Microship Status Reports

Hello from the Microship lab! As always, the feeling I have when immersed in many simultaneous projects is a frustrating one of making incremental progress in many directions — advances which, although adding up to equivalent net progress in one direction (minus context-switching overhead), subjectively appear as mere dabbling. A sketch here, a phone call…

As I mentioned in the previous issue, one of the hot projects currently afoot is a pair of manpacks (though as Jean Polly pointed out in response, now that Faun is part of this project they might better be called personpacks…). Anyway, it’s proving to be a fascinating and challenging part of the system, so…

You haven’t seen one of these reports for a while, have you? (Some of you — the new UCSD Microship engineering team — have NEVER seen one.) Well, between June ’93 and April ’94, I put out over half a megabyte of these project updates. Somewhere last spring, I got out of the habit of…

(Originally published as Microship Status Report #76 on August 9, 1994) I suppose I should just build a macro for an opening paragraph that apologizes for infrequent updates, and automatically insert it along with the title block on every status report. I’ve been busy, and a lot is happening. I need an archivist to do…

Nomadness Report, Issue #25 by Steven K. Roberts July 16, 1994 San Diego, California “Water corrodes; salt water corrodes absolutely.” — James R Louttit, The New Skipper’s Bowditch Hi. Remember me? It’s been almost 8 months since a Nomadness Report. While some might construe this as a lack of activity, it’s anything but: since the…

by Steven K. Roberts UCSD – San Diego May 12, 1994 (including video) I spent this past weekend in Seattle, sailing a couple of Fulmar-19s around Puget Sound (about 25 miles on Sunday, ranging from reaching at 11+ knots to pedaling about 4 miles in dead calm), starting at Shilshole Marina and making two trips…

Microship Status Report #74 by Steven K. Roberts San Diego, California April 29, 1994 As the time between updates increases, the amount of catch-up obviously increases, complicating the task of doing an update and inducing further procrastination. Clearly, the obvious solution is continuous, real-time broadcast of every moment of my life, thus eliminating the troublesome accumulation…

by Steven K. Robertsat UCSDApril 2, 1994 Kayak Damage! It’s been a hell of a week. My new manager de-materialized before she fully materialized, someone who needs to be severely spanked scratched the face of my new Sharp active-matrix color LCD, and our neighbor in Seaweed Canyon pushed over a giant storage shelving unit in…

As the project grew more complex, the little “daily updates” to the team became longer and more polished. This is the last of the month-long collections; going forward each will be its own archive post. Here, as we near the end of the first quarter’s student projects, we are beginning to re-think the entire Microship…