A typical empty lot in the Fresno/Clovis conurbation. With a population of more than half a million and growing, views like this are growing less common in the area.

They are relics of the township and range system of land allotment which was devised to share out in a fair way the vast new territories acquired by the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, and which is the basis for the familiar grid system on which most American towns west of the Mississippi are laid out. In this they differ fundamentally from undeveloped lots in European towns, which – as densely overgrown as they may appear – almost certainly have a history of intense human activity going back many centuries. Hard as it is to fathom, these wild acres are pretty much as they were when the first white settlers crossed the mountains to try their fortunes in the promised land towards the setting sun.

Standing on such a parcel of land here in the San Joaquin Valley of central California – especially one undisturbed by the plough – one imagines wistfully the world that the naturalist John Muir encountered when he journeyed from San Francisco to Yosemite in the summer of 1868. He wrote:

…The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains. Florida is indeed a land of flowers, but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida. Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between, as in our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled in the flowers; not, as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, but free and separate, one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between.

Little of Muir’s San Joaquin remains. It was quickly noted that a land which could support flora in such abundance must be fertile indeed, and today the valley is an immense patchwork of fields, providing much of America’s fruit, vegetables, nuts, wine, dairy produce and cotton and all of its raisins. So it has remained for most of the last 150 years, interspersed here and there with small towns and just the occasional larger city – Sacramento, Fresno, Bakersfield. For while it is an ideal place for agriculture, it is less attractive for human habitation. The San Joaquin’s climate is classified as savanna: dry, flat grassland, with stagnant air that cradles cloying fogs in the winter and extreme, stifling heat in the summer. It rains seldom, so that the air also easily traps haze and pollution, rendering the beautiful, snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains and the lower Coast Range invisible for much of the year and giving the valley an illusory resemblance to the endless featurelessness of the midwestern prairies.

Even with modern air conditioning, it is a harsh place to live. For the early farmers, toiling in layers of Victorian clothes, it must have been almost unbearable. The few older farmhouses that remain are often built on stilts to allow air to circulate underneath and provide some coolness. At four o’clock in July and August – the hottest part of the day – valley cities can seem like ghost towns. Nothing stirs on the burning sidewalks – or anywhere else except in the fields, where migrant workers from Mexico and Central America pick fruit and cotton no matter how high the mercury rises. Even driving is difficult: if you have not found some shade, your parked car will be like an oven, the seats scalding hot, the steering wheel and gearshift intolerable to touch. Opening windows does nothing to cool either buildings or vehicles: you just crank up the AC and hope it works quickly.

A semi-rural scene in Clovis, California in December 2003.

Yet ever-growing numbers of people call this unforgiving environment home. The transformation of the San Joaquin began in the 1930s, with the arrival of thousands of poor farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl disaster of the Midwest, seeking a still-fertile place where they could begin anew. Now the valley is seeing a fresh influx of humanity: but these new invaders are fleeing not an environmental disaster but a more modern and prosaic phenomenon. California’s tourist image of golden beaches, sun, palm trees and the emblematic grandeur of the Golden Gate have driven property prices and the cost of living off the scale in the state’s main population centres around San Francisco Bay, the Los Angeles basin and San Diego.

The same location five years later - now a small business park.

Suddenly the baked San Joaquin Valley, with its high unemployment, inhospitable climate and abundant land leading to relatively low property prices, is looking attractive. People from the megalopolises are selling their million-dollar townhouses and buying big new homes in the valley. Some continue to commute to their jobs in the city, but with the people comes infrastructure and the businesses seeking to serve and employ them. The new housing developments are no longer dormitories but are beginning to house new valley dwellers.

All of this needs space, and with the fields of the San Joaquin still growing much of the nation’s food that space must be reclaimed from those empty lots within the city limits. The view shrinks, the old trees fall, the wildflowers and ground squirrels that lived there must make way for the humans who would now live and work on the land that was their home. Piece by piece,as we watch, the last parcels of John Muir’s wilderness are vanishing under the concrete foundations of the future.

First off,  a short history lesson entitled “My Mobile Life” by yours truly. I’ve always been one of those people that has to have the latest nifty phone and after a while that’s evolved into a kind of phone dependency. I’ve been a heavy user of mobile browsers for awhile, so much so that mobile browsing has probably replaced the newspaper and magazines in my daily routine. Over the years I’ve sampled a number of phones, from Nokia’s earliest smartphones, to Windows Mobile devices of numerous size and shape, to, yes, Apple’s original iPhone.

I’ve tried both flavours of N95 and a procession of HTC devices (such as the T-Mobile Vario, Vario 2, Vario 3, and HTC’s own Touch), amongst others. A comparison of these three different platforms – Windows Mobile, Apple’s Mobile OS X and Nokia’s weapon of choice Series 60 – will almost certainly be a topic for a future article. For now, we’re here to focus on the iPhone 3g.

Or are we? Some of the 3g’s most important features are actually part of Apple’s 2.0 software update. Which means they’re not exclusive to the 3g at all: you can easily get them on your first generation iPhone.

The most prominent of these are, of course, Apple’s iTunes App Store and support for Microsoft’s Exchange server. Both of these work brilliantly. Much has been written on the App Store’s game changing introduction, and it’s certainly the most impressive mobile app installation experience I’ve had since, well, the jailbroken iPhone I owned before this one.

Many will claim that Apple’s offering is actually less capable than the jailbreak + installer combo, as applications for the store can’t run in the background on the device. This kills any potential MMS applications, chat applications, or even Last.FM’s excellent Scrobbler utility – which would monitor the tracks you listen to and upload them to Last.FM.

Current Apps range from novelties to budget trackers, to games, to blogging apps (hooray for the recently released WordPress client). There probably really is something for everyone and this is growing on a daily basis.

The original launch, on a heavy lift Ariane 5 rocket, was called off “after a software programming glitch was discovered during the final countdown”.

The upcoming flight will orbit a dual satellite payload of EADS Astrium’s Skynet 5C spacecraft for U.K.-based operator Paradigm, and the Thales Alenia Space-built Turksat 3A relay platform for Turksat of Turkey.

Skynet military satellite in orbit

Due to their geostationary orbits, the Skynet satellites will provide secure military communications between the UK and British forces deployed anywhere in the world for the next 15 years.

These satellites have technology that allows them to pinpoint communications on to particular regions of the world with absolute precision, and without interference,” explained Malcolm Peto from Paradigm Secure Communications, the company that runs Skynet. “You know the areas where British forces operate, and you can imagine the type of interference attempted. We can avoid that very simply, very clinically.

Skynet will also be used to route battlefield communications and commands between remote flying drones and provide welfare services such as free messages between service personnel on operations and their families and friends back home.

the Skynet military communications system

Once fully deployed the Skynet satellites are powered by huge solar arrays, giving the two metre satellites a total wingspan of 34 metres, the same as an Airbus. They are owned and operated by Paradigm, a subsidiary of the Astrium/European Aerospace and Defence Company, making them the first military spacecraft not owned by a governmental or international organisation.

This is the third of seven Ariane 5 launches planned for 2008. Astrium see the Ariane 5 as the “world’s reference for heavy-lift launchers, … carrying payloads weighing more than 9 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit with a high degree of accuracy”.

Ariane 5 blasts off

*LATE BREAKING NEWS* With one hour to go before launch, Arianespace have announced “During final pre-launch checks for the Ariane 5 ECA’s mission with Skynet 5C the result of a launcher software test was not nominal.

Therefore, Arianespace has decided to stop the launch countdown. The launch vehicle and the two payloads are in a safe condition.

A new date for the mission will be announced as soon as possible.”

Watch this space…