Hard electrons
On Sunday I nearly got the electric motorbike working.
The problem is that it's sort of hard to tell how close I got. Everything was plugged in and in place, but nothing actually turned on, went beep or spun round. It's that sort of 'back to the drawing board' feel that I imagine makes scientific research so depressing - what bit of the large supply of things isn't working, and how do I deduce which one it is?
I'd spent the week preparing for it. I got the motor fitted with a tyre (from the excellent TJ's Tyres in Braddon), where it was opined that the fact that the spokes were bent where they attached to the wheel was a cause for concern. I got the awesome Laurie who runs Suspension Smith in Fyshwick to make me up some spacers and find an axle that would make sure that the motor fit in the middle of the rear suspension arms. I borrowed eight large UPS batteries in order to supply the 96 volts that is my aim for the battery pack's minimum potential. I spent the rest of Saturday going through my wiring and control box trying to get all the things that were supposed to connect together to do so correctly.
That bit is the real challenge. You see, there are five large and twenty-eight small connections from the motor controller; the large ones are the battery terminals in and the three motor coils out, the smaller ones do everything from turn a light on when the controller's 'on' to detect the position of the throttle to connections like 'boost' that aren't connected to a wire on the break-out cables and aren't documented in the manual. The motor itself has ten connectors (power for the three coils, hall effect sensors for each coil, ground and five volts, and the temperature sensor to and from). Some of the controller's outputs attach to external things - LEDs, variable resistors for throttle and brake, power supply, etc. which have to be put somewhere. So it's a bit bewildering working out how to connect it all together.
So on the day Rob and I fitted the brake and torque arm, fitted the spacers and axle (which were perfect!) and ran the cable. Then I lugged one of the batteries, the controller and the huge splay of leads out and started connecting things. I'd built a little kit box, used two D-15 ('VGA') connectors for the controller's inputs, and soldered all the wires to a circuit board. It's all reasonably neat but nothing like waterproof or robust enough to run - it's only really there to give me a chance to work out how the electrics all go together before I start actually finalising where everything goes. And the familiarity with its less-than-professional construction made me tentative as to how it was going to go. Would connecting it spin the motor up to maximum RPM? Had I something round the wrong way that would have its magic smoke escape?
With Rob holding on the front brake, I gingerly connected the battery to the controller. Nothing. I connected the mock-up box to the controller. Nothing. I switched the switch on. Nothing. Hmmmm.
I remembered that the controller required separate power and that was the only jack I hadn't soldered up. I did a quick soldering job and checked the polarity, and attached a spare motorcycle battery to the mock-up box's power input.
Nothing. Double hmmmm.
And that was more or less it for the day. We had to go out to lunch, Rob had to go and play hockey, and the next big task was to try and work out why all my clever soldering and wiring had produced a dud. The important lesson was that instead of one big box that everything plugged into, which was a pain to solder and required special connectors, I should have had each little subsystem in a separate box (or a different part of the same box) with its own connector. That way, when something breaks you can narrow it down fairly easily, and you don't have so much that's interconnected and jammed together. The Kelly jumper leads bundle the leads for the same functions - throttle, brake, LEDs, etc. - together, so you can have a separate box for each.
Also, buying an extra set of connectors isn't necessary, since Kelly supply you
with a set and they're push-on pull-off 'quick' connectors so they can be taken
apart again, but it is very helpful as it means you've got a test set if you
botch something completely.
posted at: 23:06 | path: /personal/ebike | permanent link to this entry
Riding on and off the road
After several weeks of indecision I registered this week for a racing day
at Wakefield
Park on a motorbike riding day. My hesitation was due to a couple of
factors: I had an unfaired Suzuki GS500, which only the true optimist could
consider a race bike; much as I enjoy the speed of the straight and the
skill of cornering, I also enjoy not crashing and injuring my bike and
myself; I hadn't done a ride outside Canberra before and was unsure how
I would go; I had to ride the bike from Canberra to Goulburn, do the
track day, and then ride back home; the certainty of there being lots of
other people dressed in their full-on racing gear with high performance
sports bikes sneering down their noses at this poor fool on an unfaired
road bike with standard narrow tyres, while not worrying me overmuch,
still didn't appeal.
Thankfully, various people I talked to told me, basically, to quit looking at the negatives and think of the positives. So I headed off at 7AM on a chilly Sunday morning for a day of fun and adventure.
I stopped just before the end of Lake George to stretch my legs, thaw my hands out and remove the mask which, though keeping my face from freezing, was directing all my breath up into my glasses to fog them up. I was glad I had had the break - I hit heavy fog just north of Lake George and discovered the fun of trying to keep your visor clear of mist with one hand at 100km/hr (I'd slowed down a bit to take a bit of extra care). Thankfully my remembered directions of how to get from the Goulburn turn-off to Wakefield Park came back perfectly and, after letting one peleton of traffic past me on the single lane road, I arrived.
I immediately started asking around for Canberra Riders people, particularly Heidi as she had said she was going to be there, she had a recognisable name, and her gender reduced my search set considerably. During the day I must have asked most of the women there if they were or knew her, but all to no avail. I hope those people can forgive such an odd question or questioner :-)
Soon enough we were meeting for the rider's briefing, where we were introduced to the signals that would tell us if there was a rider off the course but upright (one single yellow flashing light), a rider down off the course (two yellow flashing lights), a rider down on the course (one red flashing light) and the end of the session (one yellow flashing light and a chequered flag at the starting line). I signed up, paid my money, and took the bike up to the marshalling area - for I was in the novices group and we were first.
By this time the fog had mostly burnt off and the sun was coming through. The first two laps were done in single file with no overtaking, following a pace bike and learning the course. Then the jockeying for position began. I had met up with another Suzuki GS-500 rider and we spent most of the lap with me following him. We talked afterward and he said he felt a little less like an outsider with someone else riding the same thing - a feeling I shared. A friend had turned up at this point who had driven around the course at other times in a Porsche, and we talked about lines and apexes and cambers and stuff like that.
The second time out we were still led but it became obvious that the one fundamental problem that race tracks face when booking different categories is they really need four 'advanced / race' divisions, one 'intermediate' and one 'novice'. Given the choice between going in novice class and missing out on the day altogether, many of the faster people end up in the same group that I and other people new to Wakefield Park were in. By the fourth session there was no doubt I was amongst the slowest on the field - I was regularly getting overtaken at virtually every corner. People with racing slicks and 900cc tuned bikes were in this class - there's no way these people can claim to be novices.
And yet it really didn't matter. There weren't enough people in each group to make it dangerous or crowded, they all realise that they have to get around you rather than you making way for them, and the best I could do was just to keep to a good line, make my intentions plain and not do anything suddenly. I kept my rear view mirrors - I doubt they would make me go very much faster if removed - and it was useful to see people coming up and plan for them. And I had a lot of fun, gradually improving my lines, feeling how much I could rely on the tyres when they were cold and warm, finding and refining that line that leads from one corner to the next to the next... I think I improved, but I had a lot of fun and that's what mattered the most to me.
I finally met up with a bunch of
Canberra Riders people at
the end of the day, and two of them said they wouldn't mind if I rode home
with them. I wasn't really keen to ride back alone anyway, and they were
going to much more scenic route through Tarrago and Bungendore. The
highlight of my day was seeing the guy I'd been following tapping on the
window of the Renault that had been tailgating me up to the lights and
telling him off for tailgating in the rain. I'd only known these people
for two hours or so and they were looking out for me - that's a community
worth being a part of!
posted at: 18:00 | path: /personal/ebike | permanent link to this entry
Manual work
The FZS 600 now has a hole where its engine used to be, and is a good
deal lighter. For those of you who find yourself contemplating doing a
similar conversion, let me annotate the workshop manual procedure for
removing the engine:
Yet.
So stick this in your manual in the appropriate pages. It will save you a fair bit of struggling and cursing, and possible accidents where you find the engine inextricably wedged somewhere or a crucial tiny sticky-outy thing bent in the process of the engine galloping earthward at some stage. And don't bother buying a manual, either. You can find the PDF for free on the internet.
The engine bay is not as large as I'd hoped, and does have some annoying
protruberances which I need to check with an engineer before I grind off.
I may also be able to mount at least one layer of cells outside the bars
on each side - the engine sticks out at least that far. Some more
logistic
posted at: 18:02 | path: /personal/ebike | permanent link to this entry
The monkey on ones back
I've just been listening to stories from a friend of mine about his new
place of work. Simple things like getting support have to go through
other departments and are quietly filed and ignored. New software is
anathema. Fixing problems is impossible, because it would admit that
the problem existed. People are regularly bullied into doing things
that are way outside their job descriptions. No-one knows the passwords
to any machines and point the finger at other people in an endless
circle. Managers actively suppress any dissent.
But the worse is yet to come. This place uses billions of tax-payers money and its budget continues to expand. Even revealing the name of this organisation or any substantiated claims can be considered treason and is a criminal offence. The money gets used on projects that regularly get cancelled, delayed and changed and often end up costing orders of magnitude more than originally budgeted. Any questioning of the spending is considered unpatriotic. Powerful people with distinguished careers have stood up to this organisation only to find themselves cut off and facing the sharp end of the law.
How does society get rid of this cancer? The theoretical function of
this organisation and its actual activities are so different as to
almost be antithetical. Yet it seems impossible to actually change
it, fix it or remove the harmful elements from it. Surely the only
thing to do is to scrap the entire thing and start afresh. Yet that
too would be considered heretical or traitorous by some. What can we
do?
posted at: 16:00 | path: /society/politics | permanent link to this entry
Proposals submitted...
The Linux Conference Australia
call for papers is now out, and I've submitted two papers - one for a
talk and one for a tutorial. Now the waiting begins...
In 2009 I got accepted to give a talk on writing good user documentation. I'd submitted several papers before then but never got accepted; the chief reason was that I had submitted papers about stuff I was interesed in but was not actually a key contributor to. LCA is crazy hard to get to speak at, but is totally worth it because they really treat speakers well. And to me it's addictive - I loved it so much in 2009 I wanted to do awesome things just to get a place in 2010.
That didn't work out for me; mainly because I'm a neophile. I tend to be interested in a whole bunch of things but only shallowly - occasionally (such as when I decided to write the doco for LMMS) I dip in but I rarely seem to be able to sustain that involvement before the next thing comes along and lures me away. But I'm more hopeful I can get a speakership at 2011 because I'm putting forward two proposals for things that I'm actually really involved in and know about.
Ah well. Now for three months of anticipation. Better keep on working on
my electric motorbike then...
posted at: 09:45 | path: /tech/lca | permanent link to this entry
Just a stage I'm going through
Sometimes it seems like a great idea to indulge yourself. You know, when
you've had an awful day at work, when you've been having trouble sleeping
for months, you've had trouble trying to describe to your partner exactly
why your day at work was so awful, and then just when you think she's
cared for you and wants you to be happy again you find out that you've done
something inexplicable wrong and you're going to enjoy another sleepless,
uncomfortable night without any help or consolation.
At times like this, it can be easy to indulge in amateur theatrics. Getting horribly drunk, being sarcastic, destroying something - the temptation to do something violent, unmissable and defiant rises to levels hard to resist. Metaphors for the futility of existence in an uncaring world come quickly to mind. Symbolic gestures of the struggle of one person to come to terms with a world that does not seem to care what he suffers beckon.
It is at this point that I would caution the reader. Step back from that metaphorical brink, look around, and pause. Nothing you do now is going to help - in fact, pretty much everything you do is going to make things worse. There are people that are worse off than you - even now, there are people suffering far worse, often through no fault of their own. Your situation is not that bad. You have probably faced this kind of problem in some guise or another before. You just need time to sort things out sensibly, and that time will come somehow.
No metaphors here. Just persist.
posted at: 01:57 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Committed to the job
There's an old joke that goes: what's the difference between 'involved'
and 'committed'? In making bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved but
the pig is committed. Well, having just spent $1500 on a broken
motorbike, I feel committed to building an electric motorbike now. Up
until now the parts I've bought - the Enertrak
hub motor, the Kelly
motor controller and peripherals - could all have been sold to someone
else willing to build an electric motorbike. But the choice of a bike
is a personal one, and I'd be lucky to get $500 for the bike now if I
sold it for parts. So I've now committed money I really can't get back.
The problem with building an electric motorbike is that what you ideally need is a motorbike that is working in every respect but the engine is blown. This isn't the usual failure mode of bikes - they usually get enthusiastically smashed into or scraped over immovable bits of terrain at speed. My initial 'wanted' requests on classified ad websites and on web forums were fruitless, and from my many and various web searches I determined that no-one was advertising the type of bike that I wanted. I also didn't really want to buy a bike that was registered and working and try to resell its engine and peripherals, despite one claim that with the right bike that could make my money back. Time to look further afield.
A friend who's a bit of a bike expert and is helping me with this project recommended Motorcycle Disposals, a company in Sydney that takes bikes that have been wrecked, repossessed or confiscated and sells them for whatever they can get. Their web site is a bit 1990s but proudly declares that it is "best viewed in Mozilla Firefox v 3.6" (which is nice) and its main page, the list of bikes they're currently tendering for, is kept reasonably up to date. If you're prepared to spend a bit of money on some replacement parts, or don't mind something with a few scrapes, then there's plenty of bargains there ready for the new rider to take away.
However, the bikes on that page are only about half of their total stock - they're the ones that are rideable or popular so are a good bargain. They have at least that many bikes that have been written off and can only be used for parts, less popular bikes, and bikes with engine problems or larger defects. I spoke to Joel one day and he recommended coming and having a look through their extra stock to find an option. This meant a 300-km drive from Canberra to Sydney and back, so I planned this with the bike-expert friend and we set off.
We narrowed it down to four options. One I liked but was on the expensive side was a Honda CBR1100XX 'Blackbird' - a large, modern bike with a very strong frame and sporty looks. For my purposes I was looking at larger bikes (to carry the load of possibly 100Kg of batteries and 26Kg of motor) with good fairings to reduce wind resistance, and this fit the bill. Better yet, the exhaust had just been sold and I reckoned I could do them a deal on the radiator and oil cooler. But its entire front fairing and headlight assembly was missing and that cost a fair bit, making it a bit less appealing given my budgetary constraints.
There was a Kawasaki ER-6N that was OK, a Honda VT250 that was running but quite old and a bit small, and a Yamaha FZS 600. The latter was within my price bracket, had a motor with part of the engine and starter missing from impact, was a solid build and of modern appearance. I reckoned I could bargain them down a bit on the price, since I wouldn't need the radiator and exhaust, they could be easily unbolted, Motorcycle Disposals also has a side-line in spare parts. Rob and I repaired to a nearby Subway to deliberate.
We fed ourselves, fulminated briefly at the diabolical slowness of 2G modem speeds, and did some searching. The Blackbird looked like costing at least another $800 to get back to working order, and though I could afford it in the long run it was harder to get enthusiastic about it. The FZS 600 only needed a nosecone and windscreen, which could cost less than $400 all up. Finally Rob said "What time do they close?" I looked up the web site. 12:30. "What time is it?" 12:30. Time for a quick phone call!
Joel said that they'd stay there for me and we hurried back. I made them an offer of $1500, $250 less than their asking price, and after a bit of theatrical clutching of hearts and reeling, they agreed when I threw in the exhaust and radiator. It turned out that they didn't need the radiator since it was dinged, but they took the radiator, I signed the bill and wheeled the bike up the ramp onto the trailer. After strapping it down securely we headed off, feeling slightly odd at picking up a non-working bike.
Fuel efficiency was 12.5Km/l (8l/100Km) going up with the empty trailer, and about 11Km/l (9.1l/100Km) going back, compared to the Liberty's usual 15Km/l (6.7l/100Km) on the highway. We felt it most when we were on the hills - it was like we'd added an extra ton of car. I went at 100Km/hr on the return journey too, just to lessen the effect of towing a bike-shaped sail behind us.
The brightest moment of the trip was on the Federal Highway. A Ford Laser Sports coupe - one of those ones with the blue stripes down the centre like it's a giant equals sign - rocketed past us at easily 140Km/hr. Five minutes later we passed a police car on the verge with a speed gun, and we spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out why they hadn't taken off after the boy racer, and the general injustice of seeing so many speeding violations happening and no evidence of police action despite the numerous police cars we'd seen on the road that day. Then, near the Bungendore turn-off, we passed a highway patrol car that had pulled over the sports car.
We felt like going back and high-fiving the cops. It's a vicarious form of justice, to be sure, with more than a touch of schadenfreude thrown in, but it was totally worth it.
Finally, we got the bike home, unstrapped it and gently wheeled it off the trailer again, and parked it in the garage in front of the other two. It feels odd to have gone from owning a car each, to owning a single car, to a car and scooter, to a car and scooter and motorbike, and now we're a four vehicle family. I'll probably sell my bike when I finish the conversion and have the electric bike on the road, but until then it's going to be a bit crowded in the garage.
The Yamaha FZS 600 "Fazer" is actually a moderately rare bike, as it was only made from about 1996 to 2001. It's unfaired - which is a bit of a shame - but has a good solid frame and the motor probably weighs about 100Kgs or so, so putting in my preferred battery pack is going to leave the bike at specified weight. It has fixed front but adjustable rear suspension, which is important as we have to readjust it for the weight of the hub motor, and it's black.
I can't prevaricate any more about building the bike now...
posted at: 16:01 | path: /personal/ebike | permanent link to this entry
Simple successes
Friends of ours are returning to the USA from their semi-yearly trip to
Canberra. We met up for a final dinner before a dance, and they mentioned
that they were big fans of Tom
Lehrer. As it happens, so am I - my Mum wisely bought me a record of
"That Was The Week That Was" back in 1987 or so and I loved it. In 2000
she also gave me "The
Remains Of Tom Lehrer", a remastered 3CD set of his
entire recorded output, including several that had never been released
before, wonderful stuff he did for PBS and light orchestra versions of some
of his more popular ones such as "The Hunting Song" and "Poisoning Pigeons
In The Park". It also comes with a booklet with a foreword written by
Dr. Demento and with
lots of fun stuff, including the Mad
comics done of some of his songs,
illustrations from the various records and other interesting tid-bits.
"Remains" is a must for any true Lehrer fan.
Now, as it happens, I knew where I could lay my hands on another "Remains". You see, my father-in-law volunteers at the Life Line book fair, and he picked up another brand-new-still-in-the-wrapper "Remains" some time ago for $5. A scheme lit up in my head when I heard they wanted a copy, and afterward I asked John if he would give his copy of "Remains" to them. He did, and I did.
It's rare to find a gift that just absolutely knocks someone else out of
the park. It's even rarer that that gift is something that you can lay
your hands on relatively easily and cheaply. To hit that spot with these
friends - to give them something that they and their kids enjoy and
treasure when I won't see them for possibly years - is its own reward.
I just feel really glad that all the pieces of the puzzle just came
together in front of me.
posted at: 18:09 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Weird boot problems fixed by mkinitrd
My brother had a weird problem where his MythTV machine stopped booting.
From a screenshot of the boot (as in JPEG sent by email) it appeared that
the boot process was missing some part of the LVM volume group. I got
him to boot the System Rescue CD and let me remotely SSH into it, and to
my surprise I found the LVM working fine.
I mounted the logical volumes, used mount's -B option to bind the /dev, /proc and /sys into the same file system, and chrooted into the directory structure. All worked fine. Suspecting the boot process had an old record of the LVM layout, I rebuild the initrd with mkinitrd. Copying it into place and rebooting brought the whole thing up again, much to his and his partners' delight.
Another successful bit of Linux troubleshooting achieved.
posted at: 21:34 | path: /tech/fedora | permanent link to this entry
Gabarn-yowtj-ja
Wikis in general have revolutionised information on the internet. Not
only is data and information more accessible but it can be improved as
time goes on with the same amount of effort. They apply the 'many
eyes' principle of fault-finding and make it easy for someone who can
improve something to do so. Before wikis, web pages were arcane things
guarded by religious orders of designers and programmers, charged with
the sacred task of protecting these pages from just anyone editing them.
Now content has been opened up to the masses.
We don't, however, have the same kind of tool for data. I'm talking both about tables of information - phone number lists, customer data, etc. - and the relationships between them. There's masses of data like this around, and most of it is in CSV files, HTML tables and occasionally in some database or other. There are interchange formats around and systems like ODBC for communicating between one database engine and another, but this still involves the database administrators to come forth from their temples and bless the queries and connections.
We need tools that can allow a web site to:
And while I'm finding Django to be a great framework to work with, I still seem to end up doing all the work of manually importing CSV files, KML lists, HTML tables and former SQL databases. This should be a simple process of no more than half a dozen steps. Every table in Wikipedia should be a data reference that can be sorted, keyed against, and used in someone else's pages. Google has put a lot of effort into understanding everything from movie times to stock prices, but for the rest of us it's a matter of asking a programmer. There's all sorts of interesting data mash-ups going on but they still seem to require APIs, server software and lots of code.
It's hard to stand on the shoulders if giants if you can't climb up...
The title of this page comes from the Wagiman
language from the Northern Territory. It roughly means fast-find - given
that I know of the language only what the dictionary gave me I don't know if
I've formed the words correctly. But it's that key property that I think
makes this such a compelling idea. The ability to throw a CSV table into a
website and it become searchable, sortable and accessible to others instantly
is compelling. While I think hand-crafted data relationships will always be
faster or more accurate than automatic imports, the latter is still better
than locking the data away for want of a system to access it.
posted at: 14:57 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
New-age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
New-age
terrorists develop homeopathic bomb
Imagine the terror that the world could be brought to with this new technique. All it would take would be a couple of drops of sugar solution or vitamins into the town's water supply, and tapping the reservoir in a specific way, to cause mass outbreaks of disease and poisoning (for if the toxin creates the antitoxin, something beneficial must create something harmful). A couple of taps by a nefarious homeopathic passer-by on your glass of water and whatever good elements that were in it could be instantly transformed into a deadly drink. And it would be completely indistinguishable from ordinary harmless water.
If, of course, homeopathy was actually true.
The question I want to put to a homeopathist is: how do you remove the memory of all the other stuff from the water? Surely just as you're tapping the water to activate the memory of the antitoxin of arsenic or hemlock or whatever, you're also activating the memory of the antitoxin of the urine and whatever else has been put in that water over time, diluted over centuries and millennia of use. I mean, there are lots of other questions to ask - how do you know you've processed the water enough? How does the toxin create the antitoxin? How does the memory stay in the water? Why do you continually refuse to go with any kind of scientific, double-blind trial of your medicine? and so forth. But I'd like to know why it is that they can be so sure that this phial of water is just carrying the one specific treatment and is now not just a broad-spectrum cureall for every disease and illness that have ever been in the water at all?
It's all garbage. The sooner these deluded people are taken out of
the system and prevented from administering placebos to people that
need real medication, the better.
posted at: 11:54 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
Political dogma
I, like pretty much everyone now, am opposed to the Australian Federal
Labor Party's 'Clean Feed' mandatory internet filtering proposal. It
won't stop paedophiles getting access to child pornography, it won't
protect children from abuse, it won't stop people getting access to
illegal content or content on the Refused Classification list, and it
will almost certainly generate a huge number of false positives,
blocking much legal content. It will slow internet access down, it
has enormous potential to be abused for political or commercial gain,
the list of refused classification sites has no judicial or public
oversight, and Senator Conroy has avoided any actual definition of what
goes on the blocked list. It's stupid, it's bound to fail, and no-one
wants it.
So why, why, are Senator Conroy and Prime Minister Rudd continuing to not only support it but insist that it be put in place?
Every time this issue comes up, at work or with friends, that is the question on everyone's lips. Why does the minister continue to insist that it must be put in place? Why are they ignoring the overwhelming technical flaws in its implementation? Why do they even think that it will do what they say it will, when everyone else has positive proof that it won't? Why are they defying the wishes of the actual citizens who voted them in, 90% of whom don't want any internet filtering? Why?
I think we can conclusively say, from the evidence of Stephen Conroy's and Kevin Rudd's words, that this has gone beyond a debatable issue. They continually label everyone else's views as extremist and denigrate opposition as supporting the things they claim the filter is against. They continually ignore all the evidence that says that the filter will not work and insist that it will. This is no longer reasonable - this is dogma. They have an absolute and unwavering faith that the filter will work - that it must work - and nothing is going to change that view at all.
No protest will work. No petitions will sway them. No carefully crafted arguments will change their mind. Stupid attempts to DDOS Government websites will only make them more committed to ignoring all nay-sayers. Don't bother to blow up a bus or threaten to start shooting parliamentarians, it won't change their minds. In my opinion they will be ignoring their friends, their fellow Senators and Ministers, and they will be talking to all of them trying to convince them of the truth of their dogma, so while we should all write to our representatives in the houses of parliament - local, state and federal - little will be done by this; we will get form letters but the volume of complaints will make some small difference.
So what do we do now? How do you win an argument with a person who denies everything you say is true and calls you a supporter of the bad guys? How do we, the people of Australia, conduct a Representative Democracy when our elected Senators and leaders refuse to listen to us?
What do we do?
posted at: 00:42 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
When awesome is no longer enough
Kate and I went to collect the mail on Sunday from our post office box, and
discovered I had a parcel waiting to be collected. "What is it," she asked.
I replied that I honestly didn't know. Either it was a T-shirt and book
from Penny Arcade, or it was two
books from Weregeek, and since both
of them were coming from north america it was hard to say which had won the
race. Besides, I love getting parcels (who doesn't?) and the delicious
suspense was increased by finding out on Monday that the parcel was too
large to fit in my small satchel and I would have to collect it on
Tuesday.
It was from Penny Arcade, and contained their book The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade and the Automata T-shirt. The latter was awesome enough, but from my brief foray into the former I have to say that it's everything I had hoped for and more. I'm only really a casual gamer so a fair number of the in-jokes about the industry go over my head, but even without that fine detail the humour still bites in. And it's not all gamer jokes, some bits (Cardboard Tube Samurai, for example) are just awesome, some bits are thought-provoking, and some I just love for how they hit home and make me say "Yeah, I can relate to that."
And I think Penny Arcade shows that two ordinary gamers - two ordinary people - can make something fantastic that goes from strength to strength and keeps coming up with new ways to be awesome. You don't need million dollar executives and lots of marketing. You need good things that reach out to people. Jerry and Mike love what they do, and they do what they love, and in the process they give millions of dollars of toys and money to charity, they run massive events like PAX that are insanely popular, they make a webcomic that is smart, funny, crude, bizarre, beautiful and even touching, and they prove that gamers can also be successfull without sacrificing their origins or being chewed up and spat out by the industry. That's an awesome example to show to people.
This is why I love reading the background and history and detail behind Penny Arcade. I love seeing Gerry's comments on cartoons, I love seeing the toys and stuff that people have made for them, or the cartoons that others have drawn with Tycho and Gabe. I love it for the same reason I love watching the episodes of Penny Arcade TV - because I learn more about them as people by listening to them talk about how they make up a comic, and this gives their output more depth to me. To see a guy at PAX take the microphone and thank the guys for keeping him cheered up during his tour of duty in Iraq, and watching Gerry go and give him a hug, says much about how much those guys really care than all of the millions of dollars that Bill Gates donates to his own charity each year.
My charity philosophy this year is to support webcomic artists. I read in the order of sixteen webcomics - some daily, some every couple of days and some intermittent. (The great thing about being in the east coast of Australia is that 4PM is midnight in the USA, more or less, and that's when new comics are traditionally dropped into their waiting servers). I don't pay for reading them normally, and this year I have decided that I will. I've paid $25 to Cheyenne Wright, the Hugo-winning colourist for Girl Genius when he had an accident. I've now bought stuff from Weregeek and Penny Arcade. When the mood takes me I will buy more stuff from the web comics I like. Because this basically goes directly to them, modulo some postage and handling - there's no publisher or media outlet standing in the doorway taking my cash and saying "we'll 'pay' the guys, yeah, sure".
It's not tax-deductible. I don't get a picture of the child in Uganda that
I saved from starvation. But someone out there gets to do what they love
- write webcomics - and entertain me in the process, and overall I think
that's a win for both of us. And I get some nice books and neat T-shirts
too, which I can use much more readily than a photo or a ribbon.
posted at: 17:03 | path: /tech | permanent link to this entry
Lost Opportunities 001
Attention anyone looking for a business proposition - set up an electric
vehicles parts supplier business on the eastern coast of Australia.
There is a small but thriving market here for batteries, motors, controllers, and most importantly the peripherals that bind them all together. The problem for most hobbyists - and that which puts them off committing more money sooner - is that each one of these parts has to be individually sourced, often from the USA or China. Few people like paying thousands of dollars, including lots of shipping fees and import duties, and waiting weeks or months in order to find out whether the part they've ordered works with their planned setup or not. Having a local supplier would mean a lot more purchases.
Sure, there's EVWorks over in Perth. Dennis has been relatively helpful to my enquiries and stocks a good range of batteries and other things. I'll probably buy most of my stuff from him. But he's very busy, not only with running the store but with his own instals, and I still begrudge having to freight a hundred odd kilos of batteries across from Perth to Canberra. Having a supplier in Sydney or even Melbourne would cut down on that considerably.
If I was able to, I'd do it; but overcommitment and inexperience prevent
me from pursuing it. So I'll have to hope that someone else takes up the
baton.
posted at: 23:20 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.
You can also read this blog as a syndicated RSS feed.