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The Nomadness NOTES
Issue #24 -- 11/24/93
by Steven K. Roberts
San Diego, CA
-------------------------------

Copyright (c) 1993 by Steven K. Roberts.  All Rights Reserved.  (Intact
reposting and free distribution are OK with permission; personal forwarding
is OK without.)

(Nomadness trivia:  Hey, issue #24 is actually Chapter #127 if you count
the "Computing Across America" and "Miles With Maggie" series.  Sounds like
I've been busier that way... actually averages one a month since I started
in '83!)



IN THIS ISSUE:
        SKANKIN' PICKLE
        SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SNAPSHOTS
        MICROSHIP DESIGN UPDATE
        MICROSHIP INTERNAL NETWORK
        HELP, ARCHIVES, AND MISCELLANY



"You know how to simulate sailing?   Stand in a cold shower and tear up
$100 bills."
                -- unattributed



------------------------------
NOTE:  Once again, I've been dragging a partly finished file around in the
PowerBook for months, making the time references herein somewhat distorted.
Sorry for the delay, but what really held me back was the fact that I am
now the nomadness list admin.  The listserv test post last week
(fortunately a short file), generated over 200 mailer daemon messages, each
of which had to be processed by hand.  Theoretically, the list is now
clean, so here's a long-overdue update... thanks for your patience!
------------------------------


SKANKIN' PICKLE

A university is probably not what you would normally label a cultural
phenomenon -- unless you had never spent any time living at one.  Since I
managed to sidestep that part of the traditional career development path,
this academic interlude as a "visiting scholar" at UCSD is a wondrous and
bizarre twist in an already strange life... dropping at age 41 <cringe>
into a maelstrom of 18,241 students.

Tonight, I found my way over to Price Center, seeking an iced mocha to cool
and stimulate after a vigorous bike ride on Black's Beach and an
exponentially MORE vigorous ride up the killer hill that is the only
pedalable return to the land of textiles and traffic.  Hey, it was a
perfect October day in Southern California, with blazing sunshine,
sparkling surf, and fresh ocean breezes.  You think I'm going to stay
entombed in an office full of clutter when I can work all night?

So I emerged from the beach, hot and sweaty, and hit the espresso joint for
relief.  One thing led to another, and soon it had segued to beer and pizza
with a group of students, followed by a Skankin' Pickle concert.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm a child of the 60's, used to getting
down to a variety of musical styles including classic rock, baroque
concertos, smokin' jazz, blues, big band, and even the impressionistic
breath-like outpourings of what is sometimes labeled "yuppie muzak."  But I
comfortably slipped into real enjoyment of this -- apparently a deviant
blend of Ska, punk, and some things so far from my native idioms that I'm
at a loss to name them.

The music:  hard-driving intensity with more melodic components than I
expected -- fast and sweaty.  Humorous and pointed lyrics, some evocative;
others crude.  Stage presence sweaty, violent, and funny.  Total devotion
to the work at hand:  music that seemed a blend of rugby, punk,
fistfighting, and aggressive horns.  But the total gestalt, if you will,
was not the band but the event...

The audience formed three tiers.  At the front, mashed against the stage,
the dedicated devotees savored the crush and periodically lofted one of
their own -- bodies floated atop a forest of hands waving like the
flagellae of a primitive sea creature, then tumbled feet first into the
seething mass.

Level two was the mosh pit.  This was a ballroom dancer's worst nightmare:
full-contact violent anarchy.  There were no couples here, nor the solo
gyrations of stoned twirlers lost in the sound.  This was a vortex of
sprinting, shoving, slamming, punching, tripping, shouting humans -- mostly
male -- driven counterclockwise by The Coriolis Force from Hell.  Somehow
from the student population, so innocent and studious on the whole, there
coalesced a motley contingent of tattooed, skinheaded, body-pierced
punks... and they crashed and fought in blissful enjoyment.  I was on the
edge of this fray and occasionally fended off a sweating
testosterone-soaked projectile flung out-of-control by a succession of
random collisions.  The crowd provided a natural counteracting force,
tossing people bodily back into the pit to ricochet a few times and resume
their frenetic celebration of decibel-driven dizziness.  Bruises were many,
and the two words never uttered were "excuse me."  Occasionally a girl
would be plucked from the surrounding crowd and hurled wide-eyed and
excited through the vortex, only to be deposited on the sidelines a moment
later -- breathless and happy to be alive.

Level three was the rather traditional concert crowd, bouncing happily to
the beat and trying to talk.  And hell, I enjoyed it so much I even bought
a Skankin' Pickle T-shirt...


SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SNAPSHOTS

Yes, life in Southern California is amusing.  Being here subjects me to a
whole suite of emotions and attitudes, ranging from gaping appreciation of
certain kinds of beauty to horror at certain kinds of attitudes.  In the
latter category, we have the most blatant disregard for the value of water
I've seen anywhere west of the Rockies in years... both here and in Ellay.
It comes from far away at great expense, but there's no community-wide
awareness of it as a scarce resource.  Neighbors and former housemates take
half-hour showers; people pre-flush in public restrooms; institutions
saturate lawns, sidewalks, and roads with automated sprinklers (even during
the rare rains).

I chanced past an apartment complex last month on my bike, and stopped in
shock at the sight of a massive flow down a storm drain.  Thinking
something amiss, I went in to tell the manager a pipe had burst in their
sprinkler system.  "There's nothing wrong, and it's not really YOUR problem
is it?" she countered aggressively.

"Well, indirectly," I replied.  We'll all pay for waste eventually.  You
could cut back on sprinkling time, or the flow--"

"Look, we've done a study, and this is the best method.  We have to
maintain a good curbside appearance.  Now if you don't MIND..."

I avoided escalating a pointless argument with the observation that
throwing away thousands of gallons of drinking water is hardly what I'd
call "good curbside appearance," for the argument would have been
meaningless to her.  Water is cheap and comes out of the tap.  What's my
problem?  I rode to the lab and reported them to the water-waste hotline.
;-)

* * *

Oh yeah, housemates.  This is a new phase of life for me -- In the past 20
years, I moved from solo apartments to solo home ownership, through brief
spurts of cohabitation into "professional house guest" mode while
traveling, back to more cohabitation, and onward to solo life in a
corporate lab.  Now I live at a University, and my "summer sublet" was a
new experience:  5 of us renters and one semi-permanent freeloader, none
particularly neat, sharing a small house with one bathroom.  Noise,
clutter, and smells were constant.  I pedaled home after midnight to sleep
in the former garage -- swathed in the cloying odors of garbage and rotten
wood while drifting off to the growl of the old freezer, the hiss of
running water, the skunk-driven rattle of the gate bolted to the wall
beside my head, the intermittent roar of buses, the acoustic CPR of
automotive rap machines, the chatter of housemates, late-night kitchen
clinking, and the yowling caterwaul of laundry instruments ported through
time from the Spanish Inquisition.   I would awaken at 8 to the infernal
leaf blower next door, wait to squeeze a 3.5-minute shower in between a
couple of 20-minute ones, and leave as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, that's over and I'm now sharing a quiet apartment with a
funny, juggling medical student named Barney -- only a short bike-ride from
the lab.  Much better...

* * *

Ah yes, the University.  It's rush season, you know -- all the fraternities
and sororities are promoting themselves, and freshmen walk around in what
one might call "rush limbo."  Personally, I'd join Pi Kappa Chino, but
then, I'm a caffeine junkie...

More strangeness.  An annual playful competition just before starting
school was the "un-Olympics," in which the 5 colleges here competed in the
traditional company-picnic sports and games.  This year, in the spirit of
political correctness, they decided that competition does not foster
cooperation and replaced it with something corny that flopped.  Besides,
the pie-eating contest was insensitive to people with eating disorders, and
the egg toss was an inappropriate waste of food when so many people in the
world are hungry.

<sigh>

But the Microship (remember the Microship?  This song's about the
Microship...) is developing along interesting lines -- and the issue that
has been occupying my finite energy reserves is the development of the
student team.  I have defined a massive array of sub-projects ranging from
the trivial to the seriously daunting, and am pleased to see student
volunteers emerging to take them on.  Lest I become a full-time manager
(already I spend more time on documents and administration than on real
engineering), I have set up a triumvirate of engineering managers, one each
from mechanical, electrical, and computer science departments.

The project list is an emailable document, and there is nothing in the
Microship charter that says all volunteers have to be students... so if you
seriously want to get involved, let me know and I'll send you the details!
(It's a bit much for distribution to the whole Nomadness mailing list,
which is now on the order of 1,600 people not including exploders and
reposts.)


MICROSHIP DESIGN UPDATE

If you have been on this mailing list since the bikelab days, you might
recall that it was once a weekly report on some detailed technical topic.
I do have a local list for daily updates to project participants and
invited guests, but that would be excessive detail for global distribution.
But these Nomadness Notes will become more frequent and will tend toward
project description:  UCSD lifestyle issues are no longer novel and you
would tire of weekly summaries about the microculture of Black's Beach,
mosh pit dynamics, and the delights of strolling around campus on a sunny
afternoon.  So let's talk about the boat!

I vaguely recall that the last real system description I posted here was
dated 6/7/93, and reflected what is now an obsolete vision of the craft.
For an updated system overview, please ftp to ucsd.edu, navigate to /nomad,
and get the file called Microship.gen.

For the past four months I've been inhaling, so to speak -- laying the
complex groundwork required to support a complex project.  (Here we go
again.)  At the moment, I have about 40 student volunteers, and the
University is providing course credit for participation in many of the more
interesting engineering projects.  There are many... the Project Catalog
details 46 of them, not to mention a growing list of miscellaneous tasks.
I'm starting to appreciate the complexities of being a good manager...

First of all, the Microship is not really a kayak anymore -- nor a trio of
kayaks formed into a trimaran.  I've been calling her a "kayacht" lately --
with a 30-foot center hull 4' wide at the waterline, 18' overall beam, and
1.5-ton estimated weight, the term "kayak" is no longer accurate.  We're
keeping one critical component, though:  the outriggers are detachable
pedal- and paddle-powered double kayaks based on Current Designs "Libra"
hulls.  (The reason for this approach is that these amas are going to be
extensively customized with special deck fixtures, oddly-placed bulkheads,
wiring, thruster mounts, high-strength couplings to crossarms, submersible
cockpits, raised cowlings for pedaling clearance, and deeper-than-normal
flotation compartments.  Trying to spec all this for a distant builder is
absurd... but so is developing kayak hulls from scratch when it has already
been done well.  Hence, commercial hulls but custom decks.)

The center hull is being designed by Nelson/Marek, the San Diego yacht
design firm that created the Stars & Stripes catamaran as well as a number
of custom yachts and racers.  We're having fun with this, pulling out all
the stops, ignoring issues of manufacturability and addressing brutal
trade-offs that are normally immutable.  It's not fully defined yet, but
we're dealing with a number of odd concepts that may make this the BEHEMOTH
of multihulls:  kick-up adjustable-depth leeboards for CLR-tuning,
floodable ballast chamber to control effective dihedral, free-standing
schooner rig, engineering department forward of the cockpit with rackmount
pressurized enclosures and fold-down work table, folding solar arrays on
polypropylene honeycomb substrates, thruster and pedal drive on each
detachable kayak/ama, pop-up crew module for lounging, complete navionics
station, and deployable landing gear to turn the collapsed system into a
trailer (to be towed by a gas-burner, not a bicycle!).

None of this exists yet, but we've been working on design concepts (with an
actual-size cardboard/lumber mockup of the cockpit segment dominating my
lab), gathering composite materials information, working on frame stress
analysis, and learning boatbuilding techniques.  No doubt there are
surprises in store, but that's part of the appeal...  think how boring it
would be to just go out and buy a yacht!  <wistful sigh>

Incidentally, as we study multihull design an interesting parallel is
becoming apparent:  multihulls are to monohulls as recumbent bicycles are
to diamond frames.  They're faster, more interesting, annoying to
old-timers, and cover a wide quality range from exquisite to garbage (the
latter helping to confirm the negative comments of traditionalists).  They
both attract wizards and nutcases, leading to odd alliances against Old
Methods; they've both been banned from traditional sanctioned races after
blowing everyone else off the course.  And they are both so undefined that
designs have not converged upon a few established standards, but instead
show up in ever more radical configurations as designers are drawn
inevitably to the challenge of pushing the envelope.  In short, both are
where the action is.


MICROSHIP INTERNAL NETWORK

The internal network architecture is getting interesting as well (On the
water, I'll finally be doing a lot of pier-to-pier networking...).  Now
that computers are cheaper than wire and connectors, we will use a
multidrop protocol (Easy-A from New Micros, a modified 4-wire RS-422) to
link a dozen or so FORTH 68HC11 processors into a cohesive system that will
be hosted by a slightly more robust board at the hub.  This whole network
requires so little power that it can stay on most of the time, and the
hub's low-level user interface is a simple 2-line LCD and keypad.

Atop that, however, will be a very robust PC (386 or 486 -- we're trying to
decide) based on Ampro's PC/104 standard.  This machine is very I/O rich
and physically robust, and in the current plan will support an
active-matrix color LCD at the helm.  The net effect here is a single
integrated environment for all shipboard electronics, data collection,
power control, navigation (via NMEA 0183 interface to the nav sensors),
charting, software development, control network graphic user interface, and
so on.

Independent of all this, but on the same ethernet, is the Macintosh (also
with active-matrix color), augmented by a second Mac in the copilot's
console and the manpack PowerBook linked via RF AppleTalk from Digital
Ocean.  This will be the work environment for writing, email, video
production, database, and all those things that I use my PowerBook for
right now.  The advantage of this architecture is elimination of the need
to context switch one machine between the two continuous heavy-duty
requirements for "office/workspace" and "comm/nav and control."  Both the
Mac and the PC will share a single waterproof keyboard and pointing device
on a fold-out panel (more on that soon; we're currently comparing
InterLink's waterproof DuraPoint with a custom controller made from one of
their XYZ touch sensors).

Of course, the Internet connection is critical, and we have put a Tadpole
SPARCbook on the Net here at UCSD with the intent of using it as a central
file server on the Microship and repository for all the unix networking
tools.  This project is just getting started and I'm not sure of the
eventual configuration... I'll tell you more as it develops.  We will be
careful to avoid redundancy and make sure that each system adds
synergistically to the others while ensuring that we can host virtually any
interesting application including video processing!

Back at the microcontroller end, some of the BEHEMOTH technology will carry
over directly.  The audio crossbar system, for example, was well-proven on
the bike although the software was never finished to the point that it
became turnkey.  A student team here is now working on that, taking two of
the boards (allowing 32 inputs, 32 outputs, and up to 8 simultaneous audio
"events") and controlling them with a dedicated FORTH board on the
multidrop network.  Unlike the bike, however, the boat will not use a
crosspoint for serial datacomm -- any device that needs to talk to others
will own a drop-point processor that couples it to the network, yielding
more of a client-server architecture.  Likewise, general power switching
and data collection will be handled by minimal processors that in many
cases will not even need application software:  they'll just sit in their
interpreter loops awaiting commands from the host.

Stay tuned for further information.  As with the bikelab series I wrote
while at Sun Microsystems, I will begin producing more focused reports as
this complex project takes shape.  At the moment, work is progressing on so
many fronts that almost everything is still vaporous.  I was embarrassed a
few times by publishing BEHEMOTH details so early that the subsequent
reality was either incomplete or vastly different; I'll try not to do that
here!


HELP, ARCHIVES, AND MISCELLANY

A few quick notes on matters various.  First, as always, I'm welcoming help
at any level -- industry involvement has always been an essential component
of these projects, and that is the case now more than ever.  We can always
use voices of experience to augment the focused energy of student
volunteers, and particularly welcome engineers from industry who are
willing to brainstorm, give a presentation, or consult with project groups.
If you have something to offer and like working with students (even
remotely), please let me know and I'll try to include you in any way
possible.  Everyone on the project is on the Net, so communication is easy.

Second, I want to try something new.  While most of the major components
are generously provided by corporate sponsors (in exchange for exposure,
harsh environment engineering data, beta testing, or just plain fun), there
are lots of expenses associated with boat construction that call for cash.
I basically generate that with occasional speaking engagements and
freelance writing, hardly enough to fully fund the development and
operation of this project.  We are establishing a special account for
individual or corporate donations, and will fashion some kind of plaque or
display on the finished Microship to credit those who helped it along.
We'll also send a Microship T-shirt to all who contribute over some
reasonable minimum (no, it's not done yet -- I'm awaiting a particularly
fine piece of CAD artwork to place the order).  If you'd like to help with
this adventure, please let me know -- and there is a mechanism already in
place if you prefer the tax advantage of contributing directly to the
University (you can earmark the funds for the Microship).

Finally, the archives of these reports have moved from the ftp site at
Telebit to the one here at UCSD.  Just ftp to ucsd.edu and look in /nomad
-- you'll find the series of stories from my travels with Maggie, the
bikelab reports, four GIFs of BEHEMOTH, an overview of the Microship, and
some older archives of the technomads alias.  I'm gradually bringing it all
up to date...

Cheers from San Diego, and thanks for your continuing interest in nomadness!

-- Steve Roberts