Troffers, Music, and Beads

I'm still migrating from Old Methods, and am finding this publishing medium a little bit less appropriate for trivial comments in passing (though one might reasonably ask why, if they are indeed trivial, I would bother to post them in the first place). This daily update thang began as a sort of ongoing geek exhibitionism (complete with webcam) between major updates to my nomadness mailing list, but over time, it became the only news pipeline: a list of items currently on eBay, a photo du jour with caption, and snippets of "today's activity" news ranging from a sentence to a couple of screens depending on what's either taking place or rantworthy.

But in this more whiz-bang automated bloggish medium, I find myself wanting to make the updates more substantial and "article-like" somehow, perhaps because I'm conscious of them becoming static "permalink" pages instead of being lost in the "to be archived" collection. It'll settle out at some level, I'm sure. At the moment, photos are more trouble; in the old system, a script by Ned Konz on our server simply received a piece of email with image attachment, then plugged it into an HTML template to make the page.

So anyway, speaking of all that, I haven't had much on eBay lately, although a pair of HP Batteries from the Portable PLUS era are off to Edison, New Jersey for $20 (via the Microship Garage Sale) and Brian Moore's Lies of Silence just went to Saddle Brooke, Arizona for $1.50. Down in the noise, but I do love turning objects I no longer need into boat parts, tools, and groceries...

I did some more suspended-ceiling research today, and am about to get the parts for my office (starting small). The only thing I haven't been able to determine from questioning the guys at the hardware megastores is whether I can throw R-38 insulation on top of troffers (those 2x4-foot electronic-ballast fluorescent units that drop in to replace tiles where you need light), or whether that will cause overheating. Calls are now in to electricians to find out.

In an utterly unrelated vein, I'm now listening to one of the most delicious pieces of music I know... "Round Midnight" from The Colour of Love by Ronnie Earl:



Oh, and it's killing us to not be in Key West for Fantasy Fest this week! Some enduring and wonderful memories of that bead-encrusted frolic in paradise... next year for sure, with boatlets.

Global Perspective

In general, I try to avoid political themes on this site... though it can sometimes be exceedingly difficult to bite my tongue, given the utter madness afoot and my general tendency to hold forth about abuse of power, curtailment of freedom, and other things that trigger a visceral antibody reaction in my brain. But still, the Microship project (remember the Microship? This song's about the Microship...) appeals to a broad spectrum of fellow geeks, dreamers, and adventurers. It's counterproductive for me to alienate folks who would otherwise enjoy and contribute to these technomadic dreams, just because we happen to hold sharply opposing political views. I used to rant quite a bit in the old "live page," but have since decided to keep this forum focused primarily on gonzo engineering and quixotic expeditions (along with the endlessly distracting infrastructure that supports them).

But in the run-up to this scary election, we all need to step back a little and look at the global big picture... which is changing faster than it has at any time in our lives. There is a tendency for Americans to extrapolate from the comfort of our idyllic past and rationalize from only a few decades of perspective that hey, even though there may be some economic and military skirmishes afoot out there, it won't really affect us here at home all that much... will it? I mean, things have always been more or less OK, and there's some sort of natural system of checks and balances to keep the world from going to hell, right?

Wrong... not in a newly unipolar world that happens to be contemporaneous with the crossing of the curves in oil production and demand. We've let ourselves get distracted by fear and the rhetoric of abstract "-isms," in the process overlooking much more fundamental issues that define the geopolitical landscape.

This article presents a disturbingly cogent global perspective without even a hint of partisan politics (itself a rather refreshing phenomenon in 2004, which is the first time in my personal history when differing political perspectives have become bitter enough to end friendships). I won't attempt to summarize the piece; I wouldn't do it justice. But I do recommend it highly.

Meet Jeannie

/Users/wordy/Pictures/mini dup pix/sr-jr-firehug
Originally uploaded by Microship.

One of the fun things about migrating from my legacy live page is that some of the more enduring content from the old medium needs to be replicated here... both for archive continuity and establishment of context (and besides, it's nice to have a few concepts "in the can" for those days when the good news is that there's no bad news, but the bad news is that that's all the good news). When a day's work involves hours of keytapping, it hardly makes for interesting copy (except, hopefully, what I've been working on), so occasionally we need feature material. Writing about writing can get a bit recursive.

So why not start with my sweetie? The lovely lady in the photo is Jeannie, whom I met a little over a year ago on Friendster. She "weekended" here until last month, doing a brutal three-way commute that also included her apartment in Seattle and job in Bellevue. At last we decided to go for it and are now in full cohabitation mode (although she still rides the bus 65 miles each way for work, which, if nothing else, has reduced the volume and frequency of my complaints about the 1/8-mile commute through the forest to my lab).

Jeannie is undergoing an interesting cultural transition, from a suburban lifestyle of consumption to a rural one of simplicity and efficiency. This relationship has made an astonishing difference in the quality of life around here; the contrast between my current state and that of last year is apparently dramatic enough to the outside observer that friends frequently comment on changes in my attitude and energy level. It is also nice to have regained an interest in creative projects, and I'm gradually getting used to the absence of well-established families of spiders, musty odors, and mysterious piles of yesteryear's detritus.

Jeannie will be the pilot of Art Throb, the other Microship (formerly known as Songline), and paddles Stella (photo), sister ship of Bubba. Integration of all these vessels is the first order of business once we finish the lab thermal/aesthetic retrofit that's now in progress. We are hoping folks will join us on some of our local kayak jaunts (like these) as well as the 7 Degrees of Freedom flotilla expedition slated for sometime next Spring.

A Vague Concept of Economics

Just a quick Friday evening update... I spent half the day running around, overnighting the batch of eBay'd matsutake to Virginia, researching suspended ceiling components and 18V cordless tools at the local home-improvement mega-store, and doing minor errands hardly worthy of mention even in this ephemeral medium.

Of more interest, perhaps, is a book proposal burbling, about which it is considered bad luck to say much until it becomes a reality. This started when a shadowy concept of economics formed in my head yesterday as I sat painfully on the cold rocky ground, nursing a sheet-metal-bloodied and nettle-tingled hand whilst slowly retrofitting rodent exclusion flashing onto my building: rather than spend the next few months engaged in painful and inefficient attempts to do the kinds of work at which I am, at best, mediocre, and at worst, unmotivated, I could -- now get this -- make money at something I'm good at and then actually pay someone else to do the other stuff. That got me thinking about writing again, and well, that's all I'll tell you about the project at the moment.

But it's a fun one.

The Joy of Monetizing

Funny, the way evolving technology changes our expectations and cultural norms. Back in the Olden Days <creak>, I recall sitting around with pals at UCSD, looking up domain names on whois, and snickering about reserving all the good ones that might someday be worth something. Books, multihulls, shopping, technology... all those and more dotcoms were available for $35. I'd be a millionnaire now, but we didn't do it because it would have been contrary to the open spirit of sharing that was the Internet of that time. In 1995, when Proctor & Gamble registered a long list of .coms (including badbreath, underarm, beautiful, flu, pimples, clean, and diarrhea), I was so incensed that I flamed 'em and sent a story to Wired.

Ah, how times change. And yes, I regret it.

Similarly, there was a time, not so long ago, that any suggestion of monetizing my website would have earned a dismissive snort. Now, I'm sprinkling AdSense code around (like over there to the right), adding Amazon Associate IDs to every book mention, and inserting affiliate links all over the place that make tiny "ka-ching" noises whenever someone clicks through and buys something from a vendor. Some of this is just accepting the Way Things Are and trying to make a living without having to venture off-island, but I've also come to look at it as a new publishing model.

Back in the '70s, when I was actually a full-time freelance writer, the way it worked was this: pitch an article idea to the almighty editor, agree on rights and deadlines, submit a laboriously typed package with accompanying artwork and SASE, then wait for the magazine publisher to mail a check (hopefully on acceptance, not publication). Presumably, for this to be a win-win, the money came from their advertising and subscription revenue, resulting in a full circle: readers get interesting material and flip past some ads, the rag makes money, and lowly writers get to to pay rent. But the scale... and corresponding potential barrier... was substantial; to play the game at all one had to be good enough to "break in," and every edition of Writers Market (the "bible") had at least one chapter telling beginners how to do just that.

Now, while that industry still exists and is as hungry for material as ever, there's a different level of granularity available. A lone writer can publish some text for the vanishingly low cost of server space, tack on a few ads with no up-front expense, then wait for the nickels to roll in. And make no mistake about it, we are talking nickels here. But it's easy to scale, and the process avoids that huge hysteresis loop that defined freelancing of old; all you have to do now is carve out a little mindshare, then let search engines and browsers do the rest.

When I look at it that way, it's not so bad... even though I remember being horrified by the sheer audacity of those first banners and still cringe a bit when I see an animated GIF on one of my pages. But them's the times. Speaking of which, I'm just setting up the first of 3 or 4 little "shops" composed of short reviews of favorite products, accompanied by affiliate links to buy them: The Microship Gear Shop.

Matsutake

My friend Karen just returned with another batch of matsutake from her secret mushroom-foraging grounds on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains. Exotic fungi have been a big part of our diet around here lately (including boletus edulis, agaricus augustus, pig's-ear gomphus, and white chanterelle), but this strong-flavored species is among the most sought-after... particularly prized in Japan, and a treat when marinated and grilled. I put a pound of them on eBay this evening... we have more than we can eat, and they're not reputed to dehydrate well.

In other news, I added another chapter to the Miles with Maggie collection: Notes from the East. And I replaced the old manually edited news feed with one that automagically happens whenever I update this blog (see the orange tag over there on the right, under the list of links).

Lab Rodent Exclusion Project

Pole Building Corner
Originally uploaded by Microship.

Cost-cutting shortcuts and/or carelessness by Pioneer Pole Buildings (the one in Ferndale, Washington, not related to these guys in Pennsylvania) are now translating into about $6K out of pocket and a couple months of hard work. The otherwise excellent 3000 square-foot "monitor style" building is only 6 years old.

The photo shows one of the corners of the building, with its spacious and wide-open cover removed. The metal exterior skin is screwed to the 2x6 girts, which are in turn fastened to the vertical corner poles... resulting in a long floor-to-ceiling gaposis that's big enough to pass rats. The related problem is a gap every 9 inches around the building where the metal overlays the baseboard, allowing mice to come and go freely and tunnel through wall-insulation to their prime nesting grounds up in the ceiling batts. In the photo, you can see where I have already started closing this off with metal flashing from Home Depot. Finally, just to achieve maximum species diversity, there are similar gaps where walls meet roof, and at least in one area we also found evidence of bat nesting.

The sad part of all this is that $60 worth of said flashing, some goo, and a bunch of random 2x4 scrap nailed between girts at the corners could have completely prevented this problem... which has involved complete removal and disposal of the building insulation, tedious retrofit of rodent-exclusion steps that would have been trivial during construction, and re-insulation. There is no choice in the matter; the building started to stink so badly over the past couple of years that working out there was becoming intolerable.

Needless to say, I am more than a little disappointed in the contractor; they should have been aware of this problem. In retrospect, I probably should have noticed it and brought it to their attention, but what does a techno-geek know about erecting pole buildings? Ah well, lesson learned. (And if you're looking for a contractor, no, I don't have any recommendations...)

Wordplay Landing

wordplaylanding
Originally uploaded by Microship.

I'm using this as a test photo... I dropped it on a Flickr uploading widget on my desktop, clicked to go there, and clicked again to blog it. The key to any tool like this is to reduce the incremental effort it takes to use it; the old system used a neat bit of Perl by Ned Konz that let me update the live page by email (including image attachments). This has to be just as easy, including photo hosting... if I have to resize manually, FTP to my server, and insert img tags, I'll never keep up with it.

Well, doggone. It works! Izzat cool, or what?

Rainy Sunday Morning

I'm still exploring this nifty publishing medium and wondering how much of the old Live Page content to import... eBay items and sales, nickel-generator list, and so on. Photos can apparently be handled with Flickr (might play with that today); I linked one yesterday at full size, but the sidebar overlaid it. Ah, learning curves.

Speaking of which, I went with Dave Robb to Home Depot yesterday, and he talked me into abandoning roll roofing for the leaky shed and using metal instead. So we loaded up a dozen sheets of 12' galvanized roofing, and my project list for the week has been edited accordingly.

Jeez... with the immediacy of a blog instead of the intellectual hysteresis of the dailies (or the near-traumatic stress of posting a nomadness update via email), I can see how this medium can, if left unchecked, degenerate into minutiae. That explains a lot of blogs out there ("I did my hair today!"). I'll be careful.

Only one recent sale in the entropy-reduction domain... a bag of six 2N3055 transistors to Buffalo, New York for $5.00.

Bear with me as I settle in here and learn the ropes; I'll run this in parallel with the legacy live page for a few days and then add a redirect link as appropriate.

Life Balance

This is neat! With the insane complexity of my life, one of my biggest ongoing problems for years has been management... layers upon layers of categorized to-do lists that have often, themselves, become a meta-project. There comes a point whereon project management becomes a full-time job and nothing whatsoever gets done, except maybe context-switching between activities that never actually receive sufficient attention.

Ned just pointed me to Life Balance, a program that at first sounded New Agey but quickly proved itself to be a powerful tool. It's the first time management system I've seen that effectively incorporates the different "core values" of your life, the times and spaces where you do things, the importance of each task to its parent project... and, significantly, the critical difference between urgency and importance. This is much more useful than the arbitrary "priority" level that typical to-do list managers let you set, and exceeds a PERT chart in overall effectiveness when you consider the big picture instead of a single project. Interacting with the software is quick, too, which is a delight, and its inheritance model keeps you from having to redundantly enter data for a long list of tasks. Based on all you tell it, the program recursively determines what tasks are relevant and most important in the place where you happen to be at the moment... then rewards you for checking them off by dynamically adjusting a pie chart that reflects the overall distribution of your time and energy.

I'm still in my first day of using it, though; here is a much more thoughtful review by Jeff Kirvin.

By the way, Life Balance syncs between a Mac (or PC) and the Palm, so it's probably the "killer app" that will get me back to using a PDA. I've been poring over the palmOne website this evening...

Ain't technology wonderful?

Hm, it seems to work. Wonder why it took me so long to try this? I've been doing this manually at my daily update page for years.