The antenna is a dual-band omnidirectional antenna designed for use in the analog (800 MHz) and digital (1900 MHz) cell phone radio spectrum. It was originally created for long-haul truckers, who found that cell phones didn't always work very well in the metal cabs of their trucks. I will attach to it my trike and use it to improve the send and receive signal strength of both my cell phone and my computer's cellular EVDO modem. The manufacturer promises a "10 to 15db gain (10 times the signal)," and it does look impressive, with its six little radials arrayed at the base and its fat black tuning coil. I'm sure it will be an improvement over the little stub on my cellphone and the slightly larger swiveling stub on my modem...how much of an improvement remains to be seen.

I'm probably going to attach the strobe light to the antenna pole, because the pole will end up being about five feet high and my trike will only be about six inches off the road. Xenon strobes are visible in daylight - you've seen them on construction vehicles - and this one is especially nifty because it comes with a ruggedized remote toggle switch. I chose amber because that's the only color that is definitively legal for use by cyclists in all 50 states.

I got the strobe with Missouri in mind. That state has a reputation among cross-country cyclists for blind hills, narrow curving roads, and antagonistic logging truck drivers who apparently believe that anyone on a bicycle is a tree-hugging hippy sumbitch and a threat to their livelihood, and therefore must be intimidated with air horns and close passes at high speed. Whenever I feel unsafe on a road, I will flick the handy switch on my Xenon strobe. This might not stop me from getting flattened beneath the wheels of a truck driven by a psychotic lumberjack, but it will make me feel better.

In addition to occupying the same physical space on the trike (up in the air), both of these items are communicative: the antenna will allow me to keep in touch with all you good people, and the strobe will shout photonically at car and truck drivers, saying, Do not crush this hapless tricyclist!

(Although, in a strict nomenclatural sense, this is a couchtrike, and the fact that I am aware of this and must remark upon it edges me, once again, back into some semblance of coolness.

Or maybe it plunges me down into a deeper level of Nerdhell. I'm not quite sure.)

[via Treehugger]

There are two 32-watt folding solar panels, for a total potential output of 4.6 amps at 13.8 volts. The small black box in between the two panels is the DC-DC converter, which converts the panels' output to a steady 13.8 volts at varying levels of amperage. For those of you new to the whole volt/amp thing: in terms of wattage, 10 volts at 1 amp is equivalent to 1 volt at 10 amps (Watts=Volts x Amps). The converter ensures that I always have a smoothly regulated 13.8 volts, even if it's an overcast day and the panels can only crank out a couple of amps. 13.8 volts is what a car battery produces, and all of my voltage-sensitive electronics (laptop, cell phone, iPod, GPS, etc.) have adapters that are designed to plug into a car's cigarette lighter and run off of DC power.

Instead of a car battery, I've got the sun. The sun is much better than a battery, because it is in outer space and I don't have to carry it in my trailer. Also, I can bet people that my trike is nuclear-powered and win drinks in bars.

When folded, the solar panels will hang along either side of the trike's rear luggage rack. When deployed, they will fold out on swing arms I'm building from PVC pipe, and extend behind me across the luggage rack on top of the Nomad trailer (there will be pictures when I've built all this, of course). This will allow me to charge or run my electronics as I pedal along.

I've received a number of supportive e-mails since I started posting about this, for which I thank the senders. I think I should mention, though, that my proposed journey is not really unique. The route that I am taking was first cycled and mapped out by the Adventure Cycling organization back in 1976, when it was known as "Bikecentennial." Since then, thousands of cyclists have used Adventure Cycling maps to cross the United States, from west to east and vice-versa. Without their nearly-30 years' worth of work maintaining and updating these maps, I might not be going on this journey at all. The organization's development of national cycling routes - including the Pacific Coast route that will be the last leg of my trip - helps make it possible for me to do what I'm doing.

I also owe a significant debt of inspiration to Steve Roberts. 22 years ago, he asked himself:

Where had all my passions gone? One afternoon I listed them: writing, adventure, computer design, ham radio, bicycling, romance, learning, networking, publishing... each of these things had at one time or another kept me up all night in a delicious frenzy of fun and giddy intellectual growth. Yet my reality had become one of performing decreasingly interesting tasks for the sole purpose of paying bills, supporting a lifestyle I didn't like in a house I didn't like in a city I didn't like. I had forgotten how to play. Could it still be possible to construct a lifestyle entirely of passions, or was losing the spark a sadly inevitable part of growing up?

Combining the passions in my list and abandoning all "rational thought," the obvious solution was to simply equip a recumbent bicycle with ham radio and computer gear, establish a virtual home in the nascent online networks, and travel full-time while writing and consulting for a living.

The results of this were Winnebiko I, Winnebiko II, and the 580-pound BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy), shown here. Among other equipment, this massive recumbent and trailer rig sported three computers, two ham radio transceivers, a bubble-jet printer, a satellite terminal, a motion-activated burglar alarm, and hydraulically-deployed training wheels to balance its weight. It took "3.5 years of development with about 160 corporate sponsors and 45 volunteers" to build.

If I didn't know that some crazy person had already done something similar, I can't honestly say that I would've thought to do it myself. Technology has advanced so far in the past fifteen years that I can buy, off-the-shelf, many of the capabilities that Roberts had to design and build from scratch. I encourage you to browse through his Nomad Research Labs site, to see what a true pioneer looks like.

Why is he a pioneer? He unplugged himself from land-based information streams and fixed geographic locations in 1983, the same year that Motorola's 1.75-pound DynaTAC 8000X became the first cellphone licensed for commercial use, and a year before William Gibson published Neuromancer. He sent and received e-mail from acoustically-coupled modems at payphones before most people had e-mail addresses. He had mobile, wireless Internet access before most people even knew what the Internet was, let alone got text messages and porn on their cell phones. He lived his life and ran his business off the grid, traveling over 16,000 miles under his own power in the process.

I can't remember where or when I first read about Steve Roberts and his tech-nomadness. But he clearly made an impression.

As for me...I'm just drafting him.

Apparently, I was living in some sort of housemate-style situation, and some of said mates had also won the Shopping Spree prize, so I was trying to direct them to the back of the store where giant foosball tables and weird arcade-style videogames could be had...things for the "common area," I guess.

Then, I woke up, in dire need of caffeine or some other stimulant. I am much more nervous and jumpy and full of dread before I have my coffee than I am afterwards, which is a sure sign that my supplies of naturally-produced amphetamine are on the wane.

It's now the inter-holiday period, that week when I can rationalize doing nothing work-related because nothing really gets done this week anyway, now does it? But it's an ineffective rationalization, so I will sit here and stew in nervous neurochemical juices because of my peculiar psychology. I used to drink to squelch such moods, but that was writing checks against my Mood account which would eventually bounce, leaving me a twitching mass of guilty neuroses on the floor, moaning for Jello. I'm on more of a cash-only basis now, in direct contrast to my actual finances.

Now, it's time for more coffee, and maybe if I can swing it a bit of animation work for a dinky contract that really ought to be paying more, but it's sort of a favor, which was dumb on my part.

Yes...yes, more coffee, from my Titanium French Press Of The Gods!

Now that didn't rhyme at all, did it? Nor was it melodic. And, when you get right down to it, Christmas is not particularly embodied in a glass of India Pale Ale.

We had smooth white snow last week, but now that it's all warm and whatnot we've quickly entered the sludgy-snow-mixed-with-rotting-leaves phase that is just so attractive. I suppose it's better than the sludgy-snow-mixed-with-auto-exhaust-and-street-crap phase that made winters in New York ery special.

This will be the last Christmas at Peapod, and after a few glasses...hell, even before a few glasses, which might account for the purchase of said glasses-full in the first place...I am of course a bit sentimental.

We came here exactly 361 days after the September 11 attacks, 361 days that I spent mostly out of my mind. I never liked living in the city...I knew it was a target even before the '93 bombing. When the strike came, I went a little nuts. Just a bit. Pea's apartment was a few blocks from the U.N., and I wouldn't let her go back to it. We walked across the Queensboro Bridge together on that day, along with thousands of others, and I think she went back to her apartment twice afterwards...once when we had a fight, and once to pack her things into boxes and move them to my apartment in Queens. Together, we fled the city, and bought this house.

There's an adage...something about making important life-decisions during periods of extreme stress, I can't quite remember.

It's been three years since then, and I don't regret anything. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if 9/11 didn't happen. I think I can honestly say that I'd be worse off, personally, strange as that sounds. Cohabitation with someone is an intimacy that has a way of making you face yourself, and it forces you to sort out your habits. Alcohol? I used it too much, for the wrong reasons, and with an intensity that I wasn't comfortable with (my current IPA indulgence notwithstanding). I doubt I'd've figured that out holed up in an apartment in Queens by myself. There are other things too, which aren't your business. But on balance, it was good to come here, it was good to buy this house, it was good to live with Pea, and it's sad that this will be our last Christmas here, and our last Christmas together.

Over the next two or three weeks, we will complete some home improvement projects that were supposed to be for us, but are now for potential buyers: remodeling the dining room, painting the grotty textured ceiling in the living room. We've already replaced the roof and re-painted the exterior trim...again, not for us, but for whoever occupies this small house after us. There will be packing to do, as we remove what is unique to us from this space, so that prospective buyers can better visualize themselves in it.

I expect it will be the final details that will bring down the emotional hammer: what do we do with the lawnmower and the weed-whacker? Should we do something about the brush pile in the far corner of the yard, with the dry skeletons of (by then) four Christmas trees in it?

Right now, the fourth tree stands at the base of the stairs, next to the groovy armchair we bought when we first moved here. It's our smallest tree, measuring just four feet, to insure that we get the decorations off it and packed away sometime before April. It's full of lights, and there's a pile of presents under it.

As it should be, no matter what comes afterwards.

...actually, there-and-back-again vacation-type travel isn’t really my cup of tea. I consider it a torment: go to some place different from your dull, dreary life and have a wonderful time, then leave to go back to your dull, dreary life — what was the point, other than to make you realize how dull and dreary your life is and how tired you are of waking up to the same four walls, the same streets, etc.? Also, the logistics of getting to the vacation destination — the frantic need to hurry, the planning, the timetable, the rush-hour aspect of everything makes a vacation seem more like work than work. To me the actual journey itself is as important, if not more so, than the destination (the destination being often somewhat of a let-down — “well, we’re finally here”).

I've never been a good vacationer myself (as Pea will attest), which is why this here cycling madness is perfect for me. I've got maps, sure, and I've got a starting point and an ending point, but the middle bits are wide open and ill-defined. If I feel like detouring somewhere in Kansas to go commune with the World's Largest Ball of Twine then I'll do so.

Part of what makes this journey appealing to me is that won't be an escape from my "dull, dreary life," it will be my life. I caught a glimpse of this reality last Saturday when I was in the shop with Johannes, spec'ing out my new trike's options while sitting on the showroom GTO. "This is like ordering my next apartment," I told him.

The danger in speculating ahead of time about a journey like this is that too much emphasis on its Mighty Transformative Power can result in vast disappointment when encountering the mundanity of, for example, having to change a flat tire for the third time in a day because you're in goathead country and discovering that you quite recently rolled through a dog pile.

However, I can't avoid at least some speculation. My life's usual pattern, when moving from one dwelling to another, is to engage in a search for a new dwelling. But I'm not doing that now. I am selling my house, and moving to...a tricycle, with a trailer. No new bank accounts, no calling the telephone and cable company for new hookups, no first-last-deposit payments. No discovering where the closest grocery store is, no unpacking, no arranging of rooms, no hanging of curtains. No laughing at Bob the Cat as she cowers under the bed for three days. In fact: no bed.

Andrea says she has "recurrent urges to drop everything and just run until I get to, I don’t know, Idaho, but fortunately (?) [I] am too lazy and broke for this to be a realistic impulse." But "realistic" isn't really a word I've been paying much attention to, lately. It's actually on my list of Avoided Concepts, along with "career," "fiscally sound," and "knee cartilage." I've already had one person make the "must be nice to be independently wealthy" comment, and yes, it certainly would be, but I'm not. I don't need to be to do this...but that doesn't stop me from wondering what, exactly, I will do when this is over. I'll have some money from the house sale, but not a mountain of it. I'll be on the West Coast with no home or job waiting for me back East, no life - dull, dreary, or otherwise - to plug back into.

I'm trusting that Something Will Happen. I'm hoping.

I feel like the little kid on a tricycle in The Incredibles who keeps showing up at the end of Bob Parr's driveway after he sees Bob lift his car up over his head at the end of a particularly bad day at work.

"Well?" Bob demands. "What are you waiting for?"

"I don't know," the kid says. "Something amazing, I guess."

Me too, kid.

Such as: equipping Company Secretary Reginald Bastard with a microphone, a camera, a handful of crêpe batter, a shoestring, and a packet of ketchup, and sending him out to talk to the Viewing Public.

This month's Man On The Street question: What's the true meaning of Christmas?

-----

Alistaire Fructose, Bricklayer
"To have as many elves as possible. In my pants."

Harry "Tiger" Watkins, Rodeo Clown
"To further the materialistic pressures of a social structure deliberately designed to keep the masses in thrall to shiny things."

Lester Bodkin, Crab Fisherman
"Last I heard, it was to keep those goddamn wetbacks on the South side of the border, where they belong. But I could be wrong, or drunk."

Lousie Pebble, Exotic Dancer
"Peace and good will towards the men with the biggest huevos. "

William Juniper, Musician
"Something about cookies. And, uh, crack. Yessir, it's not Christmas without a fat rock in the pipe!"

Reuben Tishkoff, Impresario
"You gonna steal from Santa Claus, you better goddamn know. This sorta thing used to be civilized. You'd hit a guy, he'd whack you, done! But Claus...at the end of this he better not know you're involved, not know your names, or think you're dead. Because he'll kill you, and then he'll go to work on you."

-----

And there you have it. Hairy Follidays, every bloody!

The injury was probably the result of riding my recumbent with the front boom too far in (the boom extends out in front, and it's where the pedals are). This is the equivalent of having your seat too low on an upright bike. But doing this is even worse on a recumbent, because it creates much greater pressure on the knees than a standard bike. This, combined with my legs' tendency to "flop outwards" at the hips because of the laid-back recumbent position and the fact that I was mashing gears instead of spinning at higher RPMs, added up to a mess o' bad mojo for my cartilage.

It's much improved, now, but it means that I have to be extra careful with both knees, and train up gently.

That injury, paradoxically, is one of the motivators for making this journey. I'm only 34, but my body is letting me know that it might not always be able to pedal 5,000 miles, so if I'm going to do such a thing, now is the time. It also adds a certain frisson to the whole endeavor: will he make it? Will his knees burst somewhere in the Rocky Mountains? Tune in and find out!

On Monday, I extended the boom out two inches. Normally, you're "supposed" to do these adjustments in increments, a quarter or half inch at a time. But: when I rode the 2.48 miles to physical therapy, my knees didn't hurt. It was the first time I've been on the bike that I didn't immediately wonder how the hell I thought I was going to get all the way to the West coast under my own aching power.

All because of a simple readjustment. The boom had been in that same position for at least 800 of the 1,300 miles I've ridden that bike, and during all that time it was causing me unnecessary pain. It was, in fact, injuring me. And in a moment of "What the hell"-ness, I lengthened the boom, which in turn improved my leg extension and, it seems, solved a biomechanical problem that's been plaguing me for almost a year.

There are a number of routes that we ride around here: a little loop that's about eight miles, a medium loop that's twelve, a big loop that's about twenty-two. After awhile, they get kind of dull...here's this hill, shift for it, here's this downhill, you can coast now, here's this spot where the fields look nice when the sun sets.

So today, instead of just pedaling the 2.48 miles back from the PT office to the house, I decided to do the little loop. But I did it backwards, turning onto the street that normally marks the end of the loop, and heading around in the other direction.

It was a revelation. The hills were new and interesting. The views of the snow-covered fields were familiar, but different enough to prompt me to stop and snap a photo with my cellphone/PDA/camera/pneumatic jack while Leadbelly sang the Relax Your Mind blues on my iPod (a blues which is, incidentally, about how to drive and pay attention so that you don't run over chickens or, say, cyclists).

Now I'm feeling fine. Invigorated, even! All because I did a couple of small things differently.

I can't help but wonder about the obvious: how will I feel when I'm doing everything differently? When I'm completely disconnected from my fixed address, my schedule, and my couch?

My guess is pretty damn good.

I'm getting the Big Adventure on, friends, and I can't wait. This will rock the House of Me, no mistake!

Not the whole thing, just a bit of it - the hook, say - and that bit just keeps repeating over and over, so that it's the last thing you hear as your head hits the pillow and it's the first thing you hear when the sun peeks through the blinds, and all day it's in there, it just goes 'round and 'round in true cephalic echo-chamber style, over and over, and you can't identify it, oh no, you can't remember where it came from, you think it might've been from a movie but you're not sure, see, that's the thing, you can't be certain, and then after days and days you can feel the pressure behind your eyeballs, building and building, and then you know what needs to be done, oh yes, you've got to do it, got to let that scrap of music out, baby, set that sucker free, and you grab your cordless Makita and slap a quarter-inch bit in there, and you're ready to go, man, got it against your forehead, and you pull the trigger and it pffft does nothing because it's been sitting in your freezing basement for months and the battery's dead, so you slap the other battery in there, the second battery that made it such a deal when you bought it, and you're ready to go and pffft it's dead too, so you stick it in the charger that was also part of the deal and the light goes red and you make yourself some coffee while you wait, and all the while that little musical demon is swirling in your head, circling, a little needle-clawed bastard, and then after half an hour you realize that the battery doesn't really need to be fully charged, does it, so you finish your coffee and yank the battery out of the charger and you slide it into the drill and you put the bit on your third eye, right on there, and you squeeze the trigger and skrrrrrr you left the drill in reverse the last time you used it so it skitters across your face drawing blood but! But! But! You quickly realize your error and you flip that switch and then you go go go, and the drill bores into your face with a smell like burning hair and there's a little pop! as it breaks through the bone and then it slices through the dura mater, the arachnoid, the pia mater and then schlooop it's in your brain! It's in your brain! And you're like "AAAAGGH! BLUAAAGGGG!!!! IT WAS THAT STUPID SONG FROM 'SHREK'!!!!"

That happens to me a lot, and it's kind of a drag, you know?

I was talking with my mother earlier today, and she told me she was disturbed by my recent bloggage, which she characterized as ‘weird.’

Mom: You were talking about... I don’t know... ‘floating’ or something...It made me think you were going off the deep end!
Me: Umm, I’m reading the blog right now, and I don’t see anything particularly weird, mom.
Mom: Well, of course *you* don’t think so!
Me: What’s weird?
Mom: It makes it sound like you’re on drugs or something. I read it and thought, “Is she on drugs? Is she going off the deep end?”
Me: [Hee hee hee hee hee.]
Mom: Do you *want* people to think you’re on drugs, is that it??
Me: No, mom, I don’t want people to think I’m on drugs.
Mom: Well, then you shouldn’t write things that are so weird.

As for me, I think my mom grokked my weirdness when I was two. Hence the dexedrine. And, as a certain journalist once wrote before he shot himself in the head and got blasted out of a cannon, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

This here is a $10 trillion economy, by god! I plan to find my weird niche in it and make a living.

Many people seem to think that jobs that can be done at home aren't real jobs. Never mind that home-office dwellers are their own cafeteria staff, shipping-and-receiving clerks and janitors. They never get credit for cutting an employer's costs, or saving commuting time to do more work. Instead, managers believe that if they aren't there to witness someone working, it can't be happening. They envision homebound workers getting away with something, like lounging in their bathrobes and watching "General Hospital."

It's as if they believe that the people working under their noses don't waste a tremendous amount of time talking about last night's college basketball game, making bids on eBay, or reading only like-minded blogs while on company time. The misconceptions are yet another indication that vacuous symbols of productivity, rather than productivity itself, are all that really count.

I have also found that the willingness of an employer to let me do my contract work offsite is directly proportional to their tech-savviness. I write for a living, and there is almost nothing I do onsite that can't be done offsite via e-mail and telephone. I do recognize the need for face-to-face contact at the beginning of and periodically during the project, and that's fine with me. But these days a computer is a computer, and I can be as much a part of company's network sitting in my office as I can sitting in a cubicle with distracting thumbtacks.

Working remotely also avoids snafus like this: "Millions Are Left to Make It to Work Any Way They Can". Because I work at home, there is no need for me to tackle a stray circus dwarf, saddle him up and whip him across the George Washington Bridge as I make my escape from Manhattan. Unless I just feel like riding a dwarf. Is that wrong?

I'm seriously considering putting the remote office idea to its ultimate test as I pedal across the country. My contacts are willing to send me jobs that I can do off-site - way off-site - if they come across them. I'm no Steve Roberts, with his trailer-borne satellite terminal and his ham radio, but I'll be almost as connected as he was, at a fraction of the weight and cost.

That's progress for you - fifteen years ago, he had a 68K Macintosh, two 286-based DOS PCs, 80MB of hard drive storage, a 9600-baud modem, and a slew of other equipment and batteries. His rig weighed 580 pounds. I'll have a 2.4 GHz PC, 80 GB of storage, cellular data connectivity at up to 400+ kbps, and my rig will probably weigh in at 100 pounds or so. Granted, he toted a lot more equipment, but he was doing R&D for the whole "Technomad" lifestyle concept. I'm just making a journey.