all: added new essays and published posts

3 files changed, 182 insertions, 18 deletions

diff --git a/essays/leica.txt b/essays/leica.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9626e4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/essays/leica.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+Leica's new M11 digital rangerfinder camera may as well come from an entirely different era. Don't get me wrong, it's plenty modern. The M11 has a high resolution sensor (a 60-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame CMOS sensor to be precise), sophisticated metering tools, and even some of the usual digital accoutrements of cameras in our age. But it thumbs its nose at autofocus, and is perfectly happy to work with lenses that are decades old. 
+
+More than that though, the Leica M11 just *feels* like, well, an old Leica. 
+
+The M11 is very much true to the heritage of the M series camera. It looks like an M series. It's compact, understated, a box on which you attach a lens. The M11 doesn't make many promises, but those it does it keeps.
+
+The M11 is also true to M series when it comes to price, which is high. The retail price of $8,995 is more that most of us are ever going to spend on a camera. But even for those of us who will never own a Leica M11, I think this is an important device that deserves something more than a simple review. 
+
+The M11 is important because it shows that the engineers at Leica are keeping something alive, something that I think the rest of the camera world has forgotten—that the camera doesn't matter, the photographs matter. The camera is just a tool.
+
+Any tool is only as good as the person using it. A wrench is just a wrench. Some wrenches may be better made than others, but if you want to do anything useful with a wrench, you need a person with the skill to use a wrench. That skill might come in different forms and guises too. I know what I'm doing with a socket wrench in an internal combustion engine, but I have no skill at all in using a plumbing wrench on the pipes in the basement.
+
+In the same way, camera are tools. Put an outdated digital camera from the early 2000s in Sebastião Salgado's hands and odds are you'll end up with a great image. Put the Leica M11 in my hands and the odds of getting a great image are less in your favor. 
+
+The reason I say the Leica M11 feels more like a film Leica than a modern digital camera isn't because it isn't capable, but because it has been engineered to be used in conjunction with human skill, that is, your skills as a photographer. This is what makes the M11 so different.
+
+Cameras are increasingly designed to remove the human skill, or more importantly the lack thereof, from the equation. From autofocus to auto white balance to auto metering, the engineering skill of most camera manufacturers over the last several decades has gone into replacing the skilled individual with a algorithm that presents, not a challenge you must rise to or adapt to, but a series of options you can choose between. 
+
+This is the path of all technological advance in our consumer society, the abstraction of skill to a set of features which claim to have removed the need for skill. And yet. Some photographs are better than others. Some photographs tell a story that's independent of technical perfection. No amount of autofocus speed is going to make your image tell a story if you have no story to tell.
+
+The Leica comes from a time before photography became a means for social approval, and was about telling stories. Stories the world needed to hear, stories the world would not have been able to hear any other way. The work of photographers like [Sebastião Salgado](https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/sebasti%C3%A3o-salgado?all/all/all/all/0) brought the rest of the world into my sheltered high school photography class in a way that nothing else I'd ever seen did. I would sit for hours leafing though *An Uncertain Grace*, staring at the same photographs day after day until I knew every corner of them. Same with [Susan Meiselas](https://www.susanmeiselas.com), whose sometimes shockingly brutal images brought home the conflicts in Central America in a way that the circus of Oliver North on TV (which happened around the same time) never could, never would. TV was sanitized. Meiselas's photography was a collection of raw emotion seared onto the page in way that no one could fail to understand. These were the things that made me want to be a photographer.
+
+I don't want to give the impression that no one is doing the kind of work Salgado and Meiselas did. There are plenty of truly great photographers working today. In fact the winner of the [Leica Oscar Barnack Newcomer Award for 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQteG83kQqo), Emile Ducke, is a great example. You know what no one asks in the linked film about his work? What camera he uses. You know what no one asked Salgado back in those days? No one asked what camera he used. No one asked Meiselas what lenses she preferred because it didn't matter. The images are all that matter and we all knew that just owning a Leica M series camera, which it turns out both Salgado and Meiselas used, at least some of the time, wasn't going to get you those images.
+
+That's why I don't know if you should buy the Leica M11 or not. It's an opinionated camera. It's from a different time, when what mattered was the image. I shot with it as a loaner for one week. The highest praise I can give any tool is the praise I'll give the M11: It did what I asked it to do. It never failed. I failed plenty, but the tool kept on being the tool, waiting for me to rise to the occasion.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Today Instagram is like the TV, it's sanitized photography. 
+
+
+
+lacks autofocus, or because it uses a rangefinger focusing systemmost of the engineering is going into trying to replicate human skill with digital smarts. 
+
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/essays/new-from-current.txt b/essays/new-from-current.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..603fab3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/essays/new-from-current.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+
+
+
+
+---
+
+From Charles Eisenstein: It is not only systems and institutions that are crumbling. It is not only political parties, social patterns, and economic organizations that are in a state of crisis. On a deeper level, we face a crisis of sense, meaning, and identity. More and more of us have lost trust in the authorities we once trusted. We have come to doubt old standards by which to discern true from false. We don’t know what to believe. We don’t know what is real. We aren’t so sure even who we are. Our notions of progress and our faith in the future has been shaken.
+
+The collective response to Covid so far has been to deepen our immersion in the old story of Separation, fear, and control. Part of that story is that progress means advancing the human capacity to manage and control everything outside of us. Better security means controlling terrorists and criminals. Better living means controlling bad habits and addictions. Better health means controlling germs and our own bodily processes. At the present writing, it has become obvious that the regime of intensifying control will not bring its promised paradise. Paradise remains ever at the horizon no matter how quickly we race toward it.
+
+The resolution of this state of affairs, however, need not be a bifurcation. We are not in the world in order to leave it. We are here to anchor a more beautiful world the present one. How do we do that? Not through force of will alone. We need other people who share our vision, who have seen the same possibility that we have seen. Those people remind us that choices and perceptions that seem crazy in the old story, that seem naive or impractical or irresponsible, are actually both sane and necessary. In other words, enlightenment is a group activity.
+
+---
+
+Of course, if there are things to be done, they should be done. But that does not mean we should rush around doing stuff, just because it seems better than doing nothing. Here is what Vinay Prasad has to say in his blog ‘Will science do better post COVID19?’
diff --git a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt
index cf8026f..1bbc064 100644
--- a/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt
+++ b/essays/off-grid-brotherhood-of-the-wrench.txt
@@ -1,67 +1,167 @@
+Beautiful is better than ugly.
+Explicit is better than implicit.
+Simple is better than complex
+Complex is better than complicated
+
+Fail gracefully when possible (an elevator is still stairs even when broken mitch hedburg joke)
+
+Complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes the system "easy" to use, also generally eliminates the redundancies and graceful degadation that makes a system resilient.
+
+The exhilaration of figuring something out.
+
+This little movie runs on a loop in my head. It invades everything I do. I see it sitting at stoplights, a similar path of electricity out of the breaker, up the light pole and to the switch which sends it to the top lens, which happens to be red.
+
+I see it doing the dishes. The water leaving the tower, flowing down increasingly narrower pipes, off the main street line and into my hot water tank where it sits until a flick of the faucet calls it up through more pipes and out onto my hands.
+
+Everything flows like this. Every system around us, when it works, does something similar.
+
+Right now the Travco does not work. I can see it in my head and yet I cannot make it work. It has to be the fuel pump. I have spark, I have compression, the missing ingredient in the basic trifecta of the internal combustion engines is fuel.
+
+But seeing it and understanding it are different than actually solving the problem, making it work. This is basic difference between architects and builders. Builders have to solve problems in the real world that architects will never encounter.
+
+Days pass. I continue to fail with the bus. The real world of by time constraints, pay checks that don’t arrive, other commitments, weather. I work on other things. Hang wall panels, sand and apply finish. I do things I know I know how to do. More days pass. Still the bus doesn’t start. I get sullen. My wife thinks I’m mad all the time. I’m not. I’m thinking about the engine, I can’t get it out of my head. It reminds me of the first time I tried to write some code. It was fun, but it also was not.
+
+
+
+# Main
+
 There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But before we overheat you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will make any small block engine overheat eventually.
 
-I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way along, toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of green-gray shrubs, creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. 
+I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way, toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of green-gray shrubs, creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. 
+
+What I don't see is a good place to pull over. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? 
+
+When the engine shuts off a silence descends. There's no sound but the quiet hissing steam escaping the radiator cap. No wind. No birds. No talking. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, just listen to the now gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road a few feet beyond us. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
+
+As a child of the 70s, I've spent my fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is just what vehicles of those days did.There was the 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born. That was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson, AZ. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 
+
+All of which is to say that I was no stranger to dealing with the work, the sweat, the cursing, and the occasional blood, that it requires to keep old cars running. That's why, two years ago, my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that was just shy of its 50th birthday at the time. My kids called it our bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people these days picture something that looks nothing like our new old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container full of beauty and joy. And it hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was more, the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an accepted part of using technology.
+
+I wanted one from the first moment I saw it. Partly because it is just that cool, but also partly because I wanted to own my own home, but not a house. I wanted a home I could move wherever I wanted. I wanted to build it out how I wanted, to understand it, to design everything in it exactly the way we needed it, to maintain it, and to take it wherever we wanted to go. The Travco was all that and more.
+
+--
+
+The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seems to want one. That's probably just as well, there aren't many left.
+
+There also aren't many people left who even know how to fix these vehicles. Well, that's not entirely true. Since the first day I owned the Travco, people have been coming up to talk to me about it. I bought the bus from a couple that lived up in the mountains of North Carolina. I got a ride up there to pick it up, and after about an hour of looking it over, I handed over the money. The previous owner mentioned offhand that it attracted a lot of attention. I was focused on other things and didn't really pay any attention to that comment until about three hours later.
+
+That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past vehicles, I've driven about 250,000 miles. But those were cars. Driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and promptly pointing it downhill toward home. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I managed to get her out on a four lane road where it felt more manageable. Still, I realized I had been driving completely tensed up for a couple of hours. I decided to pull over at a rest area and take a break.
+
+The engine wasn't even off before two people come running up to the bus wanting to see it, take pictures, and talk about it—what year is it, where did you get it, and eventually they work their way around to what has become the big question almost everyone wants to know: what engine is in it? 
+
+The answer is a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but have not been able to confirm or deny this speculation. I can say that at times, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it feels like I have about the same amount of power as a Dodge Dart, but with 8000 extra pounds of weight. 
+
+In 2016 when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked intimidatingly complex and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer, part of what I wanted when we decided to live in a vintage RV was less computers, maybe even no computers. There's not a computer chip in the 318, nor is there one anywhere else in the bus. 
+
+I completely rebuilt the interior, gutting it down to the bare fiberglass and re-running all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's no backup cameras, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we stop, but the automatic pilot system will never fail. Because there isn't one. 
+
+A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously would let no networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposes. 
+
+Adama would approve of our solar panels, which have been our primary source of power for years, but he would not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. I used to be able to check our battery charge status from my phone, before Bluetooth stopped working on my phone. But I knew there was a good chance bluetooth would fail me, it had before. Luckily for me I had long ago added a shunt with a hardwired gauge, should the Bluetooth fail. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology, but I'm not going to leave the systems that keep the lights on to technologies I can't repair. I thought of the Adama character when my phone stopped connecting to the charge controller, I could almost seem him smiling.
+
+Complex systems are inherently fragile. It might be more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water or to check the battery status from my phone, but the trade off in complexity wasn't worth the small gain in convenience. Nothing brought this home for me quite like the choke cable.
+
+When I bought the bus the manual choke cable was broken. When your engine is cold it needs more gas than air to get started. In an aspirated engine the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes, controlling how much air gets into the engine. Too much air and the engine won't cold start. In older vehicles, prior to the mid-1960s, this mixture was controlled by the driver with the chock leveler. Pull it out and the flap in the carburetor closes, the cold engine starts, and then you push it back in. 
+
+Manual choke is archaic. But since the bus's was broken I went even more archaic. I did what the choke cable should have been doing -- pulling the carburetor shut so that the cold engine gets enough gas to start -- with my finger. Every time I start the engine I have to lift up the cover, unscrew the air filter and work the carburetor with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dash board knob took years of scouring eBay. By then, well I was used to it. I've had a choke cable for over a year now and I still haven't installed it.
+
+What I discovered after hundreds of cold morning starts is that I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once the cable came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting, which it wasn't, I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right.
 
-What I don't see though is a good place to pull over. Not that we need one really. We haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. Why not? 
+Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the engine, connecting with it if you will. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine every time, but these days I am less looking things over than just spending time with it.
 
-When the engine shuts off there's no sound. No wind. No birds. No talking. We all, my wife, three children, and myself, just listen to the slow hiss of the radiator boiling over. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road a few feet beyond us. After a minute my wife turns around and says to kids, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 
+Car ethusiasts often get this way
+
+
+This has become my guiding design principle, my philosophy of technology if you will, the technology must connect me with the machine in a meaningful way. There is no technology for its own sake, no technology that abstracts function for convenience, no technology that removes the human interaction for "simplicity" or "ease of use". Ease of use means I can use it, as well as repair it and rebuild it if need be.
+
+Eventually I was able to track down reprints of the original shop manuals for the Dodge M300 chassis, which is the basis for the Travco, as well as many other motorhomes of the era. From reading this in the evenings around the campfire, I know that the designers of the bus meant for it to be maintained by anyone. It's written in simple language, with clear instructions, and explanations of why you need to do something as well has how to do it. 
+
+I used the same guiding principle when upgrading things to make it livable for a family of five.Limiting complexity was a concious decision by me, just as it was a conscious decision by the Dodge and Travco engineers in 1969. The bus is all mechanical and easy enough to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the coolant system that had us at the side of the road climbing up the White Mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, closing the spring so that coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. 
+
+The engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax. The carburetor jets, which control how much gas and air are pulled into the carburetor and sent on to the combustion chambers are just metal cones you tighten or loosen with a screw driver. There are almost no special tools required to fix anything in the bus. I carry a lot of wrenches, a few screwdrivers, and a wide array of spare parts. That's about all I need to keep it going.
 
 ---
 
-As a child of the 70s, I've spent my fair share of time at the side of the road in broken down vehicles. There was a mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson, AZ. There was a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was actually very reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 
+I haven't always kept it going though. That's not where I started. For a long time I was happy to understand how it worked, but still let others do the actual work. A mechanic in Florida flared new transmission cooler lines for us. Another in Colorado did the shocks. Another in Utah fixed the transmission cooler lines (again). Everything on the inside I rebuilt and repaired myself, but the engine, for all its apparent simplicity, was still intimidating to me.
 
-This might help explain why, two years ago my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that was just shy of its 50th birthday at the time. When you say motorhome what most people these days picture looks nothing like our bus as my kids call it. The Travco hails from a different era, an era when the Right to Repair was more the need to repair. In its day the need to repair seems to have been an accepted trade off of technology. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seems to want one. That's probably just as well, there aren't many left.
+One evening in the laundry room at Ridgway State Park just outside of Ridgway Colorado, while watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, another man came in and, after he stuffed his laundry in the machine, we started talking. Eventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked which engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard and has haunted me ever since. He said, "do you turn your own wrenches?" I told him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 
 
-There also aren't many people left who even know how to fix these vehicles. Well, that's not entirely true. In fact, ever since the first day I bought the Travco people have been coming up to talk to me about it and 90 percent of the time what people want to know is what engine does it have in it?
+I knew he was right. I knew he was right before he said anything because I had come to realize that knowing is not enough. Knowing only becomes useful when you apply it by doing. I knew it was time for me to start doing more, to start doing everything. Sometimes I get sick of crawling under the bus to fix things. Sometimes I want to make it all go away, just tow it to a mechanic and make it all better, leave me free to spend time with my kids. But that's not how it works. If I wanted to really be in control, if I wanted to be responsible for my own home, I had to take ownership of it, all of it. I had to turn my own wrenches. I realized that evening that I was not living up to the goals I claimed I had. I had to do the work myself. The knowledge was nothing without the know-how and the know-how took getting in there and getting dirty.
 
-When I bought the bus the previous owner mentioned that it attracted a lot of attention, but I didn't really pay any attention to that comment until about three hours later when I stopped at a rest area and two different people came running up to the bus wanting to see it, talk about it, and eventually work their way around to asking me what engine was in it.
+That's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would tell me every time I got frustrated. Remember it's all just nuts and bolts. 
 
-At the time I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked intimidatingly complex and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. I am a former computer programmer, I wanted to get away from computers. There's not a computer chip in the 318. It's mechanical and relatively easy to understand, which is why so many people do. Take the thermostat, part of the system that had us at the side of the road climbing desert mountains. The thermostat is controlled by a piece of wax that melts when it's hot, releasing a spring that lets coolant into the engine. As the engine cools the wax hardens, the spring closes, coolant stops flowing and the engine heats up again. The entire engine temperature system is controlled by a piece of wax.
+Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.
 
 
 
+Problem solving seems fun after the problem is solved. During the actual solving it’s less fun. Food, sleep, these things seem unimportant when I have a problem that needs solving stuck in my head. I tend to get obsessed about things. Even when I don’t want to. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do much programming anymore. I never let things go until I solve the problem to my satisfaction. Of course breaking a web server doesn’t cost much relative to damaging an engine, so with the bus the stakes are much higher, the sullen thinking phase I pass through is correspondingly more sullen and requires more concentration.
 
+Something here about the exhilaration of figuring things out. Example with the fuel pump and then later with the exhaust manifolds
 
+---
 
+Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. 
 
+These are the first three [philosophical "rules" of the Python programming language](https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonPhilosophy), which happens to be the thing that allows me to live in a Travco, traveling full time. 
 
+After finding out about bus, the engine, and that we live in it "full time" as RVers say, the inevitable next question is -- how? The American version of this is *what do you do?*. The European version (about half the people we met in National Parks and other public lands between 2017-2018 were visitors from abroad) is *what is your job?*. I prefer the European version for its specificity. 
 
-Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1]
+The answer is that, since I walked out of the last restaurant kitchen I ran in 2005, I have been a writer and programmer, working from home. For a long time, thanks to demand, I was able to limit my programming to Python (even more specifically, the Django web framework). 
 
-There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines.
 
 
-[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available.
+After years of working at home it occurred to me that I didn't actually need a house to work (yes, I am a slow learner). 
 
+I pointed this out to my wife one day and somewhere over some beers while on vacation in Florida we decided to try living in an RV. Two months later we had the Travco, 9 months after that we were on the road. 
 
+Lest you think programming from an RV is somehow glamorous... well, it's not. The project that sustained our early travels involved building an inventory tracking system. We're not talking about building cool apps for hot startups that were going to IPO. I prefer to work for small, family-run businesses even if that means building inventory tracking systems, which, trust me, is not glamorous. 
 
+There is one aspect of work though that very much informed  
 
+---
 
+Later when I knew enough to know what questions to ask, I went to YouTube where dozens of total strangers walked me through how to repair everything from faulty wires to brake adjuster screws. But the biggest single step after my uncle set me on the path to turning my own wrenches was to buy a reprint of the original shop manual. Here were the words of the engineers who made the bus. How to test systems, what to do when different problems arise. Even how to tune things just the way you want them.
 
+There are still things I can't fix. I don't travel with an engine lift so I can't do a complete rebuild. But since that afternoon in the laundromat I've replaced or rebuilt the carburetor, the radiator (twice), the water pump, the alternator, the power steering pump, the fuel pump (twice), the brakes, the shocks, the transmission cooler lines, and a host of other little things I've long since forgotten about. Far more important than any single thing I've fixed though is that I know it's all just nuts and bolts. I given the right tools and the enough time, anyone can fix anything in this bus, including me. Which is exactly where I wanted to be when I bought it.
 
+And yet, despite all that, despite all the wrench turning, here we are, at the side of the road in Nevada. Because older vehicles might be repairable, but they have other limitations most of us aren't used to facing anymore. This is another part of what I love about the bus. It's an adventure every time I drive it. Nothing has failed in the buses systems to leave us at the side of the road. There is nothing for me to fix. Nothing is broken. The bus is just overworked. It may not have the power to get over the mountain. That's a limitation we've pushed a few times and each time we've made it what gets us over the top isn't technical skills, spare parts, or engine savvy, it's patience.
 
 
+---
 
+This is just one moment. This is another one. They pass by whether we use them or not. This is what I tell myself while I sit idly throwing gravel down into a dry ravine, waiting. Patience. This is just one moment. The rest of the day has been amazing. 
 
+We woke that morning in the ghost town of Gold Point. We headed west because for nine months of that's a much of plan as we'd come up with, let's go west. West today started on Highway 266, a little climb up into the hills, through another ghost town and down some more hills into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on highway 168 that we got some hints of our future. There was an ominous collection of road signs indicating steep, winding roads ahead. There was even a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a three digit state highway in Nevada, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I figured it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
 
-Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. 
+Up and over the second pass was not too bad. It was the windiest road we'd driven in the bus, but we made it over the second pass into a valley with nothing. Not even phone service. There was one lone building set way back from the road with a huge sign that read “no telephone available."
 
+We stopped for lunch and a road work crew we’d passed up the mountain came down and pulled into the same turnout we were in. I took the opportunity to ask them about the final pass. They seemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them did say, "there’s one part we call the narrows, it's only one lane through there." I just stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" "Seriously." "Don’t tell my wife that."
 
-Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
+---
 
-We're only going about 25 miles an hour
+The kids are headed back up. They have gNo fossils were found, though 
 
 
-alpine fell fields 
+and pulled into the next turn out. The bus sat boiling over for a bit, maybe a quart, and then it stopped. We climbed out to sit for a while and consider our options. Except that there weren’t any really. With no cell reception to call a tow truck, no real way to turn around, and no where else to go even if we did, we had to get over the pass. At one point an older gentleman on a Harley stopped at see if we were okay. We chatted for a bit and he told us the top of the pass was only about four or five miles ahead, which was encouraging.
 
-the horizen 
+---
 
+Programming is a relatively new discipline and still believes that the ideal can exist in the real world. Mechanics know better. Programmers, Python programmers anyway, invent things like virtual environments and attempt to sandbox their programs from outside influence, they try to ignore the real world and it keeps failing. Programmers call these failures bugs and pretend they'll all be fixed one day. They won't. Ask any mechanic. That's not how it goes in the real world, and you can't mitigate or abstract away the real world. Eventually programming will figure this out and become a mature discipline that realizes perfection only exists on paper. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
+Behind that question I've come to think there are several others worth asking, the first is, how did this thing last so long when so little else has? The answer to that is a long and twisting tale, but the short version is that the Chrysler 318 LA engine was made for a long time, and used in a lot of vehicles, which is to say a lot of these engines are out there in the world. That created a huge market for parts and so far, that market continues to exist though I have to imagine it's shrinking every year. For now though, I can walk into any parts store in America and have whatever part I need in a couple of days.[^1]
+
+There is, however, I think another question the people who've asked me about the bus engine have in mind though when they say, what engine does it have in it, they are, almost universally, people from the time when many people could and did repair their own engines.
+
+
+[^1]: This is still true even with post pandemic shortages, though I, and many others, have noticed a significant drop in the quality of part available.
+
+
+
 
 
 
@@ -71,6 +171,13 @@ the horizen
 
 
 
+Somewhere far up the road there are cool pinyon-juniper woodlands with sagebrush meadows and bristlecone pine forests. 
+
+
+Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
+
+
+
 
 
 
@@ -78,7 +185,6 @@ Of course they do. They barely notice when we break down. They half like it. It'
 
 I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's just the radiator overheating. We live in a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. Now almost no one besides us seem to want one. Ours is electric blue with a wide white stripe wrapped around it. 
 
-After a night in the middle of Gold Point we hit the road, continuing our somewhat random plan. I came up with something I thought was pretty good: take highway 266 west from Gold Point, grab highway 168, go over the White Mountains, drop down into Big Pine and follow 395 up to my aunt and uncle’s house up in Wellington. It seems simple when you type it out. I bet it made the gods chuckle anyway.
 
 Highway 266 was uneventful, a little climb up into the White Mountains, through a ghost town and down into a small town called Oasis. It was when we turned on 168 that we got some hints of what was to come. The signs read steep, winding roads ahead. Okay, no biggie, probably. Then there was a sign that said one lane road ahead, trucks not recommended. But we’re on a two digit state highway in California, those don’t narrow down to one lane. I thought maybe it meant there was no passing lane. It did not mean that.
 
@@ -136,7 +242,6 @@ I unbuckle the lap belt and lean over to open the doghouse and make sure it's ju
 
 
 
-It's hard to embrace van life as a family of five. Most vans are, well, they're vans. I'll never get Chris Farley screaming *in a van, down by the river* out of my head. I can't live in a van. And RVs are for retirees. I'm not retired. I don't want to be retired. Let's get a trailer then, my wife said two years ago when we decided to try living on the road. So I searched for a trailer, but Google, bless its algorithmic heart, which that day had a bit of arrhythmia, showed me a Travco instead. "That," I said, "that is what we need". Two months later we had one. A year later it was actually liveable. My kids dubbed it "the big blue bus," or just "the bus" for short.