Microship Status 09/27/93

Back from a week on the road -- both energized and exhausted. The focus of the trip was the Mobile World Expo in San Jose, where I displayed BEHEMOTH for two days while meeting with sponsors new and old, cavorting with friends various, selling books, learning about the latest developments in wireless and pen computing, and doing the Media Dance (including German TV). All this was bracketed by a succession of visits between here and there, including an evening with my new major contact at Apple, a jazz concert, numerous dinners, hikes in the mountains, telescope play, and more. In short, my usual method of making one week feel like three -- as close as we can get to life extension!

That provided lots of new input on the boat, of course, but first, here are a few paragraphs written as an unfinished status report ten days ago:

* * *

Excellent meeting with Robb Walker of Nelson/Marek Yacht Design! He was pleased with the models, but a bit startled at how much the machine has grown in size since our first meeting about a month ago. The emerging tradeoff pits comfort and seaworthiness at one extreme against agility and "adventure" on the other. To help clarify my own thinking, I should try to define an operational specification:

The Microship must be small enough to easily portage and navigate through tiny rivulets, work well under human power, provide comfortable sleeping accommodations for two as well as a fully-stocked laboratory, be seaworthy under rough conditions, possess high WQ, zip across the water like the wind, and be virtually unbreakable.

Obviously, it's impossible to check all those boxes... so what we have encontered is the age-old struggle between comfort and light weight. Security versus freedom. <sigh>

* * *

I wrote that, left it in the unifinished mail queue, then had a road trip. Now I'd like to briefly update you on developments since.

First, as you know, Apple has become a Microship project sponsor. I spent a night at the home of Mike Clark in Glendale -- he designed ADB, the gorilla-proof Mac used by Koko, and countless other things. Amazingly creative guy, and he's part of the Vivarium Project (Learning Concepts Group). I now have a Mac IIFX in the lab, running AutoCAD Release 12. Of course, I don't know how to USE AutoCAD yet, but at least the tools are in place. I'll probably be getting a 180C PowerBook to hack into the console, and there should be quite a bit of technical support. As Apple's interface-device expert, he's also very interested in seeing how the Interlink FSR pointing device that Ron is working on will shape up -- they've never tried it.

In the OTHER personal computing camp, there's a fair chance of Compaq getting involved. I met them at the show and interest is strong... it's added to the list of proposals that I don't have time to write <sigh>. There are quite a number of interesting DOS and Windows apps, and this would be a good way to include them in the system while also adding development bandwidth.

While at Mike's house, I also had the pleasure of meeting Alec Brooks and Graham Gyatt of AeroVironment. Alec is distinguished for his development of the record-setting Flying Fish II human-powered hydrofoil, and Graham is launching a 100-foot long solar-powered flying wing. The company's real work these days is developing the GM electric car, so we all had plenty to talk about... and Alec offered help with hydrodynamics and propeller design!

Dean Anderson from AT&T faxed a long document detailing Kurt Hughes' "cylinder molding" method for skinny boat hulls. This may make MUCH more sense (and be significantly faster production) than the strip-composite method heretofore considered, and I'm now studying the literature to see if it can be applied. Again, the net comes through! This was a result of my rec.boats discussions.

The briefcase and notebook are full of business cards and comments about other people and companies... more as they develop. At the moment, I'm in recovery mode, with a daunting post tradeshow TO-DO list. More as I catch up with interrupt requests and noise reduction...

LITERATURE RECEIVED:

A pile of Mobile World tradeshow material from vendors various, including conference proceedings.

West System technical manual (epoxy)

Kurt Hughes article on Cylinder Molding technique

Canon still-video system literature

Trimble GPS literature

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