Printer Karma

I'm in love with my Leatherman New Wave multi-tool! (affiliate REI link). I traded away my original Leatherman last week and almost immediately started missing it; I had seen and admired the Wave, then was pleased to discover that they just released a new version in the last couple of months. Everything locks back, the blades support comfortable one-handed operation, and there is an integral tool-holder that accomodates a set of 20 additional bits (hex drivers and the like, not included with the basic unit). The thing is exquisitely engineered, and just feels good to use... definitely a permanent part of the technomadic pack.

Nice mechanical things like that are a special comfort sometimes. At the other end of the spectrum, I wasted more than half of yesterday dealing with printers. First, my trusty SparcPrinter E (made by Lexmark and donated 7-8 years ago by Halted Specialties) died from the cold in the lab (now that there's no insulation, thanks to the “Pioneer mouse problem,” it's very hard to keep the office at even a low-level maintenance warmth). So I wrestled with that for a while, needing to print a label for shipping... then decided to try Jeannie's HP officejet 5110xi all-in-one printer/fax/copier/scanner thingie that has been in the cozy house since she moved from Seattle.

But after discovering that none of the generic HP printer drivers had any idea there was now something plugged to the Mac's USB port (CUPS was no help), I went hunting on the web and discovered that the "driver" for this is a 53-megabyte download! That's rather impractical in my broadband-free zone, so Ned snagged it via DSL and handed a CD to Jeannie on her way home. Then the real fun started.

First, the installation. This is bloatware on an almost Microsoftian scale... 1,314 items were installed on my hard drive (requiring that all other applications first be quit), then I was launched on a browser-based "tour" that covered all the features of the machine and oh, by the way, requested my personal info. Where was the clickable option for "Damn it, I'm just using this stupid thing temporarily because my laser printer died from the cold, so no, I don't need fax cover pages, product registration, and rollover eye candy describing machine features"? But I pressed on, since the 1-page document I wanted to print all day was still on the desktop, needing to become hardcopy.

But now that I could actually see the machine, thanks to the 53 meg of mystery code, it turned out that the printer itself is exhibiting a chronic, apparently unfixable carriage jam... or at least it thinks it is. Various online help sites (including one from HP that's locked to prevent new posts, yet still presents a cute little floating javascript widget that prompts me to tell them how helpful it was), offered ideas about what to do when confronted with this problem... generally consisting of various forms of resetting and re-initializing, culminating in the advice to contact tech support.

I hate printers, and it’s ironic that in my last post I reminisced fondly about the Model 28 teletype. Now that was a thing of beauty, ayup.



Anyway, I managed to uninstall most of the bloatware from the Mac after digging around and finding an uninstaller tucked away deep in some directory... but even that turned out to be a sloppy process with a half-dozen items declared "in use" and thus undeletable. (Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that in the trash they were called "HP Registry Items," a distinctly Windozian term.. suggesting that this might have been a crude port intead of real Mac OS X software.) But what’s even more obnoxious is that even after uninstalling, something mysterious called “HP Communications” was gobbling over 50-70% of my CPU at any given moment, dramatically slowing all other applications. Restarting the system today finally got rid of it.

My advice to fellow Mac-heads is to avoid this installer (5100_634_EN.smi.hqx) at all costs; it is ugly and ill-behaved! I’m sure it works fine under Windows; Jeannie used it on her Compaq before moving to the island, and loved it. I have always been fond of HP engineering across all their product lines, so I suspect this is an anomaly... or just bad printer karma. (LATER NOTE, ADDED Feb 12, 2005: I'm not alone. Into the dumpster it goes.)

The fallout of all that is that I’ll buy a throw-away inkjet from a friend to print shipping documents until I can either fix the stalwart Lexmark or afford to replace it with something else of the workgroup (networked) class. Or, as was suggested today, I could learn to use one of those manual text-recording devices. Ah, here’s one from Silicon Valley (it says “Santa Clara Marriott” on the side). That should work.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Japanese-English Dictionary - $9.75 to Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Winnebiko II Poster - $20.00 to London, England

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Site updates:

Just a few fixes in the Gear Shop.

Ancient Behemoths

The two recent pointers to ancient Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH media coverage finally motivated me to find a decent photo-album tool, so a quick visit to the Mac OS X side of Versiontracker yielded the Java-based JAlbum, and the result is that about 50 scans from my media coverage over the years are now online here. It was pretty painless, since I didn't have to manually crunch all the thumbnails and IMG tags. The worst part, of course, was this pathetic half-speed dialup connection... I just launched an SCP of the whole mess with Fugu and had dinner while 6 megabytes oozed recursively off the island. Ain't technology wonderful?

And speaking of golden oldies... here is a very early personal computer:


This is the front panel of the system I designed and built in 1974, based on an Intel 8008 CPU with a 600 kHz clock and 4Kx8 Static RAM made of 2102s. I was reminiscing about this earlier today while, cleaning my office, I stumbled across the original file of 30-year-old schematics. It was all wire-wrapped (on 60-socket Augat panels plugged into a Scanbe "Rapid Rack" card cage), and the design included a number of enhancements that overcame the 8008's intrinsic shortcomings... in particular, a hardware hack that added a data stack in RAM in addition to the 7-level return stack. There were also 8 interrupt channels, 64 bits each of input and output, a graphics subsystem using a pair of 8-bit multiplying DACs outputting X-Y to an oscilloscope from a DMA display list, and a painfully slow math co-processor made from a Taylor-Series calculator chip with kluged BCD and 7-segment interface. I remember the night it drew a lovely (sin X)/X curve... took HOURS and I had consumed half a bottle of Jack Daniels by the time it was done, but it was a thing of beauty, I tellya what.

This machine also implemented Walsh-function waveform synthesis and a top-octave synthesizer for music projects, a hardware polyphonic music keyboard interface that I published in Byte, a one-shot Hollerith card reader that allowed me to boot-load with a multi-punched image instead of wearing my fingers out with deposit-next, Friden paper tape reader and punch, 1200 baud cassette interface, and a hardware driver for the marvelous Model 28 Baudot teletype that I still recall with fondness. (This latter circuit was my first published magazine article... in the July 25, 1974 issue of Electronics magazine.)

I sure do miss front panels. This one got a lot of use, and my early "screen saver" was a 555 (associated with the black knob) that allowed variable-speed single-stepping and a corresponding hypnotic blinking of the address and data bus LEDs.

Damn. 30 years. I started my beard the day this machine first worked, which was October 31, 1974. It was, like my bike, named BEHEMOTH (for "Badly Engineered Heap of Electrical, Mechanical, Optical, & Thermal Hardware"), and it's on display at the Computer History Museum, which is also where BEHEMOTH-the-bicycle lives. The photo above is courtesy of Jason Scott, who recently visited the museum and posted a page of photos.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Palm Cradle - $3.50 to Redmond, Washington
Linux Journal back issues - $12.23 to Purcellville, Virginia
Arctic Odyssey by Len Sherman - $10.50 to Wewoka, Oklahoma

New goodies on eBay:

Modern Sex Techniques, published in 1959
49 Quartz-window DIP EPROMS (27C64, -128, -1024, & -2048)

Site updates:

Media album discussed above

Matters Audio

I've been having lots of fun playing with Echolink, a very clever VOIP system for ham radio operators. It astounds me that I can have "armchair copy" through my laptop and a 24 kbps dialup... if you're a ham and want to chat, give it a try and email me for a sked! Most users are Windoze-based and use the client software from the main Echolink site; those of us on Macs use EchoMac instead. There are over 2000 stations on at any given moment, many of which are repeaters... meaning that I can walk around (inside Wi-Fi range) with my untethered iBook and converse with someone driving to work in Tokyo. Ain't technology wonderful?

Another percolating project, in addition to a book proposal currently underway, is to make an audiobook of Computing Across America. This has languished for years due to serious publisher problems (don't get me started on that topic or this will turn into a rant), but there's a lot of life in the story (and the themes of freedom-security and breaking the chains are as timely as ever). Maybe we can even get it into the catalog of Simply Audiobooks. (Full disclosure: that's an affiliate link.)

In the spirit of the picture in my previous update, here is another from 20 years ago... a photo of me on the Winnebiko in the Austin American-Statesman:


In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Genome by Matt Ridley - $5.25 to St. Germain, Wisconsin

New goodies on eBay:

Sanseido デイリ コンサイス Japanese-English Dictionary.

Site updates:

Another Miles with Maggie chapter has been added to the collection... "Junkyards and Tollbridges"

Flashback to the Winnebiko

I just heard from Jason Scott of textfiles fame, who was kind enough to scan this 2-page spread from a 1983 issue of CompuServe's Online Today magazine:


It all came rushing back... the freshness and clarity of the adventure, the full head of hair, the sense of venturing into new conceptual territory and becoming an agent of future shock ("you have an office on your bicycle?"), the abrupt break with my suburban past. I need that feeling again, and soon.

More and more, I'm sensing impending cultural change. Even though the hot tub (which I cleaned and brought back online today) soothes and comforts like a nice splash of kava, there is a sense of a cusp just over the horizon. This is what prompted the new discussion forums, which seem to be getting off to a good start, as well as my renewed interest in reducing tonnage. My talk-to-do ratio regarding nomadness has gotten entirely too high over the past decade...

Mining the Artifacts of a Life

I'm having fun with the new discussion forums... we have about 15 registered members so far, and roughly 30 posts. I sent a message to the long-established technomads mailing list about this, and am about to do one to nomadness (to which I have not posted for over 3 years).

One of the primary themes of the forum is an increase in the efficiency of life under external stress (which can take the form of a nomadic existence, a shortage of cashflow, or a social/political/economic disaster). The basic strategy is a sort of focusing, in which the massive amounts of energy and cash that we have habitually tied up in superfluities get converted into a more deliberate and better-targeted suite of tools (ideally mobile). This is one of the things that gives me pleasure as I ship once-treasured artifacts to their new owners... like these in the past few days:

New Community Networks: Wired for Change by Schuler - $3.99 to Auburndale, Massachusetts.

It's a Breeze CD by Itzhak Perlman & Andre Previn - $8.50 to Glendale, Arizona

Khachaturian: Gayaneh & Spartacus Suites CD - $7.00 to Kirkwood, Missouri

Debussy: Music for Oboe and Harp CD - $7.50 to Allston, Massachusetts.

An ancient but functional Spa Blower - $35.00 to Jacksonville, Florida

It's such a strange little thrill on so many levels, since each item represents an investment of resources, energy, and in many cases even emotion -- a little nugget trapped in the dense matrix of stuff that clutters and defines a life. Mining these things not only recovers some value, but it bestows a little breath of freedom... one less object that has to be dealt with someday, one less entry in the cluttered intellectual catalog of possessions, one less thing taking up space (and, in most cases, losing value as the years pass). It's addicting.

So hey, want some stuff? <grin> On the "live page" that I used before migrating to this medium, I maintained a list of links to current auctions; but if I do that now, they'll be archived forever and will thus end up broken as the eBay database drops off the oldies. So instead, I'll just mention things by name as they appear and refer you to the "Items on eBay" link over there on the right if anything catches your fancy. On the block at the moment are ten issues of Linux Journal from 2001, and an old Palm PDA cradle.

Much more soon! I'm working on the new office space in the lab now.

New Forums Online!

You know, one of the great things about this Interweb is that it's not just a point-to-multipoint broadcast medium like the publishing venues of yesteryear; it's a vehicle for peer-to-peer exchange (although the Old Media dinosaurs are frantically trying to solve that problem via their proxy lawmakers before they find themselves obsolete).

Despite the freedom promised by the technology, however, it's easy to fall into the habit of just posting web pages and blog entries... then responding to queries and comments as they come in. That's adds up to a lot of one-to-one conversations and is indeed highly interactive on that level, but it doesn't foster community. Mailing lists like the 14-year-old technomads listserv come closer, but these days more and more people are trying to turn down the noise level of their digital lives, and in any case there's no archiving system that's pleasant to use.

As such, one of the things that's been lurking on my epic to-do list for quite a while has been the establishment of a more public discussion tool. Inspired by a surprisingly enthusiastic response to the bold-faced paragraph in my previous update, I finally did it over the weekend: there is now a collection of forums on this site. The basic premise is that 21 years of building (and talking about) "technomadic" tools has translated into a useful resource for folks who want to maximize their probability of surviving uncertain times. Self-sufficiency tools and related skills are not just for folks on gonzo expeditions; they are also essential for people who want to decrease their dependency upon social infrastructure and the whole bloated consumer culture that may well crash and burn in the event of serious economic or cultural disruption. Given what's afoot these days, I'm fairly confident that this will become an issue and catch a lot of people by surprise.

The forums are linked over there on the right; please drop by and participate if you're interested!

In eBay news, the 4 vintage issues of ACM Computing Surveys went for $8.00 to Durham, NC... but nobody wanted the 49 windowed EPROMS.

Dave Robb and I kayaked the south end of Lake Whatcom (map) on Thursday, and this weekend Jeannie and I participated in the annual Chili-Chowder cookoff here on the island (CARE had a booth). I'm now in the process of cleaning the hot tub, which is graced with a new lid to replace the one that had become so waterlogged that it was almost impossible to lift. And the new ceiling project in the lab begins this week, now that it's no longer raining inside the shed.

(Nov 15 update: I'm experimenting with feed variations)

The Tools of Technomadics

So. A week has passed now, and even as the stalwart defenders of democracy pursue countless election irregularities, we are adjusting to the new reality: an intensification of the old reality. I don't know what this means, but I have an uneasy feeling about it.

I like the advice of Geov Parrish in the Seattle Weekly: get involved at the grassroots level, now that it has become clear that the two-party system has failed us. This echoes the theme of my previous post in which I commented on the power of slow evolution, compared to the staged battles of a duopoly in which the players define each other and the debates are framed by a politically savvy incumbency.

All this brings us back around to technomadics, which is, after all, the theme of this blog, the Microship website, and my life. It started like this: in 1983, I responded to the intellectual desert of central Ohio and my own personal entropy by inventing a new lifestyle... one characterized by alacrity, technologically enabled mobile communications, and a freedom/security amalgam that seems almost nostalgically dreamlike given today's more ominous implication of those conjoined words. In an unintended symbolic act, I pedaled away from suburban Columbus without even bothering to close the door of my still-cluttered house, and never looked back.

It was the control-alt-delete of a human life.

Over the years, I wandered freely, refining my tools and building a new concept of home rooted not in real estate but wheel estate, not in the classic "enclave of stability" defined by Toffler but in the emerging global community of the Net. The media loved it, sponsors supported the development of new bike versions, and I found that my little escape pod had become a career replete with beta tests, rollouts of new versions, and the corporate trade-show circuit.

And then I landed on Camano Island. It was to be another machine-building layover; with the bike retired to The Computer History Museum, the Microships began to coalesce in the clutter of a 3000 square foot lab constructed for that purpose alone. But then I started caring about things I couldn't control (like developer-rape of our island), and I suffered the time- and motivation-sink of a personal disaster that somehow caused two years to pass with virtually no progress. And then Bush got re-selected.

If ever there was a wake-up call, that was it.

Suddenly, my sane and stable friends all over are asking Big Questions: Should I flee to another country? Hunker down in survival mode? Kowtow and stop posting my true feelings for fear of hate mail or unwelcome visits in the night? Live under the radar like the "zeroes" of Max Headroom? I've never seen so many comfortable, well-educated, technically savvy people with stable careers be so uncertain about their futures.

So it has occurred to me that the lessons of my own peculiar career... technomadics... suddenly apply in new ways. No longer is this about renouncing the suburban lifestyle to have a gonzo adventure aboard a gizmologically intensive and fancifully named contraption; it's about survival in the face of economic and political uncertainty.

This is a time to learn skills, build off-grid backup power systems, create non-economic informal barter networks for tools and resources, plant low-maintenance gardens, get to know your neighbors better, implement alternative communication modalities, strengthen your off-site data backup procedures, lay in a deep inventory of foods that store well, learn to cook, buy a water filter and basic camping gear that is kept ready to go, eliminate debt, eschew consumerism, and convert your excess tonnage to cash (and thus into useful tools). Shed the things that would tie you down if for some reason you really wanted to relocate in a hurry. Make sure you and your family are on the same page about all this. Rekindle your network of distant friends (what I've always called the "hospitality database"). Deploy nickel generators to decrease your dependence on a single client or employer, and refresh your knowledge in areas that might serve you well during times of unrest or feed you as you pass through unfamiliar places.

Years ago, I wrote a short piece called First Steps to Aquatic Technomadness that posits an initial to-do list prerequisite to full-time travel... it contains some useful thoughts along these lines, although more slanted to traveling in a flotilla than passing unscathed through Dark Times.

If we turn out not to need any of this, I'll breathe a huge sigh of relief and chuckle at my own paranoia. But the exercise will make us stronger and more efficient, which is a Good Thing regardless: we as a culture have become soft, addled, and dependent upon the continuation of stability and services that have been in place since we were children. I think that's why it's hard for most of America to contemplate the enormity of the changes that might befall us, even as we surf the net and shake our heads about torture, terrorism, imperial adventures abroad, and economic Red Alerts. Most of us have never really been all that stressed, at least not in comparison to folks who fight for their lives on a regular basis, and it's extremely hard to visualize having to think in terms of survival and food instead of comfort and wealth.

In other news...

My old friend Bill Vodall, WA7NWP, suggested today that my "essays" like the above belong in a different context than the daily news bits. I agree, though I don't want to dilute this into two blogs when one is already a project. So I'm going to try using this nifty blockquote tag to set aside little quickie updates like these:

Thanks to Dave Robb, I got off my sedentary butt yesterday and made major progress on the leaky shed roof. We ripped off the old roll roofing, pulled all the rusty nails, added strips of plywood to span a low area, removed the dormant chimney and patched the hole, stapled down roofing felt, and started installing the new metal roof. It should be finished today.

That work, along with a few other recent projects, has made me a real fan of the new Hitachi 18-volt power tool set I bought on eBay.

We're planning a short kayak trip tomorrow to test a new paddle bag design that will be cheaper and simpler to produce... and restore sanity. Especially the latter. It's been too long.

A Restoration of Nuance

There's a numbness in the air, giving these first few days after Black Tuesday a bleak, hollow feel, intensifying the eerie autumnal darkness that comes from setting back the clock. I'd love to see data on alcohol sales this week, and would bet there's an anomalous peak that rivals New Year's eve. Damn. I should have thought to daytrade Seagrams.

Maybe we'll never know if the election fraud was enough to pull this off, whether Kerry planned all along to take a dive for his fellow Skull 'n Bonesman, or if this is actually the will of a narrow majority. At least the exit polls were accurate in the places without electronic voting... and hey, if nothing else, I have another reason to be glad I left Ohio, the state that inspires long-distance travel.

So we move on; what else can we do? This brings to mind something I blogged while pedaling through Mendocino County in January, 1987 (yah, I know the term "blog" hadn't been coined yet, but whatever):

Contrary to popular news stories of the day, social change does not hinge on government overthrow. Those are just the warrings of competing ideologues, not incremental steps in the evolution of consciousness. Growth -- the recognition and elimination of ignorance -- happens on a human level, slowly, building over time like the gradual conversion of a successful anomaly into a whole new species. Governments and eco-trashers simply apply selection pressure, insuring their eventual deterioration.

In other words, folks, it's pointless and self-defeating to beat our heads against the unscalable walls of a system that owns not only the courts, but also the world's most powerful military, the law enforcement agencies, and mass media. Although it's a distasteful thought at the moment, we all, whatever side of the Great Cultural Divide we happen to be on, need to make up with those ex-friends and hopelessly uninformed family members who have been emailing us partisan screeds for the past year, and try to learn together. Increasing polarization will only set us up for more culture clashes, in which some wedge issue (gay marriage or the like) will be manufactured to frame the debate, distracting us from the important things while effectively reducing the level of discourse to Bible thumping on one side and liberal rage on the other.

An empire rules by eliminating nuance, and corporate media reflects this without really intending to (except perhaps Fox and the great wasteland of talk radio, neither of which could survive were there not a market for simple-minded polarization of every topic). Never in my life have I seen complex issues reduced so thoroughly to good-vs-evil, black-and-white cartoons... except perhaps in the comic books I read when I was about 8.

So how do we solve the problem? Get your Republican friends to turn off the bloody TV and think/read/learn! And we "liberals" (when did that become an epithet, anyway?) need to broaden our horizons as well... it's too easy to get all one's news from What Really Happened, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, and the always-excellent Smirking Chimp when they present such passionate (and eminently forwardable) writing. But WorldPress and Google News serve up international media... deepening the reader's perspective... and there are of course blogs from all over. While you're at it, get a shortwave radio and really listen to views from around the world as they pour through the static; there's an immediacy and color about it you can't find online. What may emerge from this is the realization that those currently in power are not really "conservatives" at all, and that the poles of the old two-party duopoly, however dated, are actually much closer to each other than they are to the neocon agenda that took us into Iraq. They're not acting on our behalf, not even that of the red states.

While we're all turning off the TV and learning, we need to get a better insight into what's really going on over there. Read Baghdad Year Zero to get a sense of the economics, and bone up on the Peak Oil concept to understand the driving force.

OK. Enough of this controlled rant; I've been quiet since the election, and my first attempt to post something fell too soon thereafter and was just angry. I decided that this blog is not the place for bitterness, and that the silver lining is that we now get to live with an object lesson in what happens when an uninformed populace gets split in half and pitted against each other.

As in engineering, clarity is beautiful but oversimplification has messy side effects. Let's stop confusing the two!

---

In utterly unrelated news, I have finished the rodent-exclusion project in the lab, and am now starting the new suspended ceiling with integral fluorescent troffers (which are, according to Lithonia, actually insulation-contact rated; thanks, Eric, for the heads-up on what question to ask). I have posted a how-to article, with photos, about keeping mice out of a pole building.

We've also sold a couple of Technomadic Designs paddle bags in the past few days (to Novato, California and Renton, Washington), as well as a copy of Living Japanese Style for $5.75 to Rochester, New York.

In Microship news, I've been looking into the PDA platform for the waterproof wireless front-end tool, which is almost certainly the evolutionary pinnacle of a long succession of designs that began back in 1993 with a HyperCard front end driving a multidrop network of FORTH nodes. I'll do a whole piece on this very soon.

But now, on this rainy Saturday, I'm off to buy drop ceiling parts for my office. Do I know how to party, or what?

Meet Bubba

bubba-straw-close
Originally uploaded by Microship.

It's mid-afternoon on election day as I write this, and it's all I can do to not reach for the emergency vodka. Hopefully, I'll look back and laugh at myself for being all nervous, but I really don't think Lord Halliburton and company are going to give up without a fight, regardless of the popular will.

Anyway, the best therapy when liberty is in crisis is to focus on magic carpets, so I'd like to introduce Bubba. Long-time readers of my random ramblings already know about this, but the new medium has shifted the demographic somewhat, and besides, the old one is still not properly archived...

Bubba is the manifestation of a curious full-circle phenomenon. The Microship project started in 1992, when I was on a speaking tour with BEHEMOTH and met a lovely lady at the Interop trade show in Washington, DC. During our summer romance, she turned me on to kayaking, and it was immediately obvious that it was time for me to retire the bike and move to water. That epiphany launched me on an obsessive exploration of all things kayak-related... eventually leading to the early Microship designs and the 10-year project that culminated in Wordplay and Art Throb (both of which are now sitting here in the lab awaiting their next adventure).

But consistent with my career of technomadness, I tend to be easily affected by the seductive allure of Creeping Featuritis and the dreaded BEHEMOTH Effect, leading to the formulation of the Roberts Law of Applied Mobile Gizmology:

• If you take an infinite number of very light things and put them together, they become infinitely heavy.

And so it came to pass that I have a pair of highly complex boatlets that are deliciously alluring to fellow geeks but too much trouble to take out for a quick daysail... well-suited to gonzo expeditions and hard-core technomadics, in other words, but not to simple things like ridding the mind of noise for an afternoon. The solution? Back to kayaking.

Bubba is a 19-foot Aire Sea Tiger inflatable, slower than a hardshell of equivalent length but in almost every other respect more pleasant: comfort, logistics, load-bearing capacity, stability, and overall ease of use. Naturally, I couldn't resist adding a bit of technology: solar power, packet radio and APRS for campsite email and live tracking, high-brightness LED navigation lights, and a decent GPS. I wrote an article about all this, including harsh-environment packaging, that was published recently in CQ VHF magazine. I've done lots of short local trips including a multi-stage circumnavigation of Camano Island, and towing bails have been added to both Microships so that Bubba (along with Jeannie's matching Stella) can bob along behind us as "shore-support pods." Even Microships need dinghies now and then.

If you're a paddler here in the Pacific Northwest and would like to join our motley crew of non-macho kayakers, please let me know! It's the best therapy I have ever found for days like today. Coming up: a circumnavigation of the north half of Whidbey Island, various river trips (not whitewater), and a 2-3 day jaunt to Port Townsend with overnights at Cascadia Marine Trail campsites.

Countdown...

Yikes, these are strange times. More divisiveness over the upcoming "election," a strange sense of foreboding in the air. Jeannie took the next 3 days off work, and we're hanging out, dabbling at projects around house/lab, and nesting... just wishing it was over. As always, I'm resisting the temptation to pass along the plethora of interesting links that reflect my feelings; twice lately, I've ended up in a pointless email battle with friends or ex-friends, firing forwarded political ammo back and forth with increasing rancor until both of us conclude, sadly, that it's hopeless and that the other is an idiot. Have you ever seen the country so sharply split? Maybe it's because the media has been bombarding us for the last four years with a cartoon-simplistic, black & white, good-versus-evil world view?

I just want this to end, and hopefully well. I wish I were more optimistic.

Anyway. Sales since last update: An autographed copy of The Mechanical Design Process - $19.00 to Chula Vista, California; Paul Horn's Nomad CD - $6.00 to Fairbanks, Alaska; and a Technomadic Designs Paddlebag to Boaz, Alabama. Small pleasures, I know, but we cling to them for their familiarity and nickels. A few random potential deals of more consequence are also afoot, but it really does seem like the whole world is on hold at the moment.

Tuesday we're volunteering to monitor a local polling site, though mercifully we don't have those newfangled touchscreen machines here on the island. Other than that, the plan is to finish up the installation of flashing and corner blockage to keep the rodents out of the lab, which is prerequisite to the new insulation that's becoming more and more urgent as the season turns.