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Last modified: 2006-10-08
I've got 25 pictures available now, but I'm still looking for a better digital photo workflow. I do all my processing using Picasa and then export the picture tray to a directory, cutting the size of images to 100 KB, and then I use another tool (Irfanview) to create the thumbnail page. I don't know how to add captions yet (most of the photos are of me or a climbing partner and a few family shots). If only I could export Picasa labels to a webpage, that would be cool.
I was frustrated with every small digital camera I tried, so I'm now using a DSLR (a Nikon D50 with an 18-200 zoom). I'd still like a smaller camera for multi-pitch rock climbs and but for now I'll get the extra exercise lugging this one around. I still think I'll ultimately be satisfied with around 16 megapixels which I think is around what I had when I shot Kodachrome 64, but for now I'll get by with 6. I hope display technology catches up at some point 2 megapixel projectors are expensive and anything bigger is practically nonexistent. (It was a lot easier for digital to crush analog when it came to audio than video - it's hard to beat a small 35 mm camera and slide projector.)
DSP/Communication
I work at Boeing Satellite Development Center where we simulate algorithms that ultimately will be placed inside ASICs or FPGAs and sent into space.
I finally picked up a cell phone, and I've had a chance to try it in the mountains around Southern California. If I'm on the top of a mountain that has line of site to a cell tower, I have pretty good luck, but otherwise no. A satellite data only fill in would sure be nice. I go into more detail into what I'm looking for here.
A Few Business Ideas (not related to communication)
I don't have a serious professional interest in any of the following ideas, but I'll throw them out there and maybe someone will find something interesting.
Backcountry Skiing
This was my favorite winter sport, but since I've moved to LA,
I
hardly go anymore. My last descent was the Mountaineer's
couloir
on
Whitney in May 2001 - pretty desperate in knee deep Sierra
cement. I used to spend too much time
trying to think of new equipment designs (instead of working on my
technique). The project I spent most of my time thinking about was an
alternative telemark binding. I thought an open discussion with other
skiers was
the best development model, so in 1997, I started posting my proposals
(see one, two,
three) to
rec.skiing.backcountry. After
several prototype iterations, I ended up with design I was only
moderately happy with - I cut off the 75 mm toe from a pair of old
Terminators and simulated two sockets in the sidewall just in front of
the flex point by cutting up an old pair of 3 pin bindings and
attaching them
with a hose-clamp through the emergency leather slots. I had a
few thoughts on
the binding
market in the past, but things have changed quite a bit since
then. Check out DrTelemark
or telemarkski.com for
something more
current.
Besides bindings, I've linked some of the equipment information I've saved from rec.skiing.backcountry posts (mine and others). A lot of it is outdated, but I hope there is some useful stuff in there still.
Skis: choosing a length.
Beacons: shovel and
GPS
interactions, your chances,
a
non-profit source, Pieps
vs. Ortovox,
directional beacons.
Skins: many thoughts on snake
skins, a few other
skin ideas, a (racy)
joke.
Climbing
Currently my favorite sport, and I'm happier with the existing equipment. Nevertheless, I've thought about two projects, neither of which I have done anything on in a while. When I first tried a friend's Spider Mitts, I thought they worked better than tape gloves for desert cragging, but were too bulky when you had to do anything but a hand or fist jam. So I cut an truck inner tube in the shape of the back of my hand with extra material for tabs to go around my wrist and for holes to fit my index finger, little finger, and thumb. I then glued two pieces of velcro to the wrist tabs. They worked pretty well, but the rubber always stained my hands black and no matter what glue I tried, the velcro kept peeling off. Lately, I've gone back to taping.
I've also thought about top rope self belay devices. After a few scary lead solos, I decided if I couldn't get a climbing partner, I would confine my self to hiking to the top of the cliff, rapping in, and climbing out. I've used a Rock Exotica (now Petzl) Soloist and a Microscender for top rope soling, and I find neither to be satisfactory. The soloist has the disadvantage that it is designed for leading also, so it has a possibility of rope slippage when falling upside down (never happened to me though). The Microscender is of course not recommended for self belay, but it worked reasonably well until one fall where it didn't catch and I slipped down the rope 5 meters to the last back up knot. I never really figured out why I slipped this far, but perhaps the little wire that provides the spring action had become hung up on my harness. (Update: I've also used the Ushba ascender which is the best so far - low drag and hasn't slipped yet. I've tried the Cinch which has the advantage that you can rap back down a move if you miss it - however the lever for rapping is too small and it has more upward drag than the Ushba.) What I really want is a one way device like an ascender, but that has very little drag in the up direction while still capable of a very positive lock when the rope is pulled the other direction (but without sharp teeth). I haven't tried the Silent Partner, but I'm not too keen on having to fall a bit to expand the clutch. I like the rope topology of a soloist (a simple loop in the rope), but wonder if it is possible to have a different lock mechanism that is independent of the (top) rope pull direction. If anyone has any suggestions for a different device, I'd love to hear them.
Bicycling
I was really into road riding about 10 years ago, now I just go for an occasional mountain bike ride in the Santa Monica mountains. I tried commuting but my route options are loud, dirty, and dangerous (I miss grad school where I commuted on the Boulder Creek bike path). I may get back into cycling in another 10-20 years when hopefully there are cleaner quieter cars zooming by. My only bike project was a pedal that I hoped could allow the rider to use a shoe with no exposed metal on the sole which could interface to a pedal in two different ways: 1] attach firmly (like an SPD) or 2] simply rest over the pedal, requiring only modest downward pressure to prevent any fore/aft movement while still allowing free rotation. This second mode could be used for those icy winter commuting days when you want to put your foot down fast, or on rough singletrack if you are at all timid (like me) and don't want to lock your feet in. I gave it up when Shimano's SPD more or less looked unbeatable. I had a few other ideas that I never worked on such as a generator light system where you could control the light output from a lever on the handlebars. If you were going down hill and on the brakes, you could go for maximum brightness, otherwise, you could decide just how much light you needed and have the rest of your leg power be used for forward progress.
Headlamps
For a while I was interested in fashioning a dimmable controller for a Petzl Arctic battery pack. Then I found Willie Hunt's page on his Lightbulb Voltage Regulator (LVR), which had already addressed the problem. However, LEDs have now completely taken over the low power (and soon high power) headlamp market, and I haven't worn my Arctic with LVR in years. If anyone wants all my old Petzl hardware, I'll part with it for the cost of postage.
Single-Payer Health Care
When Hillary Clinton took over the cause of Health Care reform in the United States, I was very dismayed to see one of the most sensible choices, Single-Payer thrown off the table right from the beginning. I have seen very compelling presentations done by the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), that make it pretty clear that not only would a Single-Payer system cost much less due to lower overheads from governments vs. the private insurance industry, but it would actually increase the average freedom of physicians, since HMOs tend to hamstring physicians much more than in Single-Payer countries such as Canada. If you listen to the standard propaganda in the US, try talking to a few Canadians also (doctors and patients) and you will often hear a different story (see PNHP's take (update: broken link, still looking)).
A Greener Economy
This involves a lot of things such as organic farming, better energy policy, better buildings to live and work in, and better transportation. Practically speaking in the US, this means better cars. Although, I'd love to see high speed trains become more commonplace in the US, as Europe and Japan already have, we will never get enough people out of their cars to clean the air as significantly as could be done with fuel cell cars. Many car companies are researching, but not many yet are committing. I urge you to write a few of them and tell them you will hold out as long as possible for a really clean car (see my letter to the car companies) (update: I couldn't hold out myself - my hippie painted SUV (see pics) died and I eventually went for the 2005 Prius - I'll post my thoughts on this car soon).
If in addition to more organic farming, the world produced less meat, environmental problems would definitely become easier to solve. It is mainly for this reason that I've been vegetarian for about 25 years. If you are concerned about getting enough protein or other nutrients, the current trend is to recommend several food groups (grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits) each day and not worry about anything but Vitamin D (supplement or sunlight) and Vitamin B-12 (supplement). However, if you're like me, and you find this explanation insufficient, you can check with the US Dept. of Agriculture which maintains a huge database of foods with detailed nutrient information (including essential amino acids). I also have a spread sheet that I culled from this database (download notes and the .csv file (I had to name the .txt, rename it to .csv for use with most Spreadsheet programs).
Free Birth Control
In my opinion, the biggest environmental problem is still human population. The impact per person is important, but two things seem clear to me. One is that I feel crowded even in the Western US, where there is still some open space left. With crowding, comes more rules controlling everything (for me constraints on camping are the most annoying). Some say if we could just come closer in the US to the impact per person of someone in Bangladesh, we could easily have 3 times as many people, but I think it would simply be more pleasant in the US if we had about half of what we have now. The other point is that the low impact Bangladesh person and their counterparts over the world would almost all gladly increase their consumption if they could, and in a growing world economy, many will. We don't have to push the Earth to its limit in terms of resource extraction, the ability to process waste outputs, and the habitat of other species, to have the potential for comfortable, enriching lives for a few billion people (to realize this potential, we need social reform). But push this to tens of billions of people, and it is pretty obvious that any safety factor in terms of carrying capacity is going to be obliterated. Enough is enough - I wish everyone would start having at most two kids and help improve the ability of poor people throughout the world to make the same intelligent choice (education, propaganda, and free birth control is enough for now, coercion is not yet necessary).
Engender Health - This seems like a good charitable organization that used to be known as "Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception", but they do lots of other things now. There is still a lot of unmet demand for contraception services, even sterilization, so if you're concerned about population issues, this might be a good choice for donations.
Free Software
Of all the progressive causes I've been interested in up to now, none has had the incredibly rapid gain in popularity that free (or open-source if you prefer) software has had. I first read of Richard Stallman's GNU project in the late 80's, and I thought it sounded great, but it seemed unlikely to succeed. Perhaps the fact that a lot of the significant software to complete a free system started from outside the US helped to increase the momentum of a real alternative to Microsoft and Apple for many users. I haven't quite gotten to the point where I'd recommend a Linux or BSD system to friends who are strictly application users, but maybe in a few years. I use Windows XP and RHEL at work and lately more Windows than Linux at home, though I'm still interested in getting Linux to run an HDTV DVR. I now favor Ubuntu over Fedora.
World Peace and Justice
I'm not quite a pacifist yet, but when I examine the history of US foreign policy (e.g. "Killing Hope" by William Blum), I strongly believe that the US cannot be the "world's policeman" - not because we don't have the resources, but because we rarely have anyone else's interest at heart when it comes to foreign intervention. I know the UN isn't perfect, but I would infinitely prefer to see my taxes support a UN armed force than the (still) over budgeted US military or repressive governments we stand behind (through weapons sales and military training). I could tolerate a lean US military with much fewer nuclear weapons for the short term, but some things like the covert arm of the CIA cannot be reformed and should just be dismantled (the intelligence arm can probably be retained under another organization).
There is a lot of great alternative media out there which covers foreign policy as well as many important domestic concerns in ways I almost never hear on NPR or public television (except for "Now"). For print (on or off the web), try Common Dreams, Z magazine, Institute for Public Accuracy, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and CounterPunch. If you have good local radio, support it if you can - otherwise you can listen to a lot of programming from WebActive. Podcasting (I hate that name as there is usually nothing specific to Apple) is all the rage now but I don't have any experience with it (other than directly downloading from Democracy Now's podcast site). It would be better than WebActive though since their site ties you to the computer in order to listen to it.