by Steven K. Roberts


Copyright (C) 2000 by Steven K. Roberts. All Rights Reserved.


IN THIS ISSUE:

"Doesn't it ever make you feel funny that there are so many
people working so hard to get you out of town?"

You know, sometimes this whole thing seems deliciously insane.
Off the deep end. Wigged out... big time. It seldom appears
to me in that light, fortunately, but occasionally I have a
moment of shifted perspective -- perhaps while lying under this
monster trying to reach a buried socket-head cap screw with a
ball driver in my fingertips, perhaps peering into the OrCAD
files, or perhaps just showing it to a visitor and having a
moment of empathy.

Whatever triggers it, the feeling is the same: I'm living an
oxymoron. Industrial bicycle touring? Four years of full-time
work on a bicycle, aided by dozens of freelancing
professionals, serious R&D tools, a few subcontractors, a lab
in Silicon Valley, and about 140 sponsors? All I wanted to do
was go for a bike ride... sheesh. The dream was so clear:
living the simple life, cruising beautiful lands, seeking love
and adventure while turning out a few spirited tales to keep
the campstove stoked and the bearings lubed, hanging out
online, playing with ham radio, writing books while pedaling,
staying linked via satellite to networks and tracking systems,
hacking real-time code in campgrounds... oops, there I go
again. The simple life. Right.

The problem is that I've become a technoid yuppie hobo.
Wanting it ALL creates a real problem when your home is a
bicycle. Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- I'm having the
time of my life -- but still, every now and then it just seems
like the most outrageous madness imaginable. Especially when I
realize that in 17 weeks I'll truck this thing to Omaha, of all
places, then pedal shakily east, my out-of-shape knees
throbbing, strange rattles stopping me for roadside tweaks, the
whole gestalt of life on the road slamming me full in the face
once again with all its gritty intensity. Crowds at
restaurants ("Just one question," someone always asks, not
realizing that it's not just one question: "What's all this
stuff DO?"). The daily quests for food and a place to sleep.
The undercurrent of security paranoia, constant exposure to
unpredictable strangers in potentially lethal vehicles, sudden
honks of unknown intent, teeth-clattering roads, narrow
motel-room doors, gray days of soaking rain, and through it all
a recurring sense of insanity touched with moments of profound
sweetness. 17 weeks until I roll BEHEMOTH out of this
windowless lab and back into the wide, wide world of unknowns,
at once alluring and terrifying despite 16,000 miles of
experience on previous releases.

It sounds abstract and unmistakably mad, but there's something
about passion that makes it all work.

Tidal Passion

I talk often of passion. It's a driving theme of nomadness, of
learning, of life in general -- it's the crystallization of
dreams, the lust for evolution, the very antithesis of comfort.
Without passion, life is spent waiting... waiting for someone
else's input to make it all seem worthwhile.

With it, growth is a way of life.

Passion is not a notion, or a psychological abstraction. It
often appears for a while in association with sex, but that's
not what it's all about either. Passion is raw and
all-consuming, and can't be replaced with religion, New Age
interpretations of experience, academic compartmentalizations
of the universe, a romp up the career ladder, or copping an
attitude. It's intense, almost violent; it renders everything
else in life unimportant while driving you on a quest of
personally epic proportion.

Something like that is not to be taken lightly, especially if
you once had it and now sense it slipping away.

The problem is that this whole culture discourages passion --
though not overtly, of course. We're politely encouraged to
excel, to invent, to make something of ourselves. But the
people who really do so have had to struggle past the
boundaries of a society that offers up numbing entertainment,
reduces education to the level of homogenization, discourages
risk in its corporate world, applauds conformity, treats the
exceptional as aberrations, and rewards the "successful" with
that spectacularly sanitized mediocrity known as suburban
bliss.

There's an abrupt boundary between the haves and the have nots,
as far as passion is concerned. You can't just dabble in
passion -- it's all or nothing. Suddenly finding it makes you
resent Christians for appropriating that otherwise delightful
term "born again"; losing it makes you feel dead (and in some
tragic cases, even take steps to make it so).

No, there's no such thing as a passion dilettante. Your life
is either driven by a grand, magnificent, all-encompassing
design . . . or it isn't.

What is possible, unfortunately, is to live passionately for a
few years then suffer through the agonizing process of watching
it slip away -- without even knowing whether it's recoverable.
It must be a bit like Parkinson's . . . the mind goes, but
slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and
understand perfectly well what it means.


What I'm assuming, however, is that passion can be viewed as a
tidal, and thus cyclic, phenomenon. It has been in my life,
certainly, with every ebb a slow tragedy and every flow an
exuberant celebration of new growth. The question is, how can
one short-circuit this process and keep passion alive? Could
we survive nonstop passion, day in and day out? Is endless
passion even possible? If you see it slipping, can you snatch
it back?

One way, I think, is with landmarks. For me, it's a strange
mix of favorite road music, an amusing juxtaposition of design
concepts, fantasies of prototypical encounters Out There, and a
few freeze-frame images of intense romance or adventure etched
like lightning flashes on my brain.

Another way to hang on to it is by spending time with
passionate people -- other mad, driven souls who brave the
chortlings of the complacent and fear not the spectre of
bankruptcy. It's powerfully reinforcing stuff, and when you
forget your own passion, a spark from someone else's can
reignite the blaze.

Now let's enumerate methods that don't work:

Waiting for someone else to come along and solve your
problems, or, if you're wealthy, attempting to subcontract your
quest.

Knowing what might work and what definitely doesn't is useful,
but the most important thing is recognizing when your passion
is slipping -- and stopping it before it's too late. The
trappings and rewards of past brilliance echo sweetly with the
magic of days gone by, and it's blissful to sail on remembered
waves if you ignore the fact that you're not on a boat
anymore.

Remember why you are. Life is only once, and slips by so
smoothly that you can get away with coasting through a whole
career and still look pretty good. Find what you really want.
Grasp it with unshakable passion and focused desire.

Everything else is secondary.

Satellite data communications

Given that passionate buildup, I guess I owe you a real
whiz-bang development in bike-tech this issue! OK, here it
is: BEHEMOTH is now connected to the network around the clock,
via direct satellite data link.

No, I'm not kidding. On a small aluminum platform at
solar-panel level behind the trailer is a 12" diameter radome
about 7" tall. Inside, a little 14 GHz antenna steered by a
stepper motor tracks the GTE GSTAR satellite 22,300 miles above
the equator at 103 degrees. This primarily handles
bidirectional mail traffic, but occasonally the antenna glances
east to take a fix on a tracker satellite and triangulate its
own location. While this doesn't have the precision of the
Trimble GPS, it does automatically stamp each data transmission
with the location of the bike (within about 1,000 feet) and
interfaces smoothly with a whole tracking system that's already
in place... handling almost 15,000 trucks, boats, cars, and
airplanes around North America. In fact, my base-office PC now
shows a road map on its screen, with BEHEMOTH's location noted
in purple and its travel history as a dotted blue line.

A coax cable pair links the radome with the main unit -- a
shock-mounted black box that now occupies the forward basement
of the trailer (with a nice low center of gravity, adding
significantly to that all-important road-hugging weight...).
This unit provides an interface to the bike's computer network,
making it a component in the whole communication and security
system. At the moment, since it's in the early phase of
testing, I'm using the standard LCD terminal usually provided
for the driver, but efforts are already underway to link it to
the mail server in the bike's SPARCstation and, at the other
end, build a seamless connection to internet.

The system that makes all this possible is the Qualcomm
OmniTRACS satellite terminal, and folks, this is some SERIOUS
magic! It's the kind of thing that makes the writer in me wax
rhapsodic...

I mean, think about it. I'm already used to ham radio and the
wonders of HF propagation, getting only a minor thrill from
making a contact with Sweden on the amount of power in a
typical Christmas tree bulb. But this is another level beyond
that. Transmit power is 1 watt (somewhere in the pocket
flashlight range), and the antenna's aperture is 5 degrees wide
and 40 degrees high, centered around 40 degrees elevation to
insure coverage anywhere in or near the US. How much of that 1
watt makes it to the satellite drifting quietly out there in
the Clark belt, roughly four times as far from here as the
diameter of the earth? What's the path loss? It's uncanny: I
can take off the white radome and roll the bike in a circle,
and that little silver antenna keeps pointing at the same spot
in the sky -- inhaling messages from Qualcomm's Network
Management Center in San Diego and uploading anything I dump
into the buffer.

Operationally, this eliminates my dependence on a number of
less reliable communication links, though I'll keep a few as
backups. There's still a place for the CellBlazer modem, of
course -- when I need blinding speed to move large files like
captured video frames, 10 kilobaud to the nearest cellular MTSO
will be much more appropriate than the 165 bits/second of the
satellite link, and well worth the air time charges (which, for
some reason, seem to be among the most un-sponsorable of all
nomadic commodities...). And I'll still use AMTOR and packet
on ham radio, though only for non-business traffic. But the
OmniTRACS terminal is rapidly becoming the centerpiece of
BEHEMOTH's mobile communications resources.

Since this technology was designed with high-value, sensitive
cargo in mind (like military munitions shipments), there are
quite a few system-level features that make it attractive. The
network management center is staffed 24 hours a day, and a pin
on the terminal's interface connector is for a panic button.
Having instant MAYDAY capability on demand -- transmitted via
satellite along with my latitude and longitude -- makes this a
major addition to the bike's security system. And the plan now
is to upload a telemetry block and brief text message every few
hours, not only keeping the base office advised of all activity
but also feeding the road fantasies of any "workstation
traveler" who wants to ride along with me via the magic of
electronics. (I'll begin with the assumption that everyone on
this nomadness alias and its cross-postings will want the
updates, and you can tell me after I hit the road if you
don't.)

As implementation proceeds, I'll have much more to report on
this latest addition. Just for amusement, by the way, I added
up the number of satellites that in one way or another will
communicate directly with the bike. There are about 30
(including the constellation of 24 GPS satellites now 3/4 of
the way to completion and four of the ham radio "OSCAR" birds
created by AMSAT and UOSAT). This all extends the original
model of high-tech nomadness:

Once you move to Dataspace, you can put your body anywhere you
like.

In Other News...

What, aside from passion and satellites, has been happening in
the bikelab? A few things:

The new fairing is under construction by Dave Berkstresser --
he made a paper mache model with the aid of my old Zzipper
lexan fairing, and has been carving nacelles into it for the
headlight, Trimble GPS antenna, reflectors, and so on. This
will be used to mold a Bondo "plug," from which will be pulled
a fiberglass female mold, which will finally be used to do the
real thing in Kevlar.

Custom blue cordura packs of great beauty have been made for
the RUMP by Jesse Newcomb, who doubles as a SCSI wizard and
Stanford radio deejay. These will be sealed onto the
fiberglass sides instead of my original flush doors, which
turned out to be almost impossible to seal without lots and
lots of gasket-compression latches. They're quite waterproof,
offer easy-access space for small items, unzip to expose the
SPARC bay (left) and the fridge (right), and, hopefully, in an
accident will help protect the fiberglass.

I just finished the power conversion panel, mounted on a
commbay sidewall across from all the battery management
hardware. This area includes a power entry module (mounted
with PEM nuts, of course), the Resonant Power Technology 12V
10A switcher for charging from the AC line, a Statpower
inverter to run 110V appliances from bike power, and the HV
supply for the 1mW HeNe laser (hey, ya gotta have a toy...).

Finally, there's been a lot of pondering here (with the aid of
Geoff Baehr and a few other networking gurus) about how to make
the Ethernet connection between Mac, PC, and SUN environments.
The smoothness of the on-board network will have a lot to do
with riding pleasure, so we're trying to make the right choices
up front. So far it looks like Xircom's Pocket LAN adapter for
the Ampro PC, LRU's Nodem for the Mac SCSI port, PC-NFS on the
former, MacX on the latter, the SPARC doing just what it was
designed to do, and about 10 feet of coax to tie 'em all
together. World's smallest multi-platform 10 MHz LAN...

The Emailbag

John Erickson from Advanced Test Development at DEC sends a fascinating
comment on another nomadic system, long ago and far away:

Hi Steven!

Yet another great issue of "Notes from the Bikelab"! Thanks for
taking the time to produce technical tidbits for those of us that
are interested in your adventures.

In Issue #7 you write:

> ...After pondering the problem for a while, the solution became
> obvious: crosspoint switching. Traditional network
> architectures require all nodes to share some common
> characteristics and generally behave themselves; a crosspoint
> matrix doesn't care. I can run events at multiple data rates
> simultaneously -- even DC or analog sensor data if required.
> (Audio, since it's so pervasive on the bike, gets its own matrix
> with a few special characteristics including gain-setting on
> every line.)

I think this strategy will prove to be incredibly _wise_ over the
long run. If you read the novel accounting the
nearly-disasterous Apollo 13 mission, the one during which the
liquid oxygen tank on the CM exploded, you will see a validation
of your strategy. The astronauts' lives were saved by their
ability to reconfigure CM and LM systems --- in particular, their
ability to play games with the power busses.

When the problem first arose they had _no_clue_ what was up ---
initially, I believe they only saw some power anomolies. But by
switching in and out various power sources (fuel cells and
batteries) they were able to determine that something was up with
their CM oxygen, and soon transferred "control" to the LM, which
served as a "lifeboat". Sufficient generality gave them the
ability to reconfigure their spacecraft in-flight for a mission
they had never expected!

Have a GREAT one!

Michael Bass, of the Molecular Science Research Center at Battelle's
Pacific Northwest Laboratory, writes:

With all of this computer equipment in the RUMP and trailer and
under the console, I was wondering if you have given much
thought to heat dissipation? Especially in the hot, humid
summer of Iowa, will you be fearing a total meltdown of
silicon?

Michael...

That's indeed a major issue. The Winnebiko II was poorly
designed in that regard -- I had a clear fairing over blue
solar panels bolted to the top aluminum panel of the console.
Got VERY hot when parked in the sun. All of BEHEMOTH's
critical areas are under white or reflective covers (except the
commbay in the trailer, but it'll have to take it -- I had to
put solar panels somewhere!). In general, I've found that the
silicon can take all kinds of abuse as long as you don't overdo
it. I'm a little more concerned about my $CD$ library (thermal
cycling of materials with different thermal expansion
coefficients), film, and so on. These I keep buried deep in
the trailer, surrounded by lots of thermal capacitance. Having
said all that, we'll see what REALLY happens on the road!

And finally, Bart Bartlett of Trimble Navigation's facility in Kawagoe,
Japan, asks:

Any thoughts on going international? If you wanted to elevate
the "Weirdness Quotient" by placing the bike in a fundamentally
different culture, I would highly recomend a trip to Japan.

Bart...

Definitely in the plans! Having been on NHK and in some
Japanese print media, I've seen the level of interest and am
trying to imagine what it would be like to travel there.
Perhaps after the 91-92 year in the US I can find a sponsor to
underwrite the hard part (getting there) and get me launched on
a jitensha-ryoko.

Incidentally, I was explaining the bike to a ham in Osaka on 10
meters one day, speaking carefully across the language
barrier. When I turned it back over to him, he replied with
enthusiasm: "Ah, Hari Davidson!"

Cheers from the bikelab!!!