The N2FNH Sound Effects Library 3B: Simple Sound Design!

I've gotten a lot of mileage from the basic everyday Microsoft Windows 98 ding wav. I currently use CoolEdit Pro Version 2.1 so when I produced a Random Access Thought on the JingTong general purpose handhelds, I needed a show and tell slideshow bell, like what you might have heard if you've been around long enough to recall those clunky junky 35mm slide film and vinyl audio record machines. The bell was the audio cue to jump to the next visual slide.

I would have used the Microsoft ding wav but as simple as it was, it was all too closely associated with PCs, so I downshifted the frequency of the bell by ten per cent. The original duration was maintained and the resulting effect was a dull and uninspiring sad little bell. But this was exactly what I wanted.

At another earlier time, I took the ding wav and time-stretched out to about four seconds. The DING became a DIIIIIIIIG. Then I passed it though a so-called CoolEdit Pro"Martian Echo" and the resultant effect was more of a DEE DOO DEE DOO DEE DOO. I then looped a lot of these DEE DOOS in sequence and they made for an appealing high tech background sound, especially when tossed in with other custom produced ambiances.

Bored one day, I took the DEE DOO loop file and adjusted the sample rate from 22.050KHz to 19,2000 KHz. Flanged it. Then, reversed the file. Flanged it again. Adjusted the sample rate back to 22.050KHz. The result was startling! A nifty very 1950's vintage vibrato-like outer space music effect. I use parts of this track now quite often.

I've produced a number of Random Access programs and promos which revolve around the theory of the Internet Tubes. I was able to assemble a unique mini-library of Internet Tube effects, going back to the DEE DOO noise as a source effect. But remember! The Microsoft ding wav was the source of all of these!

Two things I did to the files: First, I Dopplered them all, including the ambiances - I wanted an aural feeling that things on the super information highway burbling by at high speed, like cars and trucks zooming by with that distinctive sweeping high to low WHOOOOM. Second, the DEE DOO noise was subjected to extensive modification to shift the DEE DOO into a more brassy tinkling sound, as if the e-mail and file transfers flitting by were feverishly flapping their tiny metallic wings. Finally, these same sounds were passed through a so-called CoolEdit Pro"Tunnel Echo" which really made the flying wavs sound even more tinkly and brassy.

You've seen photographs of a house-sized ball of string with a man standing next to it. The Nutty guy started with a strand maybe an inch or two long when he was seven. Fifty five years later, there's a fifteen foot diameter cloth sphere in his front yard that the neighbors wish he would just roll away. But the theory is the same. Start out with something small and simple and you can build, assemble and construct things that look or sound nothing like the original, but of course, much better and far more exciting!

That's what creativity is all about!

Into the Internet Tubes! In search of Black Holes!

We delve deep below the streets of midtown Big City in this week's edition of the Random Access File. Our host Howard Stern, NO NO NO! NOT THAT GUY! NOT THAT GUY!, is just your average everyday working stiff, who carefully escorts you, our valued podcast listener, through the ins and outs of one of the largest Internet tubes in Big City in search of an truly ominous denizen, the Internet Black Hole! The fact is, the Internet is not such a friendly global environment. The digital high seas are fraught with all sorts of nasty sub oceanic entities, including the Internet Black Holes.

Mister Stern has been a senior member of the IITCMWU, the International Internet Tube Construction and Maintenance Workers Union AFL-CIO Local 237A, since December 14th 1939, so he carries with him almost seven decades of accumulated experience on Mechanical Internet Infrastructure. By the way, this feature was recorded in Big City Cable's primary outgoing e-mail tube so if you listen carefully, you can actually hear personal e-mails and spam being tossed from server to server.

In the associated promo that plays before the main Random Access File feature, we learn that Marilyn Krasnov is also employed by Big City Cable as an Internet Tube Maintenance Specialist.

So download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to: http://www.twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts Look for file number RAF080424_HOLE.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!

From the RAT Files Circa 2003: Terrorism...and Amateur Radio!?!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO which is due to air in August of 2003. Please click on this address: http://www.twiar.org/ for more information on this amateur radio news service. The call signs and names noted in this copy are fictitious and do not represent any specific amateur radio or citizen band station, but there is an Empire State Plaza. It's located a just few blocks away from this keyboard. Like several previously scripted Random Access Files, this feature was first aired as spoken word and then later was edited and scoped down to a ten minute produced version which has run from time to time overThis Week in Amateur Radio.

A man sits in a small room. A squalid little pay-by-the-hour 10-by-10. At the Blodgett Motel.A 24-unit dump just off Central Avenue on Arcadia Street in Colonie. A mellow-yellow, white-bread suburban community just a few minutes west of Albany. The capital city of New York, The Empire State. His dusty complexion and jet black hair suggest that he is Middle Eastern, Perhaps Eurasian. Maybe Mediterranean. But he could be South American. One can not tell for sure. He is perched on the edge of a severely "tested" and hopelessly worn-out mattress, marked with some incidental and somewhat ambiguous brownish-yellow stains. But he is not concerned with this.

He unpacks the sleek silver laptop. Disconnects the cheap close-out RadioShack beige-colored plastic room phone. Plugs in the Dell Inspirion 600m. For his own odd sense of security, he decides to do a dial-up. The connection to EarthLink is made. A click on the WinPack icon renders an instance of this popular packet program, up and good to go. It happens to be version 6.8. The man types in the telnet address for VE2UPZ. VE2UPZ is an amateur radio packet bulletin board system with Internet connections located near Montreal. The WinPack Selection List Editor has been set to reject all message inventory except those containing JPEG images issued from a certain GW3 ham station, encapsulated and transmitted within an eclectic data format known as 7PLUS.

During this session, three out of an expected five zipped JPEG files plus one tiny text message are downloaded. The images appear to be intended for any ham's view, sent "@WorldWide". But the tiny text was sent personally to the man's legally-obtained KC2 call sign. WinPack dutifully unzips and decodes the images. These are images of a World War II Boeing B-17 bomber. Shots taken at the big Oshkosh Airshow just a few months prior. The personal text is also unzipped and decoded. There is a single word: FRAGOR.

FRAGOR is Latin for BOOM.

A click on another icon brings up something just as interesting.. This is called: The Evidence Eliminator. It happens to be version 1.6. This is a so-called Steganography application which can encode and decode text messages embedded in JPEGs, GIFs, bitmaps and other image formats. The keyword FRAGOR is entered into the interface. The three B-17 pictures are called up. The Evidence Eliminator performs its assignment flawlessly. Some remarkably strategic documentation is extracted. Sensitive information detailing certain architectural flaws in a New York State government structure referred to as the Empire State Plaza is now before him.

The Empire State plaza is an huge, sprawling World's Fair-like office complex in Albany's downtown business district, complete with an over-sized museum, a forty-story skyscraper and a bulbously bloated toilet bowl-shaped theater which everyone in these parts euphemistically calls "The Egg".

But the man had anticipated two additional images.

Still online with EarthLink, another telnet session is made to the G8QAR amateur packet Internet gateway at Kidderminster in the United Kingdom. A check of stations heard list on the 2 meter - 144.85 radio port reveals a certain GW3 station has been beaconing on the frequency. The man jumps into the radio network and connects with the open terminal of the GW3 Terminal Node Controller.

The man types:
"Hello Ian. Here is Anthony. Are you there?"
Moments later:
"Yes, Anthony. Ian is here. How is the family?"
"The family is well. We received some snapshots but two were missing."
"Oh that is too bad. Did you check with Francois or Niles? I think they may have those..."
"Not yet, but yes, I will give them both a call now. Thank you Ian, please give your son a hug for me."
"I will. Hope to hear from you soon." *click*

The man who calls himself Anthony knows that Francois is the F6DEE Internet BBS near Toulouse and Niles is actually NL1DBU, a citizen band bulletin board system in Uitgeest, Holland. Winpack now up again and a link to F6DEE. All five images are there plus his personal message and just for curiosity, he logs in with NL1DBU but finds only one of the five images and no personal message. No matter though, he has what he needs. This mission will be accomplished soon. For a small moment, the man who calls himself Anthony reclines on the spotty old mattress and muses: How easy it was to pass through the lax security at the Albany International Airport. All he had to do was take off his shoes. The so-easy-to-use western technology Microsoft Windows XP laptop computer.

The Empire State Plaza structural weakness data first harvested perhaps five years ago, forwarded at that time by hand over land and sea with great risk and delivered to an electronic database located in a place where the need to know is held by the select few. This same data just now relayed back to provincial upstate New York, hidden in full view and embedded in simple JPEG photo images of American airplanes.

Easy access to commercial Internet telephone lines. Easy access to homebrew radio transmission networks constructed by unsuspecting and apparently quite naive amateur and citizen band radio "hobbyists". The two missing photos are now before him. More shots of the same B-17, providing the needed additional thought-to-be-secure data plus contact and so-called "equipment" information.

If all goes well.. By 3PM Tuesday...............FRAGOR!

Hi this is Bill Baran - N2FNH with the Random Access File. The tragic events of September 11th, 2001 in New York have given me pause for thought in a perhaps unusual sort of way. What if those in the world who would attempt to render us harm, possible terrorist operatives known in the popular media as "sleepers", actually employ our packet radio network systems for nefarious gain. A "triviality" perhaps. Why bother? Who would waste their time? 1200 baud? You must be joking! But please consider:Amateur packet radio, once a rag-tag, hodge-podge collection of disparate regional radio networks can now be easily daisy-chained together where ever there is a nearby radio-to-the-Internet gateway to fashion a highly usable communications network available to anyone who understands the strengths and weaknesses of these networks and also understands how to gain access. And access is easy. An operative need not make use use of any archaic and torturous 1200 baud radio links. He can bypass those by carefully intercepting one of approximately 500 strategically-located Internet gateways, nodes, online packet bulletin board system or even DXClusters.

The availability of low cost or free domain names for dynamically addressed Internet communications systems has made it possible for a small fleet of online BBSs and DXClusters to mushroom forth, with little or no need for radio circuits. Therefore, information transfer becomes instantaneous. Less stringent requirements for amateur radio licensing in the United States and many other countries makes it more easy for an operative to secure a license legitimately. But there is a wide range of other more sophisticated communications options available: Cellphones, Satellite telephones, 802.11 WiFi, even Nextel walkie talkies with coast-to-coast coverage. Why would a terrorist make use of amateur packet radio? Why?

Because access is easy. A legal call sign gets you in. To date, I have not come across one Sysop who would subject a prospective user to the kind of scrutiny a government or military agency might employ to verify an identity. Plus, both amateur radio and citizen band packet networks are: Effectively out of the way. If the Internet is akin to a galaxy, studded with stars, suns, planets, moons and comets, then ham and CB packet radios with their associated wireline systems are nothing more than an infinitesimal pinpoint of light, virtually invisible on the extreme fringe. Effectively, out of the way. Easily missed. Totally unnoticed. And often forgotten even by its own architects, maintainers and supporters.

Government regulatory agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission expressly forbid the use of codes or encryption. But who could guess that names like Francois or Niles might be keywords representing select mailboxes on the Internet? Average everyday although highly strategic message boards that more commonly carry the occasional FOR SALE item, the oddball trivia factoid or the meaningless rantings about Land Line Lids. How could a local ham watching his packet monitor in the British Isles know that common given names like Ian or Anthony might actually be aliases for Mustafah, Singh, Anatoli or Fidel?

And would an eyebrow be raised if these names were actually seen? Most likely not. In the global village, such names are common everywhere. But an operative working surreptitiously will take no chance. When in Rome, use a Roman name. There are however some disadvantages to using such networks. Such networks are homegrown affairs. They are not commercial services. They are the efforts of hobbyists, who offer up their discretionary time for the better cause.But if a critical node or gateway crashes and drops off the screen, it might be days, weeks, maybe even years before the time is taken to effect a repair. Thus, a clever operative however will maintain an up-to-the-minute awareness of the systems needed to get the job done. And who could guess that text messages could be embedded in simple computer generated images?

You can try this your self: Click on: http://www.evidence-eliminator.co.uk/ (tread light here, not sure if this is still safe) and download a program identified as Dound's Steganographer. It happens to be version 1.6. It's freeware and it allows the user to encrypt or digitally watermark any bitmap image, making use of any keyword you choose. Remarkably, it works! By the way, even as this Random Access File was being written, check out this real packet message I just intercepted from the VE2TOY BBS at Laval. It's from G6HXW and it was sent to CODE3(at)WW on the 25th of August, 2003:
............................................................................
From : G6HXW
To : CODE3(at)WW
Type/status : B$
Date/time : 25-Aug 20:47
BID (MID) : 670378G6HXW
Message # : 394681
Title : Night owl to Squirrel
(This message has been read 1 times so far in this BBS.)
Path: !VA2BBS!VE2WXK!VE2PKT!KB2TXP!VK3TE!VK3KAY!PP5AQ!HA3PG!IK1ZNW!LZ0FBB!
!GB7CRV!GB7CIP!GB7WSX!GB7IPW!
From: G6HXW@GB7IPW.#38.GBR.EU
To : CODE3(at)WW

The night owl has spotted the squirrel eating at the tree stump.
Put plan B into operation. Test over.
73 - Lionel, G6HXW @ GB7IPW-2
;-)

Message timed: 23:52 on 2003-Aug-25
Message sent using WinPack-AGW V6.80
--- End of messsage #394681 to CODE3 from G6HXW ---
............................................................................

Could this be some secret terrorist communique? Or is it just another typical test message from some funny guy ham operator? I would say the latter, wouldn't you? But then again...
- 30 -

WHAT ARE YA!

Visual Sound Effects! More Optical Onomatopoeia!

Here are a few more images associated with visual sound effects or optical onomatopoeia. Most of these are from stateside comic publications. Remarkably, many of these seemingly silly words are very similar to names assigned to audio sound effects in commercially available libraries such as the Hanna Barbera Sound FX Library.They use such nonsense words to label sounds that can not otherwise be titled.

Words like FLBONK, BILP, PEEONG, GEDUNK and BRONK, can not do justice to what each effect actually sounds like but at least you know which is which. In my own effects library, I am forced to do the same so equally baffling phrases like JAWUBBA_WUBBA and ZACHBLIP_BLOOP show in my inventory lists.

The Dead Are Among Us! The Dead Are All Around Us!

The focus continues on the dead media thread in this week's episode of the Random Access Thought, an exclusive feature of This Week in Amateur Radio.Actually, it's not so much DEAD as OBSOLETE. Any high tech item you purchase today is doomed to obsolescence within a matter of months as the next "latest and greatest" hits the store shelves.

Hosted by The Dead Media Guy, this week's RAT also features the Krasnov family, including Marilyn, Beverly (Mother Radio) Boleslav and Cigman. The items discussed are computer serial ports, the venerable Western Union Telegram, the Zaurus pocket organizer, early versions of the Palm Pilot (I have an "old" Palm M500 and a Sony Clique here, both of which belong to MNOAOS Zach) and the original Nintendo Gameboy (mine!)!

There is a new TWIAR Blog Promo on board this week, featuring the enigmatic TANK and Zach and a new QSL card offer as well, starring Mother Radio and Zach's digital pal Bix Nix. Of course, a bevy of rare vintage 1950's era analog sound effects are littered throughout all the Random Access elements so make a point to secure a download of this week's This Week!

So go get This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to http://twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts

Look for file number RAT080409_DED3.WAV - DEAD MEDIA: SERIAL PORTS AND OTHER THINGS, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the ripe RAT audio WAV file inside!

From the RAT Files circa 2003: The Future is Here! It's Just Very Hard to See...

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO which first aired in June of 2002. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this amateur radio news service. This is one of my favorite Random Access Files. Aside from it being an adjective-heavy boatload of copy, it was one of my more passionate efforts. Also, this installment has been reincarnated several times. I believe the original voice only version played in two ten minute segments. It reappeared as a twenty minute two part version with added sound effects. I finally reshaped it down to a single ten minute version, which still airs from time to time.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.
Since they promised us:
FLYING CARS!
So far, I see no flying cars.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.

Since they promised us:
HOUSEHOLD ROBOT FRENCH MAIDS!
So far, I see no household robot French maids.

It has been at least forty years.
...............maybe fifty years.
.......possibly even sixty years.
Since they promised us:
ANTI_GRAVITY TUBES!
(Something like an elevator without the elevator).
But so far, I see no anti-gravity tubes.

Buck Rogers
Flash Gordon (the Mac Raboy version)
Life Magazine
Popular Electronics
Popular Science,
Popular Mechanics
Science and Mechanics
Rocky Jones - Space Ranger
Captain Video
Captain Midnight
Gort
DC Comics
Marvel Comics (Stan Lee, always cool)
The Jetsons
The Flintstones
Walt Disney
Bill Hanna
Joe Barbera
The collective Captains - Kirk, Picard and Janeway
Mister Spock (live long)
Scotty (She's gonna blow)
Bones (He's dead, Jim. I'm a doctor)
Stanley Kubrick (despite his amusing toilet scenes)
Doctor Strangelove (not really, but I liked the film)
The Big Black Monolith (scary)
George Lucas
Luke Skywalker
His father Darth
His sister Princess
The tin can R2
The other can C3
Steven Spielberg
Steve's CE3K thing from the mother ship
Rita Liebowitz
The Great Gazoo
MAD Magazine (rarely)
Playboy Magazine (barely)
Robby the Robot (Oh, my Krell)
SuperCar
StingRay
FireBall XL-5
Thunderbirds (are GO F-A-B)
Scott McCloud (Space Angel)
Space Ghost (Gary Owens)
The Herculoids
Tom Swift (not Tom Slick)
Analog Science Fiction
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Issac Azimov
The National Geographic
Potzrebe
Roger Ramjet (Gary Owens)
Noodles Romanoff
Max Headroom
Max Korn
Anna Nova
Adam Strange
Wonder Woman
And anyone else
You can think of.

They all promised us...
Cities sculpted into impossibly tall, shimmering see-through time-share
high rises (which we shall call):
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal flying car for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal helicopter for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal jet pack for zooming around:
The Glass Spires.
Antigravity tubes for zooming up and down inside, outside and around:
The Glass Spires.
Your own personal robot French robot maid for cleaning:
The Glass Spires.
They promised us this fabulous, spectacular-looking future!

Things around here look pretty much the same today as they did in 1953. There are a few obvious changes, like buildings, automobiles and airplanes. Here in little old Albany New York, we've got an Empire State Plaza and the State University of New York at Albany and the New York State Office Campus, all apparently designed by frustrated former New York City World's Fair architects. Very, very ultra modern but surrounded by sagging turn-of-the-century vintage tenement buildings, dusty depression era houses, post World War Two cookie-cutter split level semi-detached ranches and even a few Lustron stainless steel houses in the Beaver Cleaver suburbs. But overall, most of the buildings that were here in 1953 are still here in 2003, in some cases, filthier, in some cases cleaner and in some cases rehabbed and stocked with a load of well-meaning, over-educated, under-paid and terminally misdirected social workers.

Cars have changed. But too not much as you might expect.
The testosterone-pumped 57 Chevy..
The estrogen-flooded Thunderbirds.
Then.
Sexless little boxy Acuras........
Sexless little boxy Toyotas.......
Sexless little boxy Subarus.......
Sexless little boxy SUVs..........
Now.

Trucks never really got into future gear. The ultimate boy toys got bigger and more ominous in size. But look pretty much the same as they did one and two score ago. City, suburban and intercity buses sad to say have changed for the worse, going from the warm and friendly well-rounded rolley polley Art Deco appointments of the General Motors coach of the 1950's and the fiercely loud, rattle trap diesel engine of the Mack bus of the same era, somehow morphing into giant moving tin can bread boxes spot-welded together by manufacturers that no one has ever heard of.

Airplanes.
The rugged workhorse and pack mule of the Second World War......
The Douglas DC-3, it's brothers....the manly DC-4,6 and 7......
And the ultra sexy three-finned Lockheed Constellation.........
Then.
Big blobby terrorist blowtorch Boeing 727s, 737s, 747s, 757s...
and all the other 7s and of course the big blobby Euro AirBuses
Now.

THE FUTURE IS HERE! But a lot of it is just very hard to see. Hi, this is Bill Baran - N2FNH - with some thoughts from the Random Access File. The future is very hard to see because the future is mostly hiding inside things, like old falling-back-to-nature farm houses, crappy old city apartments, even crappier old office buildings and cars, some crappy and some not so crappy and commercial airliners and boats and things like that. The Internet, arguably our most universally futuristic application to date can't be seen at all, except as images skittering across dumpy beige-colored TV monitor screens, downloading their way out of boxy beige boxes sitting on dumpy dingy desks or dumpy beige towers sitting on the floors beside those dumpy dingy desks inside those same old falling-back-to-nature farm houses, those same crappy old city apartments and same even crappier old office buildings. Outside, the Internet is incognito. Looking just like old, tired, weather - ravaged, very badly listing telephone poles strung with droopy, sagging wires, clad with Flying Walanda squirrels, cranky crows and timeless pairs of kids' KEDS (or maybe it's NIKE) sneakers tangled, strangled and dangling for dear life, the wires secretly and quietly transmitting the megabauds to the unseen distant servers sequestered in big city basements. In some cases, you may see fatter, pudgier, bird poop-stained cables groaning from the same poles and this would be your Verizon, Bellsouth, Pacific Bell, SNET et al broadband DSL or Time Warner Road Runner transmission line.

The big boxy beige boxes themselves ARE getting smaller, changing color and becoming more more invisible too, turning into PDAs that are so small they can fit in your pocket. The Internet is more invisible to the outside world then television has been in its various forms. The 1950s saw single-channel 20-element Yagis and multi-channel 40-element log periodic antennas mushroom over rooftops everywhere. You knew where the future was because the antenna was the visible link to the Ether. Nowadays, computers are linked with their hard-to-see Ethernet cards but they are connected with equally hard-to-see cables and twisted pairs of wires that slide around and then disappear into a tiny socket in a wall inside an office or residence.

By the late 1970s, the first of the giant metal ears, satellite dishes - small-scale Arecibos, blossomed in back yards at first across the rural fruited plain. But then many sprung up in suburban backyards too and sometimes even New York City high rises. Neighbors were pissed. They complained it was an eyesore but really they were jealous because they did not have the future in a boxy beige box delivering 500 channels of "Gee Honey, there's nothing good on the tube tonight".

As we made our way to the mid-90s and then into the present century, the TV dishes got smaller and became almost completely invisible, every house on the block with an 18-inch Japanese stir fry wok jammed on a stick sideways over the porch or on a window sill in the suburbs and the urbs, the trailer courts and the downtown ghettos. The TVs got bigger and bigger and still promise to get even bigger but they are hiding inside houses, hiding inside apartments and hiding inside condos that somehow themselves seem to be getting smaller and smaller.

Cable TV, even worse, with its black, shaky, snaky, kinky coax wires strung helter-skelter under the ground, through the basements, behind the walls and other filthy cobweb-laced, insect-infested places just out of view. The future..terminating in a little boxy beige box with glittering red LEDs sitting by the TV set. The future continues to become even more invisible.

As the TV dishes got smaller and the decades-old rooftop TV antennas now almost completely rusted away, some things - were - getting bigger. You could actually see them. King Kong vs. Godzilla-sized cellphone towers rising up like gargantuan steel weeds, spreading their giant Rodan antenna wings everywhere, on every open lot, every roadside, every hillside, every apartment rooftop, the towers are appearing to be getting bigger and wider and heavier and are studded with truly ominous and very formidable emitters. But the telephones they serve, Are getting smaller. They are so small. They are almost invisible. They are smaller than your hand. You could easily drop it in a toilet.

But you can telephone someone with no wires needed. Or make like a two-way radio (Ala' Nextel). Or send instant text messages or even get HTML or XML or any ML on some. But they are so small, You could easily drop it in a toilet. The future continues to become even more invisible.

And what happened to those thousands of CB and amateur radio antennas that were homegrown on housetops and towers everywhere. Most did indeed rust away. Many were taken down as new property covenants condemned the gawky, gangly sky hooks a socially unacceptable structural offense. Clever entrepeneurs moved right in and invented invisible antennas or at least every small but supposedly very active antennas. And the radios themselves, Like the cellphones and PDAs, Smaller and smaller again. The smallest ones, You could easily drop in a toilet.

Other radios will soon be hiding, masquerading as brother and sister boards, stuffed in PCI slots inside the boxy beige boxes but will be called Software Defined Radios, virtual transceivers where the radio is just a picture on the boxy beige box screen. In professional circles, the radio station, the television station, the audio and video post-production house, once repositories of big red glowing glass tubes, big iron rack mounts, big patch bays snarled with big finger- sized wires, big 14inch metal reel-to-reel tape machines, and the big Gates control consoles with the big fist -sized pots - all have given way to tiny little virtual studios that can easily be concealed in a little boxy beige box and further concealed in a closet painted in the color of your choice. The future continues to become even more invisible.

Our neighborhood shops and superettes, one on every corner when we were kids, all have politically defected from the neighborhood and have slipped inside big giant boxy, in some cases beige, boxes. Monstrous, sprawling, faceless landscape eaters that we all call the Mall. But it is here in the Mall where the glass-spired future comes closest to the desired realization. But this future too is concealed within the great sometimes boxy beige-colored boxes. The interior decoration often appointed with spectacular see-thru glass elevators, brilliant sparkling glass chandeliers and of course the ubiquitous go-up and down escalators. But escalators will always be the always-cool but truly retro future machine. All of this invisible to the world...

Unless you go inside.

The future continues to become even more invisible.

Each day, take look around you and see the future. Each day, there will be something new to see. Something truly futuristic. Something truly fantastic. Something wonderful - (ala' 2010). But this, and the rest of the future, will continue to become even smaller and more and more invisible. So small in fact, You could easily drop it in a toilet. -30-

No Shame!