Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: Tiny UAVs, So Long Brett, The Pachinko Effect

Itty-Bitty UAVs. Check out these pix from a recent unmanned vehicle conference in DC. The first one looks like one of those scale models you see displayed as a trophy in an aerospace exec or pilot's office. But no, it's a fully functioning drone - get it airborne with a bungee cord or using a grenade launcher attachment for a rifle. Have a fat wallet and an urge to build your own, or start a UAV venture for that matter? Check the next image for an assortment of controller components from tiny to chunky. If you're into things robotic, check out the main DIYDrones home page and feeds for everything from hobbyist to milbot news. Organized by Chris Anderson (yes, that one) - which is a good recommend given his record as a trend spotter.

Vacationing in Earthsea

Nearly 20 years ago, I was a 'guest artist' at a summer arts program at Humboldt State University on California's North Coast. The first and last time I've held the title, which amounted to coder-at-large for one of the first experiments in what was then called hypermedia fiction. One of the other artists, more in the traditional definition, was writer Vonda McIntyre. In an evening bull session she mentioned that fellow fantasy author Ursula LeGuin loved the North Coast area around Trinidad and had used it as the model for the seascape of her Earthsea series of books.

So, by that definition, we've spent the last week vacationing in a little bit of Earthsea. The wild blackberries are ripe, the salmon are running up on the Klamath, and a little front blew out the fog for the last two days. Life is good! Now on to Mendo for a few days before returning home.

Loafing on the Eastern Shore

So where have I been hiding out? Partly just summer loafing, some work on a project that might or might not surface publicly, and a family trip to the East Coast. We visited my wife's people on Long Island, then drove down the coast to visit my brothers' families near Williamsburg. While dealing with NYC and New Jersey Turnpike traffic didn't feel like much improvement on the airport hassles at the time, once we got down to the Delmarva area we deliberately went off the beaten path.

Another Analyst Staring Out The (Airplane) Window

I've been following Jon Udell's blog for the thread re data control and privacy, and found myself bemused by his habit of watching the landscape scroll past from the airplane window seat. A soul mate! I've been taking the window seat for some 35 years now for the same reason, and still can't get enough of it. It's a show to beat whatever rubbish is on the seatback LCD panel. Snake River canyon! Center pivots! Greenland fjords! Tracing defunct railroads across the old Northwest! What's not to like? I've picked vacation spots just because I had to get my feet onto that terrain down there.

Jon's got some ideas for a realtime synch between Google Earth and his airborne position. GE is a bit bandwidth consuming, let's say, for in flight use. My recent wanderings have featured another solution. Since I've gotten bitten by the geocaching bug (I can quit any time...) I've had a hand-held GPSr along on trips, and they turn out to work quite well airborne. Yes, you're in a metal tube, but the improved LOS to the satellites seems to at least offset that problem. (I use Magellans, because they'll hold lock in redwood forests, but the latest Garmins with the SiRF chipset are as good or better.)

Turn on backtrack and set map mode for a large span, then work on calibrating your 'head declination' against lateral distance from 35,000 feet. I've never bothered to download the track into a mapping program, but I have written down the nearest named town or waypoint to a feature of interest and tracked it down in a DeLorme book or GE later on.

Udell cites Doc Searls as another window watcher. How many more geogawkers are out there?

And.... We're Back

Random observations from the road:

• There's nothing like a couple of weeks living out of a 8x19 foot tin box to make you appreciate the home you were beginning to think needed a couple more rooms.
  
• Portland is like Seattle - a good weather weekend causes the town to empty out into the hills.
  
• In our several years' absence, our favorite Oregon coast roadside attraction, Misty Meadows jams and jellies, has grown from a hand built shack and gravel pull off to a substantial store and blacktop lot.
  
• Casinos everywhere, proliferating in the boondock exile of the Indian 'rancherias'. Much as I appreciate the ironic justice in the natives' getting some of their own back at last, I've gotta wonder if there are enough fools customers to go around.
  
• We've lived by the rule of "Always try places named Mom's or Eat" to enjoy the variety of the road. Failed twice in a row this time, on both quality and service; apparently the marketing hacks are onto it. Ah well, flush one of those humble rules for living.
  
• There are miles and miles of US 101 in Oregon and California with roadbed shattered by truck traffic. I've no idea from my vantage point whether its overweight cargos or (ahem) 'deferred' maintenance budgets, but we got a better ride on several Forest Service gravel roads than on 101 in northern Sonoma County. I really enjoy being the subject of a practical physics experiment in the resonant frequency of the spring systems of a 19' trailer and an F-150 as coupled by Draw-Tite bars.
  
• There are still unappreciated and under visited marvels out there. I'll mention in particular Lava Beds National Monument, a unique combination of natural and human history, way up in the thinly populated northeast corner of California. This year it gifted us a high desert thunderstorm just at dusk. I'm waiting hopefully for some photos taken of that interesting light; there's no way a digicam sensor could do it justice. Just next door is the Tule Lake Wildlife Refuge. With the migration season just starting, we were already seeing Canada geese by the acre, and a few precocious snow geese on the move early.
  
• The retiring boomers are hitting the road in RVs, and the big rig makers should be profiting. We heard comments from campers and park and attraction owners about the number of people on the road late in the season and the growing size of both RV parks and rigs.
  
• There's an observable lifecycle of RVs. They all start as luxury good of various magnitude, and descend through years and multiple owners to hunting and fishing rigs (campers and small trailers) or high plains line shacks and other housing of last resort (bigger trailers and 5ers). It's the self-propelled ones that seem to end up as hulks in back lots - once the engine reaches senescence they don't appear to be as adaptable to other use.
  
• Someone should write a marketing or ethnography thesis about the complex signaling by various types of RV parks and users thereof: in-transit camps, destinations, public parks, seasonal parks, vacationers, snowbirds, full timers, migrant laborers, retirees, unemployed. The closest thing I've seen is this study of RVing seniors, which makes some description of the evolutionary stages of RV parks.
  
• In lava country, the cinder blocks are the color of the earth, so the lowliest constructions may appear more in tune with their surroundings than the mini-mansion resort confections.
  
• If you're conscious of the natural world, the yellow flowers of the rabbitbrush mark the boundary of a foreign land for the Bay Area resident - the high desert and plains of the true American West. Conversely, the reappearance of the redwood, the live oak and (alas) the poison oak measure the return to home.
  
• In 150 miles and one morning we drove from the heavy rains of an early winter storm in Eureka to the smoke drift of an out-of-control blaze just north of Wine Country. But fall reached here while we traveled, though today's thermometer belies it: On today's lunchtime walk I heard the minor key songs of two golden crowned sparrows come for the winter. And a big eight point buck in rut came down out of the hills and thrashed a bunch of my front yard shrubs. We're home!
  

Blogging from Bend

We're in Bend, Oregon, at a fancy campground with free WiFi access. We've been through here several times before and always stop off at the High Desert Museum - highly recommended! This time I was astonished to run across an exhibit of photography by former Apple colleague Bill Atkinson, featuring images from his new book, Within the Stone. Also recommended!

Bend is a crowded town this evening, with an interesting mix of folks. It's the first day of deer season here, and the back roads we followed this afternoon were loaded with pickups and campers heading into the hills. But a number of them stopped off in town first, and along with some genuine ranch folks from parts East, are an interesting admixture to the locals turned out for an arts fair, and the week-enders come over the Cascades. It seemed like every restaurant in town was full, but we wedged out way into the Bend Brewing Company for a couple of ales and dinner. This must be an interesting town politically - it's about an equal count of cars with universal liberal bumper sticker displays, and homes wall-papered with Bush/Cheney signs.

Tomorrow we head up to the Columbia Gorge and on Monday turn our path towards Portland and friends, then the shore and home in another ten days. Given today's news, perhaps we will see Mt. St. Helens steaming as we pass! I'll end this post with an image from another volcano we've visited on this trip - a shot down the north side of Mt. Lassen from its peak.

Relaxing on the Coastside

We took a long weekend's trip out to the San Mateo coastside, a shakedown cruise for a new toy, pictured above. Those not from around here may not realize there's plenty of open space within an hour's drive of the teeming Valley.

We stayed three nights at the Costanoa resort and camp, and made it our base for short excursions. These included a run down to Santa Cruz to help an old friend move house, visiting Storrs Winery (grand noir and petite sirah) and Rhythm Fusion on the return. In Pescadero, one of our favorite small towns, we dined at Duarte's Tavern, a local classic, and visited Phipps Ranch and Harley Farms goat cheese dairy for local provender. Also several hikes in the vicinity, including checking on the condition of one trail we had helped build several years ago.

This is a warmup for a longer trip in late September and early October. Travel blogging may occur, depending on the availability of campground and Internet cafe access in certain parts of California and Oregon.

The Flight of Enola Gay

Our last stop in the East was the new Smithsonian Air & Space display just south of Dulles airport. It's a magnificent facility: spacious, well-lit, still squeaky-clean, and with room to grow in both exhibits and crowds. The exhibits are well organized and broadly representative: from hang gliders to a Concorde, WWI fighters to an F-35 prototype, a Boeing 707, and the Enterprise shuttle mockup - still missing the wing edges destructively tested in analyzing the loss of Columbia.

Among these remarkable machines, only one will make your neck hairs stand up just viewing it. There was controversy when Enola Gay was readied for display. In the end, its exhibit bears the same one paragraph service record as all the other aircraft, noting its singular mission. It's all the more effective for its understatement. The others are there as representatives of their type, but only one plane was first to destroy a city, and it is before you. This is the aluminum and steel memorial to the time when the deeds of the Empire of Japan convinced America that its citizens should be destroyed without compunction.

9/11 bears witness that there are those in the Arab and Islamic worlds who would destroy Americans without compunction. In the week of our vacation, the disclosures of Abu Ghraib may well have moved more to that belief. The beheading of Nick Berg last week likely increased the number of American who believe it is time to retaliate without compunction.

The curators of the Smithsonian believe that Enola Gay has been so well restored that it would fly again, were its tanks refueled.