Here we are, 12 of us, in the corporate meeting room. We each have our wireless laptop computer sitting in front of us. Jack screwed up, as usual, on his phase of the project, but it's not up to me to ask him why. I IM the chief on my laptop, to ask Jack to explain his screw-up. Jack has to come clean and my personal relationship with him is not in trouble. I have to work with him every day.

It's difficult to compare this form of communications with smoke signals by American Indians or Pheidippides running some 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver a message of victory in battle. I've seen pictures of soldiers sitting in treetops to report the "positioning" of troops during our Civil War. They also used tethered hot air balloons for this purpose. Today, global positioning of activities on our entire planet can be viewed by us from images sent to us by satellite transmissions. During WWII basic training, everyone had to learn semaphore and Morse code for communications. Our cell phones and BlackBerries can take care of all our communications today.

The size and efficiency of a fleet of trucks for any specific hauling job is difficult to predict. Think of all the variables:

• Size and number of haul units.
• Loading site conditions.
• Haul road conditions.
• Traffic and weather delays.
• Dump site conditions.

Today GPS can show the dispatcher, on a roadmap display, the exact location of all the hauling units on this project. He can add or deduct from the fleet, change the haul route, and be in personal contact with the operators and drivers over their radios or cell phones. Now, this new instant graphic display of all units operating, at any given time, has greatly improved our scheduling efficiency. Two-way radios have seen many improvements. In the past, when the antennas or towers were out of range, we lost communications. Today we have satellites to bounce our radio and GPS signals. Cell phones, of course, are a must for all employees today, from the president of the company on down to the foremen.

BlackBerry now does it all for communications. I'm sure that most of you reading these notes on communications are acquainted with the features of this incredible pocket device. Just in case you're not, maybe you would like to use one to fit some of these activities into your daily routine:

E-mail, Phone, Wireless Internet, Tethered Modem (no need for wireless PC card), Organizer, SMS (Short Messaging Service), IM, Paging, Corporate Data.

While the Blackberry is in your pocket, you're in touch with the world and the world is in touch with you.

"PolyWorks is a powerful point cloud software solution that processes data obtained from any short-range, mid-range or long-range 3-D scanner. Since 2000, InnovMetric has been working in close collaboration with surveyors and scanner manufacturers, applying its vast experience in processing very large point clouds to meet the specific needs of the surveying community."

If you haven't already done so, check out this PolyWorks. It can give you scan alignment, geo-referencing, measurements, feature extraction and much more that can be fed right into AutoCAD, and MicroStation.

Winter is here. What are the road conditions in your domain? Now, again, we don't need a patrolman on each spot monitoring the road conditions. We can still use those sensors imbedded in the pavement or bridge decks. But, there is a laser system, developed by Goodrich Sensor Systems, previously used to detect icing on aircraft wings, that can be mounted above the roadway. An operator can sit at a desk in your office to view the images scanned by this laser system to determine whether areas are dry or are covered with water, ice or snow. Now this operator can handle the road maintenance fleet the same as the dispatcher in the material hauling spread described earlier. Also, GPS can tell him where any maintenance unit is at any given time. This could be tough on operators stopping for a coffee break. I recently heard of a strike by private snowplow operators opposing the use of GPS to locate their unit.

Our communications are no longer delivered by messenger, telegraph, treetop observer, or by smoke signals. Technology throughout the world has immeasurably improved our efficiency of planning, operating and completing our projects. What did we ever do without that BlackBerry in our pocket?