
---------------------- 
NOTES FROM THE BIKELAB 
Issue #8 -- 3/20/91
by Steven K. Roberts
----------------------

Copyright (C) 1991 by Steven K. Roberts.  All Rights Reserved.
(Intact reposting and free distribution is OK with permission; 
personal forwarding is quite OK without.)

	IN THIS ISSUE:
		Tidal Passion
		Satellite data communications
		In other news
		The emailbag

	"Doesn't it ever make you feel funny that there are so many
	people working so hard to get you out of town?"
		 -- Dave Berkstresser during a busy night with 
		    3 of us slaving away in the bikelab...

	You know, sometimes this whole thing seems deliciously insane.
	Off the deep end.  Wigged out... big time.  It seldom appears
	to me in that light, fortunately, but occasionally I have a
	moment of shifted perspective -- perhaps while lying under this
	monster trying to reach a buried socket-head cap screw with a
	ball driver in my fingertips, perhaps peering into the OrCAD
	files, or perhaps just showing it to a visitor and having a
	moment of empathy.

	Whatever triggers it, the feeling is the same:  I'm living an
	oxymoron.  Industrial bicycle touring?  Four years of full-time
	work on a bicycle, aided by dozens of freelancing
	professionals, serious R&D tools, a few subcontractors, a lab
	in Silicon Valley, and about 140 sponsors?  All I wanted to do
	was go for a bike ride... sheesh.  The dream was so clear:
	living the simple life, cruising beautiful lands, seeking love
	and adventure while turning out a few spirited tales to keep
	the campstove stoked and the bearings lubed, hanging out
	online, playing with ham radio, writing books while pedaling,
	staying linked via satellite to networks and tracking systems,
	hacking real-time code in campgrounds...  oops, there I go
	again.  The simple life.  Right.

	The problem is that I've become a technoid yuppie hobo.
	Wanting it ALL creates a real problem when your home is a
	bicycle.  Not that I'm complaining, mind you -- I'm having the
	time of my life -- but still, every now and then it just seems
	like the most outrageous madness imaginable.  Especially when I
	realize that in 17 weeks I'll truck this thing to Omaha, of all
	places, then pedal shakily east, my out-of-shape knees
	throbbing, strange rattles stopping me for roadside tweaks, the
	whole gestalt of life on the road slamming me full in the face
	once again with all its gritty intensity.  Crowds at
	restaurants ("Just one question," someone always asks, not
	realizing that it's not just one question:  "What's all this
	stuff DO?").  The daily quests for food and a place to sleep.
	The undercurrent of security paranoia, constant exposure to
	unpredictable strangers in potentially lethal vehicles, sudden
	honks of unknown intent, teeth-clattering roads, narrow
	motel-room doors, gray days of soaking rain, and through it all
	a recurring sense of insanity touched with moments of profound
	sweetness.  17 weeks until I roll BEHEMOTH out of this
	windowless lab and back into the wide, wide world of unknowns,
	at once alluring and terrifying despite 16,000 miles of
	experience on previous releases.

	It sounds abstract and unmistakably mad, but there's something
	about passion that makes it all work.

Tidal Passion
-------------  

	I talk often of passion.  It's a driving theme of nomadness, of
	learning, of life in general -- it's the crystallization of
	dreams, the lust for evolution, the very antithesis of comfort.
	Without passion, life is spent waiting... waiting for someone
	else's input to make it all seem worthwhile.

	With it, growth is a way of life.

	Passion is not a notion, or a psychological abstraction.  It
	often appears for a while in association with sex, but that's
	not what it's all about either.  Passion is raw and
	all-consuming, and can't be replaced with religion, New Age
	interpretations of experience, academic compartmentalizations
	of the universe, a romp up the career ladder, or copping an
	attitude.  It's intense, almost violent; it renders everything
	else in life unimportant while driving you on a quest of
	personally epic proportion.

	Something like that is not to be taken lightly, especially if
	you once had it and now sense it slipping away.

	The problem is that this whole culture discourages passion --
	though not overtly, of course.  We're politely encouraged to
	excel, to invent, to make something of ourselves.  But the
	people who really do so have had to struggle past the
	boundaries of a society that offers up numbing entertainment,
	reduces education to the level of homogenization, discourages
	risk in its corporate world, applauds conformity, treats the
	exceptional as aberrations, and rewards the "successful" with
	that spectacularly sanitized mediocrity known as suburban
	bliss.

	There's an abrupt boundary between the haves and the have nots,
	as far as passion is concerned.  You can't just dabble in
	passion -- it's all or nothing.  Suddenly finding it makes you
	resent Christians for appropriating that otherwise delightful
	term "born again"; losing it makes you feel dead (and in some
	tragic cases, even take steps to make it so).

	No, there's no such thing as a passion dilettante.  Your life
	is either driven by a grand, magnificent, all-encompassing
	design . . . or it isn't.

	What is possible, unfortunately, is to live passionately for a
	few years then suffer through the agonizing process of watching
	it slip away -- without even knowing whether it's recoverable.
	It must be a bit like Parkinson's . . . the mind goes, but
	slowly enough that you witness your own dissolution and
	understand perfectly well what it means.

                      	             * * *

	What I'm assuming, however, is that passion can be viewed as a
	tidal, and thus cyclic, phenomenon.  It has been in my life,
	certainly, with every ebb a slow tragedy and every flow an
	exuberant celebration of new growth.  The question is, how can
	one short-circuit this process and keep passion alive?  Could
	we survive nonstop passion, day in and day out?  Is endless
	passion even possible?  If you see it slipping, can you snatch
	it back?

	One way, I think, is with landmarks.  For me, it's a strange
	mix of favorite road music, an amusing juxtaposition of design
	concepts, fantasies of prototypical encounters Out There, and a
	few freeze-frame images of intense romance or adventure etched
	like lightning flashes on my brain.

	Another way to hang on to it is by spending time with
	passionate people -- other mad, driven souls who brave the
	chortlings of the complacent and fear not the spectre of
	bankruptcy.  It's powerfully reinforcing stuff, and when you
	forget your own passion, a spark from someone else's can
	reignite the blaze.

	Now let's enumerate methods that don't work:

	>>  Commiserating with dispassionate friends (did you know that
	The Random House Dictionary defines dispassionate as "free from
	or unaffected by passion or bias" as if passion were a disease
	and somehow comparable to bias?)

	>>  Making lists of things to do, especially if they represent
	the intellectualization of something about which you were once
	passionate.

	>>  Perennially reshuffling your workspace, filing systems,
	business structure, software choices, circle of friends, or
	choice of town -- all in the name of correcting problems that
	are interfering with your pursuit of the Big Dream.

	>>  Waiting for someone else to come along and solve your
	problems, or, if you're wealthy, attempting to subcontract your
	quest.

	>>  Praying, drinking, getting stoned, swilling coffee, playing
	Crystal Quest, stroking crystals, or otherwise engaging in any
	numbing ritual that by direct effect or superstition is somehow
	involved with soothing your psyche or warding off danger.  (Not
	that all these things are necessarily bad, mind you, they just
	don't have anything to do with passion . . . even though some
	of them feel pretty good.  Why, one day last year on a coffee
	buzz I broke 2 million in Crystal Quest and celebrated with a
	drink!)

	Knowing what might work and what definitely doesn't is useful,
	but the most important thing is recognizing when your passion
	is slipping -- and stopping it before it's too late.  The
	trappings and rewards of past brilliance echo sweetly with the
	magic of days gone by, and it's blissful to sail on remembered
	waves if you ignore the fact that you're not on a boat
	anymore.

	Remember why you are.  Life is only once, and slips by so
	smoothly that you can get away with coasting through a whole
	career and still look pretty good.  Find what you really want.
	Grasp it with unshakable passion and focused desire.

	Everything else is secondary.

Satellite data communications
-----------------------------

	Given that passionate buildup, I guess I owe you a real
	whiz-bang development in bike-tech this issue!  OK, here it
	is:  BEHEMOTH is now connected to the network around the clock,
	via direct satellite data link.

	No, I'm not kidding.  On a small aluminum platform at
	solar-panel level behind the trailer is a 12" diameter radome
	about 7" tall.  Inside, a little 14 GHz antenna steered by a
	stepper motor tracks the GTE GSTAR satellite 22,300 miles above
	the equator at 103 degrees.  This primarily handles
	bidirectional mail traffic, but occasonally the antenna glances
	east to take a fix on a tracker satellite and triangulate its
	own location.  While this doesn't have the precision of the
	Trimble GPS, it does automatically stamp each data transmission
	with the location of the bike (within about 1,000 feet) and
	interfaces smoothly with a whole tracking system that's already
	in place... handling almost 15,000 trucks, boats, cars, and
	airplanes around North America.  In fact, my base-office PC now
	shows a road map on its screen, with BEHEMOTH's location noted
	in purple and its travel history as a dotted blue line.

	A coax cable pair links the radome with the main unit -- a
	shock-mounted black box that now occupies the forward basement
	of the trailer (with a nice low center of gravity, adding
	significantly to that all-important road-hugging weight...).
	This unit provides an interface to the bike's computer network,
	making it a component in the whole communication and security
	system.  At the moment, since it's in the early phase of
	testing, I'm using the standard LCD terminal usually provided
	for the driver, but efforts are already underway to link it to
	the mail server in the bike's SPARCstation and, at the other
	end, build a seamless connection to internet.

	The system that makes all this possible is the Qualcomm
	OmniTRACS satellite terminal, and folks, this is some SERIOUS
	magic!  It's the kind of thing that makes the writer in me wax
	rhapsodic...

	I mean, think about it.  I'm already used to ham radio and the
	wonders of HF propagation, getting only a minor thrill from
	making a contact with Sweden on the amount of power in a
	typical Christmas tree bulb.  But this is another level beyond
	that.  Transmit power is 1 watt (somewhere in the pocket
	flashlight range), and the antenna's aperture is 5 degrees wide
	and 40 degrees high, centered around 40 degrees elevation to
	insure coverage anywhere in or near the US.  How much of that 1
	watt makes it to the satellite drifting quietly out there in
	the Clark belt, roughly four times as far from here as the
	diameter of the earth?  What's the path loss?  It's uncanny:  I
	can take off the white radome and roll the bike in a circle,
	and that little silver antenna keeps pointing at the same spot
	in the sky -- inhaling messages from Qualcomm's Network
	Management Center in San Diego and uploading anything I dump
	into the buffer.

	Operationally, this eliminates my dependence on a number of
	less reliable communication links, though I'll keep a few as
	backups.  There's still a place for the CellBlazer modem, of
	course -- when I need blinding speed to move large files like
	captured video frames, 10 kilobaud to the nearest cellular MTSO
	will be much more appropriate than the 165 bits/second of the
	satellite link, and well worth the air time charges (which, for
	some reason, seem to be among the most un-sponsorable of all
	nomadic commodities...).  And I'll still use AMTOR and packet
	on ham radio, though only for non-business traffic.  But the
	OmniTRACS terminal is rapidly becoming the centerpiece of
	BEHEMOTH's mobile communications resources.

	Since this technology was designed with high-value, sensitive
	cargo in mind (like military munitions shipments), there are
	quite a few system-level features that make it attractive.  The
	network management center is staffed 24 hours a day, and a pin
	on the terminal's interface connector is for a panic button.
	Having instant MAYDAY capability on demand -- transmitted via
	satellite along with my latitude and longitude -- makes this a
	major addition to the bike's security system.  And the plan now
	is to upload a telemetry block and brief text message every few
	hours, not only keeping the base office advised of all activity
	but also feeding the road fantasies of any "workstation
	traveler" who wants to ride along with me via the magic of
	electronics.  (I'll begin with the assumption that everyone on
	this nomadness alias and its cross-postings will want the
	updates, and you can tell me after I hit the road if you
	don't.)

	As implementation proceeds, I'll have much more to report on
	this latest addition.  Just for amusement, by the way, I added
	up the number of satellites that in one way or another will
	communicate directly with the bike.  There are about 30
	(including the constellation of 24 GPS satellites now 3/4 of
	the way to completion and four of the ham radio "OSCAR" birds
	created by AMSAT and UOSAT).  This all extends the original
	model of high-tech nomadness:

	Once you move to Dataspace, you can put your body anywhere you
	like.

In Other News...
----------------

	What, aside from passion and satellites, has been happening in
	the bikelab?  A few things:

	The new fairing is under construction by Dave Berkstresser --
	he made a paper mache model with the aid of my old Zzipper
	lexan fairing, and has been carving nacelles into it for the
	headlight, Trimble GPS antenna, reflectors, and so on.  This
	will be used to mold a Bondo "plug," from which will be pulled
	a fiberglass female mold, which will finally be used to do the
	real thing in Kevlar.

	Custom blue cordura packs of great beauty have been made for
	the RUMP by Jesse Newcomb, who doubles as a SCSI wizard and
	Stanford radio deejay.  These will be sealed onto the
	fiberglass sides instead of my original flush doors, which
	turned out to be almost impossible to seal without lots and
	lots of gasket-compression latches.  They're quite waterproof,
	offer easy-access space for small items, unzip to expose the
	SPARC bay (left) and the fridge (right), and, hopefully, in an
	accident will help protect the fiberglass.

	I just finished the power conversion panel, mounted on a
	commbay sidewall across from all the battery management
	hardware.  This area includes a power entry module (mounted
	with PEM nuts, of course), the Resonant Power Technology 12V
	10A switcher for charging from the AC line, a Statpower
	inverter to run 110V appliances from bike power, and the HV
	supply for the 1mW HeNe laser (hey, ya gotta have a toy...).

	Finally, there's been a lot of pondering here (with the aid of
	Geoff Baehr and a few other networking gurus) about how to make
	the Ethernet connection between Mac, PC, and SUN environments.
	The smoothness of the on-board network will have a lot to do
	with riding pleasure, so we're trying to make the right choices
	up front.  So far it looks like Xircom's Pocket LAN adapter for
	the Ampro PC, LRU's Nodem for the Mac SCSI port, PC-NFS on the
	former, MacX on the latter, the SPARC doing just what it was
	designed to do, and about 10 feet of coax to tie 'em all
	together.  World's smallest multi-platform 10 MHz LAN...

The Emailbag
------------

John Erickson from Advanced Test Development at DEC sends a fascinating
comment on another nomadic system, long ago and far away:

        Hi Steven!
        
        Yet another  great  issue of "Notes from the Bikelab"! Thanks for
        taking the time to produce technical tidbits for those of us that
        are interested in your adventures.

        In Issue #7 you write:
        
>	 ...After pondering the problem  for  a while, the solution became
>        obvious:       crosspoint  switching.      Traditional    network
>        architectures    require  all  nodes  to  share    some    common
>        characteristics  and  generally behave themselves;  a  crosspoint
>        matrix doesn't care.  I can run events  at  multiple  data  rates
>        simultaneously  --  even  DC  or analog sensor data if  required.
>        (Audio, since it's so pervasive on the bike, gets its  own matrix
>        with a few  special  characteristics  including  gain-setting  on
>        every line.)

        I think this strategy will prove to be incredibly _wise_ over the
        long  run.    If  you    read    the    novel    accounting   the
        nearly-disasterous Apollo 13 mission, the one  during  which  the
        liquid oxygen tank on the CM exploded,  you will see a validation
        of  your  strategy.  The astronauts' lives were  saved  by  their
        ability to reconfigure CM and LM systems --- in particular, their
        ability to play games with the power busses. 
        
        When  the problem first arose they had _no_clue_ what was up  ---
        initially,  I believe they only saw some power anomolies.  But by
        switching in and  out  various  power  sources  (fuel  cells  and
        batteries) they were able to determine that something was up with
        their CM oxygen, and soon  transferred "control" to the LM, which
        served  as a "lifeboat".  Sufficient  generality  gave  them  the
        ability to reconfigure their spacecraft in-flight for  a  mission
        they had never expected!
        
        Have a GREAT one!

Michael Bass, of the Molecular Science Research Center at Battelle's
Pacific Northwest Laboratory, writes:

	With all of this computer equipment in the RUMP and trailer and
	under the console, I was wondering if you have given much
	thought to heat dissipation?  Especially in the hot, humid
	summer of Iowa, will you be fearing a total meltdown of
	silicon?

Michael...

	That's indeed a major issue.  The Winnebiko II was poorly
	designed in that regard -- I had a clear fairing over blue
	solar panels bolted to the top aluminum panel of the console.
	Got VERY hot when parked in the sun.  All of BEHEMOTH's
	critical areas are under white or reflective covers (except the
	commbay in the trailer, but it'll have to take it -- I had to
	put solar panels somewhere!).  In general, I've found that the
	silicon can take all kinds of abuse as long as you don't overdo
	it.  I'm a little more concerned about my $CD$ library (thermal
	cycling of materials with different thermal expansion
	coefficients), film, and so on.  These I keep buried deep in
	the trailer, surrounded by lots of thermal capacitance.  Having
	said all that, we'll see what REALLY happens on the road!

And finally, Bart Bartlett of Trimble Navigation's facility in Kawagoe,
Japan, asks:

	Any thoughts on going international?  If you wanted to elevate
	the "Weirdness Quotient" by placing the bike in a fundamentally
	different culture, I would highly recomend a trip to Japan.

Bart...

	Definitely in the plans!  Having been on NHK and in some
	Japanese print media, I've seen the level of interest and am
	trying to imagine what it would be like to travel there.
	Perhaps after the 91-92 year in the US I can find a sponsor to
	underwrite the hard part (getting there) and get me launched on
	a jitensha-ryoko.

	Incidentally, I was explaining the bike to a ham in Osaka on 10
	meters one day, speaking carefully across the language
	barrier.  When I turned it back over to him, he replied with
	enthusiasm:  "Ah, Hari Davidson!"

	Cheers from the bikelab!!!

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

		wordy@bikelab.Sun.com (primary internet)
		wordy@cup.portal.com
		GEnie, MCI, or AOL:  wordy (GEnie preferred)

