Cable-Tec Expo ’15 – A Return to New Orleans

There’s a temptation to pack the passport when traveling to New Orleans. I left it at home, but upon arriving for Cable-Tec Expo ‘15, knew that I was once again in a place both familiar and strange. New Orleans is foreign for well-known reasons. It’s familiar for particular ones. My first visit was for Cable-Tec Expo 2000, fifteen years ago, and I’d been back several times. Other ties relate to...
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The UCI World Championship – and a Memory

After a long buildup, the UCI World Championship finally came to town. When it did, it sent me back a few decades, to a year I spent with my family in northern France – and to a gray day when I stood with my brothers beside one of the region’s old stone-paved roads. We waited in the drizzle; then cyclists on the Paris-Roubaix road race appeared, and sped by as spectators shouted out names....
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Data Centers, IoT and Connecting the Dots

As a tech writer working mostly incognito on behalf a range of companies, I can identify myself much less often than I could when working as a journalist. Ghost writers under NDAs don’t have bylines. Two recent projects, however, bear my name. In one case, I wrote a position paper about advanced data centers. In another, I co-authored an article about the Internet of Things (IoT) for a...
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Going to IBC – or Not?

It’s been several years since I last attended IBC. Registering late, I found a hotel in Zandvoort, a town on the North Sea about 30 km west of Amsterdam and the RAI Convention Center, where I spent a few days with colleagues at the online publication Videonet. A busy event for some 55,000 video pros, IBC is not nearly as crazed as CES, which draws more than three times as many people. But it’s...
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