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?

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

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 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.

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.

So naturally I went to Linux.

I have gotten the cross-compiling toolchain working on my Macbook Pro to get my own code on the gumstix board I’ve been working on – but there’s a snag. The version I’m using is too new for the OS that came pre-installed on the Gumstix, so I had to upgrade it. After practicing flashing the file-system image on the gumstix with some pre-built images from Dave Hylands, I was finally confident enough to use my own home-compiled image, but the OSX version of Buildroot for the gumstix doesn’t support the Verdex motherboard that I have. Long story short, I was in a major bind.

Linux to save the day! I went to the Apple store (where I find myself at least once a week these days – even if I’m not buying anything) and picked up a LaCie pocket external hard drive. Using rEFIt which is an amazing EFI replacement for OSX, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn (who comes up with these names?) to the hard drive, and left a partition of free space to allow a future installation of another OS should I need to later. I can triple boot with no need to partition my meager 100 gig MBP hard drive! Plus I found that I don’t even have to kill my uptime!

I now have the current version of Buildroot – which does support the verdex motherboard that I have – up and compiling on Ubuntu. I just finished flashing the file-system image and kernel with my own build… I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see “Hello World!” in my life!

And mad props to Michael for letting me take over his kitchen table this weekend

I was watching a youtube video on the BART, when I switched to Safari to check a web page when the unit froze solid. I held the home button for 8 seconds, which is the equivalent of force quitting whatever app is open, to no avail. I did my first hard reset by holding the power switch and home button together for ~10 seconds, which managed to turn the phone off, but it stalled at the metallic apple logo screen when I tried to start it again. I waited a good minute before I did another hard reset to turn it off. I put it away and waited until I got home before running my full line-up of diagnostics on it, including holding every button combo for 30 seconds.

Nothing worked. I could not get the phone past the apple logo screen.

I made an appointment with a “genius” at the SF Apple store, for which I arrived 10 minutes early. The genius tried a few things, including syncing the phone with my MBP and the MB they have in-store. He managed to pull up an error he’d seen before, so things were looking up. Then we got this little gem:

Oh, yeah, error 0xE8000025. Huh? I quickly googled it which turned up a few results for users syncing with non-standard characters in their usernames on windows. Clearly not for me.

We both tried for another 40 minutes or so everything in our book, including creating a new user, re-installing iTunes, and deleting a bunch of .kext and .plist files in the System Library. We never made it past that screen.

So, in good faith, Apple gave me a brand new replacement phone with no further questions asked, even though the guy was convinced it was a software error that could be fixed. How sweet of them.

I did notice this pop up when I synced just now:

Hrm. I sent it because I’m a good apple citizen. We’ll see what happens to this one.

When I first walked in at 1pm or so I perused the tables of people working on various iPhone web apps. I found a group of guys working on the next “killer app”, so I pulled up a chair and offered myself to the group. It’s pretty amazing, really, how quick it all happened. The guy who was taking the lead for the group explained what the app was, how it was going to work, etc… to me, and I was right on board. We had him doing backend development, a graphics guy, a logistics guy, me doing frontend stuff, and – get this – not one but two venture capitalists sitting with us going over the business model with checkbooks in hand. We worked for a few hours, throwing ideas and functionality back and forth at each other, going over every aspect of the app and how cool it was going to be. It was quite exciting!

But … there is a reason I’m writing in past tense. Right when we were getting into the meat of it, a group of four guys walked up and demoed the exact app we were working on that they started building 2 weeks ago. We were all a bit dumbfounded – not angry – when the VCs gave the other guys their cards and walked away. We had a company in the making and it was disbanded before it even came together.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hacking on the iPhone and discussing the next steps for ourselves. I wound up working with a guy from Yelp getting their mobile site blinged out for the iPhone. All in all, a busy day!

I’ll be there on Friday at 6 when the thing kicks off, and hopefully all day Saturday and Sunday as well. Hope to see you there!