“Keacher! Where’s that status report?” my boss bellowed.

It was an unusually quiet bellow, completely inaudible to those around me, for in this context, my boss and my self are coextensive. No matter. It’s still a reasonable question.

I seem to like starting named projects:

• Keacher.com: Active. My personal blog since 2001.  At least one post per month for the past nine years.  Depending on my whims, at times a place for personal updates, and at others an outlet for thoughts targeted at general readers.
• BonnevilleClub: Dead. Site dedicated for Pontiac Bonneville owners. Founded it eight years ago, sold it two years ago. New owner killed it.  About a million page views per month in its heyday.  Lots of lessons learned about people management, product management, and asset sales.
• Tagg: Dead. Tagging physical objects with virtual identifiers. Project for a class at Stanford two and a half years ago. Never got traction. Didn’t continue after class. Valuable networking with entrepreneurs and investors.
• Zoitz: On hiatus since 2008. A capricious webcomic for engineers and scientists.  One of the many things I did during a period of unusual productivity in the spring of 2007.  Millions of views over the past three years despite having only a few dozen strips.  A good deal of attention on Digg, reddit, Stumbleupon, and Slashdot.  Still gets tens of thousands of views every month.  Confusion of early strips with xkcd material prompted a drawing style change.  A number of additional strip ideas are in my notebooks; haven’t gotten around to publishing them.  Never figured out how to monetize it.
• Nesota LLC: Active. The umbrella/holding company for my business activities.  Name comes from the final six letters of “Minnesota,” in the style of “Cisco” coming from the final five letters of “San Francisco.”
• Northstartup: Active. The official blog for Nesota, discussing entrepreneurship and topics related to Nesota’s products.
• Whitespacecomic: Inactive. An experiment in ultraminimalist art: just words, no drawings.  Or, put another way, each caption was structured so as to be the punchline for a blank white space.
• Photography: On hiatus. My on-again, off-again relationship with photography is currently in the “off” part of the cycle.  Not really a named endeavor, but I have it on the list anyway.
• Blurity: Active. My photo-deblurring startup, though technically Nesota is the startup and Blurity is a product.  I’m still working to improve the quality to a level that I find acceptable — a prime example of software projects taking longer than expected.  Still, it’s been under development for a solid nine months, and reactions to the initial prototypes have been positive.  I’m more confident than ever that I can pull it off.
• Stopping in Every State: Active.  A half-year road trip to visit and play hockey in every American state and Canadian province.  Scheduled to begin in the summer of 2011.  I’m currently writing the blog as a past-tense retrospective of what in reality are future events.  There is a temptation to switch styles to something a bit more entertaining, akin to my favorite account of a road trip: the “When You Wish Upon a Star” series from Chris Welty’s “Porsching” column.

So there you have it.  Throw in my other current hobbies, like baking, goaltending, backpacking, and writing meta blog posts, and it makes for a full plate.  Good; my productivity tends to increase when I have more to do.

Back to work…

I first met myself — or more precisely, the person I was to become — not long after arriving at Rose-Hulman in 2000.  It was the beginning of a grand adventure, one that would present the opportunities and motivations for me to reinvent my identity and my outlook on life.  I’d vaguely wanted to change some things about myself for a while, but I never really got around to it.  The act of moving to a new state, full of the unknown, provided the necessary motivation.

Adventure.  Yes, life is (or should be) a series of adventures held together by the glue of time.  Said another way, adventures beget stories, and the human existence is defined by our stories.  Man was not meant to grow complacently content.

It was not coincidental that my arrival at Rose was preceded by a road trip.  Not the insane, heavy-drinking blast from the movies, mind you, but a significant 610 mile drive nonetheless.

Many other trips followed during college.  Visits to Chicago and St. Louis.  Skiing in Colorado.  Top-speed runs, pushed by youthful stupidity and limited only by engine governors, to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and West Virginia.  Dozens of treks between Minnesota and Indiana.  A first trip abroad, to Paris, France.  I found and nurtured a love of travel.

Going to California for grad school was as much about the adventure of living in Silicon Valley as it was about getting an advanced degree.  It, too, was preceded by years of preparation, days of driving, and another dose of personal reinvention.  I loved it.

Now I am enjoying the adventure of entrepreneurship.  I am on the frontier of my soul, pushing forward the state of the art and learning how to become truly self-sufficient.  The goal is to be beholden to no one and nothing but my own ethics.  I’m not there yet, but I’m enjoying the drive.  I am more passionate than ever about solving my chosen problem — the ubiquity of blurry photos — and my movement beyond “the dip” make me confident that the dream is attainable.

Still, over the past month or so the itch has grown to have another traveling adventure.  Another grand tour, perhaps, to echo the one I took six years ago around Western Europe.  The urge boiled over into giddy excitement last night, and instead of sleeping, I took to doing research and sketching potential routes.  The one holding the greatest appeal is deliciously high concept:

“Epic North American road trip.”

Long-time readers of this blog might recognize this desire as nothing new.  The seed was planted years ago by Grandstaff; or more specifically, by his compelling written documentation [Updated: Now using the archive.org capture; see the summer of 2003 in particular] of his trip around the United States.  The spark that jolted the dream back to life came from a far less noble source: the 2010 Kia Sorento Superbowl commercial. (Inspiration comes from strange places.)

Ok, so what exactly does an “epic North American road trip” entail?  Three main goals:

• Visit all 50 American states and 10 Canadian provinces
• Play hockey in each of those states and provinces
• Accomplish all of the travel by driving (except for Hawaii, of course)

Why?  Well, to the extent supported by my limited research, it appears that such a feat has never been accomplished.  There are guys who have run marathons in every state, a guy who is trying to visit every Starbucks location in the world, and lots of people who try to see every stadium for their favorite major-league sport.  I’ve had a long-time desire to play a game of hockey in the birthplace of hockey (i.e, Canada), so playing in every province and every state seems like a reasonable extension.

Other lesser goals for the trip include visiting friends, backpacking in national parks, enjoying the regional seasonal produce, taking photos, and writing about everything.

It will be a minimalist adventure.  A rough sketch of what I’ll bring:

• Ultralight backpacking gear
• Minimal clothes chosen for maximum utility
• Laptop computer with wireless broadband card
• Cell phone (well, probably three of them: an American one, a Canadian one, and a satellite one)
• DSLR camera
• Basic tools and emergency supplies
• Road bike (maybe — that might have to be saved for a future trip)
• Hockey gear

That last item really constrains my vehicle options.  Everything else (well, besides the bike) is small enough that I could probably get away with a sports car.

This is all I brought to Europe when I was there for a month

Part of me wants to do this with the wrong vehicle, or at least with one that adds character.  If I were shooting for the “proper” vehicle, the choice would be easy: Toyota Land Cruiser.  The Land Cruiser is kind of like a Land Rover, except being Japanese instead of British, it doesn’t break down all the time.  It is, apparently, the go-to vehicle for harsh operating conditions in the most remote corners of the world.  Since my main concern would be not getting stranded in the middle of Canada or Alaska, I can be a bit more liberal with my selection.

Maybe an Outback?  Maybe my current Outback?  Perhaps a sports sedan would be better. The BMW M5 would be a classy Gumball-esque choice, and it would be large enough for another person if I found somebody else up for a crazy doing-something-in-every-state trek (not necessarily hockey).  Or, if caution is to be thrown to the wind, maybe a sports car like the GT-R really would be the way to go.

Obviously, all of this won’t be cheap.  In terms of time, I expect around six months will be necessary for a proper tour.  In terms of money, a rough guess might be in the neighborhood of $25,000, excluding the car.  I can think of many worse ways to blow a few grand.  Plus, with wireless broadband and the ubiquity of WiFi, I could continue working on projects for myself (e.g., Blurity) or for others (e.g., freelancing) while on the road.

Expected start date is July 1, 2011.  Let the preparation begin.

If you pitted your car’s engine against your car’s brakes, which would win?

As you’ve almost certainly heard, Toyota is under a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the moment due to reports of “unintended acceleration” in its cars.   My personal belief is that the problem is driver error attributable to mass delusion, since you’re no more likely to encounter such a situation in a Toyota than in any other brand.  One tends to find what one is seeking to find.   It hasn’t helped that Toyota’s initial handling of the situation will go down as a textbook case of what not to do.

Okay, but what about the reports where drivers claimed to be pressing the brake pedal to no effect?  Can the engine really overpower the brakes in a modern car?  Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math to find out.

Assume that a car (a simplified model of the Lexus ES 350 in this case) and its passengers weighs 4000 lbs, has a 270 hp engine operating at the peak of its powerband, is going 70 mph, and can stop from 70 mph in 176 ft.   In metric units, that’s 1818 kg, 201 kW, 31 m/s, and 53.6 m.  Assuming constant deceleration, we see that the acceleration and time to decelerate is

v^2 = v_0 ^2 + 2 * a * (d-d_0)

0 = 31.3^2 + 2 * a * (53.6)

a = -9.13 m/s^2

t = (v – v_0) / a

t = 3.42 s

This means that the car is capable of decelerating at just under 1 g.

Now, let’s  look at how much power the brakes are dissipating during that stop.  First, we need to find the energy of the car at speed. Again assuming constant deceleration,

Ek = 0.5 * m * v^2

Ek = 0.5 * 1818 * 31.3^2

Ek = 890 kJ

Next, we solve for power:

P = E/t

P = 890 kJ / 3.42 s

P = 260 kW

Since the brakes are capable of dissipating more power than the engine is capable of producing, the brakes will win over the engine — though obviously the stopping distance and time will be increased.

Now, this margin might not appear to be much above the power output of the engine, but it ignores a few things:

• The engine produces peak power only in a limited rpm band, so the power output at any given time is likely to be less than the theoretical maximum
• There are significant drivetrain losses, so the actual power at the wheels is about 15% lower than that at the engine’s crankshaft
• Torque, and not power dissipation, is a strong factor when considering the actual stopping capabilities of a braking system

That last point is probably quite important, but I will leave exact calculation of its significance as an exercise for the reader.

There are some other caveats.  Brake effectiveness decreases with increased heat (a condition known as “brake fade”), so continued or repeated application of the brakes might severely hamper their ability to stop the vehicle.  The situation is further degraded by the loss of vacuum assist after repeated applications of the brake pedal while at speed.  Engine vacuum decreases with engine speed, so at full throttle, if the vacuum reserve has been depleted, the driver might find it very difficult to fully apply the brakes.

As a further aside: what about the parking/emergency brake?  Although it operates using an entirely separate system, it is very weak.  My BMW had no problem overpowering the parking brake from a standstill — something that was so easy and so common that it warranted an idiot light on the dash — so I am quite doubtful that it could stop the car in a reasonable distance from highway speeds even without the extra force from the engine.  (No numbers for analysis here, sorry.) Stick with the main brakes.

The idea that a car’s braking system can stop a car from highway speeds, even at full throttle, is supported by empirical evidence.  Car and Driver did a series of tests of the matter, in which they had no problems stopping various cars.  For example, the V6 Camry they tested stopped from 70 mph in 174 ft under normal conditions.  When the test was repeated with the throttle wide open, the same stop required 190 ft — an increase of less than 10%.

If anything, it seems like poor user interface design or poor user training is at fault here.  How many people know that power brakes offer less power assistance after being pumped?  Who besides techies familiar with ATX-style power supplies would guess that one must hold down the start/stop button on a modern car for about three seconds to force it to turn off?  How many drivers have practiced panic stops or evasive driving?

But I suppose new floormats are a good enough placebo.

I have several medium-sized cardboard boxes sitting around unopened from the last time I moved (about nine months ago).  They are nondescript and unlabeled.   Just strong, brown, plain boxes.  What they hold I do not remember.

If somebody put a gun to my head and said, “Tell me what’s in those boxes or you’ll die!” — well, I’d probably open them up and inform the inquisitive aggressor of the contents.  However, if the hypothetical gunman stopped me and insisted that I answer before looking, I would be without a clue:

“Books, perhaps?” I would stammer.  “Ok, which ones?” would be the response.  Again, I would draw a complete blank.

Clearly, I haven’t missed the utility of whatever lies in those cardboard caskets.

The only certainty is uncertainty; what they hold is — simultaneously — both valuable and worthless.  It will take observation to collapse it into a single truth.

I’m sure that the moment I open those boxes, I will be unable to live without whatever they contain.

In the beginning, god created the computer monitor.  The foreground glowed green; the background remained inky black.  And for a long while, that was the state of the world.  Then, in the mid 1990s, there was a great awakening. With the rise of the GUI, and particularly Windows 95, the world discovered and embraced full-screen, full-color, lush, vivid desktop backgrounds.

I change desktop wallpapers about as often as I change cell phones (i.e., rarely), so I have a reasonably clear recollection of my history, backgroundically speaking, for the past decade or so.

"Sierra by Moonlight" from Digital Blasphemy. My background circa 1999.

Our desktop backgrounds are windows into our soul.  They reflect our dreams for the future and our nostalgia for the past.  They show our desires and our triumphs.  They lurk as ever-present reminders of what we find appealing.

Porsche Carrera GT. My dream car and background circa 2003.

Some treat them as art.  Others use them to encourage relaxation or spur productivity.  A minority even recognize their potential for pranks, like the ol’ take-a-screenshot-and-remove-the-icons gag.

Solid black. It was a time of rudderless ennui, circa 2005.

What makes the perfect wallpaper?  After all, the image is seldom seen, as the efficient computer user will have every pixel of screen real estate covered by maximized windows.  I, for one, see my desktop background only while locking or unlocking my computer.  Should the image make it easy to see the desktop icons?  Should it look good stretched or cropped to the prevailing aspect ratio?  Should it exist at all?

Stanford from the air: a fairy-tale view via Microsoft Live Maps. My hopes, dreams, and identity during the period of use: March 2007 - June 2009.

I’ve taken a number of nature photos that I think would make good backgrounds, and yet… few of them evoke the emotional response that I find necessary for a compelling choice.  Notably, I can’t recall ever using a photo of people for a background.  Perhaps I don’t want to cover their faces with my windows?

Avalanche Lake in Glacier National Park. In use as background: June 2009 - present.

Our choices of desktop wallpapers are perhaps most closely related to our choices of profile photos on the various social networks.  The profile photos project how we wish the world to perceive us; the wallpapers project how we wish to see ourselves.  Proud fathers, adventurous rebels, stoic visionaries, drunken douches… all samples from the broad spectrum of possibilities.

So dream about that sports car, that island, that retirement.  Remind yourself about your spouse, your child, and your family.  Remember that trip, that dog, that crazy night.  Boost your concentration.   Be practical.  Be ridiculous. Be artistic.  Be rational.  There are no wrong answers.  Choose one and learn about yourself.