Microship

The More Things Change...

2009-04-04T20:05:00.000-07:00

The current quest for workspace to build the latest gizmological extravaganza triggered a stray engram in my creaky wetware, and googling my archives I find this from 1990: But have you ever explored an unfamiliar, overpopulated town with the intent of finding a few hundred square feet of free workspace? Even with a famous bike, it’s not easy. I called here and there, growing dispirited, watching the inexorable passage of time with something akin to rage. I had grim thoughts of the whole...

Lab and House on Camano Island

2009-02-27T15:36:00.001-08:00

I arrived on Camano Island in 1998, with the intent of quickly finishing the Microship project and taking off on the expedition. But boat projects have a way of taking their own sweet time (especially übergeeky ones like this), and the years kept passing... while I grew ever more comfortable in this wooded paradise at the northern edge of Puget Sound. Things have changed now, and my partner and I are preparing to make the transition to a full-time life aboard Nomadness, a 44-foot steel...

A Little Comment on Serendipity

2006-10-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

My active bloggage these days is over on Nomadness, as that's the new boat project; this one is becoming a catch-all for random commentary that might be a bit more enduring than those ephemeral snippets on my live page that, after a few days online, are whisked off to the bit bucket the moment new ones arrive. A friend was remarking recently about the increasing number of "small world" moments in her life as she pursues ever more interesting projects -- wondering aloud if this is merely random...

A Flurry of Updates

2006-05-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

There's quite a bit of news since my last posting, long ago and far away in Kentucky. The old homestead has been shut down, and I hauled a Wells-Cargo trailer full of eBayables back home to Camano Island. (Photos and details of the truck/trailer rig are over here). The main thrust at the moment is acquiring and outfitting a ship of live-aboard scale, and the quest has had some bizarre twists... so many that the ship to be named Nomadness now has its own blog. At this writing, that is all...

Cybertronics and Other Antiquities

2005-09-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm trying desperately to get out of this old house in Kentucky and back to the Pacific Northwest, where, in addition to Shacktopus, there's a boat in my immediate future. I'm stuck in a time warp here... A relic from the past just turned up in family archives: I published this catalog 30 years ago, during the heyday of my fledgling company called Cybertronics (I should have hung onto that trademark and grabbed the domain name when I had the chance!). The origins of my "Wordy" moniker are...

Ode to New Orleans

2005-08-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

I have a backlog of material that needs to go here, snippets of things posted on the Microship Live Page during this time I have spent in Kentucky, dealing with the death of my father. An aggregate posting of this 2-month era will appear here soon. But at the moment, on the eve of the landfall of Katrina, my thoughts are in N'Awlins. It seems fitting to repost something I wrote ages ago, back during the dreamlike Miles with Maggie epoch... I offer it here to help those who only know New...

Shacktopus Debut

2005-06-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Well, the first waypoint has been reached... a public showing of the Shacktopus system. It was certainly not finished (no RigNexus and no cabling), but the gross packaging was completed in time for the Sea-Pac amateur radio convention in Seaside, Oregon. That's Budd, W3FF, of Buddipole fame examining the box; Jeannie and I are working the booth. She's now a ham, by the way, and had a ball with her first glimpse of the radio-geek culture... preparing her somewhat for Field Day, a week later,...

Shacktopus Taking Shape

2005-05-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

This is an intense time... driven by my old nemesis, the trade-show deadline. Actually, it's just a hamfest, but the pressure is every bit as intense as a COMDEX of the Olden Days: this is my first public appearance in years. I certainly don't expect to be done, of course, but the looming mid-June date is effectively keeping me from sinking into the sloth that characterized much of the past 3 or 4 years. But it's not just that. Today I had a bit of an epiphany, discovering (thanks to Ned...

Technomadic Goodies and High-tech Wire

2005-05-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

First, a correction: in my last update, I indulged in a rantlet (since deleted) that complained about a lack of response from RadioLabs over a month of attempting to ask some tech questions before ordering. It turned out that a link to this blog in my email sig file was getting snagged by their spam filter, and they never knew I was attempting to get in touch. This is a good reminder that email is considerably more open-loop than it used to be (for entirely technical reasons), and that...

Corporate Personalities

2005-05-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

For over 20 years, I have been mining industry for the components needed to construct technomadic adventure tools: Winnebiko, Winnebiko II, BEHEMOTH, Microship in its various incarnations, and now Shacktopus. I have been very fortunate to be able to conjure a sort of 3-way symbiosis of project, media, and sponsorship that has allowed me to build a career out of this without having to simultaneously "get a real job." Along the way, I've dealt with a lot of companies... and a lot of people who...

Playing Radio for a Living

2005-04-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

Since I'm working full-time on the new Shacktopus system, a sort of Microship-in-a-pack also known as Shack To Go, I'm going to start keeping a running commentary here. Eventually, when this all stabilizes, it will have a proper set of static html pages. The past few weeks have seen the acquisition of a lot of new communications gear. Over the last 3 days, I've assembled the exquisite miniature Elecraft T1 antenna tuner kit, and just gave it a test today between the Yaesu FT-817 and the...

The Shacktopus

2005-04-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Yikes, it's been a while since I've posted here, though I've been doing "daily updates" with fresh photos 2-3 times a week. That's the place to look when you find yourself gripped with the urge to find out what I'm up to; I'm reserving this blog for project reports and maunderings that justify a bit more persistence than the fleeting updates over in the other venue (they are not archived). So, after all that build-up, what justifies this update? A couple of things. First, we've solved half...

A Zulu Rhapsody

2005-02-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

In addition to its role in the project, Zulu the Zodiac is quickly becoming a convergence tool... reducing the number of separate objects I need to carry around while generally improving the efficiency of my life. I have attempted this with PDAs in the past without much success, and as much as I trust and adore my iBook, it's simply too large and IMPORTANT to subject to all the rigors of being constantly at my side. I took it on a 5-day kayak trip a year or so ago, needing it for fireside...

Zodiac on the Microship

2005-02-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

I gave an introduction to the new Microship system architecture in couple of recent (relatively speaking) postings: VNOS in Blue Jeans, introducing the server-side tool that will be discovered by wireless Tapwave Zodiacs, and Canoe and Kayak Interfacing, which briefly addresses the the notion of a wandering user interface device interacting with "substrate interfaces" on each boatlet. There is now progress to report. The Zodiac is here, and I'm maintaining a page about the machine to...

Publishing Venues

2005-01-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a comment from Eric Remy as well as much noodling on the topic, I've decided that my "publishing needs" require three mutually exclusive venues... This blog, which, with its hip style and automatic archiving, seems to impose a writing style that verges on the article. It's also a nuisance to deal with images beyond inline wee ones... Flickr has lately become too slow and cumbersome to use, but hosting the piccys myself requires thumbnail creation, FTP, and fiddly tags. Static...

VNOS in Blue Jeans

2005-01-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

Throughout the course of the Microship project, one of the recurring themes has been the choice of a software platform that would allow integration of widely scattered, non-homogenous resources into a comfortable user interface that can manifest itself wherever I happen to be. Over the past decade, this has included a custom multidrop network of 68HC11 boards running multitasking FORTH under a HyperCard front end, NewtonScript talking to Macs via Digital Ocean wireless tools, Perl on a Linux...

A Willing Disbelief of Suspension

2005-01-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

Ah, learning curves. The last week of 2004 saw good progress on the new office in the lab... most notably the suspended ceiling project. This should be trivial, but as with most things, it's not quite as straightforward as it seems. The issue at the moment goes back to a comment I made here 2 months ago, when I was trying to find out if one can lay insulation directly atop those fluorescent troffers that take the place of a ceiling tile. Unable to find the answer on the box they come in,...

Usurped Winter Solstice Celebration

2004-12-26T21:34:00.000-08:00

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...

Hacking Camano Island

2004-12-19T21:51:00.000-08:00

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...

Canoe and Kayak Interfacing

2004-12-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

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...

Vanishing Gizmology

2004-12-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

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...

Nomad is on Island

2004-12-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

(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...

Microship System Architecture

2004-12-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

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...

Printer Karma

2004-11-30T19:37:00.000-08:00

I'm in love with my Leatherman New Wave multi-tool! (affiliate REI link). I traded away my original Leatherman last week and almost immediately started missing it; I had seen and admired the Wave, then was pleased to discover that they just released a new version in the last couple of months. Everything locks back, the blades support comfortable one-handed operation, and there is an integral tool-holder that accomodates a set of 20 additional bits (hex drivers and the like, not included with...

Ancient Behemoths

2004-11-27T18:35:00.000-08:00

The two recent pointers to ancient Winnebiko and BEHEMOTH media coverage finally motivated me to find a decent photo-album tool, so a quick visit to the Mac OS X side of Versiontracker yielded the Java-based JAlbum, and the result is that about 50 scans from my media coverage over the years are now online here. It was pretty painless, since I didn't have to manually crunch all the thumbnails and IMG tags. The worst part, of course, was this pathetic half-speed dialup connection... I just...