
---------------------- 
NOTES FROM THE BIKELAB 
Issue #5 -- 1/16/91
by Steven K. Roberts
----------------------

Copyright (C) 1990 by Steven K. Roberts.  All Rights Reserved.

	IN THIS ISSUE:
		A few announcements
		Home base quest
		On-the-road Scenario

	Hofstadter's Law:  "It always takes longer than you think it
	will take, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
			-- Douglas R. Hofstadter

A Few Announcements
-------------------

	Short update this week -- I'm in the jaws of overload.  Every
	piece of the project takes much longer than it should, and it's
	starting to seem like I'm making a career of RUMP latches,
	phone calls, and email.  So there's not much hot technical news
	for this issue, unless you count the arrival of a care package
	of environmentally sealed connectors from LEMO, a trio of huge
	trailer shockmounts from Lord Mfg, a growing CD library along
	with a neat way to carry them, and intriguing sponsorship
	possibilities from the madness of MacWorld.

	I do have two announcements, though.  First, as I mentioned
	last week, the bike will be featured on this week's edition of
	Silicon Valley Report, aired on channel 54 by KTEH.  The times
	are:

		Thursday 1/17 -- 9:00 PM
		Friday 1/18   -- 7:30 PM
		Saturday 1/19 -- 5:30 PM

	Second, in response to many requests, I am about to start the
	open-house series in the bikelab.  At present, this offer is
	for SUN EMPLOYEES ONLY:  I'll be hosting groups of ten or so
	people a week, selected from a list of requests.  Each
	mini-open-house will be on a Friday afternoon at 3:00, and will
	last 1-2 hours.  To get on the list, please email a request to
	wordy@bikelab.Corp and tell me who you are, what you do (in a
	sentence or two), how many will be in your party, and if there
	are any Fridays when you can't make it.  The idea here is to
	put together reasonably congruent groups of people, allowing us
	to get into interesting focused discussion beyond bike
	show-n-tell.  Part of my job here is to share information,
	ideas, packaging concepts, specific technologies that may be of
	use to Sun, and relevant contacts, and this approach seems to
	have much higher bandwidth than the occasional crowded speech
	and its accompanying Q&A session.  (What's in it for me, of
	course, is access to your ideas, meeting interesting people,
	and finding help on some of the projects.)  The series begins
	Friday, 1/25.

Home Base Quest
---------------

	Speaking of finding help, there's a big quest underway at the
	moment.  As you may have read earlier, I'm hitting the road
	full time on July 15 (only 26 weeks away).  It would be
	pleasant to just fling open the doors of this building and
	pedal away, knowing that everything is under control... but
	it's not that easy.  I have a full-scale lab here with a lot of
	resources, as well as an office that must be managed by someone
	who becomes my universe interface.  Suddenly it's time to start
	working on finding the right situation.

	Ideally, the lab will remain operational in a space of about
	5-600 square feet, managed by a spirited techno-polyglot who is
	in a position to benefit from my tools (CAD systems, laptops,
	milling machine, development systems, inventory, ham gear, test
	equipment, industry contacts, sponsors, etc.).  The "job"
	involves keeping the lab alive, acting as my technical support
	base, shipping the occasional replacement part, commiserating
	with me on the phone when I blow out a bifurcated widgetframus
	in Corsica due to excessive refrangible densiosity, and
	otherwise hold the operation together.  If the lab can remain
	here at Sun, so much the better:  whoever runs it can become
	the consulting liaison.

	It would be nice if the office can remain coupled with the lab,
	but it is not absolutely necessary.  Again, I offer a suite of
	equipment that can support someone's freelancing -- along with
	enough contacts in the media to launch another whole career.
	What's needed here is an intelligent generalist who wants to
	present the illusion of stability to the world, participate in
	all my relationships, run the mail-order business, do daily
	email and matter-transfer, manage the finances, and otherwise
	hold the whole affair together while I'm pedaling the planet
	aboard trusty BEHEMOTH.

	This must all be underway by April.  If you are intrigued by
	either or both, please write me a letter and tell me why.

On-the-road Scenario
--------------------

	Finally, I offer the following as a reminder (to us both) of
	why I'm doing all this.  It's easy to forget, you know:  the
	mysteries of the Road (lovingly referred to throughout my
	various ramblings as "The Other Woman") sometimes seem pretty
	abstract when I'm so deeply immersed in the technical side of
	the project that actually having to pedal it seems like a
	design flaw.

	Recently, I sold an article to Marlow Magazine, a new
	publication that debuts this month from the PC & Mac Connection
	people in New Hampshire.  The editor wanted something a little
	more lively than my usual attempt to summarize the machine's
	technical capabilities, and I delivered a piece that included
	an imaginary scenario of a typical day on the road.  Here it
	is, updated to reflect the latest developments.  Relax and put
	yourself into this scene:

--------------

	Hot sweat steams inside layers of polypropylene.  The road,
	winding and narrow, is a relentless 9% grade stretching before
	you into the clouds.  An occasional logging truck splashes past
	with a roar and the smell of chopped fir.  Sounds:  rain
	ticking ripstop, your own rhythmic panting, the soft clatter of
	chain and derailleur, an occasional muted birdsong, your mate's
	voice breathless in your ear via 2-meter ham radio, the soft
	whir of a pump pushing coolant through the helmet heat
	exchanger, the bike's speech synthesizer piping up to announce
	system events or incoming calls.  The heads-up display shows a
	shimmering red scrolling map of Shasta County, your own
	location a centered blinking arrow derived from the GPS satnav
	system, tonight's campsite a slowly nearing tent icon.  You
	zoom out, and 32 miles ahead is a house; you double-click it
	with the thumb mouse and a window opens, showing the database
	record of an online friend you've never met.  Too far... maybe
	tomorrow night.

	The console in front of you carries both Mac and DOS
	environments, with the former able to open under Multifinder an
	X session to the SPARCstation (file server and CDROM mapping
	workstation) behind the seat.  The main display is a HyperCard
	graphic user interface to the FORTH embedded control systems,
	and you see at a glance that the battery is at 68% with 23.4
	hours to discharge predicted at present sliding-average
	rate...  no solar power today.  You touch a thumb button to
	engage the head mouse, and with a subtle nod click on the ham
	radio icon.  A virtual front panel pops up, looking remarkably
	like the Icom HF transceiver back in the trailer -- with a
	click of another button it comes to life, while below your
	awareness a trio of FORTH processors in the bike's major nodes
	set bits in their audio crosspoint switch matrices to establish
	a bidirectional audio link between radio and helmet.  Your Ohio
	friend is still chatting away on 20 meters... you break in at a
	polite moment and let him know you'll be on from the campground
	after dinner:  will he have time to check some documentation
	for you?  There's a databook you never got around to adding to
	the bike's microfiche library, and as Murphy would have it,
	that's the one you need.

	That issue shelved, you open a text window and add a few
	thoughts to your article about this remarkable mountain range,
	typing flute-like on the binary handlebar keyboard with barely
	perceptible movements of your fingertips.  You are actually
	keying in macros, which are interpreted by PRD+ running in the
	background on the T1000 that occupies the lower third of the
	console.  "otr" you key, and "on the road" appears on the
	screen; continuing in this fashion, you appear to the system as
	a 100+ word-per-minute typist, blazing away through a
	FORTH-controlled matrix that masquerades as a standard
	Macintosh keyboard.

	A synthesized voice in your ear:   "Satellite pass complete;
	you have mail."  Speaking distinctly, you say "read it" into
	the boom microphone; the Covox interprets the command and the
	Audapter immediately reads you a friendly note from a woman in
	Australia, ported from Internet via a gateway in Silicon
	Valley.

	Another logging truck, too close!  You touch a red thumb button
	and the air horns blast -- the driver swerves and toots back.
	Grr.
	The road levels, the rain finally stops, and it's a downhill
	coast all the way to camp.  Occasionally you squeeze the
	brakes, but never quite enough to engage the hydraulics -- the
	bicycle control processor senses the pressure rise in the
	system and directs the regenerative braking controller to draw
	a proportional amount of power from the variable-reluctance
	front wheel hub.  This satisfies your braking requests, and
	dumps a couple hundred watts into the power bus.  Today it
	recharges the batteries... on a sunny day, the excess power
	would be passed to the solid-state refrigerator that cools the
	thermal mass of drinking water... providing a heat sink for
	your helmet cooler.  It feels good to conserve scarce
	resources.

	An hour later you are camping, smells from the stove
	intoxicating, the sweet buzz of healthy tired muscles
	retreating in the glow of firelight, Gran Marnier, and a smooth
	CD on the stereo.  In its own tent, the bike waits, security
	system alert and watching for movement.  You can't relax yet,
	though -- you have to consult an OrCAD file prior to the sked
	with the ham in Ohio... you climb into your tent, and under
	candlelight open an aluminum suitcase, flip up a small antenna,
	touch a key to awaken the laptop, and sign on to the bike via
	UHF business band packet datacomm.  A few quick commands, and
	you hear the Ampro PC's hard drive quietly spin up off in the
	trees -- then the file enters your local system RAMdisk in
	short 4800-baud bursts.  Ain't technology wonderful?   While
	munching linguini with clam sauce, you peruse the schematic and
	make a few notes.

	Once you get the pinout data from Ohio and finish the changes
	to the CAD file, it's time to ship it to your partner on the
	design project.  The final version will go out machine readable
	direct to the printed-circuit fab house, of course, but this
	one is for comments... you extend the fiberglass BYP (big
	yellow pole) mounted on the back of the trailer, aim a
	6-element 900-MHz yagi antenna in the general direction of
	Redding, and via the laptop RF link direct the system to check
	for clear cellular phone service.  That established, you pass a
	print capture of the schematic file to the fax software and let
	the bike handle the details of sending it to a fax machine in
	Boston.

	While the cellular antenna is set up, you rlogin to your base
	SPARC to send a long-overdue column to the alias and browse a
	couple of newsgroups, then kick back with another little nip of
	Gran Marnier for a relaxed evening of staring into the fire and
	chatting with your sweetie.  Ah, the outdoor life...

	(And are you still wondering why I do this?)

----------

	Cheers from the bikelab!!!

		Steven K. Roberts 
		Nomadic Research Labs 
		P.O. Box 2390 
		Santa Cruz, CA 95063

		wordy@bikelab.Sun.com 
		wordy@cup.portal.com
		GEnie, MCI, or AOL:  wordy

