20. March 2010 by admin.

I have a minor hobby, I guess, and I’ve had it for awhile I guess. But there are a lot of phrases used in common American and British English that sound weird… I have to often ask “Where did that word or phrase come from? Tonight on CQ100, a virtual amateur radio “ionosphere”, which means virtual radio world - a question was posed to a particular regularly meeting group - Where does “Turnpike” come from? A lot of us travel fairly regularly on highways called a “Turnpike” so what does that mean, really? I gave the winning answer … but I cheated (All is fair in love and war) by using Google.com, a popular search engine. I found:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tur2.htm

and that page contained the winning answer. So go there and see what I saw. It was an intriguing word puzzle question and I love learning about where word and phrase originations come from. Some cannot be nailed down to a guaranteed answer. But then again, as with everything, it’s all about the journey, right????

—

Alan Spicer Telecom / Alan Spicer Marine Telecom

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20. March 2010 by admin.

* This is Alan Spicer, of Alan Spicer Telecom / Marine Telecom. I got an interesting email just recently and this is part of what it said:

We really like your site and this is why I’m contacting you. 

Recently, we’ve created a campaign site for the telecommunication company Ericsson called 2020 Shaping Ideas. The site is about how the world could look like in the year 2020.  To imagining this, we’ve got help from 20 different thinkers who does have a great insight about what life will be like ten years from now. 

We will only contact a few sites around the world, besides you, whom we feel are credible, interesting and relevant.  

…

* Here is where it is:

2020 Shaping Ideas - http://www.ericsson.com/campaign/20about2020/index.html

* I’ve visited the site already and watched the videos on there … and I like it! And I think that others will like it as well. A lot of things are changing in the U.S. and around the world and a lot of people have finally got to thinking about what our future is and what we can do to make it better. There very likely is a “time window” where we can miss a “Golden Opportunity” to have a positive effect on how things will be in 2020. A lot of things are changing at a rapid pace, not only technology (especially mobile and portable technology) but economical problems and hardships. No doubt the US has just went through some rough times and we may not be out of the woods yet. But we are playing on a Global Scale these days. Our children are a lot more intelligent, and their minds are different than ours because of the massive availability of information and communications capability. But this is not merely a local thing. This is happening around the world … and other countries such as China and India … and we need to learn to work and play in a global mind game - as well as business and marketing game. That is if we want to continue to be relevant. We might end up importing most of our “mindshare” as well as “hardware” from other countries that do it better. So we better learn how to work with and for a world market. We already get a lot of products from other countries, and a lot of US Businesses have went bankrupt or close to it, not only in Communications (Telecom) but other markets as well. Anyway there are some good videos from that site that I am going to try an embed on here, as they are available for that via Youtube.com. I will say that I’ve learned a lot working in the marine industry with the yachting market, as captains and crews are from many places around the world. I’ve had customers outside of the country, and from several countries and islands in the Carribean. You can’t just be US-centric anymore. Ham Radio, a.k.a., Amateur Radio - in which I had been primarily on VHF (called 2-Meters) and UHF (called 70-centimeters), I have recently become active again on HF (3-30 Mhz) which permits communications worldwide, and trust me I have been doing just that. The reason I bring up Amateur Radio is that it is enlightening to talk to people in other countries around the world, and look them up in Google Earth and see where they are. It makes me feel closer to being a part of the whole globe, to a world of wonderful people, instead of just people from the U.S. Many of my friends and customers that work and live in the Yachting World have an advantage - they get to travel to other parts of the world and deal with the differences in locales and peoples. (Note: That I did several “Med Cruises” in the U.S. Navy so I have been around the world a little bit) Anyway this is a good thing.

Anyway we might need to learn that we don’t know everything, and we certainly don’t *run* everything on a global scale. So we might need to learn to work with the peoples of all of the other countries of the world, learn from them, and let’s all *run* things together.

So check out that site: http://www.ericsson.com/campaign/20about2020/index.html and the content on there and let me know what YOU think? Maybe you can be a part of that site - in one way or another - and have your ideas and opinions about the future heard.

* Here are some videos from there:

(bear with me if you read this post early on as I am working on it. Go to the main 2020 site link above to carry on with watching videos - while I work on this. During editing, video embed links can become broken, and I have to go back and fix them. But I wanted to get this *live* on Friday so you could see it over the weekend!)




2020 Shaping Ideas - Jeffrey Sachs




2020 Shaping Ideas - Ian Pearson




2020 Shaping Ideas - Carlota Perez




2020 Shaping Ideas - Johan Bergendahl




2020 Shaping Ideas - Don Tapscott (Growing Up Digital. See this one!) Their brains are actually different than ours. Those that say the younger generation are the dumbest are wrong - They might just be the smartest generation.
—
Alan Spicer Telecom / Marine Telecom
http://www.marinetelecom.net
Email: communications (at) marinetelecom.net
Telephone: +1 954 683 3426

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