It Starts with an Idea

by Steve Ciarcia

y now you’re probably sick of hearing dire warnings about January 1, 2000. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you to death with more talk on the subject. I said my piece a few months ago and believe me, I’m just as happy as you are to have this media hype over and done with.

I witnessed some absurd levels of preparedness. A friend of mine was describing the plan in his town. Their readiness got to the point of having hundreds of civil preparedness "block-watchers" throughout the community whose job was to place special colored flags on houses and at road intersections so roving police cars could find people in distress. While remotely plausible I suppose, I wonder if the kind of readiness that assumes a total failure of the infrastructure of things like telephones, cellphones, and the 911 system only served to feed the media hype on all this.

We know the truth, of course. If there were any problems, it was the result of lazy programming, not divine intervention or doomsday conspiracy. And, if systems weren’t fixed before January 1, it probably had more to do with some bean-counter determining that it was cheaper to fix things that actually failed rather than performing a lot of expensive preventive maintenance.

So, now that we’ve made it to January 2000, what’s in store at Circuit Cellar? Perhaps the best way to answer that is to look at what we started last year. For Circuit Cellar, 1999 was a banner year. When many other technical magazines were imploding, consolidating, or restructuring, Circuit Cellar was expanding. We’ve increased our circulation, doubled the editorial content we bring you each month, doubled the number of design contests we sponsor, and greatly expanded our technical coverage.

If past achievement offers a clue about doing things that will be successful in the future, it certainly has to be Internet related. Last year we started Circuit Cellar Online and it has become a tremendous success. Unlike many other publications, our online magazine isn’t an HTML rehash of the print version. Instead, it contains 100% new editorial with many web-specific features and enhancements (and printable PDFs for the web-phobic types). I appreciate the fact that so many of you frequent it each month (which keeps the sponsors happy).

Last year was a beginning. If I have to admit to having a long-term objective, it would be to make the Circuit Cellar brand into a serious "dot com" resource. When I say serious, I mean that wherever you see a Circuit Cellar-sponsored activity on the Internet, you know it’s unique or just plain better than elsewhere.

Our latest venture may seem a little like dŽj vu. If you’ve been hanging around this technical stuff as long as I have, you might remember "Ask BYTE." It’s fifteen years later, but the need for an informative technical Q&A forum is still there.

Starting this month, Circuit Cellar brings you the latest in question-and-answer authorities—Ask Us. Managed by Jeff Bachiochi and hosted on ChipCenter.com, Ask Us offers readers a convenient channel directly to experts who are ready to answer your most pressing technical questions. Have a nagging analog interfacing problem? Want to know how acoustically correct MP3 is before you buy those $8000 B&W speakers? Pose your question to the Ask Us team of researchers.

Of course, all the things you like seeing at Circuit Cellar each month began as ideas. Many of them came from reader correspondence or from guys like Bob Perrin (Circuit Cellar Online—Considering the Details column). Our future depends on keeping these ideas flowing. If you’ve got a great inspiration or an idea for something that you’d like to see done at Circuit Cellar, tell me about it. I’ve told you all along that our magazine is a community and it’s that community of ideas that keeps it all worthwhile.