Straining Toward Nomadness

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 to stay marginally afloat. Clear. Focused. Irresponsible, but who cares... the project grows.

Things are different now, and it's exhausting. What I want is to be immersed in the ship with a departure plan clear in my mind, living in a haze of solder smoke backlit by software-driven blinkies, mechanical systems humming away in the background, the to-do list steadily shortening, test-jaunts as simple as casting off docklines and taking her for a spin. In some ways, that's even more compelling a vision than sailing off into the sunset; nothing like getting my geek on with that old envelope-pushing passion.

But the current reality is strangely orthogonal, as I attempt to multitask a dozen projects at once: aboard the boat, in the lab, on the computer. It's all fun; every little invention is a delight... but there are so many of them that I lose track of design documents on my own hard drive and get a wave of guilt when passing shelves laden with new toys. I've even declared a moratorium on acquisitions until I can put more of the previous ones to use and clear some mental shelf space.

Part of this is the huge lunge needed to claw my way out of the mire of complexity that is this land-based lifestyle, and it's not just the relatively trivial problem of dumping a household to go cruising. Hell, that's the easy part, even with the new vegetable garden, a loving mate, and her dog:


The hard part is the Microship lab, which is not micro at all: 3000 square feet packed with geekstuff from previous techomadic endeavors. When I walk around with a clear head, I realize just how little I actually use... so the Polaris mobile lab project continues to occupy center stage despite the seductive allure of Nomadness rusting slowly in the sunshine. The carpentry is almost done (today I wrapped up fabrication of 12 hinged panels that make the 45° jump between wall and newly insulated roof, providing a cable channel for all the benches). Once I distill the tonnage into a sleek 320 square-foot portable system, on-site boat projects should be less hobbled by the constant need to make 3-hour runs back to home base.

Since I also have to make a living while all this is going on, that project is starting to accumulate enough information for another book... a detailed how-to on turning a stock Wells-Cargo trailer into a mobile shop, with sections on carpentry, power, security, benches, inventory, and so on.

Of course, everything feels like a potential publishing project now; the Reaching Escape Velocity book is finished and available... a surprisingly smooth process. That's an Amazon link there in the previous sentence; it can also be ordered from the individual book page at CreateSpace (I make more money from the latter, but it's much less convenient for the buyer since there is no ability to queue up a multi-book order to get free shipping). I also deleted the PDF version that was for sale, and offer the book in my online store (signed if you like).

This information should help many projects get off the ground... the arts of working with sponsors, media, and volunteers are discussed in detail, along with the, um, obsessive focus on a massively complex undertaking that is the, um, yeah, the most important single thing you can be doing. I think I need to re-read this and apply it to Nomadness development!

There's an outline over yonder if you'd like to learn more (I'd paste it here, but HTML lists get all spacey in Blogger).

Speaking of books, now that I have been through the CreateSpace publishing process, I'm coaching an old friend as she brings her book to life. This is going to be interesting; I set up a simple web page for her and will post the occasional teaser until Saved for the Demon is available. It's a wild and engaging tale, believe me.

Boat Updates

Now that the weather is frankly gorgeous, I should be aboard every day working on ship projects... but instead I am in the forest, hustling to get the mobile lab ready for deployment. There has been some progress, however.

The most urgent class of tasks at the moment involves issues that impact my ability to cast off the lines and go for a sail. One of those was trivial-but-maddening: tool drawers that flew open at the slightest hint of roll, slamming to the extreme of travel and back with every wavelet. Clearly unacceptable. Once, long ago, they had clever plastic spring-latch assemblies embedded in a finger-hole nacelle, but both that and the corresponding strikes are no longer viable.

The redneck solution (pillow and duct-tape) got me through last season, but that's just embarrassing. Given all the constraints (not be an ankle-biter, not require major surgery, not be too expensive, not be ugly), the answer took longer than expected to emerge... but it was my favorite sort of fix: use something already in stock!

All it took was a pair of Southco soft draw latches:


These things are great (and available from McMaster-Carr) - they are soft and pliable, easy to use, and even look pretty good. Technically, they are not pulling in the right direction for use on drawer faces, but I'm confident that the problem is solved.

Speaking of problems, I'm dealing with a couple of lighting issues. The first is the wimpy solar LED RailLight that not only rusts in a single season, but has poor-quality mounting hardware, batteries that don't make it through the night, and non-marinized components. One of mine came with a cracked globe and missing screw... I would call this a good idea cheesily implemented, and thus a waste of money. I thought I was going to relocate my pair to the garden after deciding they aren't boat-worthy, but they didn't survive being wet and neither works... so off they go to the dumpster after I harvest the little solar cells:


The second lighting-related annoyance is actually from a manufacturer that I have respected for years - AquaSignal. I used their lights on the Microship with Luxeon LED retrofits and 350 mA constant current sources, and naturally looked to their new Series 32 when preparing to replace the old incandescents.

Well, It's the most astonishingly fragile assembly I've ever seen in this product space, and the instructions are useless.

Apparently, they expect this to stay rooted to the harsh stern environment with only a little expanding plastic bushing on one side, and nothing on the other but the friction of the wire-exit tube. Behind the gasket, it is potted; there is no mounting base (the substrate is actually very well-made and substantial, but I suspect drilling an extra mounting hole is not what they had in mind). I'm suspicious of the wire exit, which appears to have a capillary path to the interior... though when I peek inside, I suspect there is enough potting.

Short of bonding this in place with 3M 4200, which may be the best move, I was so convinced that I was missing some intended mounting scheme that I even posted to Cruisers Forum in the hopes that I'd be derisively pointed to an obvious RTFM-ish solution. No such luck. Other people have been gluing them on as well. Not quite sure what the company was thinking, but despite excellent light output, I cannot recommend these:


Next up: fabrication of the stainless cage around the woodstove (all parts on hand), mounting the bracket for stowing the dink's petite little outboard, fixturing the water heater behind the shower enclosure, extracting the last of the old watermaker for the fellow who bought its pump on eBay, mounting the shore-water entry where the old water heater stack exited, and starting the power system retrofit.

A Paleo-Techomadic Take on Location Independence

In my previous post, I mused about the sudden interest in something that has been central to my life since 1983... a number of variations on what is basically full-time travel augmented by geek tools that are now universal (and a way of thinking that makes it sustainable). Some people are even monetizing this, selling books, courses, coaching, and other materials... and indeed, when I look at how much of a conceptual leap it must be from the perspective of a life of employment, I suspect there is a market. I know that my 1993 First Steps document helped get a lot of people moving, and it even presupposed a set of technomadic urges. It really is simple in principle, but there are countless technical details that are not at all obvious, and it is good to see the aggregation of tips and techniques.

(attribution needed; this was in my old humor file)

I've been asked a few times if I'm annoyed that young pups are claiming to have just invented something that I've been doing for 25 years... but actually, the answer is no. The only irritating part is an occasional lack of historical perspective, but that's easily adjusted with blog comments and community participation. Otherwise, I think it's pretty cool that this toolset (both technical and intellectual) is finally accessible enough to become a trend, and the hype will probably calm down. I can think of four good reasons why someone might be motivated to contemplate full-time technomadics:

1. No choice in the matter, due to loss of home... might as well be proactive about it and design a rootless lifestyle to incorporate solid communication and productivity tools!
2. Discovering that one is spending so much time on the road servicing clients (or doing other gigs) that it makes sense to become decoupled from a home base. This is subject to context-switching overhead, and is best suited to either long on-site consulting gigs or short, high-paying ones that allow lots of travel time in between (the latter was the case when I was on an open-ended speaking tour for a few years).
3. Wanting to find a way to afford a life of full-time travel and exploration, without having to save up and then chip away relentlessly at what sailors call "the cruising kitty." Freelancing or practicing locally marketable skills while traveling is a highly effective business model... and predates me by a few centuries. I just added portable computers and network connectivity to the mix, unexpectedly becoming high profile in the process (selected thumbnails here and here, exhaustive list here).
4. Being obsessed with the geekery of the mobile platform. I'm also in this category (obviously), though it can get in the way of travel itself. Why am I conjuring a network of 15 Arduino nodes, a resource-management system, the on-board server, an integrated communication console, and a mobile lab to support it all... when I could forget the gizmos and go sailing during this gorgeous weather window? It's a sickness, I tellya.
   

I'm looking forward to seeing how this all evolves, now that one can realistically accessorize their preferred travel style with the tools necessary to be truly location-independent. I will close with a bit of self-indulgence... a complete scan of my article in the August 1984 issue of Popular Computing, 25 years ago. Each thumbnail below opens into a readable page; this was a fun one, and really captured the feel of this new way of life.

Digital Nomad Redux

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: populating the store, databasing sensor channels, eBaying, writing a book, assembling McMaster-Carr and Digikey orders for overdue projects, designing a marine datalogger product, distilling decades of accumulated gizmology into a sleek kit that can fit in a mobile lab... and of course finding time to tweet about it all. Meanwhile, real birds are a-twitter in the forest and the boat tugs at mooring lines stiffened by the windblown salt of winter storms.

We did take her for a spin, though. 'Twas Mother's Day weekend, and we planned to sail down to Camano for a relaxed day of anchoring with Adventuress and welcoming friends aboard for a potluck. Up early, stowing things for the anticipated gallop in perfect winds, energized by that nervous excitement that precedes the unfurling of long-dormant wings. But then, quoth Sky at the stern: "Um, I don't think we're going anywhere today."

An epic accumulation of biology clung to the rudder, and after considerable effort, we detached a clump with the approximate dimensions of a cushy recliner. Crusty barnacles yielded with a crunch as we passed the back of a brush head over the reachable parts of the hull; clouds of smaller stuff tinged with bottom-paint dust floated off with every stroke. All this would only have slowed us down somewhat, but I was more concerned with fouling of the unreachable Max-Prop and the raw-water intake. Block the latter; lose the engine.

We thus spent a perfect sunny day at the dock, then the fellows from Waterworx arrived to free-dive the hull. An hour later, she had a clean bill of health with the exception of a fully-dissolved nose zinc on the prop (to be replaced this week).

By then it was too late to go frolic, but the next morning we fired up the mighty Yanmar and tiptoed out of the channel in a minus tide for a windless crossing of Saratoga Passage. Not a particularly memorable day on the water, but it sure hit the spot... and we returned to a new slip amongst the live-aboards, leaving the old one open for transients. New friends already.

But I'm looking forward to more days like this:

Video by Sky, October 10, 2008, sailing off Camano Island. Music is Aldo Ciccolini playing Satie's impertinent little "Etre Jaloux De Son Camarade Qui A Une Grosse Tête" from the Peccadilles Importunes. (The CD is available here, and includes the delicious Gnossiennes that I have been playing.)

Rambling Updates on Many Fronts

Remember the Reaching Escape Velocity PDF that I mentioned recently, for sale in my online store, detailing the process of launching a gonzo engineering project with the help of sponsors, media, and volunteers? I decided that it would really be better as a hardcopy book instead of something that can be forwarded willy-nilly and uploaded to various PDF servers (as has happened with other projects). This seemed a good opportunity to get familiar with the CreateSpace publishing process... and so far, I'm impressed. The book is now in the final proofing cycle, and if I like what I see I will click the button to immediately take it live on Amazon. Here's the cover:


Update on May 20: It is now orderable from this page at CreateSpace, or from my own online store.

I know the cover has a slightly disturbing religious feel to it, all lavender and rainbows, but dang, it works so well. I did try to come up with something a bit more on the "escape velocity" theme, but I lack the Photoshoppery skills to do it well:

That's my old school bus, in which Maggie and I covered 16,000 miles around the US back in 1988-89, hauling the Winnebiko II to speaking gigs and promoting the Computing Across America book (which I think I'll re-issue via CreateSpace, with lots of updates and photos from the era). I don't know the photographer of that gorgeous shuttle launch photo from 2005 but will of course take it down (or add a credit) if there's any objection.

Speaking of my little storefront, I'm now a dealer for Sparkfun Electronics, makers of all sorts of geek goodies. I've started offering Arduinos, sensors, and various related items that are in some way relevant to "Boat Hacking," but am most excited about some of the value-added projects that are enabled by their offerings. I'm just wrapping up the prototype of a sealed GPS datalogger that can be left bolted in an exposed location, remote-controlled from below, serving up its accumulated track files via Bluetooth.

Another is a little USB environmental sensor suite that is just plain cool... I'm repackaging that for harsh environments as well, but also sell the bare board. I fired it up at my desk the other day, and could look at a "verbose" report updated every second:

Humidity=58.36 %
SHT Temperature=065.77 F
SCP Temperature=019.0 C
SCP Temperature=066.28 F
Pressure=101073 Pa
Light=963
Batt=0
Count=000140

Or a terse version, suited to comma-delimited database applications:

#54.89,065.82,019.0,066.28,101151,989,0,000276$

For a fraction of the cost of the marinized models, this delivers a lot of surprisingly high-res data... though of course it would very quickly die if subjected to even one droplet of seawater. I'm more likely to use it for interior conditions, and deploy a Maretron WSO100 at the masthead for the N2K stuff.

I finally started a database to keep track of all this... a quick survey reveals that I should not be surprised if the number of "data points" aboard Nomadness reaches 1000. This is the implementation in FileMakerPro:


I used the tagging concept to label each point with searchable labels, and pull-down fields select the associated node and the class of object (sensor, computed value, output, manually switched power, and so on). This should be a useful design tool for what is becoming a rather complex data structure.

Retro Nomadness

These spin-off projects made me chuckle the other day when I was Googling for something or other and stumbled across this bit of humor from 11 years ago: NRL Expanding Operations. It was particularly funny at the time, going out to my 5000-strong Nomadness mailing list, as a few humor-impaired folks didn't realize I was kidding and actually troubled to flame me for the blatant sellout when I should be altruistically carrying the technomadic torch!

I've been getting a kick out of the sudden (re)discovery of the "Digital Nomad" or "Location Independent" lifestyle. It's all over Twitter and the blogosphere these days, and I just joined a friendly online group devoted to it. I tweeted a chuckle about all this to Howard Rheingold, and he added that Twitter is the first occurrence of social media, too. (He is a long-time veteran of online community and the Well, and we even crossed paths during a BBC Horizon TV filming via virtual space in 1992... using satcom, handlebar keyboard, and console Macintosh on my bicycle in Massachusetts while he was in Marin County... and I was just now astounded to find the show available online, with commentary. Drag the slider to 31:30 for my bit.)

Lest I sound like another creaky old fart who liked it better in the Olden Days, I hasten to add that back then, technomadics was a rather esoteric pursuit. It took deep hacking, big muscles to move ridiculously large machines, too much money for too little actual capability, calm patience to deal with marginal services and terrible comm links, and highly understanding clients who didn't immediately think "homeless bum" upon hearing a bearded geek raving about technomadics. People were still debating the radical concept of working at home; working anywhere, especially while in motion, was almost too much of a stretch. It did make for good media coverage for those of us who managed to do what today would be unremarkable, but it didn't scale well... "not ready for prime time," as they used to say.

Things have changed a lot. A more granular and less-hierarchical business climate rewards those with the physical and intellectual alacrity to respond quickly to needs. Digital Nomads or Location Independent Professionals can snag a gig in minutes, reposition to be near a client if need be, scamper around doing research, or just park in a gorgeous spot to hunker over a laptop and code/write/design. Some good friends are doing exactly this as we speak... check out Chris and Cherie of Technomadia.

Years ago, I quipped, "once you move to Dataspace, you can put your body anywhere you like." Despite the neologism that was quickly eclipsed by the catchier "cyberspace," that's more true now than ever.

It's always fun to reminisce about yesteryear's geekery, and in that vein I just found a photo from my house in Kentucky, back in 1977. A couple of months ago, I ran this picture from 2-3 years earlier; this is how my livingroom evolved:


That music keyboard should not, alas, suggest that I actually knew how to play... I just wanted to. In true geek style, my solution to that problem was not to take lessons, but to invent a polyphonic keyboard interface that scanned all the debounced J-wire contacts with a big multiplexer, compared current state to previous state in a TTL RAM, and delivered change notifications via a parallel port to a program running on the Cromemco machine that in turn ran a homebrew synthesizer. I never did learn to play piano until very recently, but that system made for a nice article in Byte in 1979 ("Polyphony Made Easy").

Ah well, enough retrospective... I need to finish the insulation of the Polaris mobile lab so I can move in and get to work full-time on the boat! I'll close with this image of Java and me, heading back to the house last night after a full day working together in the dog-free zone, keeping alert for the admittedly cute but oh-so-exasperating little Zubenelgenubi:


Cheers from the nomadhouse,
Steve

Cabling into Spring

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, networking, communications, and light fabrication shop in the marina parking lot might occasionally attract a client... a potentially welcome distraction as we find ourselves ever more carefully watching cash flow.

The only news to report on the trailer front since last posting (other than ideas, which, as always, tend to outpace reality) is that the wall insulation is complete and the roof insulation is underway. The latter is nicely modular: strips of 1.5" rigid foam cut to fit between the ribs, slightly wider luan plywood sheets that meet edge-to-edge with their neighbors, and 3" wooden retainers that hold it the whole mess up with self-drilling screws. Quite a clean look, and easy to install... there will be more details with photos in the eventual article, I'm sure.

Boat Power Issues

But let's talk about Nomadness. I arrived the other day for a work session, and found the Inverter/Charger-from-Hell showing the dreaded "Low Bus Error" message. A couple of days earlier, it seems, there had been a brief shore power glitch. My ProSine 2.0 responds to this by latching into some pathological mode that, instead of resuming battery charging, actively kills the batteries by running itself from them (while other system loads do likewise, to the tune of 6-8 amps total). This has happened a half-dozen times since I bought the boat, but the most recent was the worst... battery bus was at about 9.2 volts and it charged at 50 amps well into the night.

Nice job, Xantrex. This failure mode isn't just a minor inconvenience; it drastically shortens the life of an expensive battery bank.

So the process of extracting that thing has moved way up on the priority list, and I won't miss it for another reason as well: it is the worst source of RFI aboard the boat. It breaks squelch well into VHF and beyond, though fortunately my steel hull minimizes the problem when the antennas are outside. I dread bringing SSB online, though, so the Prosine will move (along with the victimized batteries) into either the mobile lab or humble UPS service at home... where a human can clear the latched error condition whenever necessary by simply turning it off and back on.

In its place, of course, will be the superb Outback FX2012 and related systems including the MX60 solar charge controller. While installing this, I'll also take care of one of the more serious mistakes made by whomever installed the Prosine: a complete lack of ventilation. In normal service, it's not a problem; the unit is in the cavernous space behind the DC power panel and heat migrates out through a huge surface area. But when trying to bring a battery bank back from discharge, it overheats... so I have to prop the access panels open.


The new system will have its own convective loop with a louvered panel down below, fan-assisted when the local node detects temperature rise.

All this has been on my list for a while now, but it has been hard to come to terms with the sheer magnitude of reverse-engineering all the undocumented power wiring. I guess it's time.

Speaking of Wires

This brings me to another issue with the boat. Not only was there inadequate documentation of the current state of the systems, but a beautifully done refit in 2002 rendered huge regions inaccessible. I was reminded of this over the weekend, when it took about 5-6 hours to install two cables from the new port and starboard Wema diesel tank sensors to their corresponding Maretron NMEA2000 interfaces. Of course, to some extent that just goes with the territory; everything on a boat is harder than it should be, and I'm not as fast as I used to be.

But there are actually two cavernous areas that are fully closed off, along with a number of instances of limited access to things that were presumably once easy to reach. The latter problem kept me from repurposing my old tank sensor cables... both were under flooring and would have required taking a saw to gorgeous teak/holly furniture. So I've been guilty of committing a sin that I preach against: spawning orphaned cable runs by disconnecting things and leaving them in place. This is bad for lots of reasons, not the least of which is more confusion down the line... it distributes stray potentials, threatens single-point grounding protocol, and makes the nightmare of a lightning strike potentially even worse.

Ah well. The only solutions are to build a boat (been there, done that; got the T-shirt), start from a bare hull (tried that and lost momentum), or rip out everything and start over (no way in hell!). The take-away lesson here, if you happen to be contemplating a nautical project, is to keep serviceability in mind at every step in the process. Seriously. Trust me, you'll be glad thousands of times.

All the muttering notwithstanding, I did finally manage to get those tank sensors wired... then conjured a trio of gauges on the Maretron DSM250 display. These are arranged logically: the top two are port and starboard 75-gallon tanks; the bottom is the aft 90-gallon tank...


At last, on to other things! That one had been awaiting completion for weeks, along with something much less fun: dealing with an intermittent stench.

You may recall my blog-moaning before winter set in, complaining about the random nose-wrinkling effect of a leak somewhere in the new holding tank system installed by First Mate Marine. This would lie in wait for weeks, working just fine, then suddenly... during a weather shift, hard sail, or winsome companions coming aboard for a day in the sun... the whole boat would reek like the inside of a porta-potty in need of service. I finally traced it to a sloppily done Spinweld, and although the plumber had offered to take care of any issues (before getting paid), he had only commiseration and apology when the you-know-what hit the fan.

I had a chat with Ronco, the tank maker, and they settled the question about how to go about sealing it. My suspicion was correct; no adhesive will reliably stick. It had to be done with heat.

This turned out not to be at all difficult, once I got motivated enough to deal with it. I took my heat gun and a butter knife, rendered the Spinweld flange saggy and wet, confirmed that the tank was softening, then mushed it all together. 5-minute job, not worth all the agonizing.


If it turns out I was wrong about the source (despite visible gaposis with dark stains) and the odeur manifests again, the diagnostic will be to close the vent stopcock, gently pressurize with the Lavac's Henderson pump, and slather all fittings and hoses with soapy water until I see smelly bubbles.

In More Fun News

I really shouldn't complain, though. Despite a yet-unacceptable cost-to-pleasure ratio, this boat offers delightful moments... sometimes without even leaving the dock. Just the other night, in fact, I was contemplating some bit of gizmology when I noticed an unusual yellow mast drift by astern. I prairie-dogged and saw the sweetest little Bristol Channel Cutter making a recon loop of the guest dock, and was delighted to see them aim themselves at an adjacent slip.

Thus began a thoroughly invigorating evening of conversation with Tycho and Kathy of Penguin, emigrés of Silicon Valley, experienced cruisers, and live-aboards. There were small-world moments galore, and I found myself savoring their relaxed demeanor and nautical wisdom while the geek banter progressed on many simultaneous levels. It's easy to forget, in the middle of to-do lists so complex that they need powerful software tools, that the essence of all this really is something quite simple (and already here, when I let myself appreciate it).

It was kinda sad watching them head out the next morning, as I contemplated a day of contortionism:


Nomadness should be stretching her wings pretty soon; now that networked microprocessors can collaborate to emulate analog fuel gauges, it's time to fill the tanks, putter out of the harbor, and shake out the winter-stiffened sails.

I think this year will have a somewhat different character from the last. Key projects are happening, but instead of letting the boat sit idle during the finest weather in one of the world's great cruising destinations, we'll alternate between boat geekery and adventure. The testing program should be fun, and the new systems will be a hoot to bring online.

Stay tuned! (That's easy to do these days, as my Twitter feed is automatically replicated over there in the left-hand sidebar of this page and I usually mutter something 2-3 times a day. There are always newsy bits at the legacy live page, complete with some decidedly retro-looking HTML, and this blogging contraption even has RSS.)

Cheers from the lab,
Steve