I didn’t want to go. The thought of moving 200 miles to an unknown town with unknown people – just to move back for college after three months – was absolutely dreadful. I was in luck, however. The real estate market that year was in a slump and the house just wouldn’t sell. My parents needed to move because my dad’s new job was starting with or without a final sale, so they packed up the day after my high school graduation and moved everything south to San Jose, putting the house in the hands of the capable real estate agent. I hope to never experience the feeling of being forced to sell one house to pay a balloon payment on another, as it stressed my parents to the point of exhaustion. I used their mental state to my advantage and convinced them that the big empty house I grew up in needed some care taking while it was oh-so-lonely on the market. I mean, someone had to water the plants, right?

It was the perfect setup. I had just turned 18 and graduated high school, my parents were off my back and I had an empty 3300 square foot house to myself for the summer. I got to stay in town and keep my $10/hr job at the local ISP writing web sites and wiring phone systems in the summer-heated attics of Northern California during the day, and hang out with the friends I’d had forever as soon as 5:00 ticked. It was brilliant. It was the summer of lakeside bonfires, late nights at In-n-Out, rope swings and my first taste of vodka.

As awesome as it was having a huge empty house at my disposal, I never really abused it. I wasn’t much of a partier, nor did I have the sort of friends who enjoyed the thought of thoroughly thrashing a place, so for the most part it sat unused. I lived out of my car for the summer, and came home just to sleep if I felt like it or crash on a friend’s couch somewhere else if I didn’t. As an 18 year-old making gobs of money, I felt like I was finally growing up and making strides toward becoming a real-life adult.

The house is on a hill, with half of it embedded in the earth and the other half jutting out on stilts overlooking a pool and the hills below. Having lived there my whole life, I knew every inch of it by heart – from the alarm system (which I reverse engineered to dial in to a remote server on breach) to the way the pump in the pool system circulated water through the filters. I had forts all over the neighborhood, in the trees, on the ground and even in a tunnel my best friend Zach and I had dug a few summers before. I was more than comfortable keeping the place under my control for a few months.

But living out of a car takes its toll. I was still driving my first car, a ’91 Honda Civic hatchback with well over 200,000 miles on it and pushing 90 horsepower on a good day. That summer, I set up the back seat as a sort-of laundry sorting facility. I hung a shower rod across the handles so I could hang my shirts for work, then the bench seat in the back was divided right down the center – one side had clean clothes and the other dirty. It was a good setup. I’d get to work at 8am with a clean shirt and leave at 5 with a tee shirt to throw on for the impending trip to the lake.

In fact, there was a bit of a routine in my life. After getting off work I’d go out and get up to my usual shenanigans with my friends. At least once or twice a week I’d make it a point to go to the house at the end of the day and start a load of laundry before I went to bed. This way I could wake up groggy, throw the clothes in the dryer so they’d be “dry enough” for hanging up in the car so I could make it to work before the clock ticked eight. I had the sort of boss who didn’t have the slightest clue as to what I did, but would definitely take note if I was more than about four seconds late in the morning. I learned a lot about how not to manage people at that job, but that’s another story.

One night I got home just past midnight, thoroughly exhausted. I hadn’t been home in a few days, so I made a quick jaunt around the house watering the plants and checking up on the yard. Thank goodness we didn’t have a lawn to mow, as I was in no mental state to operate anything with rotating blades. I threw my dirty clothes in the washer and padded down the stairs to the futon I called my bed. I passed out with the swiftness only a sunburned teenager could pull off.

Thank goodness for phone alarms. I set my alarm clock to go off every weekday at 7:23, just enough time to throw my clothes in the dryer, take a shower and drive the 15 minutes in to town for work.

I hit the button on the phone and sat up. Something was just a bit off this morning. Nothing panic-inducing, just … off. I looked outside and the sun was already well on its way up for another 100+ degree day. Then it hit me.

I heard running water.

No big deal, I immediately thought. I left the drip irrigation for the ground cover on. It’s happened before, and it’ll most likely happen again. The spigot is upstairs, through the kitchen and just outside the laundry room door. My brain was starting to turn on as I stumbled my way up. After living in the house for 16 years, I knew exactly how many stairs there were and to this day I’m confident I could make my way through the place drunk and blindfolded. I reached the top and took a step into the kitchen.

My foot splashed as I planted it on the hardwood floor. It took a few seconds to realize what this meant. I made an effort to keep walking, each foot splashing as it made contact with the floor.

The situation was revealed as I kept walking. There was easily three inches of water covering the entirety of the kitchen floor and it reached up past my ankles in the laundry room. Naturally, I flipped the fuck out.

I ran to the washing machine and stared at it for a moment. It’s one of those front-loading machines that uses less water than the traditional upright type, and it was dutifully spewing water out its front. I shut it off and turned around a few times, trying to survey the damage.

It was extensive. Both rooms were totally flooded, and the water was spilling over into the living room, seeping in the carpet several feet into the room. I ran back through the water to the garage and grabbed a broom. I opened the outside door from the laundry room and began to sweep the water outside. It felt somewhat effective as water was clearly flowing out the door, but seemed to make no difference in the overall situation.

I thought again, and ran to the bathroom to get towels. At least I could stop the seeping into the next room, right? The upstairs bathroom was empty – of course it would be, nobody lived in the house except me. I ran downstairs and grabbed my sole bath towel. What respectable 18 year-old boy needs more than one towel anyway?

I reached the top of the stairs, towel in hand, and realized I was in deep, deep shit.

I called my mom, 200 hopeless miles away. I was frantic. In fact, that’s the first time I ever used the word “fuck” in her presence, and one of only a handful of occasions to this day. The conversation went something like ,“Oh fuck, this is fucking bad, the washer is fucking fucked, it was fucking leaking water all fucking night…”, or something to that extent.

With my mother informed, I ran to my neighbor’s house. Earl Love. You can’t make these things up. He rounded up a stack of towels and a much bigger push-style broom and we made our way back to the disaster area. Upon arrival, he simply stood back and nodded a few times, chuckling to himself, then got to work with the broom pushing water outside through the door.

My boss called. It was 8:03 a.m. by this point. I told him I was taking the day off, something about a family emergency. Close enough.

By mid-morning we had most of the standing water out of the house, and had all the windows open with box fans pushing the 103 degree dry air through the place. Early in the afternoon my mother arrived. She skipped out on a luncheon and drove up as soon as I called. No doubt she could sense the urgency in my voice. She made arrangements with some carpet cleaners to bring industrial fans to put in the living room.

Then, right on schedule, the realtor showed up at 3 p.m. to show the house.

It was my fifth consecutive week of traveling around Western Europe by train. I had already passed through a dozen or more countries with just a pack on my back, and I was getting to the phase where nothing was new anymore. I love traveling – and this trip was no exception – but this was a backpacking marathon of exploring cities, experiencing cultures and meeting people. I was nearing exhaustion, and I knew it. Each new city became a blur, and nothing much stuck anymore. To this day I have vivid memories from the first few weeks of the trip exploring the Louvre in Paris, circling the Duomo in Florence and hiking in the Swiss Alps, but once I moved on through Prague and Berlin, things started to get a bit hazy. I was in auto mode, setting up in each new city the same way. Train in, find a hostel, bookmark the city’s section in the Lonely Planet guide, explore all day and then meet some people to go have beers with at night. It was a routine, and I became an expert at it.

After going through many countries, languages and cultures, I learned to tune out those little things which I pay close attention to at home. I broke my habit of eavesdropping on strangers (funny, the things we miss) and started missing certain social cues. I’d get suddenly frustrated trying to order a loaf of bread from a baker who didn’t speak English; a task which I’d looked forward to in France was now a chore. While I was still having a blast, I was physically weary and completely jaded by my journey.

I was catching up with my guidebook on the train in to Stockholm when I met eyes with another trekker. We’re an easy bunch to pick out by our distinctly American style and sunburned faces, and the overpacked backpacks are a big help. I moved to the seat across from her and asked where she was headed. After five weeks on the road I had become an extrovert, a trait I only seem to pick up when I’m feeling out of place.

“Stockholm”, she replied.

Perfect. If I played my cards right, we could team up and find a hostel together. These things always seem easier when you’re a group, even just of two, and besides, she was pretty cute. I could certainly think of worse things to do than bumble around a foreign city with her for a day.

“Hey, me too!” was my fumbled response. I was over-thinking things now, something I’m notorious for. “Well hey, do you have a place to stay?”

“Not yet.”

“Me either. I’ve got a guidebook that lists a few hostels, want to check ‘em out?”, I asked, not hiding my hope for an affirmative reply.

“Sure. I’m Katie.” she said and stuck out her hand. I was taken aback by her assertive attitude paired with a set of kind eyes and a warm smile.

“David”, I replied and shook her hand, “very nice to meet you.”

We got around to some small talk, the usual things travelers pretend to care about each other. But talking to her was different. She was genuinely interested, and I got the feeling she cared about my answers beyond just a mild curiosity. And suddenly I found myself caring about what she was saying. For how exhausted I’d been and hour prior, I was finding a new energy and intrigue with this girl. I learned that she had just graduated from college, and had put away every dollar she earned working at a lab on campus. She saved enough money to buy an “around-the-world” plane ticket, the type that gives you freedom to fly to various locations of your choice, as well as a chunk of cash to actually follow through. She had taken an entire year off for the trip, and was just a month into it. I was insanely jealous.

We wound up picking out the cheapest hostel, which was still a staggeringly expensive 145 Swedish Kronos (about USD$20). Traveling on a shoestring changes your idea of what a “nice place” is. After arriving at the station, we battled the street signs together to find the place. When we did, we were looking down an alley to a door that was sunken half a flight of stairs below the road. We ducked in to find reception and the owner, who promptly guided us across the street to another building with a single dorm-style room. There were forty beds set up bunk-style and the only privacy was the bathrooms, and even that was a bit of a stretch with the 3/4-height doors. All this for twenty dollars. We picked a bunk bed to share as close to the corner as we could manage and shrugged. Any thoughts of a romantic evening I had were shattered.

It was mid-morning when we dropped our stuff, so we had plenty of time to go out and grab lunch and explore the city. The hostel owner gave us a map and pointed us to a “secret garden” that supposedly only locals knew about. I’m sure it’s the same spiel he gives every couple that passes through, but we were excited at the thought of it. We picked up a picnic lunch from a market and went on a quest to find the garden.

And it did live up to its name! We finally found it after taking a narrow walking path between a few buildings. It turned out to be a park of sorts, 20 meters per side, surrounded by old brick offices. The only ways in were from the back doors of the offices, or to take the walking path we came in on. It was beautiful! There were roses and freshly cut grass and a few trees that were no doubt as old as the buildings that hid them. We were the only people in sight when we set out our lunch and uncorked a bottle of wine. It was perhaps the first time on the trip when I was truly carefree. For a moment, as we got lost in great food and conversation, the worries of traveling drifted away to my subconscious. I stopped worrying about where my passport was, if my backpack was locked securely, the timetable of trains, and certainly the looming thought of the journey home. For a moment, it was bliss.

The afternoon followed suit. We rented a canoe and paddled around the canals of the city and admired multimillion dollar yachts with helipads for roofs. I was seeing everything with a fresh set of eyes now, as if the weeks of traveling suddenly had no effect on me. We talked about life and traveling and  laughed until we cried.

We floated on air back to the hostel just before supper to wash up and change for a night out. I was still aloof and the dirty floor of the hostel and the cold shower didn’t matter anymore. It was just good to be alive and happy.

We were getting ready to leave for dinner when we saw a guy come in to the room with his head down and an unsteady walk. He sat on a lower bunk a few beds away and put his head in his hands, and just sat there. Katie and I exchanged a worried glance, and both silently wondered what to do. At first we shrugged it off – he was probably just a homesick traveler or something – but the more we stood in silence, it became apparent that something was wrong. Katie took the initiative and walked softly toward our fellow traveler. I followed and we both sat on the bunk facing him.

“What’s wrong?” Katie started. The man looked up at us and was visibly crying, but he wasn’t making a sound. He had the physique of a body builder, but looked physically ill. Something was clearly wrong. He put his head back in his hands, and Katie and I looked at each other again, both of us unsure of what to do.

After an eternity of silence, Katie shuffled forward on the bed and touched his knee.

“I’ve been traveling for nine years”, he finally sobbed. As if saying this gave him strength, he sat up and wiped his tears with his shirt sleeve. “I’ve been away from home for nine years”, he continued, “and I’m going home in three days”. I thought to myself that he looked a bit wrecked just to be going through the mental process of going home again, but he kept on.

“I set this date to go home six months ago and bought the plane ticket last month.” He was on the verge of breaking down again. “I’ve been all over the world these nine years, and seen and experienced just about everything there is. I decided six months ago that I’m ready to go home. I’m 29 and decided I want to go home and settle down.”

Suddenly I was spiteful of his situation. Here was a guy who was living his dream, doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He was on the road for nine years with no responsibilities and no ties to anything or anyone, and he was breaking up over the realization that he had to go home and settle at some point. It sounded incredibly selfish to me.

He continued, “A few months ago I called my high school sweetheart and got back in touch with her. She remembered me right away and we hit it off again. I’ve been talking to her just about daily since then, and I think we’re ready to start again, to start a life together. I think I’ve fallen in love with her all over, and want to spend my life with her.” Hearing this softened my spite a bit. His situation didn’t sound as terrible as he was acting it out to be. It sounded like he was ready to go home. He was clearly genuinely in love with this girl who was waiting to meet him in three days. Katie and I exchanged glances again, this time of confusion.

“But you know, I’ve been traveling around, and I’ve done a lot of things.” he said matter-of-factly. “A lot of things I’m not proud of.”

“Look, man,” I spoke up, “we’ve all done things we’re not proud of. We all have a history, but that makes us who we are. And it sounds like this girl you’ve got at home loves you for who you are. You don’t have to live in the past, man, you can make your own future.” I tried to sound as comforting as I could, which has never been a strong point of  mine. In this case, I was trying to give advice to a man nearly a decade older than myself on a topic that I really had no experience with.

“No, man, you don’t get it.” he replied, on the verge of tears again. I thought to myself that, no, I probably don’t. I tried again, though.

“Hey, you can put the past behind you and move on…” I repeated, this time with different words. I didn’t know what else to say, so I trailed off.

“Not always.” he said resolutely, as if he was telling himself more than me. “I have been feeling sick the past few weeks, which is unusual. I’ve got a rock solid immune system, I’ve survived months in the jungle, so it’s weird. I went to the doctor to get checked out here last week…” He paused a moment and looked down.

He looked back up, directly at me, and said, “I just found out I’m HIV positive.”

The world stopped.

I was still lost for words, but this time for an entirely different reason. My mind went blank and was racing at the same time. I vaguely remember muttering “Oh, shit” to myself, then whispering to him “I’m so sorry.”

The rest of the conversation remains a blur, but we did all cry together. He asked how he could live out his life, how to tell his girlfriend back home, and how to face his family. I had no answers for him. He antagonized himself for living his lifestyle, and said he knew exactly when it happened. I remember telling him to be strong or some other half-assed attempt at being supportive, but mostly I kept repeating “I’m sorry”. We talked a long while, and left with hugs and words of encouragement.

That was the first and the last time I saw or heard of him. He was gone before I woke up the next day, and to this day I can’t remember his name.

But I do remember his story.

What follows is a full write up of the entire project from day one. It’s a lot to read, but I think it’s good to document it for personal reasons if nothing else. Feel free to skip around to the end to get to the juicy bits, or just check out the cool photos and video.

My History

I’ve seen a number of high altitude weather balloon projects over the years, and I always thought that they were phenomenally interesting. The idea that a mere mortal can put together a payload and send it to the far reaches of the atmosphere just sounded wild and amazing. Years ago, a handful of incredibly smart people started calling it a hobby and learned the ins and outs of putting together these projects. They would make a box only to let it go and have it ascend to twenty miles or more before plummeting back to the earth. It all seemed to surreal and oddly enticing.

Then, a little over a year ago some high school kids in Spain launched a high altitude weather balloon into near space and took some amazing photos. I was truly inspired by their feat – both because of the technical details of such an endeavor as well as their extraordinarily young age. I told myself that if they could do a project like that, then I certainly could.

I started immediately with back of the napkin notes. I had lunch with my good friend who also happens to be named David (cyan2004) once or twice a week to talk over and document on Woodstock’s Pizza napkins various parts of the project, from wireless solutions to parachutes to the extreme conditions that a payload would face at altitude. After a while, I started in on buying some of the parts needed. First came the souped up flight computer – back then we were planning on using the highly-overqualified Gumstix Overo Earth platform – and some of the temperature sensors. Then came lots of research into other various parts. We bought a couple balloons from one of the suppliers that the National Weather Service uses as well as a 4-foot parachute designed for high altitude rockets from a guy who sews them in his garage. I studied for and got my ham radio license (call sign KI6YMZ) to be able to legally transmit high powered radio signals from altitude. Aside from having to figure out the cryptic computer (which runs a full Linux stack), things were going very well and a launch seemed imminent.

Then, as tends to happen, some other Big Idea came into play and the balloon project was put on the back burner. David wound up moving 170 miles away and I lost a lot of ambition for the project, so it sat under my desk for a while.

Fast forward 12 months. By some twist of fate I moved 1200 miles to work for one of the very companies that supplied the original parts for the balloon when it was in the early stages. I took the box with all the parts for the project along when I moved, and it sat under the same desk in my new home for a while longer.

About a month and a half ago as I write this I decided to finish what I started. I had learned a lot about ham radio by talking to other hams on local repeaters, and gained a better idea of how the radio system should work. I started lurking in the #highaltitude IRC channel on Freenode again, where a bunch of UK-based ballooners hang out and talk about their projects. Aside from being incredibly inspiring, they all are extremely smart and some have been launching projects of various types for ten years or more. Every question I throw at them is answered as in-depth as I can understand, and even then a lot continues to go over my head. It continues to be a great resource as I continue in my journey of high altitude projects.

Choosing the Gear – a.k.a. My Justifications

When I picked up the project again, I immediately scrapped the idea of having a gumstix as the flight computer. It was about 10,000 times more computing power than is needed to parse GPS data and send it over a radio, and more than that it’s a pain in the ass to work with sometimes. “Simple” things like getting the I2C bus to work involved tracing schematics, trudging through thousands of pages of datasheets and delving into years of mailing list archives. I decided on the Arduino platform because I was already familiar with it, it’s far easier to use, has a much smaller form factor and power requirements, and there’s a huge support community around it.

I already had the GPS unit purchased, so I stuck with that. It’s a Garmin GPS 18 LVC with bare wires on the end, chosen because it was confirmed to work at high altitudes. Some civilian GPS receivers stop reporting after 30,000 feet, and all GPS units are disabled at speeds greater than 500m/s for safety reasons. Next launch I’m planning to switch it out for a u-blox, after the Garmin malfunctioned during the first flight. More on that later. I threw in a USB weather board that my employer Sparkfun sells which added sensors for humidity, pressure, ambient light and various temperature sensors. In addition, I wired up the Dallas Semiconductor 1-wire temperature sensor on a 20cm pigtail to string outside the box to record the external temperature.

To record all the data I got another Sparkfun product, Nate’s very own OpenLog. With its form factor, it pops on the back of the Arduino Pro Mini and logs all data sent to it over the default serial line. With a 1GB microSD card, I could store years of data before filling it up. I sent it everything I had access to, including all the weather and telemetry data.

I chose to use the non-rechargeable Energizer Lithium batteries to power everything due to their weight (about 2/3 of an equivalent alkaline) and great discharge curve at low temperatures. They can go to -40°C and function as if they are at room temperature.

The radio module was a no-brainer after talking to the guys in #highaltitude – the Radiometrix NTX2 – a 10 mW transmitter on the open 433 Mhz band. Despite its low output rating and miniscule 25 mA power consumption, with a proper antenna and sensitive enough receiver one can hear it from hundreds of kilometers away. There’s a significantly lower amount of free space path loss when you’re transmitting from well above the ground, after all! I borrowed the schematic for a voltage divider from James Coxon which is used to transmit RTTY data. It basically sends a carrier signal and pulls it up 425kHz to transmit a binary 1, and back down again for binary 0, and then follows the typical serial protocol of sending 7/8 bits and one stop bit.

After talking to another #highaltitude member, I settled on making a bazooka antenna out of a piece of coaxial cable to add to the payload. It’s got the benefit of being lightweight and very simple to put together. A trip to Radio Shack and a few minutes soldering and I had a working radio that I could send data over at 50 bits per second!

During my ham heyday, I purchased a Yaesu FT-817 radio which offers wide coverage and battery-powered operation for mobile use. For its size, it’s also got a pretty sensitive receiver. Paired with a directional 434Mhz yagi antenna, it’s the ideal tracking setup. I piped the output to a Y-splitter which went to a pair of circumaural headphones and to the input of the sound card in my Macbook Pro. The #highaltitude crew maintains a distribution of the cross-platform radio program fl-digi modified for these sorts of projects, and it performed flawlessly in decoding and logging the data.

Of course it wouldn’t be worth it to send the payload up and not take any pictures! I originally bought a point-and-shoot Nikon camera with a broken LCD screen on eBay for a few dollars to send up. I soldered wires in series with the power button and shutter so I could remotely control it with the Arduino by way of an optoislator. Instead, however, I used my much newer and nicer Canon point-and-shoot which is smaller, takes better photos, and has the added benefit of being able to use CHDK. CHDK is a firmware modification that a bunch of hardware hackers maintain that lets users extend the functionality of their Canon cameras. Features include the ability to take RAW photos, modify existing settings, as well as write scripts to control the camera internally. A particularly nice script is the Ultra Intervalometer, which you can specify to take a photo automatically at predetermined intervals. This was nice for a project like this because it’s entirely self-contained in the camera. If any of the code winds up breaking midway through the ascent, for instance, there’s no worry that the camera will stop taking photos. As you’ll see, the camera performed flawlessly.

In addition to the 12.1 megapixel still camera, I had a dream to record HD video. After searching far and wide for the best solution, I decided on the GoPro HD1. It’s designed to be small, lightweight, minimal, and most of all rugged. It’s used as a helmet cam for snowboarders, board cam for surfers, rollcage cam for racer, and everything in between. I even saw it on a recent episode of Mythbusters (the one with the duct tape). It takes breathtaking 1080p video and fits in the palm of your hand. The stock battery lasts about 2.5 hours, so of course I cracked it open and soldered new leads and added an external battery with about twice the capacity. Throw a 32GB SD card in, and you can record the highest definition video for 5 hours continuously.

Finally, I did wind up making a simple RADAR reflector based on a design I’d found online. I went to the local kite shop and got some carbon fiber tubing and right-angle connectors and lined sheets of aluminum foil at right angles to the cross sections. I have no idea if it works or not, but it was a best effort and only weighs three ounces!

Talking to the FAA

One big hurdle was making sure everything was legal. I found it nearly impossible to find anyone either at the FAA or at the local ATC who could direct me as to the legality of a high-altitude launch. I called every number I could find online, including the FAAs national 800 number. Despite getting transferred to a dozen different offices, I never got in touch with the Right Person.

In previous research, I stumbled across the website for the Edge of Space Sciences, a research group that has done 150+ launches. It never clicked before, but they are based out of Denver, CO – since my move a mere 40 miles away! I emailed the director of the project there and he immediately replied with contact for people at Denver International Airport who knew the balloon person at the regional FAA offices based outside Seattle, Washington. EOSS has had a running blanket waiver for their launches that lets them launch not only larger payloads, but in various weather conditions as well. As they’ve had the waiver for a number of years, nobody there could direct me to the exempt launches and how they work.

Despite having been in touch with the regional FAA office, I never got a definitive answer about the legality of the launch. The Federal Aviation Regulations that covers balloons and rockets is FAR-101, and the first section outlines what defines a “waiver exempt” launch. My project fit all the requirements, including payload size and density, line breaking force, and inclusion of a RADAR reflector. As far as I can interpret the regulations, the project is exempt from any of the FAR-101 regulations. In the future I hope to keep in touch with the FAA and the kind folks at the ATC at DIA and keep it safe. It would be fun and somewhat interesting to get into larger payloads with heavier experiments set up; I’ve got big plans for these already.

Launch Day

Operating under the assumption that the project is FAR-101 exempt and no notice need be given to launch, I went ahead with it. I was initially planning on launching on a Sunday, but I wound up chickening out and postponing until the following Wednesday, May 18th. I told my friend and partner-in-crime Brennen that we are taking the day off to launch a balloon and spend the day tracking it across the Colorado plains. He was surprisingly okay with it all, and wound up being an invaluable help throughout the whole thing.

We met a bit after 8:30 and double-checked that we had everything we needed including the payload, balloon, tarp, helium, and triple-checked that we had the duct tape and cable ties. Nothing would work without these last two things, believe me. We made one last launch prediction on CU’s amazing landing site predictor, just to make sure the winds hadn’t changed too drastically overnight. When we were satisfied, we scarfed coffee and pastries from the shop across the street and headed out into the great plains of Eastern Colorado. A few miles outside of our starting point in Boulder, it became painfully apparent that we were driving into a void. The towns became fewer and further between until we turned onto a county road and the towns turned into nothing more than a cluster of houses spaced miles apart.

I had an idea to launch from a park that I’d seen on Google Maps about 2.5 hours from Boulder. As we drove nearer to the location, however, it became apparent that no such park existed. In its stead was a single room cafe with a lone woman in charge behind the counter. We pulled in and casually asked if she minded us launching a weather balloon from the front lot. With just a single funny look and no questions, she told us that “well, we don’t usually have requests for that sort of thing, but you should talk to my husband”. She gave us directions to backtrack a quarter mile until we came to a steel siding shop, and ask for the owner. We drove down and found him, and he directed us to a large field adjacent to the property where he gave us free reign “as long as we close the gate when we’re done”. Again, surprisingly few questions were asked about what it was we were actually doing.

We picked a spot away from the power lines and parked and unloaded all the gear. A few boxes with the radio, computer, balloon, payload and all. The first thing that struck us was the abundance of cactus plants all around. Not the most delightful thing to think about when filling a balloon with $85 worth of lighter-than-air gas. Luckily we brought a tarp, which we laid down over the plants and set up on.

After plugging in the various parts of the payload, it was apparent that something had gone wrong. There was no signal coming through to the receiving radio, and the token blinking light on the Arduino was not blinking its “everything is okay” signal every 15 seconds as it was supposed to. I grabbed my laptop and frantically started debugging the issue. After the late night putting the final touches on everything I didn’t even know what revision of the code I was running anymore. With a quick flash to the most up to date code and a reset of the system, the mysterious bug vanished and everything began to work fine.

This all took a few minutes to set up, and it was another 30 minutes before we even started filling the balloon. By then, the white puffy clouds that were in the distance were gathering into a fairly sizable and frightening storm cloud. We pressed on.

Filling the balloon was a bit of a surprise. Neither of us had ever done anything of the sort, so we made it up as we went along. I had been to the hardware store a few times to figure out a way to get the regulator on the tank to fit the one inch cuff of the balloon, but beyond that I was clueless. We hooked everything together and let it fill. After a time, the balloon took shape. It didn’t seem as if the amount of lift was increasing, but we were patient. Completely clueless, we watched the PSI guage drop from its capacity of 2700 PSI down past 2000, 1500, 1000… we didn’t know when to stop. I remembered that the tank capacity was 110 cubic feet, and the capacity of the balloon was just a bit less. If we filled the balloon too much, it would expand and burst prematurely and not reach maximum altitude. Worst case is we fail to fill it to capacity, and the balloon fails to pop, stops rising and remains in stasis at high altitude with no means to cut it down until the sun’s UV rays deteriorate it.

We erred on the side of caution and filled the balloon until less than 400 PSI remained in the tank. It was quite stressful, watching as the air filled the balloon. Trying to think, is there even a conversion from PSI of a tank of a given size into volume of a gas? Does the element of the gas change the equation? What if it’s not pure helium and just a 95% mix? Will the pressure decrease linearly or will it fit a curve? At the end of it all, we just filled it until it felt right and there was enough lift to make us feel confident it would carry the payload.

We tied the neck of the balloon off with a single zip tie at first, and ran a line through it and tied it off to the tank. A backup of sorts, in case it got out of our control. We added a few more zip ties, and tied the payload line from two points on the neck down 20 feet to the top of the parachute. From the parachute, we tied a line through the radar reflector and on to the payload, which we secured with cable ties zipped together to fit snugly around the entirety of the box. When all was said and done, it was very secure and the balloon felt like it had more than enough lift.

By this time, it had been more than an hour since we parked in the field. The storm cloud that was in the distance before was now rustling at the edge of our field with a major threat of rain. We looked at each other, then at the payload, and up at the balloon now floating above our heads. There was a moment of hesitation before we decided that we had come too far to scrap the launch now. I double checked for the last time that we were receiving valid telemetry data from the payload on the radio.

With the payload in hand and the balloon tugging at it toward the sky, I looked at Brennen and shrugged. There was nothing more to do, and everything had been triple-checked at least. I glanced at the mounting storm now upon us, shrugged that off as well and said, “Screw it, let’s fly”, counted to three and released the box.

For a moment it was completely silent as we watched the payload rise those first few meters. I just watched. There was nothing more to do, and it became painfully real at that exact moment. Even if I wanted to make a last minute change, to update the code or restart the camera, it was too late. The only thing left to do was hope everything works.

For the first two minutes or so, we just waited and watched. Brennen clicked a few photos of the whole thing rising up into the sky with the storm looming in the background, and I just stood there and watched as it happened. For a brief second, we looked at each other and had the same question, “Now what?”. We knew the trip would take a couple hours at least, and we had no idea what to do. Should we follow it with the car? Where is the best place to track it from anyway? Should we stay a ways away from it for the best signal, or what?

Somehow from that we wound up in a rush to pack the car back up. We threw the tarp in a pile and threw the rest of the equipment in the boxes and threw the whole lot into the back of the car. We went back out through the fence and were sure to lock the gate on the way out. All of a sudden we were on the open road again, with no real place in mind to go. I had a 4-foot yagi antenna between my legs and was listening to the signal that the radio was picking up from it.

A few things were instantly apparent. One was that there was no cell reception in the area, making the primary following method – an iPhone running Google Maps – impossible, and second I noticed that the altitude data from the payload was not updating as expected. The latitude and longitude values were inching along as the payload drifted now hundreds of meters above our heads, but we had no idea exactly how high it was. By extension, we had no idea how fast it was rising, making any landing prediction calculations a bit hazy.

We drove around and around, finally deciding that the best thing to do would be to drive west until we found the first sign of cell service and download map data to the phone. We drove to the small town of Ault and picked up a quick lunch of a snickers bar and a bottle of water. Miraculously we found cell service there as well, however after much frustration we learned that the OpenStreetMap application I was banking on for map data can only download the map image data on a WiFi connection – and god only knew where the nearest broadband Internet connection was at that point.

In a stroke of luck, I was carrying my “backup phone”, an Android-based G1. I searched for “GPS” and found a waypoint-finder application that supported decimal-based latitude and longitude input. The app was designed for geocachers looking for loot, however it would be perfect for locating a crash-landed payload – and didn’t rely on the nonexistent cell network to operate.

With a snickers bar in my belly and a bag of beef jerky in hand, we set out on the road again and started backtracking toward the still-airborne payload.

The way I was tracking everything was this. The payload has a GPS unit on board, and a computer to read and process the data for the relevant bits. The computer builds a sentence of data including position, altitude, temperature and a timestamp, which it then modulates into an analog signal it broadcasts over the upper sideband of an FM signal at ~433Mhz at an incredibly slow 50 bits per second. The ground radio receives this signal as audio in the form of alternating blips and bloops. Plug an audio cable into the radio and then into the input of a computer’s sound card, and it can be decoded into the original message and show up one character at a time a little over 6 characters per second. A full sentence of data is therefore decoded every 15 seconds or so. Because of the uncertainty of transmission, the entire sentence is run through a simple XOR checksum which is appended to the end of the message; on the ground it’s a simple check to make sure the data you’re reading off the air is indeed the same as the data that was sent from the payload.

We drove and tracked the payload for another hour or so, when my trusty laptop’s battery started towards empty. I was prepared, however, and brought out a power inverter that let me plug the laptop into the power plug in the car. After fiddling with the various buttons and trying to figure out what the status LEDs on the unit were, it was clear that the inverter was dead. The smell of burning electronics was probably the biggest clue, but it left us with no power for the quickly-dying tracking computer. The situation was desperate, as we needed to keep tracking the payload as long as we could – we still had no way to verify if the payload was on it’s way down or not so we needed to get a reading from the lowest possible altitude before impact.

We stopped at a self-serve gas station that only pumped 85-octane gasoline and hunted for a power outlet to no avail. We even stopped back at the cafe, but they were already closed and only had a non-standard 220-volt outlet outside. We drove back to the tiny launch town of Briggsdale once again. We were planning on stopping at the local market, but wound up finding the Briggsdale Community Library which was open for another 25 minutes. We begged the librarian to let us borrow some power, and despite her quizzical looks she was happy to help. We found the only available outlet in the ceiling of the back reading room. We could stretch the power cord to reach the front room, run the cables to the radio which could just reach the door, and then run the antenna cable outside where we could aim the antenna. As Rube Golbergian as it seemed, it was effective and we started receiving data on the computer again!

Unfortunately the library was indeed set to close, so we were only able to receive a few minutes before we were kicked out. With the battery partially charged and after taking one last position reading from the box, we packed up our mess of wires, made a donation to the box and were on our way in the direction of the last known position. After a few miles on the road again, I fired up the tracking system. Despite pulling over and aiming the antenna in the right direction, I couldn’t pick up the signal from the payload. Either something had gone horribly wrong, or the payload had landed!

Knowing that the box was sitting on the earth somewhere was frightening news. It was a relief to know that we had a final location at which to end or search, but the last reading we received had been nearly 30 minutes prior – it could have been a mile up or a hundred feet up when we heard from it. The whole thing could have drifted a huge amount in any direction and we’d never know! Our best bet was to drive to where it last reported and try to pick up the signal from the grounded payload. In theory, the payload can transmit a few hundred meters while on the ground; if we got close, we could figure out where it was using a directional antenna.

We were about 25 kilometers away from the location, and there were no main roads in the direction we needed to travel. We zig-zagged across the chessboard-like grid of county roads until we wound up on an unpaved track in the same latitude as our target. With the recent storm, the going was rough. At some points the two drive wheels skidded across the entire lane, at others the rear tires struggled to keep up sending the car fishtailing sideways in the inches of mud. It was a slow and tedious 25 klicks, but Brennen was a champion driver.

About a kilometer away from the site, I asked Brennen to pull over and attempted to pick up the signal. I got nothing, so we continued on.

We approached within a few meters from the coordinates where the payload had last transmitted from and retried. Again, nothing.

At this point, I felt lost. We knew where the payload was at some point during the descent, and were standing exactly at it. Except we were standing in the middle of an empty field, miles from the nearest paved road, with no brightly colored payload or burst balloon to be found. Not only that, but if we couldn’t pick up the signal again, we had nothing to even hint at the right direction to go to look for it.

I opened the computer and looked at the log of the last few lat/long readings. From them, we could deduce approximately which direction and how fast the box was traveling on the last leg of the descent and we could sort-of track where it might have gone. We still had no idea how high it was when the last coordinates were transmitted, but we had nothing else to go on.

We set up a grid on the county roads covering a plausible search area, and followed it for about 30 minutes. It was bleak – not only were we making some gross assumptions about where we thought it might be, but the roads were spaced a mile or more apart making a visual recovery improbable. I began to lose all hope that we’d find the box at all, and became instantly thankful that my phone number was plastered all over the outside of it.

I told Brennen that I wanted to give up and call off the search. After covering most of our search area and with nothing else to go on, it was a bleak outlook indeed. He turned the car around at the next four-way intersection, and I looked down one last county road that we hadn’t covered yet and decided that we’d done enough. I’d started to go insane thinking about all the what-ifs – like what if it was in the middle of an unkempt field; it would never be found! We headed back the way we drove in, still on the unpaved roads, but this time towards the nearest interstate. I was beginning to talk about all the things that would change with the next payload – better radio links, more secure power connectors, and backup downlinks.

Brennen slowed down after a few hundred meters and his gaze shifted out the side window. “That looks like a bright box”, he muttered. I followed his gaze and nodded. “It sure doesn’t look like it fits into the landscape…”, I trailed off. Getting a bit closer, I nearly jumped out of my seat. I was looking at the payload, burst balloon, radar reflector and all!  It had landed about 40 meters from the side of the road on the top of a knoll covered in cactus and weeds. Brennen stopped in the middle of the road and I jumped out.

I ran the distance to the landing site in record time and looked everything over. The wooden dowel that held the antenna out the bottom of the box was clearly sticking straight up through the foam, pushed through and snapped off on impact. The balloon was wrapped tightly around the parachute, and appeared to render it nearly ineffective. I dropped to my knees, whipped out my knife and sliced the payload open to reveal that everything inside was intact!

The first thing I looked at was the still camera. I pressed the “playback” button and saw a picture of the ground I was standing on, shot after impact. I quickly scanned the most recent pictures and saw photos of clouds and clear photos from near-space. I just about fainted with relief! No matter what else happened, I had gotten the photos I was after, and was holding the memory card in my hand again. The launch was a success! I looked back at the payload and saw that the blinking red “record” light was still flashing on the video camera. Too soon to say, but it looked like we had full video of the journey as well!

After calming down from the giddiness that had washed over me, we packed up the remains and set out for home. In the car again, I immediately transferred all the photos and videos off of the memory cards onto my laptop for safe keeping. Brennen and I toasted beers at the Oskar Blues brewery in Longmont on the way home – truly a successful day!

Media

Aftermath

How we ever found that balloon remains an incredibly lucky mystery. How we missed seeing the payload the first drive-by and found it traveling the other direction is astounding, and that it was so close to the road as to be able to see it is simply amazing. If it had been 20 meters further, we’d never have found it and there’s a good chance it would have been months or years before anyone else stumbled upon it.

I still am unsure of what exactly went wrong with the GPS unit that caused it to report errant altitude data. Likewise, I never figured out why the radio stopped transmitting after impact despite the rest of the electronics having power and logging data. I learned a lot from these troubles, though, and will certainly fix the issues with any subsequent launches. All in all, it was an incredibly fun project to put together. There have been many similar projects over the years, and will no doubt be many more in the future, but this was my take on building and launching a weather balloon.

Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, comments or just want to say hi, I hope you shoot me an email; it’s me@stilldavid.com.

For sale is a 1999 Honda Accord EX V6 that has 222k miles on it with a blown engine and radiator.

This was the top of the line Accord in 1999, complete with leather seats and a sun/moon roof. The body is in decent condition, with just one minor parallel parking incident on the rear bumper that just needs a bit of paint. This car spent its life in Northern California up until a couple months ago. (see below). The transmission is in good shape,  all the glass is good (new windshield 4 months ago) and it’s never been in a wreck. All four tires are brand new as of ~5k miles ago (with receipt to prove it) and the brakes are brand new as of ~2k miles ago (again, receipt to prove it).

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Now: the story.

Picture me. I’m 23, out of school and full of adventure. I bought this car from my parents (who bought it new in 1999 – I was there) a couple years ago and planned on driving it for the rest of my life, really. I just put new tires and brakes on it, and have done regular maintenance to keep the car up. It has the 200 hp V6 engine – perfect for me, the speed demon. I have the speeding tickets to prove that one, too…

Anyway, a job pops up 1200 miles away in a little town I’d never been to called Boulder, Colorado. It’s pretty much my dream job and Boulder seems like a pretty chill place, so I give my two weeks at my dead-end job in California and become the first person in my family to move out of the state. I drive two ten hour days to drive to my new hometown. The car performs like a champ except on some of the mountain passes when it starts to heat up more than usual. No big deal, I say. I add some water and keep a vigilant eye on the radiator for the rest of the trip, checking and adding water as needed. After a few stops, the engine settles down and drives all the way to Boulder with no sweat after the initial hiccups. Awesome. I just need a new radiator, that’s only a few hundred bucks to replace.

Here, however, the story takes a radical twist.

The weekend I get to Boulder (Feb 21) I meet my new co-worker-to-be and park the car at his house while I search for a place to live. Good, I think. The car could use a rest. I leave everything I own in the back, no big deal. My co-worker reminded me to take the beer I’d brought (a case of Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale, in case you were wondering) out of the trunk because it was supposed to get cold that night. Nice to let me know – for me anything below about 35 degrees I’d consider damn cold. The next night the temperature dropped to 1 degree Fahrenheit. One. Degree. Perhaps the coldest weather I’d ever been in.

Then I put it all together. I added a bunch of _water_ to the radiator. Not _antifreeze_. #$%&

But the damage had been done. I tried driving the car from its place to my new house a couple miles away, and after about half a mile it started steaming water everywhere. I stopped the engine immediately and had it towed the rest of the way. Now I don’t know much about engines, but I’m pretty sure this one is dead. Shot. Blown. Whatever. If you didn’t put it together yet, water expands as it freezes. As I had a bunch of water in my engine block, it froze and expanded in the near-record low temperatures that night and most likely blew apart the engine at the seams. Or seals. Or whatever engines are held together with.

I’m terribly sorry to see this car go, which is probably why it’s taken me almost two months to post it, but I must move on.

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So please, make me an offer on a car that is completely fine other than the engine.  I’ve seen the J30 V6 engines on here for as little as $500 if you’re mechanically inclined. Unfortunately, I’m not. A mechanic quoted me at $3-4k to swap a brand new one in, which is a bit much for me at the moment. (Moving is quite expensive, as it turns out). Or, if you have a 98-02 Accord V6 that was in a terrible wreck but the engine is good, with our cars combined, we could have a whole car again! It would be glorious!

I have AAA, too, so if you live within 4 miles of downtown Boulder, I could probably arrange to tow it to your place. After 4 miles, it’s a marginal fee per mile to tow it the rest of the way. Unless you have a trailer, that’s cool too. Or if you want, you can try driving it (it starts and runs and shifts fine), but believe me when I say you’re on your own if you choose that route.

Cheers, thanks for reading. Time to crack open one of those twenty-four ounce harvest ales…

Funny thing, that life. Certainly not without a sense of humor, but never in ways you can forsee or really appreciate until you take a moment to reflect.

I just did quite possibly the craziest thing in my life. I gave up a lax job with incredible security many years into the future to move 1200 miles to work at a place where I make about the same, and probably won’t even sign a contract that guarantees employment through my first paycheck. Craziest, yes, but not the most illogical. To understand why, you have to appreciate where I’m coming from…

In a nutshell, what I had was a State Job. Not to downplay the people or work they do (<3), but it is an entirely different atmosphere than the so-called “real world” that  every state worker fears so much. At a State Job, deadlines aren’t so much fixed as they are suggestions – there is no tangible money on the line so if you fail to deliver there are no tangible consequences. You weren’t going to get a raise anyway, and there’s no way in hell they would fire you for anything less than, say, blatant disregard for authority. For many people in many situations, this is perfect. For me, it was suffocating and indeed extremely frustrating. I saw hopeful co-workers who thought, even after several years of trying, that they could change the system But we could all see that thinking like that is lying to yourself. I could go on about exactly why and how a simple job led to a path of insanity for me, but suffice to say it did.

So I wanted out. I wasn’t sure where I wanted out to, per se, but I wanted out. In the back of my mind for the last several years, I had some places in my mind where I told myself I could move to if it ever came to it. The places were pretty limited, and included the Bay Area (specifically San Francisco), Seattle, or Colorado. Short of those places, I’d thought about moving out of the country to try something radically different, but I’m not sure if I’m up to that just yet at this stage of my life. But those thoughts just sort of simmered on the back burner for a while.

If you know me at all, you know that I love my “perpetual projects”. These are things like the “robot” I’ve been hacking on for the last few years – projects  that are never really “finished”, per se. I’ve sunk several thousands of dollars on these projects over time, but I use them as an outlet for learning about electronics and embedded programming and the such. If you ask anyone who’s into hobby electronics, they’ve no doubt heard of SparkFun Electronics. I’ve spent more than a few dollars in their online store, and their forums and IRC channel are indispensable for getting help on whatever it is you’re working on. I’ve always looked at the company fondly, and told myself, “That’s where I would like to work”. At a small company with a lax environment, working on things that matter – even if only to a nerdy niche. I liked the idea of selling a physical product and not making money solely based on advertising or reselling some meta product that only exists in ones and zeros.

So when they tweeted, it stuck with me. That weekend I put together my resume and whatnot, and sent it off on Monday before I ran off to a meeting. I really didn’t know what to expect. It’s a small company with lots of talent, and it’s 1200 miles away from little old Chico, CA. Would they even give me the time of day?

During the meeting, my phone buzzed. I glanced at it and saw that they had already emailed back! I floated back to my desk and read the email. They were interested in a phone interview!

Cutting the details short, I interviewed on the phone and then via a video chat over the next week, and wound up getting an offer. It felt right, and I was more than ready for a change, so I accepted and started getting my life packed up. Holy. Shit. Even now, I don’t have a firm grasp of the consequences – both good and bad – of a move like this. I went through a week in somewhat of a daze, then a week of  ”lasts” and goodbyes before I packed up a U-Haul, jumped in my car, and headed across a few states to my new home in Boulder, Colorado.

Boulder. I’ve never been to Boulder prior to a week ago. I was fortunate enough to have been talking to one of the SFE employees who gave me a place to crash when I got here, which was a live saver. I trolled craigslist until I found a place that sounded alright and was in my price range. It turns out to be in a prime location close to the apparently-famous Pearl St. Mall, many coffee shops and brew pubs, and less than a block away from a dangerously-good burrito joint that’s already had multiple visits. It’s a 4-bedroom house in which I signed a lease to rent the “eastern upstairs room”. Each person-room has its own lease, a concept new to me; we’ll see how it works out. The other roommates have their own quirks, but it’s a good situation all in all.

And work at SparkFun. I am not entirely sure what I was expecting, but it’s certainly lived up to what I wanted in a job. I won’t go into too many details here – perhaps in a future post – but rest assured that I’m having a blast so far. The weather here is somewhat erratic, but I think I’m going to start riding my bike the 5 miles in to work next week provided it doesn’t snow too much.

So yeah, life is funny sometimes. I just made the biggest move of my life, and for better or for worse, I’m here. It’s been great so far, and I’m looking forward to snowboarding at winter park next weekend, and then spending spring and summertime rock climbing in the flatirons and beyond, cycling around the foothills, and who knows what else.

Life’s too short not to seize opportunity, especially when it’s staring you down.

Well, okay, it’s not exactly a robotic surgeon, but with a real-life doctor at the helm it’s certainly an incredible tool that makes for better surgeries.

I’m talking about the da Vinci Surgical System that I was fortunate enough to check out at El Camino hospital in Mountain View last week. Without getting into too much geeky detail, it is basically a remote controlled robot with 4 arms (each with 7 degrees of freedom) that have interchangeable tools at the end of them. When a person goes in for surgery under da Vinci, instead of a seven or eight inch incision for a prostatectomy the patient receives five much smaller incisions that the arms of the robot can reach into to perform the same task.

One of the robot’s 8mm diameter arms is equipped with two high-intensity halogen lights fed through fiber optic lines, situated in between two more fiber optic cables that pipe to two high-definition video cameras. From this, the operator has stereo vision of what is going on inside the working area.

The operator sits just ten feet away from the patient at the controls of da Vinci, and has control of two of the attached tools at a time by way of hyper-sensitive hand controls and a series of pedals. There is a VR-style headset the surgeon looks into while operating, giving a fully three-dimensional HD stereo view of what’s going on.

Of course I wasn’t about to go performing surgery on anyone, so for my visit the very kind OR tech set up the practice tray for me to play with. It’ essentially a miniature rubber playground with tiny rubber bands to play with.

I was amazed at the engineering that went into this $1.7M robot – any old simpleton such as myself could sit down and pick it right up. Within a minute and a half I was maneuvering all over the tray, adjusting the camera, and expertly moving the little rubber pieces around. For such a large and involved machine, they had it simplified down to an understandable user interface.

Basically, all this comes down to safer surgeries with much faster recovery times – some operations allow the patients to go home the same day of the surgery. Also, instead of having a large scar up the lower abdomen, patients are left with tiny incision marks that can completely heal in just a couple months.

Ten years ago, it was a dream to think of a robot aiding in surgeries as da Vinci does several times a day at El Camino. It’s hard to imagine what may be capable ten years from now – perhaps the human operator will be cut from the equation leaving just a computer controlling the robot, or perhaps something even more advanced that hasn’t been thought up yet. Whatever it may be, it’s technology like da Vinci that is enhancing people’s lives today, and pushing against the boundaries of what is possible in the future.

I suffer from what I have best seen defined as N.A.D.D. If you have not read this article, please do so now. (Command + Click the link) I’ll wait.

That’s Rands’ way of putting things, and it is what resonates most with me. It describes how I can’t sit still on a computer. There are a thousand different things I could be doing, therefore I must do all of them. And the only way to be remotely successful at doing everything is to multitask – do many things simultaneously. This behavior comes in many forms – I browse the mobile version of bloglines on my iPhone with the latest album blaring when I ride the bus for instance – but manifests itself most strikingly when I sit down with my computer at any given point.

When I open my computer, I have e-mail, a feed reader, my IDE, tomorrow’s presentation, and at least a half-dozen browser tabs open on any range of completely different topics. I’m at the point where I read both Digg and Slashdot daily, peruse Engadget and TechCrunch and even Valleywag on occassion. I’m subscribed to over 100 feeds – all of which ping me when they’re updated. Not to mention AIM, which I’ve been known to live on for days at a time. It’s information overload. And more and more I’m finding out that none of it matters.

Or, I should say, very little of it matters. I was tipped off with my trip to Seattle a few weekends ago. We left on Thursday night and didn’t return until the wee hours of the following Monday morning – a full 3 days away from home – and I didn’t take my laptop. I limited myself to just checking email on my friend’s iMac once per day, something most would consider “normal”. I wanted to see if the world would keep spinning if I left it alone for a few days.

It did.

When I returned, I had nearly a thousand unread items in my feed reader, pages of digg to catch up on, and scores of forum posts to read and comment on. It was overwhelming to say the least. What I did haunts me to this day: I pressed “mark all as read”. I didn’t open a single one of them. Nope, not a one.

I went to class on Monday, as usual, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I didn’t miss out on any random conversation before class, nor did anyone laugh at me for not knowing that Samsung’s new ZX-8000 had spy pictures leaked in Japan. I didn’t know that Kottke had posted linked a New York Times article about a restaurant owner being sued over his tomato soup and how ridiculous the world is. I had no idea. And I was strangely comfortable with it.

I thought about it some, and checked a few things out. I realized that I have a choice in the world I live in. One is a world of A-List bloggers that keep up with the latest Web trends, already talk about Web 4.0, and link to each other with articles from other A-List bloggers until nobody remembers where shit came from anymore. There’s nothing bad about this all-digital world, and I would love to be in it if I had the time. But that’s the most precious resource to this group – time. If you aren’t in the first 10 comments, you might as well pack up and go home. If you link to something half a day late, you’re toast. If you think you have a scoop only to find out that Michael Arrington has had beta access for a month and a half, you fail.

There’s something I found out about these people that live. This Lifestyle is their full time job. They literally get paid to live The Lifestyle. From Gruber to Kottke to Arrington to CmdrTaco, it’s the life they live, and we reap the benefits as consumers and they reap the benefits for doing us their respected service. I had the pleasure of spending some time with Anil “LOLCats and Goatse” Dash, who turned out to be an incredibly nice and down to earth guy, but he is just plugged in. He can’t get away from it, or he’d almost be doing a disservice to his cultish following. It sucks you in, this life does, and it’s incredibly hard to escape.

Enter Me.

I’m a 4th year (going on 5) Computer Science student who doesn’t really care about school more than just graduating and moving on. I’m not an A-List blogger, but I keep up with and read the best of them. I’ve been beta tester on some cool Web Two Dot Oh apps, and had a gmail invite before they hit eBay. My problem is that I don’t have a niche yet. I am a self-proclaimed Jack of All Trades, Master of None. I “sorta-kinda” know a lot of things – most of the major scripting languages, some database stuff, some sysadmin stuff, some embedded systems programming, a bit about hardware; I know how the internet works, and how to make a browser do a bit of DOM magic; I also keep up with all the internet memes. I know all the references in the Internet People YouTube Montage. So where do I fit in? My problem is that I’m not plugged into any of these things, I just know enough to get me by. I can’t focus on any one thing for some reason, and my guess is that it’s for fear of “wasting time”.
In this world of N.A.D.D. it doesn’t take any time at all to check a blog. I find myself skimming the long posts because they take too long to read, or I keep marking them unread until I just say fuck it and move on with my life – if the author can’t say something in 2 skimmable paragraphs then it is not worth my time. I browse slashdot at +4 or +5 because anything else just doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that “I’m not wasting time if I check my feeds”, because I can get through them in 2 minutes anyway. Of course it’s only because I just checked them 5 minutes ago, and only one of them has updated.

Where does this leave me?

I’ve been incredibly unproductive for the last few months. I can’t seem to finish anything, and I can’t focus on school or work or even my own blog (which has been on a near two-month hiatus). I put this all together in my Software Engineering class when my teacher mentioned a thing called Flow.

Flow. It’s a mental state that you’ve experienced before. It happens when you line up a shot in golf. You feel it when you drive fast in the rain and your tires slip, putting you in that hyper-aware mental state. Or, in the context of my class, you experience it when you are coding a big project. You are in the zone completely. You know what variables are instantiated in what scope and exactly what they’re doing and why. Every function is in your own human RAM, callable at a moments notice when you need it. You feel Flow. It’s a mental state that is difficult to achieve, and perhaps more difficult to obtain. It can take hours at a time to get to that state, but a single second to snap out of it. It can be the ring of a telephone or the bleep of an email notification that snaps you out of it, but it’s complete programmer’s bliss while you’ve got it.

The problem with The Lifestyle is that it doesn’t require Flow to maintain it. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You live in 15 second blurbs. You read a page while you have 3 more loading in the background because you don’t have time to wait around watching the page take form as the data is transferred from the remote servers. All this is happening, of course, while you’re debugging that 5-line script you are writing – any longer, of course, would require a train of thought that lasts longer than half a minute. When your email beeps, you command-tab-command-1 it, grok it, take action, and move on in mere seconds. The Lifestyle Becomes your Flow. If you can’t use quicksilver to eject a disk image (after calculating the number of milliseconds saved over using expose to view the desktop, select the image, and command-e it) then perhaps you don’t understand where I’m coming from.

So what now? I’m addicted…

Turns out, it’s a choice. Ask anyone who’s had a company-wide productivity meeting. Set a time – once an hour or twice a day perhaps – to check your email is what they say. Same thing with your feed reader. If you can’t read through all of them in one block of time once a day, then perhaps you have too many. Categorize them into “Must Read” down to “Only read on a Lazy Sunday”. Don’t even visit Digg. Unsubscribe from Engadget – you will thank me later. You have to realize that Life will go on whether you are caught up in the details or not.
My grandpa used to let the phone ring (there was no answering machine) while he was watching Wheel of Fortune, lest anyone interrupt his TV time. “If it’s important”, he used to say, “they’ll call back”. It’s true. If the news is really that important, it’ll find you, I promise.

Even as I write this, I had to close out everything else. I turned off my wi-fi, and migrated to one Space. I’m even writing in a plain text editor because anything else has too many buttons. As it is, I’m in the window of a coffee shop and am distracted enough by people watching.

So I have to ask, did you skim this article? Was it “tl;dr”, or did you go through it line by line? I’m not offended either way, but take a look around, seriously… how many apps you you have open right now? :P

Where do I begin.

How about at the beginning. It started with a spark of interest in Urban Exploring, which is defined as going to places where most people wouldn’t think, or dare go. I started doing this before I even knew what it was called, most notably when I went to the abandoned Diamond Matchstick factory outside of my current hometown, Chico CA. It had plenty of old buildings and broken down cars to explore and photograph.

Fast forward to last weekend, when I went to Super Happy Dev House 20 with Sean. He is an avid urban explorer, and has the pictures on his flickrset to prove it. We went out to an old lumberyard on Saturday night, reigniting the spark to want to go out and explore closer to home. We discussed an old missile silo just outside Chico that was abandoned in the ’60′s and rumored to be still around.

I’d heard about it, after reading an article in the Chico Beat that Sean also re-linked me to. I had plans to go with another friend who I’d done a bit of urbex (?) with before, but we never got around to it – and winter is upon us so I figured there’s no time like the present.

I did a bit more research and came across a photoset from a near-identical facility located in Colorado. After seeing the spectacular photo-ops, I was quite determined visit the silo. I even came across an old photo from 1986 that some kids took while on the daring escapade in 1986 – proving that it had been done before with no ill results. By this time, my mind was made up, and I was going no matter what. There was a break in the clouds this afternoon, so I decided to go check it out – even if I had to go alone.

I borrowed Stassia’s Jetta and drove out to the site. There was a huge rock wall and iron gate on Keefer Road blocking the entrance, just like the article had outlined. This was the place. Just to be cautious, I drove up and down the road a couple times and circled as close as I could get to the facility on Cohasset, finally parking under a tree on Keefer Road a ways from the gated road. I crossed a field the quarter-mile to an empty man-made lake ever so cautiously until I heard what sounded like a construction site. Sure enough there were 3 huge earth movers working at the missile silo site, which is supposed to be abandoned! I decided it would heed me to wait until they left to do my exploring.

On the way out, there was a small, dry ravine with – get this – the carcass of a dead cow rotting in it! It reeked of rotting flesh and was surrounded by flies and covered with ants. I snapped a couple pictures and continued on my way out.

This was starting to get creepy! A supposedly abandoned missile silo with new construction going on around it, an 8-foot high chain-link fence with barbed wire surrounding it, and now a dead cow in the ravine with no apparent cause of death that hadn’t yet been removed by its owner. It may have been just my imagination running, but it felt like a scene from a bad episode of The X Files. I just had to go back to investigate!

I waited until just before dark to return, and came better equipped. I had all my camera gear in my backpack with the tripod strapped to the outside, my headlamp with extra batteries, my black fleece and sturdy shoes on. I drove up Keefer Road and parked in the same spot that I had before under the oak tree. The time was 6:15. I told Stassia I’d meet her at a coffee shop to return her car by 8 – plenty of time to explore.

I crossed over the field to the empty lake with a bit more confidence this time, as if I owned the place. I leaned up against the bank of the lake and grabbed my camera and 300mm lens. From my vantage point I could clearly see a parked earth mover, a few shipping containers and what looked like a small house – all surrounded by the chain-link fence. No people in sight. With a bit more care I crossed the main road and sat under the only large oak tree in the middle of a field of knee-high grass and grabbed the camera again. From my new position, I clearly saw the house with what looked like either a reflection from the setting sun in the window, or one of the lights was on inside. Parked in front of the house was a huge pickup truck with nobby tires and a significant lift kit – just the kind of truck a construction worker would drive. Was he packing up to leave, or did he leave his truck overnight to return in the morning? I took note and continued.

Beyond the shelter of my tree and on the outside border of the fence, I found where the earth-movers had been working. There were huge piles of dirt which had recently been moved around with no rhyme or reason as to what was going on or what was being constructed. This just added to the conspiracy theory brewing inside my head. I took a couple pictures in the setting sun and continued to the chain-link fence separating me from my goal. I paced the border several times and saw where a dozen people before me had cut through the fence to get in, and where the caretaker had meticulously patched each and every hole. There were no open holes, unfortunately, and that should have been my first clue.

There was a spot in the corner of the fence where the barbed wire had been mangled and cut in some places; someone had scaled over it before me. I took great care climbing over and landed on the other side safely. Now there was nothing between me and the grand missile silo I’d heard so much about. But there was more than just a missile silo here… there were a half-dozen or so shipping containers placed in a row, and the construction equipment I had seen working earlier parked next to a house-sized aluminum hangar. There was even a semi truck parked outside. Definitely not “abandoned”. Much to my surprise, the door to the hangar was open, so I took a peek. Inside, there was another semi truck, an ATV, a golf cart, and a fairly good sized makeshift machine shop complete with a drill press, band saws, and tools. Again, not what I expected at all. Careful not to disturb anything, I went back outside and wiped my prints off the door handle (just in case, right?). I checked one of the shipping containers which had its padlock hanging loose. Inside there was another ATV, what looked like a pile of parachutes or tents in the back, and a huge stack of ammo boxes front and center. The conspiracy theory was all but true in my mind.

I was getting pretty freaked out by all this, so I turned my attention to the house in the center of it all. It was about 100 yards away from my position at the shipping containers, and I could now clearly see that there was a light on inside. I watched it for several minutes and – was that a silhouette I just saw? No, couldn’t be. Or was it? I took my shaking nerves as a sign that it was time to scram, so I stumbled in the dark back to the fence and made my escape. I started my journey back to the car along the perimeter of the fenced-off area.

I grabbed my iPhone which has a decent map of the area, and could determine my position along the fence. I couldn’t help but notice on the map that one of the silo doors was just on the other side of the fence from me, calling for me to explore. My nerves had calmed down enough for me to feel confident to scale the fence yet again to have a peek. After all, I was well out of view of the house.

I went to the opposite corner of the fence where, again, someone had mangled the barbed wire into a manageable mess. I climbed over with a bit more trouble than before, but on this part of the fence there was a bar about halfway up the fence on the opposite side that I could get a foot on. From it, it was just a few feet to the ground, so I dropped down and evaluated my situation. From the map, I could tell that there was a silo door next to a lone tree in the center of the property. I made my way towards it under the darkness of night.

Standing on the door was like nothing I’d done before. Just knowing the history of the place under my feet, that 160 feet below my there used to lie a Titan I nuclear ICBM that could launch at the touch of a button – that’s some power! I started getting giddy with excitement, I wanted to find the entrance to the underground silo and control center more than anything now! I took another look at my auto-dimmed screen to find where the next silo door was, and found it a few hundred feet away. Again, I got the same humbling rush standing on the huge concrete and steel doors. On the map, I could clearly see where the house was – smack in the center of the gated-off area. I could also faintly see what must have looked like a concrete subterranean entrance just maybe 50 feet from the house.
The only light other than the clouded-over moon and stars was coming from the porch light of the house. I sort of used this to my advantage as I approached the house. Next to the house, right about where the entrance was, there was one of those portable water towers on stilts. It cast a shadow from the porch light that I ducked in while I took carefully placed steps toward the house. I stopped and hid behind a pile of excavated rocks for a minute while I re-evaluated my situation yet again. I was very close to the underground entrance to the silos, plus I was positioned well – behind the shadow of the entrance and the water tower. Taking another look, I saw a ski boat next to the truck parked near the house as well. So this was starting to look more like a family’s house, not just a caretaker keeping watch over the construction site. But I was so close to the entrance I could taste it.

I left the cover of my pile of rocks and went to the entrance. What I saw was straight out of a game of Half Life. There were two huge concrete doors that opened out of the earth like cellar doors protecting some unknown treasure. Beneath the doors was an elevator that took up the length and width of the opening, surrounded by a chest-high gate. I felt as if I had to first gather the red key, knock out the 2 guards in front and kill all the aliens before I could continue. From my position I could see the elevator, and the blast doors, standing almost 10 feet high, protected my view from the house. But from what I could tell, there was no staircase or ladder to descend to the depths of the unknown. I didn’t have the full view, though – there was another side to the elevator that I couldn’t see. The far side, however, didn’t have the protection of the blast doors for cover, they were in plain sight and lit from the house. I had come too far to give up, so I tiptoed my way around the concrete door, and poked my head around to take a look. I didn’t see much before I distinctly heard a sliding glass door open from the house – I was found out!

It was not the sound of the sliding glass door that scared me. It was the sound of the dogs.

Yes, that was it, dogs. Definitely more than one, definitely aggressive sounding, and I was certain they were moving right towards me, and fast! I didn’t bother to stick around and find out – instead I took off as fast as I could the opposite direction under the shadow of my water tower once again, and dove behind the cover of my rock pile. My heart was pounding! I had a few seconds to decide what to do. I heard the dogs still running towards me. I had maybe a 50 foot head start on them – not much – and a chain link fence holding me captive to the place I had worked so hard to get to.

I took off running again, moving as fast as I could to the chain-link fence. I was still a few hundred feet from it, and the dogs were right on my tail. They caught up to me after a few seconds, and I could count three of them. A huge dog that better resembled a bear than a household pet was trailing a few feet behind me to the left and growling a deep, throaty growl that scared the shit out of me. To my right, there were two smaller dogs, about rottweiler size or so, each barking their own version of “Let’s get this sonnuvabitch!”

I should mention at this point that I had just donated two pints of blood just four hours earlier. Of course they discourage any sort of physical activity for a day or so, and recommend a hearty dinner to make up for all the lost fluid, lest you pass out or get lightheaded. Save the 7-up I had at the blood bank, I hadn’t eaten since.

I could just see the fence now, coming up quick out of the darkness. There was that split-second decision to either stop and climb carefully up and over the barbed wire and hope the dogs aren’t the bloodthirsty human flesh-eating type, or just jump and hope for the best.

I, of course, chose the latter. In one swift and less than graceful movement, I grabbed the top bar of the 8-foot high fence, braced my foot on the lower bar, and half somersaulted/half fell over the remaining strands of barbed wire to safety. I did not stop there! I ran another 50 feet or so to a cluster of trees where my lack of blood caught up with me. I dropped my backpack as flat as it could go and pressed my body flat against the ground behind the tree. It was when my heart slowed down that I heard the rumble of the truck over the barking of the dogs. Then came the headlights peeking over the hill before the truck parked behind the yapping dogs and brought out the spotlight.
I couldn’t see much with my face pressed to the ground, but the field behind me lit up in an instant with what must have been a high-powered spotlight. The beam swept the field briefly before it stopped, trained on the tree that I was hiding behind! I held my ground and didn’t budge for what seemed like an eternity before the light moved on. Another lifetime later, the light was shut off and the truck moved on past the dogs, still barking at my scent from my upwind position.

When the faint glow of the taillights disappeared, I jumped up and made a break for the field. I was halfway to the next grove of trees with a good 5oo feet to go, when the truck’s headlights bobbed over the hill again. I threw my bag down and dropped to my face in the middle of the field of knee-high grass. The truck stopped and started its sweeping the field with its sun-like lamp again. I didn’t bother looking up this time, I covered myself as best I could and just waited it out. When the beam of light disappeared, I stole a glance and saw just the taillights of the truck. After another second, I saw the back-up lights of the truck. I couldn’t tell what the driver was doing, but I wasn’t too keen on sticking around to find out, so I grabbed my bag once again and sprinted to the cover of the next cluster of trees.

Keeping a safe distance between myself and the road, I made my way through my protective covering of oaks. I passed the dead cow once again, and froze twice as the driver made two passes up and down the road past me, spotlight still searching for an its target – me.

I made it to the edge of the woods with one more 500 foot clearing and a stone wall between myself and the safety of the car. I waited another minute to see if the truck would make another pass. When it didn’t, I made a healthy jog across the clearing with an eye out behind me for the truck. My heart had caught up with my adrenaline rush, so I was tripping and panting my way across the field which was already cluttered with volcanic rock and cow patties.

At long last, I made it to the safety of the Jetta, literally threw my stuff in the passenger seat and chirped the tires as I sped away into the night.

Update 1

As it turns out, there’s another Titan I ICBM site nearby, and I wound up accessing and exploring it a few months after I wrote this post. I didn’t write about that trip, but I have a few photos from it available on my California Silo set on flickr.

The site in Chico is still privately owned, and I DO NOT recommend even attempting to access it (if the above hasn’t already scared you off). The other nearby site has been BLOCKED OFF from all access since I visited it, and it is impossible to enter unless you want to break through the 110-ton 4 foot-thick concrete and steel silo bay doors.

Update 2

I found another Titan I site in Colorado, with pictures at my Colorado Silo set on flickr.

Comments are closed on this entry, but feel free to send me email with questions or to share your story. (me@stilldavid.com)

I’ve got a bunch of progress on the autonomous car project (okay, someone think up a good name for this thing, quick!) but I think I’ll hold off on that for a bit more until I can do a full write-up. I’ll just note that I’ve got the i2c bus working across the board, which means that the sonar is hooked up and the thing can finally move! Quite exciting indeed.

Last Sunday I went on a mountain bike ride with Router Dave on a couple trails I’d never been on before. We Chicoans are so lucky to have such a nice park so close to us. After a ~4 mile trek straight down the canyon, I thought it would be a good idea to cool off by jumping into the creek at Bear Hole. It was nice, but when I was climbing a rock my foot slipped a few inches straight into a pile of broken glass where someone had smashed a bottle. Much blood and pain followed:

Sorry for the graphic image, but that’s my foot after all! Please note that this happened about a mile above where the gate was locked and across the creek from the road, so there was a fair amount of gunk accumulated in the wound after a nice swim and bike ride down to Dave’s waiting parents. (thanks again for the help!)

I am also in a fair amount of (non-physical) pain because my trusty MacBook Pro’s keyboard and trackpad suddenly stopped working last week. Of course I feel naked without having a computer I can tote anywhere – sans external keyboard and mouse. After a couple phone calls to the Apple store, it was made clear that I’d have to send the computer in and sell my soul to pay for it. Did I mention I was just under 20 days out of warranty? *sigh*

I went to the bookstore on campus – our local Apple authorized reseller – and begged the manager to order me the part and let me install it myself. After 2 trips and much pleading on my part he finally gave in and ordered me a new topcase for wholesale price! What a nice guy :) Of course this means that I’m on my own for installation and I can throw any warranty out the window, but I love excitement. I’ll keep you posted how the install goes next Thursday or Friday when the part comes in.

That’s all for now. Until next time, keep on truckin’.

Keep an eye on my flickr tomorrow.