Note: There is a page on this site with the complete schematics and other details of my 8008 system from 1974. This one is merely a musing from a night in the harbor back in 2009. It’s freezing in the harbor, and I’m on one of my too-infrequent work trips… mapping my normal project-management context-switching…

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Hoo-boy, this is a crazy time. Whether on the cusp of TEOTWAWKI, the transition to an initial cap in the word depression, or just a bloody dust-up in the sleight-of-handoff of dictatorial powers, there is a sense of contextual discontinuity that makes it hard to maintain steady project focus. Of course, I’m perfectly capable of…

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I’ve often moaned in these electronic pages about the inefficiency of my current facilities; despite seeming, on the surface, to be a sort of geek paradise (3000 square-foot lab in the woods), the reality borders on absurdity. With the boat a 3-hour round-trip drive away, the rhythm of the project is the precise antithesis of…

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It’s a humble little thing, this microprocessor that will spend its days tucked away under the forward berth, tirelessly keeping an eye on such mundane matters as the amount of sewage in the holding tank and the status of associated valves… and it probably doesn’t deserve all this bloggage. But the Sewage node has some…

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‘Tis a busy time, this January in the Nomadhouse: a wonderful visit from my daughter, Zen Cart learning curve, Satie’s Gnossiennes, stoking the home fires, magnetized boat curtains, lab entropy reduction, and plunging into ship network design… and that’s just the fun stuff, interrupted too often by the psychic energy sinks of daily life and…

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Wow, I haven’t been in this mode for years, and I feel rusty! Downloading libraries, reading documentation, defining data structures, parsing strings, and even sketching a retro flowchart or two… this is definitely Good Times, but man, am I ever out of shape. But still, hot on the heels of installing Zen Cart for local…

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Cold, dark winter days are demotivating and I didn’t get it together to go see how the boat handles a foot of snow loading, but I am happy to report progress on three simultaneous fronts: the ship’s Shacktopus network, the Boat Hacking book, and an online store to conjure a nickel generator from the first…

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I’ve never been much of a fan of Christmas, except perhaps when I was a kidlet in the nuclear family of mom/dad/me back in Kentucky, long ago and very far away from other relatives. Back then, the tree glittered and new toys appeared, just as they should (nothing has really changed). Here is a little…

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This freezing week has been a time for system design work, the start of a new book, waterworks fabrication, and preparing my office for use as a ship simulator during the software-development phase. We did make one brief run to the boat last week, then got stuck in a nasty snowstorm enroute back… which turned…

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Note: this was written in 2008, while I was trying to make sense of the network architecture of the boat. Both Shacktopus and Datawake have since been re-used for other systems in my life. Sorry for the confusion! Real physical tasks are queuing up, but it’s a rainy holiday weekend and I find myself more…

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