Blog | Nomadness | Geek expressionism at sea

Nickel Generators

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Steve

Winnebiko II circa 1988, photo by Dan Burden

In 1983, I abandoned all pretense of responsibility and hit the road on a bicycle. This was deeply alarming to my parents, since I was now 30 and a suburban homeowner; even though I was barely scraping by as a freelance writer, at least it was amidst the trappings of normalcy. But when I sent them this article in Online Today announcing my upcoming “Computing Across America” adventure, my mother’s first response was…

“What’s the matter, Steve? You going to be a bum all your life?”

I often chuckled at that over the years, but of course she was right. From the perspective of the American Dream, I had gone terrifyingly astray. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged business | 4 Comments

New Places, Products, Publications, Partners, & Pussycats

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Steve

It’s astounding how much can change between one blog post and the next. The more time passes, the more I find myself in that catch-up mode that tempts me to blast through a huge range of subjects, addressing none of them well. Topics like relationship change, for example, can keep a blogger procrastinating for months.

The nutshell summary, at least in the domain that is the primary subject of this blog, is that the brief Everett epoch is over; Nomadness is now in La Conner, with moorage on the channel and two rental spaces a short walk away. One, where I’m writing this, is a cute little retail storefront, passed daily by the rising tide of tourists drawn by tulip season. The other is a sort of garage, stealthy tucked away and perfect for the Polaris mobile lab.

I have not looked back toward Everett for a moment. The physical marina facilities were excellent and expensive, but getting anything done (like parking the trailer or receiving mail) was nearly impossible, and the rather rough town was a long way off… even getting a bite to eat was a project. I put some brainstorm energy into starting a cruiser support operation to reduce the well-known annoyances, but that would have been a crazy wrong turn in life. Better to move on… and here’s the new home of my little ship:

It’s quite wonderful. There’s a sense of congeniality about the whole town, my dock neighbors are friendly, and the physical facilities are all I need to get on with the project. So, onward!

Nickel Generators and a New Publishing Model

One of the factors that has reduced my blogging output is easy access to microblogging on Facebook, and although that does keep me in touch with lots of people I care about, it’s pretty much a black hole where archives are concerned. A blog is eternally Googlable, with time spent on the well-turned phrase paying off for years. Facebook posts trigger entertaining real-time chat and are quickly forgotten. It has its place, but is starting to annoy me.

I’ve been thinking about all this, as well as the precarious state of my finances (thanks to Peter Schiff’s organization, which talked me out of buying AAPL a few years ago since it would crash the moment Steve gets sick again). For a while after shutting down the old family home, I enjoyed the illusion of passive income and being “set,” but that turned out to be a fantasy. So, just like in the old BEHEMOTH and Microship days, I need to leverage my projects into something that provides break-even cash flow.

There are both fun and hard ways to do this. The hard ways include consulting and tech writing, leveraging my tools and learning curves, and I am in fact doing a little of this. It also includes book-writing (huge time investment but emotionally rewarding), magazine freelancing (iffy but fun), and developing products spawned by my projects (complex to start, but lucrative if done well and kept simple).

The most recent of these is a line of Expedition Medical Chests that my partner and I are producing. She’s a nurse, and with her experience patching up bodies and my years of adventure, we think we’ve found a sweet spot with ER-grade supplies, gasketed Lexan packaging, and a self-published book keyed to the contents. We’ll see… initial feedback is very positive.

That’s all fun stuff, but really, my home territory is expressed very simply: build machines that scratch the persistent itch of technopassion, sharing the process publicly. I never outgrew Science Fairs…

When I took off from Ohio in 1983 on the Winnebiko, I became the proto-blogger… posting tales of adventure on CompuServe, uploaded from my Radio Shack Model 100 via payphones. As the bike evolved though various upgrade projects into the Winnebiko II and then BEHEMOTH, this ongoing narrative veered into gizmology, and soon that became the core publishing activity. The Bikelab Notes and the 8-year series of Microship Status Reports ended up with thousands of subscribers… and benefited me hugely in terms of general PR, sponsor relations, media coverage, and even a primitive “Dear Lazyweb” crowdsourced research department. I don’t think I ever asked a question without getting at least some well-meaning advice (and usually the answers I needed).

It also built a community around the projects, making them part of a shared geek culture. Still, 20 years later, I occasionally get email from someone that begins, “I used to subscribe to your Bikelab Reports…” and then goes on to ask what’s up, share a thought upon stumbling across my current projects, or just say hello.

Speaking of BEHEMOTH, it has been in the Computer History Museum for many years and is now in their permanent Revolution exhibit. Those of you who remember the bike from yesteryear might get a kick out of this:

So thinking about all this, and recognizing the central role that ongoing narrative has played in my technomadics, I’ve decided to dust off the old publishing model and cast it in a new role as part of the Nomadness project.

This blog will not go away; in fact, it will improve by becoming a succession of articles about specific topics. Since it is eternally Googlable, it does its job best if posts are focused on one subject at a time… not rambling narratives about thinking about whether or not to plan a new way to manage a project that might be a better alternative to the current design… and oh, by the way, I put up some curtains. The blog should be clear and useful to people in the future who want solutions, not updates on the intermediate states of an ancient project.

A larger version of this same concept is the set of planned Boat Hacking monographs… hardcopy design packages with, in some cases, associated kits. But those don’t exist yet, so let’s not talk about them.

All that is good stuff, but it leaves out the personal narrative that made the Microship Status Reports so much fun. Those, being subscription-based, are the perfect vehicle for a nickel generator.

So here’s the announcement: I have just begun producing weekly newsletters about the Nomadness project, with lots of personal geeky rambling fun (here’s Issue #1 as a free sample, a 1.36 meg PDF). I’ve pondered the best way to deliver these, since the old method of plain-text email with links to pictures was messy and prone to link rot. To keep it client-agnostic and allow inline images, I’ll do them as PDF documents, which will be emailed to subscribers. For those who really prefer paper, they will be compiled into quarterly digests printed by MagCloud.

There is a Subscribe button over there on the right, and PayPal takes care of renewal (which can be declined or canceled, of course). Subscriptions to the weekly updates are $20/year, which is 38¢ a week. If the idea of automatic renewal makes you nervous, then you can order a single year for $20 with the Buy Now button instead.

Also, if you don’t want to use PayPal, no problem… I have a wonderful widget called Square that plugs into my Droid X and lets me take plastic via cell phone. Ain’t technology wonderful? We can do that by phone, or take an old-fashioned check by mail.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the fun, nearly real-time writing!

Life Changes

It seems odd, for someone who has lived a life of geek exhibitionism, to be all shy and private when it comes to matters of the heart. Readers of Computing Across America might be snickering, but that was more a retrospective… not real-time. Yes, changes have occurred, and Sky now owns and lives aboard Dervish, with which she will sail the Salish Sea this summer. Differences of direction from two strong-willed characters moved us to the two-boat solution, then beyond.

I’m now aboard Nomadness most of the time, with renewed project focus after the angst of Big Change… something that gets harder as we age. My new partner has taken over the house, and I return weekly to spend quality time, work on our Medical Chest business venture, recover from back pain episodes, shed tonnage, putter with chickens and kittens, play the piano, and get geared up for my next assault on the boat project. Kirsten is a wonderful friend and dorkelgånger… and I’m also relieved that I didn’t have to rent my house to strangers while still depending on the facilities there.

Oh, did I mention kittens? My dearly beloved Java disappeared around Thanksgiving, after being with me for 13 years. I’m assuming it was predation, but for months was haunted by not knowing, calling her every time I walked from house to lab, checking her usual hangouts inside and out for evidence of recent activity.

After a respectful interval we agreed that feline company is essential, so finally adopted a goofy pair and named them after two sailors on the 1994 BOC Challenge (round-the-world single-handed sailing race): Isabelle Autissier and The Ghost of Harry Mitchell. Izzy accompanies me to the boat where she never leaves my side; Harry has bonded with Kirsten; when together they switch modes and become bestest of kitty pals with our role relegated to support staff. Typical cats, in other words.

So those are the headlines, as they say. The boat projects are coming back to life with the reluctant return of warmth to the Pacific Northwest; already I’ve installed the new water heater, Fusion stereo with embedded iPod, removable padded step seat, and one of the final four pilothouse curtains. Next up is an adjustable bed in the forward cabin (back problems), new power system panel, and then the lab desk that will carry all the geeky bits.

If you want weekly ongoing updates, please consider the new subscription newsletter… future blog posts will be more focused on single projects as they are completed.

Cheers from Nomadness,
Steve

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged La Conner, Nomadness Report, publishing | 1 Comment

Paperless Voyaging

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Steve

It’s not easy to move aboard after over a decade in a familiar home and cluttered lab. Not only are there changes of expectation about what constitutes “comfort,” but everything important to daily life must somehow be incorporated into a space that is, in my case, less than 5% of the square footage that I have somehow expanded to fill over the years.

Many of the decisions are trivial, of course; ancient computers, long-dormant parts inventory, and piles of accumulated cruft are not hard to eliminate. Tools are a little harder, but I’ve already distilled an efficient subset of the redundancy of my unkempt shop (and I have the luxury of an intermediate workspace in the form of a mobile lab). Key systems are being built in to the ship’s console, treasures are being sold or stored, and I’m selecting the best of the kitchen stuff for my seagoing galley and donating the rest. So far, so good. It’s mostly just tonnage, replaceable down the road if need be.

But what about all the paper?

This is huge, and the more I stared at the problem, the more I realized that it has become a real obstacle: 35 years or more of correspondence, financial records, manufacturer literature, notebooks, saved articles, product documentation, maps, books, publication masters, magazine back issues, business cards, random scraps… along with dozens of binders packed with my own magazine articles and expedition media coverage. It adds up to an absurd quantity of paper, some of which is actually important (or might be someday) and all of which feels like undifferentiated, overwhelming clutter. Three 5-drawer file cabinets, multiple other drawers, overflowing bookcases and shelves, musty bankers’ boxes of sagging file folders… every document is a tiny anchor holding me down.

Gulliver tied down in Lilliput

Clearly, the first step is to eliminate most of it; I’ve hauled many a load to the recycling center and destroyed old financials that carry personal information. But still… there is a lot left. This posting is about two tools that I’ve recently added to my life that are specifically intended to deal with this problem.

The Kindle

I’ve dabbled in e-books over the years, most actively when I was carrying around a Tapwave Zodiac PDA back in 2005. I’ve since been aware of various offerings in that product space, but figured I’d eventually move to an iPad.

Well. The Kindle popped up on my radar recently when I read about the combined WiFi and 3G communications with no recurring fees, battery life (wireless offf) on the order of a month, spectacular screen, PDF support, and other interesting features. Could it really be that good? I spent many hours reading reviews and MobileRead forums, thought it through, and went for it… along with the leather cover with built-in light. It’s been about a month now, and I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

Frankly, I’m rather blown away by this thing. Not only has it improved the reading experience over books (which I never thought I’d say), but the communications are so sweetly integrated that I think of it as my little knowledge gadget. The browser does not replace a full-featured environment like Firefox/Safari/Chrome, of course… there’s no color, only one window can exist at a time, cursor control is fiddly compared to a mouse, the print is tiny if you display a busy web page fit-to-screen instead of zoomed, and navigation is slow… but it’s free and secondary to the primary function of the device. It integrates “sharing” very well, and allows a painless post to Facebook and Twitter without going through the browser at all.

Searching is well-integrated, making it feel more like a research tool than just an e-book reader. I can be reading along and decide I want to know more about something, type the term, then choose the scope of the search: the current book, all the books stored in the device (fully indexed, so it’s instant), the Amazon store, Google, or Wikipedia. If a browser page is “busy” with sidebars like Wikipedia, I click “Article Mode” to strip all that and display the text just like a book.

In other words, it’s really well thought out… better than I expected by far. The fact that it can hold about 3,500 books in addition to all this is just crazy to contemplate, and a single keystroke starts a surprisingly good text-to-speech reading of the current page. (It also plays audiobooks, which I have not tried, and includes a minimal MP3 player.)

The environment is not as rich as an iPad or netbook, of course, but I like it better for reading since the screen is passive, happy in direct sunlight, power-miserly, visible over a very wide angle, and even useful in bed at night (by pulling out the light integrated into the case). It’s also much cheaper, and the lack of monthly fees makes it painless to own. Of course, Amazon does that in the hope that readers will shop regularly in their store… something I have already done a few times. Here’s a page of my own Reaching Escape Velocity Kindle book:

The device also supports PDF, and I’ve been installing a library of manuals and system documentation to provide a portable documentation resource on the boat, functional in awkward corners or when there has been a system failure with the Big Iron or related network tools. Transferring files is easy – plug in the USB cable and drag them across, or send them to your Kindle’s unique email address at no charge (unless you use 3G, in which case Amazon charges 15 cents a megabyte for the transfer). That service can even do format conversions on the fly, but there is a free tool called Calibre that makes locally managing the Kindle library easy, including conversion of other e-book formats to MOBI (which is what underlies Amazon’s copy-protected AZW).

If your primary need is complex technical PDF viewing, the larger Kindle DX is probably the better choice… it has a 9.7″ display instead of the 6″ one that’s on mine, and the difference is reportedly huge when in PDF-land. I was tempted, but when I considered the wide range of uses and the premium I place on portable convenience, the smaller (and cheaper) one made more sense. Some graphics-intensive files are better viewed by rotating the image, and it’s possible to zoom and scroll in discrete steps…

So how will all this map onto life aboard Nomadness? The bookshelf over the pilothouse nav station is 42 inches wide, and there are a few little nooks here and there where other volumes will doubtless be tucked (berth-side shelves and nacelles in the lab area). Almost all of that premium library space is going to be given over to reference material like cruising guides, books about ship systems, software manuals, and so on. General fiction and nonfiction titles will live in the Kindle… and I’ve already found that for linear reading I prefer this over paper.

In addition to books, the portable PDF library, and general online research, the Kindle will serve as a repository of reference material like checklists and procedures. There is obvious overlap between this and the local server that can be accessed by any wireless browser on the boat (iPhone Touch, Droid, iPad, laptop, or whatever), but the single-point failure potential of a complex and power-hungry system is significant enough to justify a backup that takes almost no power and works in bright sunlight. Calibre will be used to manage this, keeping version control from being an issue in the more dynamic documents… including a running backup of the logbook and PDF copies of all ship’s papers.

Document Conversion via ScanSnap

I keep mentioning PDF versions of my own documents, but until recently that was a difficult thing to accomplish. For years, the Mac has been able to “print to PDF,” which is fine… but what about all the paper I complained about at the beginning of this article?

The traditional method of getting documents into a computer, of course, is a scanner… and I have a nice Canon 8800F flatbed that I quite adore for photos and taking crisp eBay images of philatelic or numismatic artifacts. It will probably even travel with me, unless I break down and get a Brother all-in-one compromise machine to handle the 11×17 printouts that are the technical drawing standard on the boat.

The problem, however, is that a flatbed scanner is a real pain for text: it turns papers into beautiful images, not text files that can be indexed by your computer. You can feed scans to OCR software, of course, but there are a lot of fiddly steps (which translate into it never getting done, if you’re like me). What we really want is to convert paper documents into Searchable PDF files, which invisibly overlay machine readable text over an image of the physical document and are thus the best of both worlds. These are automatically indexed by your computer (via Spotlight on the Mac), and you can copy and paste from them.

Fortunately, someone has been building devices optimized for this over the past few years: the Fujitsu ScanSnap series. Current models are the S15oo desktop machine, and the svelte little S1300 portable version. Inspired by an excellent e-book (Take Control of your Paperless Office, by Joe Kissell), I ordered the portable version from Amazon and spent an evening fine-tuning the various options.

And, I gotta tellya, I’m impressed. A little “ScanSnap manager” window pops up, letting you select whether you’re aiming the next scan at the standard default process (which for me is a Searchable PDF with multiple pages and auto-detection of double-sided documents), or to various alternatives: image, business-card interpreter tied to the address book, email, Word document, Excel, print, raw image to a folder, or iPhoto. Then you just drop the stack of paper in the machine and it does the rest.

Naturally, there are lots of knobs to twiddle regarding image quality and other options, and since my interest is archival, I’m making the magazine articles pretty but settling for average on the receipts and business documents. They all get sorted into a growing file hierarchy in a folder called “PDF Library,” though many people use enhanced database tools (like Devon Think) to manage it all. It’s pretty cool to type “ScanSnap” into Spotlight and get a PDF of the Amazon invoice that arrived when I bought it… maybe I’ll be less sloppy when the next tax time rolls around.

An interesting side-project that’s falling out of this is my attempt to publish the full collection of my media coverage and magazine articles over the years… probably in some content-management system like WordPress so I don’t get buried in site-design and navigation details. This led me into an exploration of how PDFs get indexed by Google, and it turns out that some fine-tuning is a good idea. Title and author metadata, in particular, should be deliberately set so that the search results don’t plug in some arbitrary string from the beginning of the document.

The canonical way to do this is the powerful Adobe Acrobat Pro, of course, but I found a couple of free tools. My favorite, which just does the job without requiring me to think very much, is the free PDFInfo from Sybrex; there is also a very flexible PDF Toolkit licensed under the GPL and available on all platforms. Since the “ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap” doesn’t let you set this metadata, adding one of these tools to the workflow will give you more control over the indexing of the resulting file.

The other issue is how, exactly, to display these on a web page. It’s user-hostile to just put in a PDF-download link, which drops a file in the user’s computer that is then opened by a reader app. It turns out that there are various ways to embed them on a page, and I’m still experimenting with various platforms and browsers to be sure they don’t require non-universal plug-ins. Here’s a test file from my magazine article archives, a piece I published in Creative Computing back in 1979…

[removed since it demands
a plug-in on most browsers]

What I notice while doing this is that the process is very fiddly in WordPress, with it adding a Shockwave wrapper and making the editing and sizing process a royal pain. In practice, if I do a lot of them, I may instead end up with a jpeg thumbnail of the article, the full extracted text as plain HTML, and a link to download the Searchable PDF. (Sounds like a job for Automator!) If the above is not readable, or is insisting that you install a plug-in to view the content, please let me know… this public test is part of my learning curve.

Anyway, the main point of all this is to convert mountains of paper into bits on a disk, and at that, the ScanSnap excels. Every time I scan something and throw it into the recycling bin, I feel incrementally lighter… and a little closer to sailing away.

Down with Paper

All in all, tonnage-reduction is a painful process, especially when it comes to those irreplaceable things like documents that carry much more meaning than the physical paper itself. Integrating a paperless toolset into the boat is thus a critical part of disconnecting from a land-based existence, and although it is daunting at first, the net effect is hugely liberating.

Among other things, it becomes possible to do proper backups… including off-site or cloud storage of the complete archive. Where a fire would have meant catastrophic loss of a lifetime’s personal archives, now it just means the loss of stuff. Individual items can be found instantly, as if a “personal Google” has suddenly materialized with access to all that stuff from the dark ages before our current computers. Hard copy can still be conjured when needed for tax or legal purposes, and sharing is easy. This is all consistent with the agility needed for a true technomadic lifestyle.

My next post here will probably be about the larger aspects of that, in fact. I coined the term technomad back in 1984, and over the years have evangelized the set of concepts that enabled me to travel full time. The world has changed considerably, and there a number of people now doing this with an agility that I could barely have imagined back then. My friends Chris and Cherie, for example, have been wandering freely for many years and documenting the process so clearly that they, in turn, have become an inspiration to others through their Tales from Techomadia blog. I’ve just been reading their excellent new e-book: Answers to the Common Excuses, which addresses a lot of the things that keep people from chasing technomadic dreams.

Cheers from the Nomadhouse, which will not be home for much longer!
Steve

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Blogs, Biz, and Bottom Jobs

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Steve

Well, that sure took longer than expected. I had plenty of warning last year about the impending demise of the blogging tool I’d been using forever, but my standard PFD mode manifested itself… and for months, an item hovering ominously near the top of my to-do list was “URGENT: WordPress migration!” Actually doing this was complicated by other content in the same directory (under Joomla) as well as still more ancient static files, so I kept putting it off… even after Blogger abandoned the FTP service upon which I had been depending.

Few readers care about the infrastructure of a website, so I’ll spare you the grisly details… but the bottom line is that my friend and fellow sailor Barry Stellrecht happens to be a WordPress geek, and along with his delightful partner Meps, is taking a break from S/V Flutterby and visiting parents here on the island prior to heading off to Burning Man. In two sessions, with much heroics and magic-wand waving, Barry banished the cruft from nomadness.com, imported my old content, ensured that vintage permalinks still work, coached me on a few admin issues, and sent me on my way. Thanks, Barry!

A Flurry of Catch-up Notes

Since the last post was nearly 6 months ago, it would hardly do for me to just expound in detail on recent activity without first restoring context. I’ve been microblogging on Facebook, which has scratched the itch at this end, but that platform is useless when it comes to leaving a meaningful public archive. So I need to bring things up to date before sharpening the focus onto specifics.

The underlying challenge here is that there is no simple linear transition to a pair of distant sailboats from 4300 square feet of Geek Entropy on an island without moorage. I’m thus embarking on a caricature of “moving aboard,” complicated further by my quixotic desire to turn Nomadness into the Starship Enterprise in the process. I have to throw everything up in the air and expect it to fall back to earth, completely rearranged and considerably smaller… that 4300 square feet worth of stuff must now fit into about 1000.

A key tool for transitional stability is the mobile lab (named Polaris). This was well underway in my last posting, and is now essentially finished. Rather than fill space here with a description, I’ll just link to my 4-part series in MAKE:online…

Make it Anywhere with a Mobile Lab (introduction)
Substrate (the trailer itself)
Fixtures (furniture, tools, and the wall of drawers)
Systems (power and communications)

Looking aft inside Polaris, with the folding whiteboard open to expose the wall of parts drawers.

At the moment, this machine is sitting outside my house on Camano Island, slowly becoming my primary workspace as I take the axe to over a decade of clutter. Things are leaving via FreeCycle, eBay, and garage sales… but there is a long way to go. Want some books?

Meanwhile, a temporary landing zone has been established in Olympia. We moved the sailboats a couple of months ago, and rented a small studio with enough land to accommodate trailers (the back yard of a dear old friend of Sky, about 4 miles from the marina). I’m not thrilled with the marina or South Sound in general, but I have hit a wall with every attempt to find live-aboard moorage with nearby powered parking in any of the places I’d like to be… and Sky has family health issues and a friend network pulling her in that direction.

And so, I’m spending this prime Northwest cruising season faffing about with logistics while my boat waits, freshly bottom-painted but stuck in murky waters on an end tie next to covered moorage. She’s in danger of whacking her shrouds on a metal roof in easterly winds and power-boat wakes, and if she’s still stuck there during heavy snowfall there’s the small matter of the dock sinking and being supported by bar-tight docklines connected to the trapped boats, but hey… at least I can park my mobile lab on-site and they are cool with live-aboards and boat work. That’s more than I can say for most marinas around here… few even answer email, most have waiting lists, and some will go all Nazi on your nautical ass if you dare open a paint can or spin up a drill.

Nomadness and Dervish on the 80-foot shared end tie. The metal posts hold up the roof of a long covered-moorage section.

At this point, I really want to find the fast-forward button and get moving on fun stuff. I’d take a break and go cruising, but I need to get my place on the island rented out ASAP to stem the bleeding cashflow.

Speaking of Business…

We had a somewhat crazy idea after buying Dervish (Sky’s sailboat) and being stuck with an unwanted boat trailer. Why not rent it out? Keelboat trailers are rare, and commercial boat-hauling services are expensive. I made a little sailboat trailer for rent web page, and she ran an ad in 48 North. The rig has been busy ever since, covering thousands of miles.

Our rental boat trailer can handle sailboats up to about 9000 pounds and 30 feet LOA.

It hasn’t been without trauma… all four tires developed bubbles and had to be replaced, the brakes had their wires pull out thanks to a rewiring job with insufficient slack, every job presents unexpected challenges, and we had to do one hauling job ourselves after a boat yard in Port Orchard declared loading a Catalina 27 impossible <eyeroll>. But it’s working, and at this rate Dervish should be paid for in a year or two of trailer-rental revenue.

Nomadness has an associated business model as well, but it requires extensive geekery and writing… a far more time-consuming process. The only ROI on my expensive monster will be the joy of geek expressionism, something I desperately want to get back to.

But there’s another boat in the Nomadic Research Labs flotilla that hasn’t gotten much attention lately, and that is the Microship. This amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran is the result of about a decade of full-time focus, all the money I managed to earn from speaking gigs, the generous help of hundreds of sponsors and volunteers, and one hired fiberglass/machining guru who spent years on-site at the Microship lab.

My life changed in various ways 6-7 years ago, derailing the planned expedition, yet I was loathe to pull the plug… so kept puttering on the project. This segued into the Bubba kayak, then Shacktopus (an abstracted technomadic toolset independent of mobile substrate). In 2005 my father passed away, so I spent 6 months shutting down the family home in Kentucky, then decided to leverage the value of the house to move up to a boat of global-voyaging scale.

The first attempt was a mistake (Microship-on-steroids, we called it), but then I found this Amazon 44. Despite a few things that might have been deal-breakers had I known about them, this is the boat I’ll be using for the foreseeable future… but one little detail remains: I still have the Microship, parked in the middle of the building that was erected for its construction.

More than just the familiar twinge whenever I walk through the lab, this is getting to be a bit of a problem: I have no place to put it, other than tarped-over in that Olympia back yard. Since I’ve finally accepted that the 14,000-mile Clueless & Lark expedition on coastal and inland waterways is not going to happen, I guess… well… I guess I need to sell the micro-trimaran.

Microship Wordplay docked on Bainbridge Island during the 2001 maiden voyage.

I put a note on the website about this a while back and got a few inquiries, but I really need to find a mediagenic technomadling who sees this as a way to shortcut a massive development effort. Of course, my design goals are quirky enough that there may be nobody who fits this unique boatlet, but in case there is… we have put her on Yachtworld. This is surreal, and I hope it’s over soon. And no, that price is not cast in stone (though it is a fraction of the actual development budget and is not at all unrealistic for the engineering and actual costs involved).

Nomadness Haulout – a Photo Essay

Finally, an update on the boat. While all this has been going on, serious geekery (Arduino nodes, Linux server, console fabrication, even the Waterworks) has been back-burnered.

She did have a haulout, though – her first since 2005, and long-overdue. The diver in Oak Harbor, last time down, estimated 5-600 pounds of biology clinging to the bottom. Ancient antifouling paint was long-gone, and bare metal was showing in spots. Yikes. I scheduled a haulout at Swantown, coincident with the move to Olympia (an entertaining 3-day run that included anchoring in the front row for the legendary Quartermaster Harbor fireworks display on July 4).

I’ve had a few previous boatyard experiences that left me wary of the whole industry, but I gotta say this was pretty good. The Port folks (Tony and Jessica) were superbly competent, and the guys at Shurtz Marine were a pleasure to deal with. We had a long talk first, and agreed on a flat rate bottom job (with an upcharge for fancy paint), as well as all the hand-holding I needed at no charge (though they’d be happy to start the clock anytime, of course, if I decided to delegate).

Nomadness was on the hard for a couple of weeks, and I did all the prep work for the bottom job. There were about 150 patches of bare steel, and all had to be ground to bright metal, acid-etched, and covered with multiple primer coats… with every step constrained by induction times and temperature-dependent recoat intervals.

The worst part was the bottom of the keel, where completely unfamiliar paint colors revealed that this area had been ignored during previous haulouts. I spent the brutal heat wave of July suited up, grinding just inches over my head, and slinging toxins… yielding a self-portrait I used as my Facebook profile picture for a while:

I keep adding to my list of things I would never want to do for a living...

It was grim, but worth it… here’s a before-and-after photo of this out-of-sight/out-of-mind area. There’s plenty of steel there, of course, and aesthetics are not an issue, but it is very important with a metal boat to keep the protective “glove” intact.

Before and after view of the bottom of the keel. This involved many hours with pneumatic die grinder and Makita angle grinder, acid etch, 5 primer layers, and (later) 3 coats of Micron 66.

I complain, but the process was actually useful in an unexpected way… really getting to know my ship. Ultimately, I’m responsible for this machine; in some distant anchorage, if something goes wrong, there is nobody in the world who will care as much as I do about the situation. As I discovered in 2008 with the plumber-from-hell, assuming that someone else will take care of it is not a viable attitude for the captain of a vessel. Not only did I get an intimate feel for the entire underwater profile, but I made a database of all the through-hulls, extracted key dimensions, and photographed every detail.

Using a die grinder and non-woven abrasive to feather out bare spots on the steel keel before applying acid etch and 5 primer coats.

After completing all the prep, I stepped back and let their guys do the bottom job. I chose Micron 66, a self-polishing copper-acrylate copolymer that does not use TBT. Antifouling is one of those subjects that leads to endless passionate discussion in the forums, and I have no idea if it was really the best choice… but after discounting others that have not worked well for me and factoring in the steel hull and northwest usage pattern, I opted for this top-of-the-line Interlux product in the hope that it will delay my next haulout by a year. We went with a red indicator layer covered by blue, both with cayenne pepper added (useful, according to anecdotal evidence, but nobody really knows):

Bottom job nearly done. At this point, the boat had to be hoisted and re-blocked to allow access to the spots that were supporting the keel.

The remaining below-waterline details included Max-prop maintenance, replacing all the zincs, and going over everything with a keen eye. Here are the new sacrificial zincs, which are intended to give up material in response to galvanic or electrolytic influence before the much more expensive metal parts of the boat. Given the excellent coating, I’m not worried about the hull for now… but protecting that prop is critical, as well as the rudder shaft.

Sacrificial zinc anodes on Nomadness. From top to bottom: one of these monsters is on each side amidships, the rudder post zinc is machined to fit, and both shaft and nose zincs protect the expensive 3-blade Max-prop

With the bottom done, I had to make a decision… how much to do topsides. There is no shortage of projects that would be much easier in a boatyard, including the looming mess caused by improper installation of aluminum opening ports. But that’s a big one, and I was getting nervous about time and money. I decided to limit the above-waterline jobs to repairing paint damage in three areas: the stem (from running up on a dock during a tricky maneuver in the wind last year, as well as other badly patched dings before my time), a 3″ starboard patch (from the rough workdock at Cap Sante after it ate one of my fenders in a storm), and a variety of rusty spots on the stern caused by bites from nasty steel fixtures on the dinghy.

Here is where Steve, the resident paint wizard at Shurtz Marine, really helped. He patiently explained the whole Awlgrip repair process, finally writing out an illustrated procedure sheet. I took everything down to bare metal with a vacuum sandblaster (coolest tool ever)…

This amazing sandblaster eliminates the whole tenting and dust-control problem on localized jobs - it gloms onto the surface and blasts a spot about 1/2" across.

From that point, it was just another precisely timed sequence of coatings, bringing the damaged areas up to a solid primer that can remain in that state for years (precise color-matching with Awlgrip is another matter entirely, and Steve didn’t blink with I told him that Cap Sante had quoted me $1300 to fix that little 3-inch patch caused by their dock). I’m just not going to go there; the only way to stay sane and avoid going broke as the owner of a steel boat is to frequently repeat this mantra: “workboat patina.”

The stem, by the way, will be protected by a chunk of KeelGuard. This is a dense plastic strip that is held in place by a highly aggressive adhesive (“you have one shot,” said Steve). It’s not often seen on sailboats, but who cares? Next time I plow into something, it will provide another layer of protection… and the VEE of the Redneck Bow Thruster will use it as a gasket. Alas, we didn’t quite get to this, so I get to take that one shot from the wobbly platform of a dinghy.

Launch day arrived. Tony and the crew picked her up again (protecting the fresh bottom paint with wax paper under the straps) and gingerly deposited her back in the brackish waters of South Puget Sound. There is no relief quite like that of seeing your boat once again afloat…

Nomadness flies back into the water after 2 weeks in the boatyard.

Now that the boatyard ordeal is over, my first project is inspired by the “hot” marina in which I’m parked, infamous for electrolytic corrosion due to deferred maintenance, metal dock structures, and a large number of derelict boats. My new zincs may be experiencing accelerated dissolution at the moment, but hopefully the galvanic isolator that came with the boat will minimize damage until I install the new isolation transformer.

I’ll save details on the AC power system for my next post, but here’s a nutshell summary of this project. To meet ABYC standards, I’ve added a dedicated shore-power circuit breaker, and also got rid of the old 30-amp twist connector in favor of a new SmartPlug. This goes straight to the Charles ISO-G2 isolation transformer, which is then one of the sources selected by a new Blue Sea panel. This is moving to the main power console, since the original location for AC switching was painfully unserviceable (it will become a much-needed pantry). And of course there will be new metering, integration with the Outback inverter/charger, and other refinements.

The most novel bit is a dedicated outlet (with ground-fault protection) for Dervish – making Nomadness the “shore power” source for the smaller boat. Given my 7.5 KW genset, shore isolation, and impending 420-watt solar array, this makes sense.

And Now, On with the Project!

Well, it feels good to catch up with this blog (tossing both Joomla and Blogger in the process). The writing process with WordPress is much more interactive and flexible, and I am no longer looking at maintaining this site as a chore.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be focused on shutting down the facilities on Camano Island (want some stuff?) and moving all operations to two boats, one mobile lab, an auxiliary trailer, and the studio. Sheesh. It’s a little embarrassing to realize that I used to live on a bicycle!

Cheers from the Nomadhouse,
Steve

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged business, haulout, paint, Polaris mobile lab, trailer | 7 Comments

The Tools of Extraction

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Steve

I’m aboard Nomadness at the moment, here to do the water-heater installation, but in classic fashion got drawn into the “opportunities” presented by this infernally glowing laptop. There seem to be two big changes afoot that will require difficult decisions and learning curves: the radical change in eBay’s fee structure that will induce me to build up my store, and Google throwing us faithful FTP bloggers under the bus.

The latter is a pain, but apparently there are disproportionate engineering resources associated with the .5% of all blogs hosted on separate servers (like mine) instead of blogspot.com. I’m in no position to argue this, and almost believe it, more or less; the “pointed-index syndrome” must come up a lot, with the tech-support folk pointing fingers at each other, saying, “your problem is over there.”

Their radical solution to this is to shut it down entirely, giving us little time and only two choices… neither one pleasant. We can be assimilated, letting Google host our content while breaking the functionality of the rest of the site, or we can change blogging platforms. I have opted for the latter, and will either incorporate all this into the existing Joomla installation at nomadness.com or go with the crowd and install WordPress.

I mention this only as a heads-up about likely glitches over the next month or so… and to see if anyone who has been through this learning curve is willing to do a bit of hand-holding.

Ah well, that’s all just bits-and-vapor anyway! Let’s talk about the fun stuff.

Moves of a Physical Nature

There’s something substantial in the works. As recent posts have hinted, I’m working on extracting myself from 12 years of being mired in a cluttered lab, and it’s actually starting to look real. No firm date is set, but this is the season; with the mobile lab receiving an infusion of carefully filtered inventory (along with the occasional bolus of material related to specific projects), I am close to considering it my primary workspace. Already, key tools and furniture are in place, shifting the theater of operations.

The first move of the trailer (named Polaris) will be a short one – about 750 feet to a parking spot near my house. I’m repurposing the old hot-tub circuit to provide an RV-style power outlet, and for a short embryonic period I’ll work on the edge of the meadow, nursing my severed umbilicus back to the maternal building in the forest. Meanwhile, I’ll move anything that still matters in the old lab to the office suite upstairs, closed off with a separate security perimeter.

(Except the Microship, of course. I still don’t know what’s going to become of that 10-year labor of love!)

Anyway, at that point two things will be able to occur: renting out the 2000 square-foot shop space, and moving the mobile lab to the marina to provide on-site support for boat projects. With multiple power sources (30-amp shore cable, 2 kW Honda generator, and 240 watts of solar panels), along with access to the boat’s wireless LAN and good light/heat/security, it should be as useful as a small dedicated building… or more so, given the ability to trundle back to home base if needed, or, as we start to live aboard full time, to whatever marina happens to catch our fancy for the duration of pre-nomadic staging.

Both Nomadness and Dervish have huge project lists (updated daily), and the past year of slow progress has made it clear that the only way to finish is to move onto the boats and make a full-time job of it. So here we go… and not a moment too soon. I’ve been feeling increasingly old and creaky, with the occasional sickness of dear friends serving as a chilling reminder that I don’t have forever. I miss those halcyon days of seeming immortality…

Tooling Around

The exercise of selecting tools for the mobile lab has been a challenge; I no longer have the luxury of essentially unlimited space. The long-desired milling machine had to be set aside, and my existing suite of heavy motorized things had to be scaled way back. Only the table saw, floor-mount drill press, compressor, and sander/grinder made the cut (plus a few portable power tools, of course).

I’m reserving one generous bit of bench real estate for a key tool that I’m seriously considering moving aboard the boat when the time comes… a small CNC router (either a BlueChick implemented in sealed birch ply or the smaller FireBall V90, but I’m not sure yet). This will solve the pesky problem of making precise and beautiful front panels, of which I need about ten, and will also lend itself to printed-circuit milling, signage, and random small parts amenable to the 2.5-D approach (not full 3D). The thought of gliding into an anchorage with custom-parts fabrication ability, perhaps also with a future incarnation of the MakerBot tucked into a corner, is intriguing… much barter and nickel-generation potential.

In the photo above, the robot will fill the table and the wall will carry my old mini-ITX SolarPC, dedicated to stepper motor control and interfaced via parallel port. It’s how the hobby CNC world does things, and that’s fine with me… no wheels to reinvent, and just a few more learning curves!

The rest of Polaris is about what you’d expect for the intended geeky mission: a robust electronics lab, general shop, hacking space, and rolling inventory bin. As I work on projects aboard Nomadness, I find that most of them don’t need anything more than what is about to be right up the ramp in the parking lot. It should speed things considerably.

Unplugging from Camano

And so, a long epoch is about to end. When I landed on Camano Island in 1998, it was to be for 2-3 years – just enough to finish the Microships and take off. But life has a way of throwing little curves, and there were enough of those to slowly grow roots much deeper than the ones I had to rip free when I left Ohio on my bicycle in 1983. Not only does that get harder with age, but “the wanderer’s danger is to find comfort,” as William Least Heat Moon once said. Or, even more poetically, this exquisite graffiti I spotted back in 1986 or so on a San Francisco municipal bus:

Soft chains are the most difficult to break:
affection, ease.
The spirit, wide-eyed, limp-muscled, nestles
on its side
and waits….

Well, not anymore. Here we go!

Fair winds,
Steve

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged blog, Polaris mobile lab, tools | 7 Comments

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The Tools of Extraction

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