, and then getting a couple of floors done. With all the other things to do in life, I figure we’ll get it complete before the end of September!

Outside of that, one of the companies that I was consulting to – Vultus – was acquired by The SCO Group. In the acquisition, I was asked to change from a part-time employee status to become a full-time employee. With everything that is going on, it was an interesting choice to make … however I chose the job with SCO.

Since joining SCO right around the first of June, we have taken on making a huge difference with the product groups at SCO. The lawsuits and legal issues are all with the “other” division of SCO – SCOSource – while we are now a part of the SCO products division. This organization has now gone through significant changes since we joined … new management … new vision … new strategies.

As the SCOx Chief Architect” I am now working with a great team of people to create a new abstraction layer above operating systems. I’ll post more about this as time progresses. The SCOx Application Substrate is what we are calling it, and it was announced last week at the SCO Forum in Las Vegas. It’s a cool concept that leverages all of the advances in operating systems, along with their bundling of common languages and services, and uses Web Services (SOAP) as the current common API. I was glad to see that the folks that invented UNIX were interested in exploring what comes next!

Outside of these two huge projects, I of course have been having an incredible time with my family and new son. Sam (named after my father and grandfather!) is almost one year old, and is growing like crazy! He’s now walking, and starting to learn words … it’s wild.

I actually am a little bummed that I haven’t been blogging more about him … and myself.

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More wireless deployments …
I have been very busy lately on a number of fronts. Two of my key consulting clients are both going through huge changes … one of them is creating the potential to change the computer industry in a way that I would have never imagined. More on that later …

On the wireless front, 80211.net has continued to expand it’s services and offerings, and we are now providing service to several different types of customers. We recently added some more Internet Cafes, and have both apartment and residential users. With all of this, we are learning a lot about the management and administration of a wireless network.

One thing that occurred recently is that our wireless relay on the mountain here in Wasatch County failed. It appears that one or more of the wiring connections got loose, and the batteries didn’t get charged. Once they died, the shed went down … for days. It sucked.

I am now working on a solution to remotely monitor the shed, and it’s electrical system. I’ll write more in the future, however we are close to deploying a solution – tied into MRTG – that will allow us to monitor the temperature, humidity, light-level, airflow, battery voltage, charge current, and load current. I am also looking to provide alarming in this solution.

Besides just providing service … we are working no how to provide “manageable” service. And we are learning a lot in the process …

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My father and his blogging …
While I have been spending all of my time lately doing everything *BUT* blogging, my father has now got some press about his blog. I set him up a year or so ago with his own place to express himself on the web … SamSaid!. I wanted to do this for him to have this place to publish, and also as an experiment to see how easy it is to blog. My father is not a heavy computer user and so he is a good “average user” for me to learn from.

Somehow he ran into someone in the local press where he lives that was intrigued by his blogging, and so they wrote this article about him. Very cool … my father is proof of the power of the blog, and that it is something that can be done by almost anyone!

Now it’s time for me to get back into the swing of blogging … I’ve been catching up on my reading … I want to start writing again!

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Internet Access at A Cup of Joe!
80211.net is glad to announce (a little late!) that we are now offering high-speed Internet Access at A Cup of Joe in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. You can find this awesome establishment at 353 West 200 South and be prepared for an inviting environment, great coffee, a quick snack … and of course wired and wireless Internet Access!

We want to thank Joe for inviting us to compliment his business with ours, and we look forward to providing our customers with a quality experience!

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Angles Deli and Cafe closed down …
We are sorry to announce that back in February we were forced to close down our Internet services at Angles Deli and Cafe in Salt Lake City, Utah. For over a month they were charging customers for our services … and then not paying us. We apologize for any inconvenience to any of our customers, and would be glad to offer credit at our new location … just two blocks up the street at A Cup of Joe!

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80211.net deploys in Wasatch County, Utah!
Continuing the work to provide lost-cost high-speed Internet Access, 80211.net has expanded its residential and apartment complex services. We have expanded our facilities into a new data center in Heber City, Utah – located in Wasatch County – and are now able to provide wireless connectivity to the outlying areas of the county. This expands on the original Salt Lake City deployments which have now been operational for over one year now.

There are a number of DSL providers offering service in the central downtown Heber City area, however 80211.net is expanding our network into the more rural areas where DSL is not available. The new hub of this network is located near the Heber Valley Airport and includes over 1500 square feet of new office and data center space. This new location is also at the end of a new fiber trunk installed by Qwest and has 100 pair of high-speed lines brought to the building.

Along with this new location, 80211.net is continuing to upgrade its wireless equipment, routers, and servers. We have added several new amplified antennas, and upgraded radios and access points to allow for more sophisticated monitoring and management. Several new network management applications have also been added that allow the 80211.net staff to be aware of the network conditions, and plan for future expansion.

80211.net is a Wireless ISP and network development consulting organization. We have extensive expertise in wired and wireless networking, authentication and access control systems, Internet Cafe deployments, apartment complex and multi-tenant building deployments, and wide-area wireless networks with alternative power solutions.

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The silence again …
It’s kind of wild … I haven’t felt like writing for a while. There are some many things going on in my life – and it’s a blast! I have a four month old son, Sam, who has added a whole new dimension to our family … and life in general. In addition to Sam, I am spreading myself thin as usual as I pursue several different projects in very interesting (to me) areas of technology. In one of my ventures, http://80211.net, we have been deploying a county-wide wireless network and learning a lot along the way. I’ll be writing more about that. In addition, I am still pursuing HumanXtensions and now on a more agressive pace. The new web-site is coming along well, and I’ll be glad when it is complete as it is both a much improved web-site while also being an interesting experiment with technolology. Lastly … my newest venture … is a unique system for distributing multimedia content. I’ll post more about that one also …

Anyhow … I’ll be posting more in the coming weeks!

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Mesh networks at a small scale …
This is an awesome article that outlines the current state of mesh network R&D at the military level. Mesh networks are going to be the next generation of wireless networking … where every wireless node becomes a “repeater” for the rest of the nodes. With this architecture, nodes are able to “relay” messages for other nodes increasing the distance over which nodes can communicate, and also increasing the fault tolerance of the entire network.

There are numerous examples of where mesh networking is going to be very powerful. Groups of people who are working together in a geographic area can now create a large mesh network that is fully distributed, and requires no central “access point”. Imagine fire fighters out in a wilderness area fighting a major forest fire. Each fire fighter is wearing a mesh networking radio, and becomes a node in a mesh network with all of the other fire fighters. As they become spread out fighting the fire, they are all relaying communications traffic back and forth between each other. If any two firefighters become separated by a ridge or other physical obstruction, they will still be able to communicate if there are other fire fighters in between them.

I can see this expanding even further into personal communications, or even automobile communications. If your car was a node in a mesh network, then communicating from car to car on a highway might enable large groups of cars to have Internet connectivity if any one of the cars was able to get to the net.

At Comdex this last week, I was able to see a demonstration and presentation by one of the first commercial vendors of this type of technology. Mesh Networks is the company … and there will be many more of them …

Sensors Gone Wild [Slashdot]