LOG

May 4, 2007 - Busy working on revisions for Coin Simulator. Bill Geurts has been a big help on this and was the first one to build it for his own use. When the Coin Relay went "thump" for the first time, it took his breath away! Bill and I are working on the design of one with a timer, so coins will collect when you hang up, if you talk over about 40 seconds. If you want to build either of these contact me....

March 31, 2008 - One of my fellow Telephone Collectors is writing a book on Phone Phreaking, or getting telephone calls for free back in the olden days. I met with him and he made a lot of notes from what I was telling him. I introduced him to a friend of mine who was also big into Phone Phreaking. For information on this topic you can look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box there are many links in this article. I was more interested in exploring the network and learning how things worked. Later I took this knowledge and made use of it in my career. I never wanted to cheat the phone company, only to learn the network.

March 15, 2008 - I was doing a bit of rewiring on my wall setup and I took this picture. Originally I purchased the telephone for a very few $ a number of years ago, I totally refinished it and it works great, sucks out all the line power, no other phones work when you use it. It is set up for 2 lines with some other features.

March 8, 2008 - The above picture was taken about 150 feet from my house. I live very close to Downtown Los Angeles. This is Open Wire and you can see the transpositions on this pole. This Open Wire is now abandoned. In the past is was used by Southern California Edison as part of their private network connecting all their offices (AE PBXs) and generating stations. If you have "Principles of Electricity" published by ATT, look up the Standard Transposition Code.

March 1, 2008 - Attended the Telephone Collectors Show in Brea, California. Had a great time looking at all those old phones and talking to people. An EXCELLENT show, thanks Gary. Met some new people there, hopefully I will see them next year. Me at the table making a drawing of how to build an automatic answer device.

February 29, 2008 - Finally got this site up and running in decent shape.

2007 - Visited China, Vietnam and India. Saw pay phone in India, about a foot square painted yellow. They take a coin but are really cell phones and have a short antenna out the side. Never saw as many technical books in a store as I did in India.

My favorite Vietnam Picture that I took

2004 - Visited China, on the train from Shanghai to the Sichuan Province I knew we were coming to a town when I saw the cell phone tower, usually in a field where a farmer had an ox pulling a plow, quite a contrast.

When I travel Internationally, I travel like a "local" and not a tourist.