daverea.com

Ten years ago, I sat in a conference room with a group of ambulance officers and paramedics. My clearance papers were on the table – a collection of training data that, taken together, was the basis for my being allowed to run the show in the back of an ambulance, alone. After I received my clearance that day, the brass left me with a parting thought: Remember: You’re never alone out there. A paramedic unit is just a radio call away. Medical control is on the other end of the phone. Your driver can help you. Ask the dispatcher, and you can even have a helicopter in fifteen minutes. But you’re never alone.

A year ago, I started a new chapter in life – pursuing a master’s degree in software engineering. My reason for returning to school: I could do a clean-sheet design for a piece of electronic hardware, but the same wasn’t so for software – and there was software in nearly everything I was creating. So, I left my cooshy job, turned in my comfy car and spent the year that followed studying my ass off.

As of yesterday, that chapter is over. My degree is finished, 64 credits and 12 months later. And I realize, in much the same way as I was never alone in my decade as a medic, that you never really start from nothing. In the software world – as in the engineering world in general – you build on the shoulders of the great people who came before you. Gauss, Tesla, Maxwell, Ohm and Shockley were all with me as I designed circuits, just as Gamma, Bass, Booch, Pressman and their cohorts have my back when it comes to creating software. Among other realizations, this past year has brought me the understanding that there’s no such thing as a clean-sheet design in the first place.

Next week, I’ll start a new job, working on new projects in the company of new friends and partners in innovation. It’s an exciting time, built not just on the foundation of intellect and creativity, but also on love and support: so my family and friends, and especially my Dad and Kelly, deserve the most thanks of all.

Recently, I ordered a new chair. After sitting in one in a customer’s newly-outfitted conference room, and noticing how run-down my current office-superstore-brand task chair was becoming, I decided to upgrade. This afternoon, my new coding throne arrived courtesy of UPS, and I eagerly unboxed and set it up. Two 13mm bolts later, I carried the chair into my office and gave it its maiden sit.

But something wasn’t right. My specimen of this particular chair didn’t feel quite the same as those ringing the conference room table. After 5 minutes, I realized the difference – the lumbar “support” piece – a D-shaped springy plastic affair upon which the chair’s poly-mesh back rested – felt like a yardstick pressed into my vertebrae. Far from the super-adjustable high-end version of the chair I’d first experienced, I realized I had purchased a much more basic model on which this lumbar support was fixed. And held in place by a T30 bolt.

Which is how I found myself at Sears an hour-or-so later, in search of a new set of Torx drivers. In order to remove the offending lumbar support piece, I’d need to remove the bolt through an opening too-small for my interchangeable-bit screwdriver. And as I surveyed the options in the “six-sided fastener-adjusting tools” section, I noticed a selection of various hex-key sets. Ever since my loose 5mm hex key – an essential tool for bicycle maintenance – went missing, I’d been meaning to remedy its absence. This is how men shop.

Hoping to avoid the loss of another loose 5mm key, I opted for a fold-up style set. I had two options: a SAE/metric pair from Allen brand (“The Original!” exclaimed the packaging) for $9.99, or the same array of sizes with Craftsman branding for $25.99. Both carried lifetime warranties. Both seemed durable enough. Both had ball-style ends. Both even had little accessory tabs that could be used to hang the tool from a pegboard. The difference? The former was made in China, and the later in Estes, Illinois.

I set down the set of Torx wrenches and picked up both of the hex-key contenders, realizing that this was fast becoming a “practice what you preach” moment. As far as “things we buy” go, there aren’t that many things sold that are still manufactured domestically. Our government has made it all-but-impossible to do business profitably in this country, and what roadblocks they haven’t put up, labor unions have. So when the issue of buying American-made goods comes up, I enthusiastically advocate for it – and even more so for “buying local” if one can. And now I had a simple choice: pay more or compromise.

I hung the Allen-brand wrench set back on its hook and headed to the checkout counter. The total bill for 10 American-made hand tools was $69.84. Just under $7 per tool, or under $3 each if you count each key on the folding sets individually. And while I realize that my purchase doesn’t affect much of anything on a global scale, it does amount to a single ballot in a very large game of vote-with-your-wallet.

And that new chair? Turns out it was made in Zeeland, Michigan.

I’ve been using open-source software since the late-nineties – I can still remember the intrigued excitement I felt when my friend Seth first told me about a free system called “Linux”, and showed me the LRP box humming along in his attic. In April, nearly two college degrees, countless thousands of lines of code, and over a decade later, I felt that same excitement when I decided to launch my own open-source project. “Deacon” (short for Droid+Beacon) was on its way to becoming a library for Android developers who wished to add push-notification capability to their Android applications. The Deacon library would avoid requiring the use of any third-party server for push delivery, affording complete autonomy for app developers – and embodying the spirit of freedom and choice that the Android platform represents.

In my years as a member of the free software community, I’ve seen plenty of projects come and go, and even witnessed the rise and fall of an empire or two (yes, Gentoo was my daily-driver for a while). But I never really considered just what the creation of a community around a piece of software would entail. As I tend to do, I oversimplified the concept – just “hang out your shingle” (virtually, of course) and the magic of the Internet will unleash a throng of developers and users at your doorstep. Teamwork would flourish, bright people would contribute inspired code, and all would be right with the world.

In the first week of the Deacon Project’s existence, I pulled some late nights and scraped together everything that – in my experience – I felt an open-source project ought to have. I started with a WordPress-powered web site (deaconproject.org), a hosted repository and project wiki on GitHub, and a mailing list. The blog’s first post painted a picture of the project’s inception, and offered a simple vision for how the Deacon push library would take shape. Within hours, I had my first contributor – my good friend and fellow grad-student, Spencer. A few days later, I received an out-of-the-blue email with another offer to contribute – this time, from Toronto-area software engineer, Android-enthusiast and entrepreneur Faisal Abid. The library began to take shape, with plenty of commits and frequent new blog entries.

It’s been four months since I founded and announced the Deacon project, and the team and I have learned a few lessons about open source projects along the way. The project is admittedly still a fledgling, but if you’re interested in hearing a few impressions from our work so far, feel free to hit the jump…

More…

Want to create a catchy, trendy, and most-importantly motivating ad for something you like? With a budget of … zero? This is how you do it:

Ubuntu from Keith Kenniff on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched Linux advertisement competitions – such as the annual contest from the Linux Foundation – with interest. And every year, I’m hugely disappointed. The videos submitted are generally poorly-produced, based on obscure concepts or just downright cheesy. But this one – while it’s a little dated (Ubuntu 10.04 is out now, and we’re just a few months from 10.10) and not quite up to ad-agency quality – I think it’s the most competent thing we’ve seen in a long time. Of course, if you want to see what happens when the heavy-hitters take out their wallets, take a look at these legends:

After learning last night that some folks have actually been checking out my training posts here, I guess a quick mention of how it went is in store! The best assessment might be the look on our faces in these photos:

As it turns out, the training time I put in this year paid off: I finished the sport class race in 52 minutes, 20 seconds – an improvement over last year’s time over almost 19 minutes! In all, it was a fantastically fun race, and it set the bar for how hard I can push myself. Jason showed some time improvement, too – he clocked in at 47:30, shaving several minutes of his 2009 time.

You can check out more photos from the race at dougrea.com.

Right around this time tomorrow morning, I should be biting into my second lap around the Fat Tire Festival course. And at the moment, it appears there will only be two laps in the race; an embarrassed-sounding e-mail from GROC, yesterday, revised the lap count back to last year’s tally. So, 10 miles of pedals, brakes, dirt and lactic acid…here we come!

…another post in a series of updates on Fat Tire Festival training rides.

This update will be brief, as my alarm is set – by necessity – to an ungodly hour tomorrow. Got the hydration pack all fixed up, tossed some Clif Bloks in my pocket and headed out for my final Fat Tire training ride. Three laps, 1 hour and 37 minutes. I was hoping for under 30 minutes per lap, but by the time I finished, I was just glad I’d gotten through it!

Apparently my GPS app (Google MyTracks) crashed a little ways into the second lap, so the map below – aside from looking a hell of a lot like all the previous maps – doesn’t really show the full extent of the agony…

Tomorrow and Friday I’ll be staying clear of the bike, and a few short hours after a big spaghetti dinner on Friday night, it’ll be time to hit the trails for the real deal! If I haven’t already badgered you by e-mail, consider this your invitation to come on out to the Fat Tire Festival, have some chow, enjoy some music, make some noise and watch Jason and I beat ourselves to a pulp! The show starts at 9:05AM on Saturday the 17th.

…another post in a series of updates on Fat Tire Festival training rides.

If today’s ride can be summed up in one word, I would have trouble choosing between “calamity” and “trainwreck” … It started off with my skipping the usual route through the sports fields, since some sort of day camp had transposed several hundred kids onto them. My start was interrupted by the realization that I’d forgotten to leave my wallet in the car, and my first climb by the realization that nature was calling. Crossing the fields at the highest point on the course, I went for a drink and realized the Nalgene-type bite valve on my hydration pack was in the “off” position – and managed to pull it clean off the hose when I hit a bump trying to twist it to “on”.

This resulted in a brief shower as I grabbed a handful of brake and dragged the bike to a stop, then pinched off the tube. After five minutes’ worth of searching left me empty-handed, I tried blowing air into the tube and pressing on – only to get drenched a few more times. After climbing the next hill, I opted to dump most of the water and cut the ride down to one lap of the course. About 50 ounces of water lighter, I pushed through the rest of the first lap.

• Date: July 12th, 2010
• Distance: 5 miles
• Time: 32:13
• Elevation gain: 645 feet
• Thoughts on starting: This is going to be a good ride. Has to be. It’s too nice a day for anything else.
• Thoughts on finishing: This is why we train! To work out the kinks!

Of course, when I got home, I checked out the Fat Tire Festival web site and made a startling realization: The sport-class race is actually three laps of the course, not the two I’ve been planning for! This weekend…will be very interesting!

(The middle photo shows my bite valve search effort…)