I'm at a long meeting in a conference room overlooking the grounds of my high school.  This happened last year too, so being here is a weird mixture of nostalgia and déjà-vu-nostalgia ("I already had this nostalgia").

Walking around the Stanford campus earlier this week, I felt firmly in the current day.  Because I was never there as a student, it's in the modern time zone for me.  But near my high school the time zone bends - somewhere nearby it's thirty years ago, and all the sights and smells remind me of what it was like then. 

Because I went to the same place for law school and college, I had this time zone feeling almost daily.  Just crossing the street from the law school to the undergraduate campus made me think that I had returned to my past.  Things seemed a little slower and out of focus, just slightly.  I guess that's sensory nostalgia.

Here, next to the high school, life is better now than it was then.  The pier nearby is all cleaned up - there's a really good rollercoaster (small) and a restaurant on the end where there used to be nothing.  I'm still doing the same things I did then, but it's more fun.  There are different worries, but I can get on a plane whenever I want and go somewhere else.

It's been a long week.  Have a nice weekend, whatever time zone you're in.

I learned the other day that the Commission had terminated a couple of proceedings that might have cast some light on all this spectrum policy wrangling. 

One had to do with receiver standards.  It's very hard to move towards using spectrum more efficiently if you're stuck dealing with a bunch of dumb legacy devices.  (Even if devices could just promise to receive IP packets that might make them smart enough.  But a lot of devices can't yet do that, of course.) 

The other had to do with interference.  If you don't have any measurements for interference, it's hard for anyone to discuss what it means or how much is too much.  Someone can always claim that planes just might fall from the sky if someone else does X or Y.

Because the incumbent carriers (both telcos and television broadcasters) are perfectly happy with dumb-but-customized devices and can work out their own interference deals behind closed doors, they don't mind having these proceedings end.  But their absence makes it harder for the rest of the ecosystem to predict the future and attract investment.  Many years of work went into these two proceedings.   (I see that Harold blogged about this eons ago.)

We can't move all of communications into the internet model - the "indifferent transport" model - using the white spaces without piercing this darkness.