Usurped Winter Solstice Celebration

We survived another one. In what has become something of a tradition, we participated in a delightful OPC (Other Peoples' Christmas), replete with food, drink, and a white-elephant gift game. It hit the spot perfectly, and we otherwise barely noticed the passage of another holiday (I gave Jeannie-the-Leo a Honeywell Animal poster that I got from my cousin back in 1967 or so, and she gave me yummy edibles).

I'm stunned today by the news of the tsunami that ravaged coastal areas all across the Bay of Bengal. I have never been there, but heard many tales of this nautical paradise from my ex-girlfriend Julie... and having lived through the Quake of '89 in Santa Cruz I am at least somewhat familiar with the feeling that comes from a power of staggering scale that suddenly manifests itself on an otherwise idyllic day. My heart goes out to those whose lives have been devastated.

Jeannie has taken a week off work, and our goal between now and the Resumption of Routine is to get my new office done out in the lab... suspended ceiling, insulation, paint, flooring, heat, and desk relocation. I suddenly have one book project likely and a second percolating in the back of my mind, a whole new technomadic toolset to design along with accompanying productization, and a rekindling of my motivation to get the Microships launched this coming year and go play. I'm genuinely turned on by the new system discussed in recent bloggage, and besides, the self-indulgent torpor that characterized 2002-3 no longer has much justification for lingering in my psyche... so it's time.

Speaking of all that, one of the hot projects this week is to do the first posting in over three years (!) to the nomadness mailing list, my core readership since 1990. This lovingly maintained list of thousands includes sponsors, volunteers, media, old friends, brilliant geeks, and doubtless a few people who thought they were signing up for news about PIC processors and development systems from Microchip Technology. Nomadness was my primary publishing venue for about a decade, but when a marriage and project fell apart more or less simultaneously three years ago this week... well, I kinda stopped posting, as I didn't know what to say beyond the ephemeral daily news updates. As time passed, it became harder and harder to construct the long-awaited "catch-up" piece, so I just sort of forgot about it... until now. The details are no longer relevant; my life suffered a glitch and then moved on, better than ever. It happens to all of us at one time or another.

So, in that happy vein, I propose a toast! Let me just break out a bottle of my yummy new homebrew blackberry wine: "Here's to Jeannie... who is making it all fun again!"

Random Notes

Here is a provocative view of the near-term technoid future.

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

2 Intel 28F128J3 (128 megabit Flash memory chips)
5 old QSL cards from Egypt, S. Africa, Ghana, & Israel

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Black faux-fur jacket

Items sold since last update

Photos of Victorian architecture - $8.50 to Bartlett, TN
Battenburg cutwork lace duvet cover & shams - $11.70 to Miami, FL
Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero - $27.00 to St. Louis, MO
J. Crew taupe linen casual suit - $9.00 to Harker Heights, TX
Franklin Covey & At-a-Glance Planner pages - $5.00 to Las Vegas, NV
Korg X5DR MIDI Synthesizer - $225.00 to Stanwood, WA

Hacking Camano Island

I spent a good part of today on Camano Island publishing projects. The first was inspired by yesterday's posting on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, in which he discussed open-source journalism in Greensboro, North Carolina. It occurred to me that here on Camano, we have a very limited, top-down news distribution system, with only one small weekly paper that also serves a town in the next county. Not only is the news filtered by, shall we say, a modest budget for writers, but the only forum for community participation is a letters column dominated (at least where interesting topics are involved) by the rantings of the usual characters decrying the "bleeding heart environmentalists" and "liberal whackos" in our midst. Not exactly a medium of participatory journalism and free exchange.

In most communities, there are things like towns, businessess, coffee shops, hangouts, and other places where the general buzz percolates and finds its way from person to person. Not here. Camano Island has 12-15 thousand people but no town, and is a strange mix of commuters, artists, freelancers, retirees, and even a few normal folk. Great place, actually, but it lacks the cultural cohesion necessary to respond with any kind of unified voice to the dangers currently threatening us: a couple of particularly rapacious developers who think only of profit, slash 'n burn loggers who rape the land and leave stump farms, projects that fail to recognize the fragility of our sole-source aquifer, the opening of our public forests to hunting, and a trio of county commissioners who don't live here but nevertheless purport to speak for us on such matters as long-term planning and the value assigned to critical areas.

So being an outspoken and contrary cuss, I set up a new Camano Island blog as well as a set of discussion forums. Hopefully, this will help get people fired up enough to start thinking more like a community, though the reality may be somewhere in between ennui and a contentious can o' worms. We'll see.

None of this has much to do with Microship development, but this is my home base and I am constantly frustrated by the fact that I end up caring about things I can't control... ranging from Casa de Eyesore under construction next door to the guy trying to erect an unwanted business center and hotel on an inappropriately zoned parcel, pumping thousands of gallons of sewage a day 5 miles to a lot he purchased in a neighborhood just for that purpose. Inaction is tantamount to signing away our own heritage, even if I did come here to build boats.

More technomadic topics next time...

Goodies from Steve on eBay:

Way-cool Houston geek shirt with mouse thumb-hole (L)
A trio of 132-pin QFP to PGA Adapter PC boards
"Carpenter Gothic" photos of Victorian architecture
Trimble TANS GPS Manual & 2 old GPS World issues
Chateau C-870 circular stainless padlock

Goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Rare purple Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero hat, new (M)
2" of Franklin Covey & At-a-Glance Planner pages
Battenburg cutwork lace duvet cover & shams
J. Crew taupe linen casual suit

Canoe and Kayak Interfacing

Been getting busy lately, which I suspect is a good thing... although the number of interesting projects is a reminder about how annoying it is to be finite. I remember when I wasn't (or at least didn't realize that I was); ever since those halcyon days, there has been an alarming increase in the number of things that never get done.

Speaking of which, I've spoken recently of the change in the topology of my technomadic toolset, and a couple more pieces have just fallen into place. As you may recall from a few days ago, the notion is simply that the "User Interface" should remain attached to the user... and each machine or environment similarly owns a "Substrate Interface." The UI is a sleek pocket-sized computer: the Tapwave Zodiac 2, with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card to provide connectivity. The SI is an ultra low power fanless PC like the SolarPC Mini-ITX system that's sitting here running Linux and Squeak in a CF card... basically, any little box of silicon that has Wi-Fi on one side and a USB host port on the other.

The software is where it really gets fun. I've just rediscovered the joys of VNOS, which is particularly adept at stitching together a wide range of resources using a visual programming environment that actually makes it fun to parse incoming strings from serial ports and build control panels. "Writing code" in this world is a matter of dragging lines between widgets, some of which can be user defined with Perl, FORTH, or regular expressions to handle oddball problems (in other words, it's easy to use, but not constraining). Loosely coupled to this is a web server (Apache), with standard PHP and CGI tools to interface with SQL telemetry and configuration databases, stored variables, and whatever code is dealing with a pile of utterly non-homogenous I/O.

The rest is essentially website design... when the human is within range of a substrate, tools suddenly exist to control things, examine sensors, browse historical data, invoke utility scripts, open multimedia streams, or whatever. The first installation will be in my office, of course, and the "affordances" (to steal a term from the usability folks) will involve music, audio crossbar channels, video cameras, environmental sensors, and anything else lying around the lab that would be fun to dust off and put to work. Once this is online, doing similar things for the boatlets should be not much more daunting than the packaging projects associated with stuffing hardware into a micro-trimaran.

In other news...

Random Notes

The homebrew blackberry wine is done! It was 4 months from a tub of must to the corking of 22 recycled Three Buck Chuck bottles, and, um, yes, looking at those numbers, apparently a little got lost along the way in, um, testing, yes, that's it, testing. (Yummy.)

The office project is moving along, now that some of the other non-maskable interrupts have been serviced. I'm choosing flooring, a friend's oops-paint is ready to go, and all the drop-ceiling and insulation parts are laying around the lab depreciating (or whatever it is that things do when we're not watching). I'm getting very itchy to move my theatre of operations out of the house and back to a place where 3000 square feet of geek toys are within reach instead of at the end of a long cold dark walk through the forest.

Also, it's starting to look as if I may be starting a new book project in January... stay tuned.

Items sold since last entry:

Technomadic Designs Paddle Bags to Seattle, WA & Green Valley, AZ
Swept CD by Julia Fordham - $7.50 to Miami, FL

New goodies from me on eBay:

Chateau stainless steel disc padlock, C-870
Trimble TANS GPS Manual & 2 old GPS World issues

New goodies from Jeannie on eBay:

Rare purple Outdoor Research Seattle Sombrero hat, size M, new

Vanishing Gizmology

You know, I've been making a career of nomadness for over 21 years now... I'm starting to feel like a technomad emeritus, sitting back and taking long philosophical views while excessively complex machines languish in the cold lab. But I did a posting to the Forums today, discussing motherships, and that got me thinking about the various ways to do this (whatever this is; that is itself not clearly defined, although I must say, it sure feels wonderful when you do it).

When I took off in 1983, you see, it was aboard the Winnebiko... a sleek and minimalist expression of the essential technomadic ethic, a suite of tools that rendered physical location irrelevant. This morphed a few years later into the imaginatively named and much more capable Winnebiko II, and eventually into the monstrous BEHEMOTH... 580 pounds of hard-core gizmology valued, according to some estimates, at $130/ounce. (There are articles in the "resources" section with feature lists of each version as well as a spirited retrospective of the entire era, all 9 years and 17,000 miles of it.)

In 1992, burned out on the road and lusting for water, I launched the Microship project, a variety of nautical pedal/paddle/solar/sail substrates that have occupied me for over a decade... proving the old adage that the average completion time of a homebuilt boat is 137 years. Overlapping all that, I wandered the US in three different motherships: a converted school bus, a 20-foot mobile lab, and a huge 44-footer that, like BEHEMOTH, helped me map the point at which a good idea ventures into the realm of excess and madness.

But you know what's turning me on most right now? Not Bubba, the geeked-out kayak that keeps me sane here on the island; not even Wordplay, the amphibian micro-trimaran that has gobbled all available resources for longer than I care to remember. No, it's the manpack-scale, exquisitely personal, almost stealthy toolset that allows a nomad to survive and stay in communication in any context whatsoever... whether aboard a custom substrate like mine, hitchhiking on OPBs (Other Peoples' Boats), riding public transport, or sojourning on one's own feet. I started thinking about this when looking at a photo of BEHEMOTH recently and wondering how much it would weigh if I were to rebuild it today with equivalent functionality. I realized with a shock that I could probably fit everything into a backpack and still have room for my toothbrush and a set of high-tech foulies.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that I'm willing to eschew our graceful fleet of ships that, Real Soon Now, will again dance across the watertop in a pas de deux of sun and spray, bones in their teeth, sails taut and solar panels a-sparkle. No, I've gone too far on this project to be stymied by the lifestyle gotchas of recent years, nor even by the still-daunting to-do list. There's an enticing and realistically scaled expedition on the horizon, not to mention an almost visceral desire to reclaim from these vessels a level of pleasure consistent with the staggering amount of time and money that has gone into them.

There's something else afoot... and I think it has to do with technology that has at last reached a level whereon I can realistically cram all my geek passions (and tools, and archives) into a backpack. Only a decade ago, I was designing massive pressurized rackmount enclosures to support a suite of perverse gizmological desires, and this shaped the substrate to the point that I lost sight of its essential human scale and bought the 30-foot folding trimaran that distracted me for 2 years. Now, I think I can take the whole system for a walk, and watch it incorporate additional communication, control, and data-collection resources when I'm sailing or kayaking... or lying in bed.

Since we find ourselves at a moment in human history when we honestly don't know whether to maximize or minimize mobility, this comes not a moment too soon.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

Autek Manuals for QF-1A Filter & WM1 SWR Meter - $13.00 to Berwyn, Illinois
Beatles White Album - $15.50 to Ft. Huachuca, Arizona

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Nomad is on Island

(written Dec 7)

I’m composing this in an office in Bellevue, which is an odd experience... it's disconcerting to see someone you know in a languorous island context appear all perky and corporate, moving briskly among cubicles with sheafs of laser-printed arcana, interacting in a loosely suited hierarchy, and otherwise doing things that seem utterly foreign. Jeannie dropped into my life via Friendster a little over a year ago, and since moving to my enclave in the woods has mysteriously disappeared before dawn five out of every seven days, only to return exhausted, 14 hours later, in dire need of drink and dinner (in that order). Of course I have always believed her, in an abstract sort of way, when she has related harrowing tales of employment travails; but now I see where she actually goes.

It's another world out there.

For me, venturing off island has become a big deal (unless it’s for an expedition, in which case it’s an energizing inhalation... funny bit of psychology, that). Today the motivation was to appear before the Island County Board of Equalization, hat in hand, petitioning for a reduction in the assessed value of a 5-acre piece of forest that has increased over 50% in the past year with corresponding impact on my property tax bill. I made my case, pointing out an adjacent “comp” that just sold for just over half that on a per-acre basis, then moved on... meandering down Whidbey Island and doing a recon mission to confirm the feasibility of incorporating a 2-mile kayak portage on an upcoming mini-expedition. Should be fine... there’s a “neck” on that huge island in the vicinity of Penn Cove and Coupeville, allowing us to haul out Bubba and sistership at a public tideland, convert to road mode with the Paddleboy "Heavy Lifter" cart, do an hour or so of hearty schleppage across Libby Road and into Fort Ebey to camp at the marine trail site, then re-launch on the western shore and paddle over to Port Townsend. There's something alluring about amphibian nomadness...

All that off-island running-about happened to coincide with the annual holiday dinner shindig where Jeannie works; hence the odd context switch into a corporate environment. Perversely, while she does adminish things and development-biz buzzwords muffle their way through padded partitions, I’m sitting here noting the flaws and details of their drop ceiling. That’s my next job at Nomadic Research Labs, now that the Wall o' Laurel is installed, so troffers and tees are very much on my mind.

Ah... time to head to Spazzo's for treats.

In other news...

Items sold since last entry:

49 Windowed DIP EPROMS - $17.00 to Barrington, Illinois
Mountain Biking in West Virginia - $5.00 to Wheeling, West Virginia

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)

Microship System Architecture

One of the things I've learned from the Microship project is that one should never start with the electronics when building something that will take over a decade to finish. I have some exquisitely engineered FORTH nodes that need to go on eBay, and let's not even talk about the video turret that represents over a man-year of work. While we were up to our elbows in epoxy, swinging sanders, and discovering first-hand why boats don't have wheels, all that high-tech gizmology just sat there and became less and less interesting. The original concept of a pressurized enclosure with a custom front-end system providing a hand-coded GUI to a multidrop network of a dozen or more nodes is no longer quite the envelope-pushing notion it once was... and the 3-4 new concepts that emerged over the years have all grown as dusty as the dotcom era from which they sprang.

No, things have changed. If I'm to complete the Microships in my lifetime and extract from them an amount of pleasure that comes close to justifying the massive dedication of time and money that went into them, then the key words wil become simplification and off the shelf. Fortunately, that doesn't imply boring, since the new design scales to kayaks, motherships, home control, and even technomadic backpacks.

The key realization is simply this: the user interface belongs with the user, not permanently wedded to a complex little trimaran that only marginally allows sleeping on board and thus enforces a protocol of syncing, mode changing, and remote linking everytime the pilot wanders ashore. There should be no need to do anything differently when moving from boat to tent to hostel to home base; the UI should simply adapt as it discovers resources in its immediate environment. If it is close to a Microship, then marine data collection and comm/nav/security tools should appear; if it's in my house, then it should offer the option to observe external cameras or talk to the heating system controls. Any one of those environments may also include communication links to the others, so in a flotilla, to use a favorite example, each pilot sees not only the on-board resources but also a subset of everyone else's (with command permissions suitably limited, of course, lest we start hacking each other's autopilots to carve our initials on the GPS track).

Fortunately, we don't really have to invent the core technology for this... for the simple control panels, a wireless browser will do just fine, talking with HTTP servers attached to any environment in which we might find ourselves. Those may be mini-ITX form factor boards, like the Squeak system from SolarPC, interface-rich and presenting "affordances" in a webbish framework to whatever client wanders within 802.11 or Bluetooth range.

The hardware implementation at the human end of all this will be a Tapwave Zodiac2 with the SanDisk Wi-Fi SDIO card. This dovetails nicely with my current developement of the "Technomadic Go Bag" that contains the stuff that's really, really essential... what you would want with you if for some reason you had to grab one thing and skedadle NOW. Function-to-weight ratio is critical, as are multiple communication modes, power system integration, survival basics, and a good suite of tools.

This design approach reduces Microship physical system integration to a single low-power processor atop a hierarchy of USB I/O, with a console presenting off-the-shelf comm/nav tools as well as a place to hang the Zode in its sealed Otterbox. That leaves only the new demountable crankset, solar array thermal retrofit, and hatch-cover hinge system in the critical to-do list for Wordplay, with a somewhat longer but somehow less daunting list for Art Throb. But the neat thing about this design is that it scales well... to a yacht, to going underground with only a backpack, or to hunkering down and living off-grid whilst coaxing edibles from the soil and making occasional stealthy kayak forays in the dead of night. The Microship project seems to be taking a pragmatic turn...

In other news...

Random bits

My printer problems are sidelined for now... the Epson Stylus C64 I bought from Dave Robb is working fine. Once I get the office insulated well enough to justify leaving one of those cheap oil-filled heaters on all the time, I'll move my theatre of desk operations back to the building (from the temporary house installation that has hopelessly cluttered a whole room), and presumably the next laser printer won't get killed off by a hard freeze.

Jeannie has also started working on the elimination of superfluities... she has a few things on eBay.

I am working up a sweat planting a closely spaced row of 20 embarrassingly non-native Russian Laurels, in order to build a visual wall between my once-private enclave and the house that's being erected in my face... despite the fact that the neighbor had 5 whole acres to play in <exasperated sigh>. At least he's a decent guy, and is not harvesting his forest for quick cash as so many people do around here (often claiming that it's for the "view" or to eliminate "danger trees")

Speaking of Camano Island, the current battle is to prevent trails in our wild areas from being closed to allow hunters free rein. It's absurd... we have dense population, beautiful forests that have been saved by the money and volunteer efforts of community groups, and a trio of county commissioners who don't even live here.

Items sold since last entry:

The Primitive Truth by Brent Lewis - $5.00 to Chicago, Illinois
Bach: Great Organ Works, Virgil Fox - $4.00 to S. Jordan, Utah

New goodies on eBay:

(nil)