Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I have always wanted to learn how to drive the Zamboni,, the ice resurfacing machine that is de rigeur for anything larger than a backyard rink. Today I got my wish, attending the Zamboni Training Class at the Union Sports Arena in Union, NJ.

The technology is pretty clever and has remained relatively unchanged for nearly half a century. Under the hood is a 4-cylinder truck engine, modified to run on natural gas and speed-governed to top out at a pedantic 9 miles per hour. It doesn't sound fast until you're racing into the corner on your Zamboni, peering around the nose of the beast to make sure you don't take out the dasherboards. The advice offered by Ken, my Zamboni instructor, was pretty much what I get from my adult hockey teammates: don't get too close to the boards, know where you are, and make sure you know how to stop.

Fortunately, driving the Zamboni is significantly easier than navigating an ice-covered New Jersey county road. Being stuck in first gear helps; it gives you strong engine braking (so that the Zamboni almost lurches to a stop when your foot comes off the gas) and prevents you from down shifting through the penalty box in a burst of acceleration. Besides the difficulty in seeing over ice dump box (think: driving a dump truck in reverse), the strangest part was the low gear ratio of the steering mechanism. Took about four cranks of the steering wheel to execute a quarter-turn in the corners, explaining the little knob on the steering wheel -- it's easier to whip the wheel when you're not in a constant 10-to-2 clock face shuffle with your hands. And here I thought the wheel knob was so you could drive the Zamboni while wearing handcuffs (not statistically likely, I realize, but if Mark Cuban's HDnet wants to do an adaption of "The Longest Yard" meets "Slap Shot", it would be a great comedic device).

Being a Zamboni-newbi, I wasn't allowed to perform an actual resurfacing. Another thing I learned: Rink rats always talk about "ice cuts" rather than "resurfacing" or the even more shoobie-like "Zamboni-ing" of the ice. It literally is an ice cut -- the Zamboni is effectively a huge sno-cone machine sans flavored syrup. No wonder we love'em in New Jersey. Directly under the driver's butt is a row of horizontal blades that scrape the ice in a rotary razor fashion statement. Levers to the right of the steering wheel move the blade tray up and down and the large horizontal wheel establishes the depth of the cut. These augers remove dirt and shavings and channel the ice into a set of vertical augers that lift the proto-sno-cone into the ice dump bin. The large lever in the middle of the control area (usually with a knob on it, but here shown with a hockey puck finial) clears the ice from the junction of the perpendicular blade systems, preventing clogs that can lead to dreaded ice contrails.

The final stage of the ice cut is to pour hot water onto the ice, from a 150-gallon tank under the hood, which fills in any deeper cuts in the ice, replaces the layer shaved off by the augers, and almost instantly bonds to the existing cold surface. There's an optional ice wash system as well, which does what it says: sprays water to loosen debris and non-water soluble objects, then slurps it back up where it's filtered and recycled. If you're cutting the ice during a public skating session, or there's a lot of particulate nastiness coming from decaying bench or hallway rubber flooring, the ice wash prevents the ice from attaining a depressing grey color.

I'm far from ready to hop on the Zamboni in an emergency, or get into the subtler parts of ice cuts like double waterings to build an extra layer of fresh, firm ice on top of the base, let alone switching gas tanks in mid-cut (yes, like a Jaguar, the Zamboni has twin tanks). But now my other car really is a Zamboni, and driving it was a great way to say farewell to 2006.

Our latest Innovating@Sun podcast is public, this time featuring Roger Meike from Sun Labs talking to me about the SunSPOT technology. SunSPOTs (Small Programmable Object Technology) are battery operated, wireless devices that run a Java stack on the bare metal. They can talk to each other, as well as a variety of real-world sensors like accelerometers, creating a myriad of uses for where your bits need to know about your atoms. The coolness is embedded, the value is yours to add -- the developer kit goes public soon as well.

I've had it with copper wiring, particularly the local loop that Verizon runs to my house. For the past 16 months, I've had nearly monthly phone calls with Verizon's repair folks, almost always starting with a rehash of previous events. The short form is that the main trunk line from the nearest pedastal to our block is out of free pairs, and the pairs that come into my house (at least two of the three) are of completely unreliable quality: hiss, hum, static, and random dropping of calls, particularly when I'm hosting my late-night staff confab. I expect some of those attributes from wireless service, but this is copper. Land line. Hard wired. Seems only the "hard" adjective is appropriate. I've had four different Verizon technicians here, running a new service line to the house (which is still sitting on top of the ground, despite two calls and three promises to bury it), diagnosing the bad line from the main distribution point, including the loading coils inserted upstream (because of our distance from the central office, making the copper line to my house look more like a transmission line, and a lossy one, at that), and, most famously, telling me the problem is with my wireless network and phones.

It's one thing when the content of phone calls frustrates you. It's another when the phones themselves cause the frustration. I went epsilon over my tolerance for infrastructure failure this week, and setup VOIP in the house. I was done before the first half of the Rutgers-West Virginia game.

8:00 Leave Staples with a new Linksys Vonage 2-port phone adaptor.

8:15 Plug in the phone adaptor. Power, and one port on the wireless router.

8:20 Provision a Vonage phone number. Before transferring anything over, and to make sure my problems really are isolated in Verizon's network, I spun up a new Vonage phone number, and then forwarded my existing Verizon number to the Vonage number. This is faster than having Vonage initiate the transfer, and I got instant gratification when it worked.

8:25 Install a modular phone jack next to my cable modem, and use it to splice into the existing house wiring. Had to first get the old number to ring forward to the new number, then I could cut the existing house wiring free of Verizon. Two snips, one punchdown, and one screw-down block later, and my VOIP circuit now routes through my doorbell as well, using all of the existing house wiring (including two wireless phone systems, one for each floor, and a doorbell that rings the phone).

8:35 Call my wife, noise-free (modulo 18 years of marriage). This will backfire at some future point, of course, because I won't be able to blame a bad signal-to-noise ratio when I forget to do something on the way home.

Total door-to-door (literally) service time: 35 minutes. I've since played around with the caller ID features on the Vonage web site, turned off voice mail (since I like our clunky but fun answering machine), set up network service connection forwarding (in case Comcast drops the line, Vonage will route calls to my cell phone).

Yes, I'm late to the VOIP game, and yes, this is about as technologically hip as discovering MP3s. But it's just so cool when it works. I've since initiated transfer of my home office line, and I'll move my fax machine over as well, cutting the cord with Verizon unless our first winter storm causes the snow plow to beat me to it.

Everything you do in the world of bits becomes part of your permanent record. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make you think about what you say and do in email, video, and digital pictures. If someone (including you) is making a digital record, it's a permanent record. The Internet is only surpassed by my mom's basement freezer as a long-term cold storage device (should I get hungry for a small piece of my 1975 bar mitzvah cake, I know where to look). Google for my mom's noodle kugel if you literally want the proof in the pudding. An email I sent on behalf of the USENET Cookbook, in April 1986, is so deeply embedded in the mesh of the Internet that it can't be extracted (or, to my mom's dismay, made somewhat less artery-hardening).

Earlier in the week, I had a fun email exchange with Tom Lycan, who blogs about the NJ Devils for the Newark Star-Ledger. He asked me about the Newark Arena, where the Devils will hopefully play next season, leaving behind their concrete-lined dump that not even Bruce Springsteen could make appealing (guess which side of the debate I'm on?) He warned me that he was preparing some notes for a future blog entry, but when you write to a writer, you are giving them free license to use what you say. Lycan did just that, and with what I think is a fair screen scraping of my on-the-record comments about Newark.