by Steven K. Roberts


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

IN THIS ISSUE:

"Is that Evil Knievel?"

Ah, I love it. Despite cries of anguish from a few who see the
mothership as a total sellout, this new twist in nomadness seems to
be working. How else could I be parked in a lush Kentucky field in
the rain, jamming to the Grateful Dead, watching email flow in from
the ether while writing software and sipping tequila in
comparative comfort? It ain't all bad.

I'm sitting on the bike, writing with a Mac keyboard resting on a
fold-down tabletop and connected to the console's external ADB
port. The music recalls fragrant California summer evenings at
sunset, sharing the Shoreline Amphitheatre with tens of thousands
of happy Deadheads, crisp articulate guitar and playful rhythms
setting a sea of bodies into synchronous motion, everything
somehow right with the world, the optimistic culture of our youth
still alive after all. It happens now in a mothership in the
Kentucky rain, luring me away from software to capture a moment
and fling it willy-nilly into the vapors of Dataspace. Such a strange
world is emerging from our collective technological consciousness...

I've driven across America since I wrote you last, piloting the
powerful new Ford 1-ton diesel truck with it's towed cargo of
mobile bikelab over the decaying interstate highway system,
wondering with every bone-jarring shock if the delicate and heavy
load will survive. California... Nevada.... Utah... Wyoming...
Colorado... Kansas... Missouri... Illinois... Indiana... Ohio... a blur of
highway lowlife and identical rest areas, motels and campgrounds,
CB truckers and faraway hams, greasy food and potent coffee,
recurring daydreams and sweaty T-shirts. I vowed to work my
way alphabetically through the CD library and made it a third of
the way through by the Dayton hamfest, noting which ones really
must go and which still touch me on some level, evoking overlaid
images of distant road miles, lovers past, major phases, lifeshaking
braindances, and sometimes nothing at all.

In a way it's not like the Road, really -- the Other Woman who for
years has lured me endlessly onward hides from the growl of this
7.3-liter International diesel, her soft voice overpowered. She
frowns slightly as I pass, an earthy woman annoyed by her man's
lust for the fast lane. "It's not that," I try to tell her. "This is
business... marketing... I'm on my way to the East Coast for media
and tradeshows, then I'll come back, you'll see..."

No response.

<sigh>

Kentucky. Being here is an odd blend of deep familiarity and
startling discovery -- like rounding a curve on Six Mile Lane for
the thousandth time to find a house gone and a new intersection in
its place. You all know the feeling. I grew up in this old house, and
there are objects that haven't been moved since I was barely tall
enough to be a threat to them. For a chronic nomad accustomed to
unfamiliar beds and new faces, this is almost an adventure:
walking around the property, mourning lost trees and admiring
new ones; finding in the basement fragments of old projects;
fighting the infernal footboard on my old bed (still trying to keep
me from growing tall); slipping into habits of childhood;
instinctively keeping a low profile by stepping lightly around
creaky spots on the floor; catching up on 20 years while looking
into the aging eyes of old friends, who somehow, incredibly, still
live in J-town.

Spending 3.5 years in Silicon Valley does change your perception,
though. I ain't a midwest boy no more -- this evening at a
Shoney's dinner, and later at the Kroger store, I was so startled by
the near-100% caucasian population that I caught myself staring.
And the language... people didn't have accents like that when ah
was a boy, no-siree. Shee-it, us folks from Kaintucky ain't even
GOT no accent; people just thinks we do cuz' they'alls diff'rent,
y'understand....

(At the Dayton hamfest, by the way, I received an interesting piece
of advice. "Jes' one thing missin' on that crazy bike o' yours... a
shotgun. You pull into Hazard, Kentucky on a Saturday night,
things liable to get a little LIVELY, dontcha know...")

Lest I be guilty of promulgating a dated stereotype, I should
hasten to add that, as I learned when bicycling through the South,
"hick" accents are not evidence of slow thought or lack of
education. Still, being freshly steeped in the cosmopolitan high-
tech vapors of Silly Valley, this visit to my old hometown is a
potent reminder that I am, indeed, back on the road. Despite the
complete change of format, the 13,800 pounds of mobile
possessions, and the smell of diesel, I still don't know where I'm
going to sleep tomorrow night... or where I'll be next month.

I do know what I'm doing for the next three weeks, though, and it's
insane....

The bike is still the core of all this -- without it, the resources I'm
throwing at the mothership would be of dubious benefit. I'm even
thinking about upgrading to a bigger trailer, but we'll save those
ruminations for a time when they're realistic -- a time that might
be nearing if these next few weeks can help correlate the often
inappropriately associated phenomena known as "fame" and
"fortune." The first is by now easy, but in no way does it guarantee
the second.

The bike was featured in a front-page story in the Wall Street
Journal on April 21, which is apparently read by a lot of people.
I'll be in People Magazine next week, and I'm on my way to New
York City tomorrow to do a full hour with Phil Donahue (cast aside
those assumptions about the subject matter, oh ye of dirty mind!
We'll be discussing the encapsulation of IP packets within other
protocol suites, as well as the daunting power management issues
associated with distributed battery-based nomadic systems.
Honest. He's really into this. "Is the caller there?" "Yes. I've been
watching your show here in Kansas and I want to know how Mr.
Roberts deals with the phase distortion and dropouts associated
with high-speed cellular data transmission. My husband is a
realtor, and he complains about it all the time...")

After taping the Donahue show (I did the B-Roll last week), I spend
a day with my agent and an editor or three, then emerge, hopefully
unscathed, from the madness of Manhattan (yeah, you got it -- I'm
driving mothership and bike into Midtown...) and head for DC.
There, I do an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, film
with the French TF-1 network, and hang out at Interop for a week,
doing show-n-tells and hopefully learning something about the
infrastructure of this network that is fast becoming the basis of my
information life. (There are people out there who think that
simply because I'm a public net-proselytizer, I'm an expert. This is
very scary. Someone might actually ask me to EXPLAIN how a
piece of mail makes it from a POP client on my bike Mac to a PPP
daemon in the sleek new Tadpole SPARCbook in my backpack, and
thence through the ether to a Sun workstation at Qualcomm and off
through CERFnet into the hard disks of machines around the globe -
- as if it's not already tough enough to justify why I'd want to do
such a thing while pedaling down a pretty country road in the first
place.)

Anyway, after that's over I give a talk at the National Science
Foundation, spend a day or two with good friends in Richmond,
zoom off to York for a probable gig at the Harley-Davidson plant,
motor over to Pittsburgh to discuss a movie deal and hang out at
CMU, then rumble down to Austin just in time to hit Mad Dog 'n
Beans and suck down a few well-earned mugs of Tecate with lime
in the June heat wave before visiting sponsors and dropping in on
Usenix.

And after that, I swear, I want a break. I really do. Think I might
follow the summer Texas horde to Colorado, lock up the
mothership, and see if I remember how to pedal this thing that
even now numbs my rump as I slowly rearrange bits on one of its
disk drives. (The bicycle, by the way, now has 644 Megabytes of
disk space, and somewhere around 34 Meg of RAM tucked away
here and there. Some week when I'm surrounded by databooks
and have absolutely nothing important to do, I really must figure
out how many transistors are on board. Being in Kentucky reminds
me of grade school, when you were pretty cool if you had one of
the new 6-transistor radios, but REALLY cool if it was a 9-
transistor or even a newfangled 12! This social scale persisted
until manufacturers caught on and started using two legs of the
little buggers as diodes just to crank up the advertised transistor
count without lying TOO blatantly about it. I sunk all my savings
into an exotic Mitsubishi ZX-505, which even had shortwave. I still
remember huddling under the blankets and listening to Radio
Havana at midnight... then sitting in the torpor of 3rd grade amidst
buzzing flies and droning teacher, drawing secret pictures of it as
well as my future fantasy laboratory. I did hang the ZX-505 on my
bike one day, with a vague sense of prescience. It had 21
transistors, I seem to recall -- though I wasn't entirely sure what
they all did. I'm afraid I can say the same thing about most of the
ones in the bike I now ride, 30 years later. It's humbling to realize
that I need an on-site network administrator and tech support
hotline to keep a bicycle running smoothly...)

* * *

Ahem. Asides aside (well, in a sense this is ALL an aside, but I'll
set that thought aside...), I suppose a brief technical update is in
order, though I'm not really in the mood for that. If I don't do this
now, though, it won't happen until June.

In the new toy category (which, if you haven't long since observed
from earlier reports, is what fuels this -- much more than
carbohydrates or even cash), we have a pair of ultralight yagis
from Mesa Antennas in Loveland, Colorado. The 4-element, 2-
meter model is totally packed within its 1-inch-square aluminum
boom -- and the elements are aluminum arrow shafts with
threaded inserts! All this, including the gamma match, weighs
about a pound. The little 5-element yagi is for UHF, and will
become the ATV big-gun on the bike (my dual-band whip is good
for about 5 miles before snow sets in).

The other way-cool piece of hardware from Dayton is the Digital
Voice Module, which is essentially a digital speech recorder that
can store just over 2 minutes of 32KHz sampled sound in its soft-
partitioned DRAM. This will find a use in the bike's HF station, as
well as for demo and security applications in which people
unfamiliar with speech synthesizers have a hard time
understanding the bike's present voice.

New CD-ROMS: Buckmaster's callbook database now includes
international hams, and I just got the long-awaited Street Atlas
USA from DeLorme -- every street in the US on one disk, with
address range data, zip codes, phone prefixes, towns, bodies of
water, and more. I plan to try it first under Windows, running
under DOS emulation on the SPARCbook. Unknown yet whether
this disk will allow access via latitude/longitude: the Trimble GPS
is up and magical, and I want to automate the mapping function
ASAP (to cut weight, you understand. I hate all these paper maps,
and I suffer from occasional bouts of origamicartophobia).

Berkeley Systems, the folks who brought you After Dark, now have
a talking Macintosh interface for the visually impaired. Since I
suffer from similar constraints while riding the bike, this might be
interesting -- an internal speech synthesizer vocalizes the entire
screen environment, naming icons as you step between them with
the numeric keypad, finding things by name, and so on. I'll report
on this when I get to know it better, but first impression is very
favorable.

I think I wrote in #15 about the bike SPARC -- it's continuing to
dazzle with its Sharp TFT LCD, and has been working beautifully
except for a power supply failure (a weird one at that -- the
aluminum case is 12V hot, dropping to 7.5 in operation, and nukes
the switcher if I rest it on the solar panels and it contacts the
antenna mount!) . I spent a whole week with the energetic folks at
Morning Star Technologies in Columbus, Ohio -- bringing up their
PPP software that creates a virtual network connection via a phone
line. If you're used to dial-up access only, this may sound like
coming full-circle, but there's a lot going on here: PPP provides
identical functionality (though slower) to a real network
connection, supporting multiple telnets, ftps, mail, and all those
other wondrous services over a completely resilient modem link.
I'm using the FAST new Telebit QBlazer, and we can unplug it right
in the middle of grabbing a gif file via ftp, plug it back in, and after
automatically re-establishing the link, PPP continues inhaling the
same pixel it was working on before being so rudely interrupted.

It also means that the bike can live right there on the internet, not
just send and receive mail through a gateway (which is still
quicker and easier until the SPARC gets repackaged into the
console instead of the case behind the seat -- I've been using
Eudora on the Macintosh as a POP client to a server running on a
Sun 4/260 at Qualcomm). Given the right permissions at this end,
you could finger the bike while it's in motion -- though needless to
say I don't allow this since I still have to pay the cellular phone
bills...

The very latest addition is the Tadpole SPARCbook, a 7-pound 18
MIPS color laptop with 120-meg disk, 8-meg RAM, and internal
fax-modem. I've had this for about 24 hours, so the learning curve
is still steep -- but it does seem rather incredible that something
this little can run unix (Solaris) and Open Windows 3. It also
emulates a 386, directly addressing the VGA, and is thus,
presumably, sufficiently brisk for graphics-intensive applications
like the mapping mentioned above. I hear tell it will emulate a
Mac as well, which should be interesting. More on this as I get to
know it....


The TO-DO list on the whiteboard beside me carries a frightening
list of commandments that must be obeyed before I hit the road in
the morning for the trek to New York, so I'll only tease you with
oblique references to online romance, high-tech kayaks, head-
mounted gyroscopes and CCD cameras, a new video, and the
dissemination of passion. <giggle> Seeya in Dataspace!

Cheers,
Steve


Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE NOMADIC RESEARCH LABS

According to the OmniTRACS satellite terminal, I am at:

X-Position: 42 57 31 N 76 5 45 W
X-Nearest-City: 7 miles SSE of Syracuse, NY
X-Nearest-Town: 7 miles WSW of Manlius, NY