I was most delighted to find my little Reaching Escape Velocity book mentioned in the pages of my favorite magazine — creative makers were exactly the readers I had in mind when writing it. The book covers the art of working with sponsors, volunteers, and media in order to launch audacious gonzo engineering projects… and is…

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The trickiest part of an insanely complex and steadily morphing project is the way it warps the lives of all involved. I have a long history of watching relationships flounder while I devote all available time and energy to technomadic dreams, obsessed with gizmological overlays on boats and bikes, revising designs to keep pace with…

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Oh good grief… has it really been 5 months since the post about clawing our way off a lee shore with a failed anchor windlass? It seems ages ago, back when leaves were on trees, the sun shone late into the evening, and I was lulled once again into the complacent fiction that sweet summer…

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I love the Hack a Day site… always something interesting in the domain of geekery, with frequent nerdgasms. It was thus a treat to find my adventures featured one day in 2009 – including embedded video excerpts from my talk at Xerox PARC on March 14, 1989. This was early in BEHEMOTH development, and I…

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As in life, disaster at sea sneaks up fast. Conditions deteriorate in a downward spiral, quietly closing off options while you fiddle with trivialities, driving you inexorably toward a dead end long before you realize it. At some point, the vague dread you’ve been feeling all day snaps into sharp focus; it’s no longer a…

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The beautiful photo above shows Sky at the helm of Nomadness. I’m anchored north of Hope Island at the moment, the boat feeling much lighter off the dock, the rhythm of life distinctly more relaxed than the task-oriented staccato that has characterized the past eight months. There is much of the latter yet ahead, alas,…

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Port Hadlock sunset

I miss the mental simplicity and steady progress of only working on one thing. I reminisce about Epic Projects of yesteryear, and they all seem to share the single characteristic of being grand obsessions so all-consuming that the rest of my life was relegated to meatspace maintenance and the bare-minimum business of hustling for cash…

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Why does it take the stirrings of springtime to accelerate the indoor jobs, all those geeky things that should be done by the time it’s warm enough to embed them in a boat? I sit at my desk, unencumbered by the customary layers of insulation, doing everything that I could have finished over the winter:…

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About a half-dozen times in the past 24 hours, the Polaris mobile-lab project has been reinforced. This is going to be wonderful tool, I think… not only to bring R&D; facilities within range of the system I’m trying to focus on, but also to add another nickel generator to the arsenal. A fairly comprehensive electronics,…

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NOTE: This post was written at the beginning of the mobile-lab project; I later did an article that covers Polaris in more detail. Here’s a bit of technomadic geekery that has thrice attempted to burble to the foreground, each time falling back into obscurity as I chased more delicious obsessions like boat acquisition, network design, and…

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