I had a long chat with K today. Things are maybe 10% better than they were, but its still rocky. We're going to first thursday tomorrow night. My mom was most upset today by my younger brother's talk of leaving the back yard and how institutionalization while still very remote, comes a bit closer. Add long-term insufficient income to the mix and there are a fair number of stresses on my system.

On the way in to town today, I had a mini-revelation. I believe that the best way for wireless networks to evolve is pure peer-to-peer systems. That means no difference between nodes, clients, access points, users, base stations, whatever. Getting on the internet means hopping from your laptop to some guy's cell phone over the next guy's PDA, through the PDA in some lady's purse, to a PC connected to a DSL line. VoIP in PDAs will be a real threat to cell phones. I cant wait to say screw-you to my cell phone company. The entire cell phone network from the switches to the towers to the handsets are 100% closed, 100% proprietary, and therefore 100% innovation-free. It felt like a revelation because the telecomm industry has been very successful but 802.11 has showed me what customer-owned infrastructure means. Phone companies will still sell data lines because they own the hard wires, but there will be a boom for companies that sell cheap communication hardware where the customer owns a much larger percentage of the infrastructure connecting one handset or PC to the destination. Linksys seems to have done well in the wireless hardware biz. I can see why cisco bought them.

One thing that gets me is why PC users dont use voice apps between PCs. Apple's iChat i've seen used a few times. I cant even name the dominant audio or audio/video conferencing standard. H.323 I think.

I stopped by The Backspace Cafe today and talked to one of the owners. I remember biking past the space many times thinking 'who could afford to rent a space like that'.