From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Mon Jan  7 17:36:17 1991
To: wordy@Corp
Subject: chapter-54

Immersed in Santa Cruz

Chapter 54 in the GEnie CAA series

by Steven K. Roberts

Santa Cruz, CA -- February 11, 1990



Copyright (C) 1990 by Steven K. Roberts, all rights reserved.







Ya know, it's funny.  Here I am in one of the world's great destinations... a

place known for its blend of 60's flavor and new age consciousness... a sexy

beach town perched perkily on sunny Monterey Bay... a wild escape only a

half-hour from the techno- delights of Silicon Valley.  Yep, here I am in Santa

Cruz, a town that loomed larger than life as I pedaled slowly and eagerly up

the coast so long ago.  I can hardly believe it!  Santa Cruz is a sort of

paradise, despite the recent quake:  twenty years of California mystique

distilled into a single idyllic moment.  Yet... I hardly notice.



And that's the essential difference between movement and stasis.



When you travel, your eyes are open to every nuance, every quaint rural

mailbox, every ripple in the cultural fabric.  You thrill to the unfamiliar

curves of new land:  a feeling so like falling in love that words flow fast and

passionate as your heart throbs with unspoken promise.



But when you stand still, the world fades to background -- the magic that once

enchanted you now frumpy and ordinary, hidden behind the old clothes of daily

routine.  Sometimes it emerges briefly to surprise and delight you, but whole

weeks and months pass with numbing sameness...



                                * * *



There are endless challenges, of course -- this is not (alas) a lazy oceanside

layover of sunshine and frolicking (especially this time of year, when it's

cold even in California).  For one thing, I've been delayed again by the old

truth that there ain't much between the couch circuit and the one-year lease.

We found a good place to live - - with the owner of a spectacular Szechuan

restaurant called the O'mei -- but the bike lab is another issue entirely.



When we arrived here in August, I worked in the dirty, unheated, leaking

garage.  The days were balmy and dry, evenings pleasantly cool.  I put up a

tangle of dipoles, installed a stereo, and puttered away the nights building

the console.  Progress was swift, especially as the COMDEX deadline neared:  I

displayed the bike in the Cirrus Logic booth with both built-in DOS systems

purring away on graphics demos.



Then it got cold.  A housemate conveniently moved out, so we doubled our rent

and moved the lab inside -- with the 12-foot bike diagonally bisecting a

bedroom already overstuffed with workbenches and shelving.  For a few days I

bravely kept at it, climbing over the machine for scraps of wire, fighting

clutter at every turn.  No way.  And besides, we could hardly afford three

Santa Cruz rooms on the meager pickings of the Nomadness biz.



But have you ever explored an unfamiliar, overpopulated town with the intent of

finding a few hundred square feet of free workspace? Even with a famous bike,

it's not easy.  I called here and there, growing dispirited, watching the

inexorable passage of time with something akin to rage.  I had grim thoughts of

the whole shtick falling apart -- of losing momentum, running out of options,

and joining the considerable homeless population of Santa Cruz... still

hustling for bike parts and dreaming of a return to the Road, pulling out my

faded photos to show anyone who would buy me a cup of coffee, hoarding

once-glittering gewgaws in mildewed boxes stashed in sympathetic crawl spaces

around town.  Shivering, I'd wirewrap on a heating vent, reduced to using

small-scale integration for lack of a development system to support my precious

but useless stash of programmable gate arrays.  I would huddle in the Mission,

coding FORTH on the backs of old religious tracts, eyes taking on that crazed

gleam that keeps the others away.  Technology would pass me by, but sometimes,

driven by a confused tangle of memories and dreams, I would take to the

streets, showing my tattered bike to likely looking passers-by and hitting them

up for bits of stainless hardware or maybe a quarter for a 74HC04.



<shudder>



Fortunately, Borland International is just up the road in Scotts Valley, and

even more fortunately, Philippe Kahn shares some of the same passions.  He's

not a typical CEO at all -- our last meeting was a brisk muddy walk in the

hills, and his home is a playground of music and technotoys.  And best of all,

I have just moved the entire project into comfortable donated lab space,

spacious and secure enough to remove all remaining excuses for not pouring my

entire being into getting this damn project finished!



                                 * * *



So how IS the project, you ask?  You... DID ask, didn't you?  Good.  It's

actually getting pretty interesting, though not moving as fast as I'd like.  A

recent story explained the grand concept, but there are a few updates... but

first, I'd like to relate "Roberts' Law of Applied Mobile Gizmology," which I

have recently developed as a direct result of this project:



"If you take an infinite number of very light things and put them together,

they become infinitely heavy."



Anyway...





A Macintosh Portable is now completely disassembled and built into the console.

 (It, and a companion SE/30 for my office, have completely changed my

perception of computers, my attitude about work, my approach to programming, my

relationship with the computer industry, and my life in general.)  A machining

and custom car wizard named Ron Covell made a flip-down enclosure for the

machine's justly famous active-matrix LCD, and it can be lifted on delrin

hinges to reveal the VGA display for the DOS system (I call it mechanical

display paging).  I'm now haunting Macintosh trade shows and the Mac RT on

GEnie, collecting software and learning, learning...



The Mac was originally intended for biketop publishing, but is now the primary

user interface for the whole system -- with HyperTalk the development language.

 Individual cards will present slices of the bike, with the Mac interpreting

high-level commands and communicating via XCMDs with the quartet of FORTH

systems that do all the crank-turning (except for those big aluminum cranks up

front -- I'm still stuck with the ever more intimidating task of turning

those).  I'm now up to 80 meg of local hard disk, somewhere around 10-12 meg of

total RAM, high-density floppies for both Mac and DOS environments, and a

Jasmine 150 megabyte file server in the trailer. Por que no?  We need data!



The console is mechanically done, and unfolds completely for service. It's

covered with a sleek, beautiful fairing made by Zzip Designs, painted white

internally to minimize solar heat gain.  The trailer is essentially complete as

well (see the article in menu choice #5 about building structures with

cardboard and fiberglass), and a fold-down door in the very rear exposes the

ham and satellite station, still under construction.  And the antenna farm is

getting completely out of hand, as expected, with stacked J-poles for the

Microsats, whips for HF, and various other strange things sticking skyward or

huddling under radomes.



The lab is full of wondrous devices that have yet to be integrated -- the

heads-up display, the microwave doppler motion sensor, the TV station, and all

sorts of other nifty components.  It all looks terribly intimidating, but as

mechanical, power, and conceptual substrates near completion, the addition of

peripherals becomes easier and easier.  The whole system is completely bus

structured, and the intent is to handle everything with software once all the

interfaces are in place.



And then it will finally be rideable, at which point I can hit the road, pedal

slowly through the hot boring central valley for a few days, and start

wondering how I could have spent so much time in idyllic Santa Cruz without

ever really getting to know the place.



                                   * * *



Yah, this is quite a place alright.  It's still reeling from the quake, which

ripped out much of the town's visible heart, but it's vibrant, fiesty, and full

of people who care passionately about all sorts of issues.



One way to glimpse past the physical reality of a town is to read the personal

ads.  Here's a group that would make for a spirited dinner party...



Yoga priestess seeking monogamous non- attachment.  Into vegetables, cotton,

confusion, sitting, knowing and not-knowing. Commitment to nothingness a must.



Unemployed?  On welfare?  Homeless? Suicidal?  Addicted?  Like to spend my

money and consume my goodies?  In your 20s/30s? You're my kind of woman.  I'm

44, prosperous, and well out of normal society.



Luscious lesbian in search of a lovely woman wanting to be cherished and

adored.  We share being unabashed and unafraid of fun, frolic, adventure.  I am

a professional 35 year old into spirituality, quiet reflection, sports.



Free spirited couple would like to meet affectionate, open-minded SWM for

friendship & frolicking.  Endless possibilities. Please include photo and

phone.



Santoria priestess, favors red decor, currently at liberty but has references.

Seeks new relationship.  Interests include poultry, photography, video,

Brazilian necromancy, fancy dress, decorating, candlemaking, and running on the

beach.  Last relationship experienced religious conversion.  Will re- locate.

No hangups.





Culturally, Santa Cruz seems (especially in off-season, when the hordes of

visitors don't obscure its true nature) to be exactly what you would expect if

you extrapolated liberally from the West Coast 60's.  The people cover the

whole range from absolutely despicable social parasites to Highly Evolved

Beings, with every political, intellectual, and sexual variant not only

represented but vociferously defended by specialized media and political

factions.  There's a predominantly leftist flavor that supports all sorts of

alternatives while unwittingly rendering certain classes of humor socially

suicidal, largely due to the massive influence of UCSC.   And, given the

proximity of Silicon Valley, there are all sorts of brilliant techies,

startups, consulting firms, and refugees from over the hill who are busily

importing mega-traffic and various other population-related problems.  I can't

blame them at all:  I'm one of them.



The beaches are spectacular -- it's hard to imagine a more optimal setting for

a town.  The sunsets along the cliffs bring even the most jaded locals to a

stumbling, gaping halt; while on balmy days (I seem to recall) the sands are

strewn with well-oiled Beauty.  There are even a couple of nude beaches in

town, much safer and more convenient than the wild windswept ones up the coast

where cars are sometimes vandalized while their owners frolic carefree in the

surf.



One perfect warm day at the end of tourist season a few months back, Maggie and

I spent the afternoon at the beach known as 2222 (for its location along West

Cliff Drive).  Naked, we lounged about in a sheltered cove with a dozen or so

other people, relaxed, non-sexual, at peace with the world.  A small group

conjured music from a kalimba, bongos, voices, and bamboo flutes; a woman

nursed her child.  A tan, muscled yogi danced alone, moved tai-chi-like and

dove into the surf; a few people read or conversed quietly; I pattered for a

few seconds on a laptop before sensing the absurdity and moving on to something

more reasonable:  dozing in the sun.



As the chill shadows of the cliff walls gobbled more and more of the beach,

most of us dressed and drifted away.  We were among the last to go, and arrived

panting at the top of the rocky path to find two young cleancut tourist couples

hanging around the precipice in obvious agitation.  "Shall we call the police?"

one woman asked, as her fella stared down at the cove with a pointed look of

disgust pasted on his face.



I followed his gaze -- the bronzed yogi lay alone on his blanket, naked and

unmoving.  The woman prattled on.  "I mean like, what if a little kid comes by

or something?  That is _really_ disgusting.  I think we better go call the

cops, guys."



I turned to her.  "It's OK... that's a nude beach."



"Oh my God, I thought he was like being a pervert or something!" Her hand flew

to her mouth, and I hope she felt as foolish as she looked.



It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?



                                * * *



Ah, life is crazy.  The other big project these days, besides my perennial

bike-obsession, is _Nomadness_, a sort of print edition of these stories

augmented by graphics, photos, and submissions from other writers.  It's a time

consuming but exciting venture, and we're up to 331 subscribers (send $15 to

Nomadic Research Labs if you'd like to increment that number).



But still, it all sometimes seems insane.  It has now been two years since

we've lived full-time on the bikes, yet we still do interviews (British and

Australian TV coming up) on the electrifying, exuberant themes of freedom and

high-tech adventure.  The Independent of London called the whole venture

"stupefyingly surreal."  Our image has more inertia than our reality:  in the

public mind, we're still out there, camping, roughing it, clipping battered

laptops to hostel phone jacks and sweating slowly across America in a

succession of wild adventures.  The reality is more like being in charge of an

interminable engineering project with a dizzying array of vendors and

subcontractors, along with an ongoing PR and publishing venture.



But the results are becoming tangible at last... the bike, though far from

done, is flickering to life and is starting to look pretty much like it will

when we get back on the road.  In the meantime, Maggie and I continue one of

our perennial arguments, reflected by the growing difference between our

bicycles....





Steve:  "More is better!"



Maggie:  "Less is more!"





And that's about it, more or less.











-- Steve