Orange Alert my ass

Apparently the terrorists are really stirring things up at the airports, it was Orange Alert when we left for Toronto on May 19 and it’s still Orange Alert as I write this in Philadelphia, waiting for my flight to Portland

Got cut off right there – they suddenly changed the gate so we all had to pick up and move across the hall, then didn’t get back to this – was going to on the flight, but was too tired, just snoozed the whole time. The flight was supposed to take off at 8:45, ended up delayed until around 9:30.

But back to the point. Orange Alert. I was going to say something about our Homeland Security personnel not being very alert, since my carry-on bag held a mini-screwdriver set (and other questionable things) – I got a kick out of the security agent scrutinizing his screen trying to figure out what all of the wires, microphones and small electronic devices were about. He finally let it through though, never even opened it up. Agent Orange, I’m on fire.

But when I got into Portland a half hour late, turned out my suitcase never made it with me. It may have just been the usual baggage screwup, but they may have actually flagged it – had my NanoPiano midi module, the cheap computer speakers I bought at Big Lots for $5.99, and the micro FM transmitter I built in Tetsuo Kogawa’s workshop on Sunday. Lisa warned me that it may be suspicious, maybe it’s used to detonate a bomb!

An aside about the workshop – Kogawa is famous as an activist for micro radio, and has given these workshops all over the place (including in person as previous Deep Wireless workshops) – if you’re handy with electronic components and a soldering iron, here are the instructions from his website. For this event, he talked to us over the internet, and the technology was less that impressive. For some reason he needed to present it over a Real Audio stream, which had a 60-120 second delay, meaning there couldn’t be any communication back and forth – at the Saturday session, people were calling the experience surreal, he quickly got far ahead of the participants and didn’t hear us say “stop!” even 2 minutes later, because he turned off the audio from our feed so he wouldn’t be distracted.

In fairness, it was 4 in the morning in Tokyo so it’s understandable if he was a little out of it. On Sunday, they set up a Skype connection which had no delay, but he still didn’t like it and insisted on using the Real Audio stream which was connected simultaneously…and in the process turned off the audio from the Skype connection so he still couldn’t hear us! However, we had Stephen Kelly helping us, a cool inventor and radio art guy from Halifax who was experienced in building the micro transmitters, and most of the people got one working.

So I carefully packed the transmitter in my suitcase. Did they see it on their X-Ray and stop my bag for investigation? Did they bring my bottle of Fructis shampoo to the lab for analysis? Did they discover my unauthorized copies of CDs and DVDs in the front pocket? I’m sure I’ll get the bag back today, I don’t really think my bag was under suspicion, it’s just fun to think about it.