by Steven K. Roberts


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

IN THIS ISSUE:

"If it needs to be stronger, we make it bigger. If that makes it
ugly, we chrome it."

Well, well. The miles, they DO fly by -- since my Kentucky
posting (bikelab-16), I've crossed the Appalachians (an easy
task with the mothership), filmed the Donahue show in
midtown Manhattan, spent a week in DC at Interop, dropped in
on a few companies and friends, ridden an unloaded upright
bicycle through Pennsylvania hills, enjoyed posh hotels,
languished in a seedy old dorm room, spoken at CMU and
Xerox, wandered city streets, glimpsed lifestyle alternatives,
discussed a film deal, experienced intense moments of love and
terror, begun real planning of the next technomadic platform,
and bounced email off of a satellite while nursing a beer.

The usual.

I'm in Rochester at the moment, fresh from a speaking gig at
Xerox and preparing to disappear to a dear friend's cabin on a
lake in the Adirondacks for three days of swatting the dreaded
black flies and kayaking with a jazz singer. After that... it'll be
off to Boston or Austin -- hey, they rhyme, so the choice is
confusing. How's this: if I get some interesting invitations
from Boston (like speaking gigs and other fun stuff), then I'll go
there sometime around the week of June 15 and then head up
to Peterborough and Maine before turning around and aiming
myself at Colorado (by way of Austin). If no interesting
opportunities materialize, I'll just head for Austin, then west.
(I love winging it: ye Bostonian denizens of the alias, consider
this a ping! Much easier than actually digging through my
poorly maintained database and making cold calls....)

Anyway, this adventure in the east has been intense, even if I
have been lumbering around in the mothership (Doug
Brightwell, writing a caption for one of the pictures in issue
#11 of the revitalized print journal "Nomadness," put it thus:
"Not a mere gas guzzler, the Mothership is actually a
sophisticated energy transducer that takes solar power
generated millions of years ago and liberates it from the dense
matrix in which it has been stored over eons..."). Consider the
New York City experience, for example...

The plan was simple enough: show up in midtown Manhattan,
drop the bike at NBC, park the mothership, hang around for a
couple of days and tape a show with Phil Donahue, then pick up
the bike and rumble down to DC.

Well... New York is a challenge. I met the show's associate
producer, Molly, at the Vince Lombardi rest area in New Jersey,
took a deep breath, and plunged into afternoon traffic: slowly
creeping down Westside Highway with some guy in a Caddie
yelling at me to get the trailer off the road or I'll get a ticket.
Into midtown, nervous, creeping through intersections in my
40-footer as cabbies honk in chorus, the whole frenetic pace of
Manhattan suddenly in my face, familiar, alien, enchanting,
terrifying. Me bewildered, unflappable Molly directing, me
questioning my sanity, Molly telling tales of big-city media. At
last we turned into the tunnel under Rockefeller Center for a
moment's respite -- unloading the bike and taking it upstairs to
spend the night on the Donahue stage. That was the easy part.

But the mothership could not remain in the basement -- plenty
of room down there, but we have RULES, y'know. Someone on
the staff had done phone research in anticipation of this
problem, so we headed off to find a distant parking garage
guaranteed to be suitable for my machine.

South we went into nighttime Manhattan, lost briefly in
Chinatown, over the Manhattan Bridge, and into Brooklyn...
then a few miles on Flatbush Avenue and east on Park. She
had laughed at me earlier for locking my door, but now locked
hers. It was getting scary, and we drew more and more stares
as we went on, cruising neighborhoods in a growling 1-ton 7.3-
liter International diesel dual-wheeled cowboy cadillac of the
sort rarely seen in New York, both it and the blazing white 20-
foot trailer crammed with high-tech toys and bristling with
antennas. At last, a tight turn onto a tiny street (Molly and I
both nervous -- nah, this CAN'T be it!) and sure enough, the
garage -- a tiny overhead door atop a short steep ramp. On one
side of the road, drivers idled, waiting for something... we
paused while a couple of cop cars zoomed past, sirens shrieking
and lights ablaze, before approaching the dusty old building,
somehow the same color as the street. Sullen eyes watched
carefully from the shadows -- the dramatic, tall redhead and
the bearded white guy in shorts and sandals, carrying a pack
with rubber-duckie antenna.

The proprietor emerged. "Hey, you made it! Everything's cool,
come on in, it'll fit -- no, no, don't worry about a thing, no
problem with security, just leave me your keys. Oh, those
people? It's cool, they's just buyin' drugs, don't worry.... What
you doing in town, anyway?"

"I'm going to be on the Donahue Show with my--"

"Donahue! That's what I call 'junk TV'." I saw Molly bristle,
and she asked him why he felt that way.

With surpising clarity, given the hint of alcohol breath and our
general setting, he elaborated -- and Molly, a real pro, swiftly
formulated a plan. "Want to be on the show next week?" she
asked.

"Me? On Donahue??? Sure!"

And so the Mothership's security was assured... the garage
owner would participate in a panel called "What I Don't Like
About Talk Shows" -- as long as the equipment remained safe
and secure for the next two days. Fifteen minutes of fame as
an instrument of commerce...

Getting it into the building was non-trivial, though, and I was
glad I had Wells Cargo weld on a couple of sacrificial skid bars
last month... they left deep grooves in the Brooklyn street. A
few false starts, fractions of an inch to spare, some rough clutch
abuse, and we were in. Moments later, a stretch limo pulled up
to whisk us off the Drake Swisshotel and immersion in another
whole asymptote of New York culture.

I emerged from my suite in the bustle of morning and limo'd to
the studio to be swept up in the whole dizzy gestalt of national
TV production. I've filmed many a feature out on the road, but
studio work is all different: makeup, lighting, a crew of dozens,
sound checks, cataloging Kentucky B-Roll clips for Phil to cue,
mics on my body and the bike, endless details. Energy built as
the audience queued in the waiting area; people scurried about
giving me advice and making adjustments. The people were
ushered in, someone went to work warming them up and
telling them how to be a good audience, and Phil briefly
dropped into my ready room to say hi and give me a couple of
last-minute tips.

And we were on! He was amazing -- quick and efficient, never
letting a lull develop, moving briskly through his notes and
handling the audience with total control (after 25 years of this,
I guess he knows how they work). Questions came rapidly,
mostly level-1, but enough to provide the conversational
openings required to hit most of the high points. Now and
then, Phil would change the subject -- perhaps mentioning ham
radio and then saying "show 'em Brian" to launch the clip of me
sitting behind the trailer, dredging some guy in Florida out of
20-meter static. At one point, the bike's cellular phone rang
and the answering machine responded: "Sorry, I'm doing the
Donahue Show at the moment and can't take your call... please
leave a message and I'll get back to you in an hour or so."

Every break, the cute makeup lady would dash on stage to
powder away the sheen of my advancing pate; producers
would hustle over to remind me about certain key points or
hand Phil a note. The crowd was eager, asking questions even
during commercial breaks, the whole scene one of fast action
and high energy. Phil, I discovered, is a yachtsman and loves
GPS, computers, and communications... so this was hitting home.
The show flew by -- too quickly -- and after a wind-down chat
I was back on the street, leaving the bike backstage overnight
to be ready for a meeting with a book editor the next day.

Playing in New York. Feeling high and successful, handing
dollar bills to homeless people slumped dejected against filthy
walls. Watching a sexy couple in Central Park, pausing to enjoy
a jazz band, browsing 47th Street Photo, hitting MOMA to
marvel at "Hide and Seek," walking, walking, endlessly amazed
by the rush of it all, loving it but longing for the mountains.
Retreating to the luxury of the Drake for room-service and
conversation, then suddenly we were back in Brooklyn to
recover the mothership, do it all in reverse, and escape to New
Jersey. (An odd concept, indeed, but after Manhattan, northern
NJ is relaxed and mellow.)

Zoom! Down the Jersey Turnpike through a gauntlet of cops
and rush of traffic, and into DC in a killer thunderstorm, streets
flooded, beltway jammed, skies black at 4 PM. A visit to GEnie,
a filming with the French TF-1 network. A night with a GEnie
friend and her husband -- chief scientist on the Hubble Space
Telescope -- and houseguest Joanna, wandering the US alone
by Honda Gold Wing and living on GEnie. Out to Columbia for
pix with London Daily Mail and a day off, then plunging into DC
itself for a week at Interop -- unmistakably the best-managed
trade show I've ever seen. The whole event was surprisingly
easy, with a daily commute from the L'Enfant Plaza via Metro
(DC's swift, safe, and comprehensible subway system) to the
Convention Center.

I took a tutorial from Doug Comer on TCP/IP (hey, way-cool
stuff, this), and spent the rest of the week in a nonstop
schedule that occupied every waking moment... running the
bike booth with the aid of lovely Eva, hired by the show to
keep me sane... doing evening events, including a party at the
Air & Space Museum... and getting to know Christina, a
kayaking jazz-singer and network administrator. (I've driven
a van to Vancouver and a car to Carson City; I once even
walked in Waukegan and got THIS close to pedaling to Petal.
Now I want to kayak to Nyack.) Nights in Adams-Morgan and
Dupont Circle, workouts in the hotel weight room, more activity
in a single week than I used to see in a pre-nomadic month.
THIS is what it's all about.

Richmond: installing the new Icom dual-bander in the
mothership while catching up on growing kids and the magical
new NeXT cube (wow) with Jim DeArras. Back to DC for a gig at
the National Science Foundation and meeting with the
delightful Noah Adams of NPR's All Things Considered (aired
last week -- 5.5 minutes!). And then the road... off to York, PA
to drop in on Soft Systems Engineering (a Sun VAR) and share a
few days with netfriend Patti and <pang> her water-company
engineer boyfriend, including the very strange experience of a
16-mile bike ride with him on unloaded upright diamond-
frame machines. What an odd sensation: a bicycle light
enough to lift, cranking up hills in a middle gear, whisking
along Lake Williams (I think) and pausing to watch huge
catfish flirt with spillway disaster... I'd forgotten the sense of
speed and freedom. Might hafta try losing a few hundred
pounds sometime! (Stay tuned)

More road. CMU, killer Grand Concourse breakfast buffet (go
there and do it!) plus a detailed tour of the surprisingly
interesting city of Pittsburgh courtesy of Jon Danzak, a DEC
friend from my old CompuServe days. Hanging out in a tired
old dorm awaiting the speaking gig, cruising town with a lovely
lesbian friend <oh jeez, still MORE pangs>, and then, zoom again,
here to Rochester and Xerox for a talk, a party, a visit, and the
warm startling experience of seeing my lovely 12-year-old
daughter for the first time in 7 years. Fast action. Change.
Intensity. Emotional extremes. Longings. Delights.

And I subject you to this shallow, rapidfire expose' of road life
to make a point...

That's exactly what it's like. I'm not kidding. There are
moments, sometimes even hours, when the discovery of a
person or place is accompanied by a longing to stay -- along
with the painful realization that by wanting it all, I'm accepting
a stiff trade-off. It's gain-bandwidth again... like a bento at a
Japanese restaurant. Some of this, some of that -- plenty of
food and all quite interesting, but not enough of any one thing
for a real relationship to develop. This is perfect for one who
loves discovery, but there are some very real <pangs> triggered
by people, towns, companies, lifestyles, restaurants, schools,
and even bicycles... knowing that I damn well better enjoy it
now because I may never pass this way again. In general, this
is a healthy attitude, but there's this constant tension between
the extremes of going and staying.

Whenever I start complaining about that phenomenon,
however, I soon find myself in one place for a while and it
drives me crazy with wanderlust. The time involved is
anywhere from 2 days to a few months, depending on the
bandwidth of the experience. Discovery is an addiction; if I
may be permitted one more electrical-engineering metaphor, I
am living an AC-coupled existence. There's a big series
capacitor between my senses and reality, and if the input
doesn't change at some minimum rate, perception decays to
zero. (Would someone without that capacitor please tell me
what it's like to remain stimulated by the same inputs for
years??? Do you REALLY, or are the habits just too comfortable
to break and the costs of change too high? Winning entries will
be excerpted in the next issue.)

The only solution, at least logically, is an illegal combination of
gain and bandwidth... breaking the rules once again by
advancing the technology or trying something outrageous...
like...


LEVIATHAN: Amphibian Nomadness

It's really bad luck to publish information about a project
before it becomes a reality, so I won't. Hell, the acronym isn't
even entirely nailed yet. <giggle>


FTP Update, Fine Print, Media, and Noise

Man, that was mean. I'm such a tease. Seriously, I am
exploring the next phase but at the moment it's just a PBI
(partly baked idea), and anything I write now is guaranteed to
be really embarassing in retrospect. (Lessons of the past --
you might have seen some of the stuff I wrote about the bike
before it actually happened <shudder>) Basically, we're trying
to identify mission-critical subsystems and implement them in
a vehicle that is not tied to asphalt, since that means hills,
potholes, drivers, glass, and, well, a lot more of what I've come
to know all too well. The style of travel itself can become too
stable, you see -- I'm now investigating the second derivative
of wanderlust.

For those of you who are new to this alias, I should cover a
couple of important matters. First, the back issues of these
Bikelab Reports, as well as some GIFs, archives of the
technomads alias, and about a megabyte of road stories (the
"Miles with Maggie" episodes that take up where my
"Computing Across America" book left off) are available free
for the asking .

Second, my itinerary these days is as random as ever, but
much faster. Because of the mothership I can zip around the
country with relatively minor propagation delays, and am
reasonably responsive to paying gigs and particularly
interesting visits. I'll try to keep you advised of the general
plans, and please freely attempt to modify them if it seems like
I'm going to be near you.

Rough plans for the next few weeks are: east immediately to
Syracuse and the Adirondacks, then either Boston or Austin as
noted earlier. If Boston, we can probably assume a host of
suburbs (a suburb of hosts?) as well as Hartford, Peterborough,
and Deer Isle, Maine -- maybe also Camden. If not Boston, then
the path to Austin will be more convoluted, doubtless including
Dallas and other points between here and there. After that,
Colorado and Utah in July, Washington State in August,
somewhere in September (this I can state with reasonable
certainty), and SF Bay Area in October and November. A few
deals in negotiation will rubberband that line beyond
recognition, but those are the approximate anchors.

Another anonymous ftp site is open on my Sun machine at
Qualcomm, and it will carry a file ("positions") of lat-long
updates from the OmniTRACS satellite terminal. I'm not sure
what we're going to do with this just yet, but it should be fun.
As you can see from the signature block at the end of this, I
now have the link running -- that location data was lifted from
the automatically-generated header of a message sent to
myself from my host's driveway. The lat-long is derived by
some spherical geometry and timing magic involving a pair of
satellites, and the towns are plugged in by a piece of software
at Qualcomm as the mail passes through the gateway.

Media: The Donahue show will air soon -- I should have a firm
date a few moments after irrevocably sending this file, and will
thus follow it with a notice soon. Good Morning America is
supposed to happen any day now but we keep playing phone
tag, and other stuff is in the works. As usual.

Those are the headlines... cheers from the road!!!

-- Steve



Steven K. Roberts, N4RVE NOMADIC RESEARCH LABS

according to the OmniTRACS satellite terminal, I am currently at:

X-Position: 43 8 3 N 77 32 25 W
X-Nearest-City: 4 miles ESE of Rochester, NY
X-Nearest-Town: 3 miles NW of East Rochester, NY