The Power of “No Excuse Sir!”

Our story begins in September of 2009. I feel that I need to explain myself, because I’m weird, so that this whole thing makes sense. September is a good place to start. It’s where things started to change. It’s when I unknowingly started out on a great journey of self discovery. It’s also a good time for a cup of coffee, so if you are serious about hearing my story, get a cup of coffee and a blanket and get comfortable somewhere. This is going to be a long chat.

One of the defining factors in my life is my job. I’m a nerd. Really. Honestly. I’m a nerd. I hide it well at times, but I’m a science and math dork. My job, besides being a dork, is to design computer chips. I’m going to dedicate a few paragraphs to the intricacies of my job. If you don’t understand it, don’t worry, most people don’t. This is shameless self promotion because I hope that someone needs my skills and I could probably use another contract right about now.

I herd bits. No, seriously, I herd bits. I orchestrate a cascade of 1’s and 0’s that circle the globe and power our telecommunications infrastructure. I’m a cowboy of the electronics industry. I design the digital devices that are mostly used in the communications industry. Sometimes I do video compressors/decompressors, sonar, radar ECM, robotics and whatever floats my boat. But I have a soft spot in my heart for modems (I have a stuffed doll of a modem at home that I snuggle up to at night).

I do most of my designs for FPGA’s. FPGA’s are awesomely powerful. You computer has a microprocessor inside it. The best mainstream microprocessors today have four cores running at 1.8 GHz. Each core can do 2-3 operations per clock tick (I’ll use 2.6 for the calculations). Therefore your PC can do 18.72 billion of instructions per second.
FPGA’s are huge programmable parallel processing machines. They are based off of memory technology. Image a memory cell with four , one-bit locations in it. This memory cell has a two bit address. If you take the bits of the address and assume that they are inputs to a logic gate, the values in the memory cell can be programmed to emulate any possible logic gate. Image a sea of programmable gates connected by a programmable fabric and you have an FPGA.

A mid-level FPGA design might run at 300 MHz (cutting edge gets up to 500 MHz). About 1/6 the speed of microprocessors today. However, they might do 2000 instructions each clock. This comes out to around 600 billion of instructions per second. The crush the performance of microprocessors by a huge margin (32x in this case). Also, FPGA’s are a growing market because making chips is getting exponentially more expensive. A lot of designs that used to be put on chips are being migrated to FPGA’s and something new called structured ASIC’s (which are like program once FPGA’s).

Still here? Still awake? The current company I was working for allowed me to work entirely from home. It was awesome. I loved it. Unfortunately, things were not going to plan. I’m a specialist at a new way of designing chips which hasn’t gone mainstream yet. Using these new tools I can get things done in a fraction of the time. Unfortunately some customers are unfamiliar with the toolflow and don’t allow me to use them. Then I feel stuck. It’s like trying to paint a Picasso with crayons.

This happened to be one of those times. Another problem is that the project was far more complicated than originally anticipated. It was destined to be a train wreck from the beginning, but we didn’t know that. Hindsight is always 20/20.

So, I love my job at the time and things are starting to hit the fan. This is not a good feeling. I’m sure some of you out there have experienced it. The feeling of impending doom. Our schedule started slipping. First just a little bit and we would joke about it. However, it kept getting worse.

This also coincided with another incident it my life. I had felt things slipping in my personal life. I decided to revert back to something I learned in my freshman year of college. It’s called “no excuse sir”.

My freshman year of school was a bit different. I’m weird, remember? While my friends were drinking and chasing girls, I was face down in dirt doing push-ups… on good days. I attended the U.S. Air Force Academy. Freshman year was tough. The worst part was the duration of the toughness. I can eat shit for a day, a week, a month. It’s entirely different to do something grueling for 9 months. It wears on you. There were a few nights where I cried before bed. No joke.

As a freshman cadet we were expected to memorize a book and be able to recite anything in it from memory while being yelled at. We were also expected to have impeccable uniforms, spotless rooms and always be at attention outside of our rooms. I was not the best at this. In fact, my roommate would often have to carry me in these aspects. On a side note, my roommate, Drew Pike was awesome at the military side of things. He was nominated the best out of all our 1,300+ classmates.

Luckily, I was very good at push-ups. There was a rule in-acted several years before I went there that upper class cadets would have to do push-ups with us. They could not just tell us to do 100 push-ups without doing 100 push-ups with us. I was better at push-ups than most of the upper class cadets in our squadron, so this saved my bacon many times.

One of the things that was drilled into my head as a freshman cadet was the reply “No excuse sir.” We had to yell it at the top of our lungs so it was more like “NO ESCUSE SIR!!!” We were not allowed to have excuses. It doesn’t matter if something is not your fault. We would get in more trouble for telling excuses than just accepting the punishment.

I have later learned that there is a lot of power in the “no excuse” mentality. When running a business, there is no excuse. If something isn’t done right, it’s your fault. Doesn’t mater what it is. If your place of business is struck by a meteorite, it’s your fault for not planning for that contingency. No excuse. Just the way it is.

As an employee this is a bad survival strategy. An integral part of the corporate world is the blame game. The ability to deflect blame, without appearing to deflect blame and to show yourself in the best light. This is often how you get ahead. A defensive strategy or effective but necessary cowardice. I like to succeed at all things I do and there really isn’t a way to get ahead within a company without being able to play this game.

When a project goes bad, if you stick your head out, it will get chopped off. I think that a lot of people sell out to the blame game. I don’t look down on them. I look down on the current corporate system. I was a sell out for a while. Maybe 8 or 9 years long. It’s a part of being successful in the corporate world. It just is.

However, it is part of what wears on your soul. It is part of the grime which had accumulated on my honor. I was tired of it. I made a promise to myself that I would start living the “No Excuse” life again. No matter what I would stick to it.

Unfortunately, the project I was on kept going bad. This was a huge source of stress. I was one of the main contributors, so the blame fell on me. I wanted to deflect the blame but that would go against my recent convictions. I bill my customers by the hour. The only solution I could find was to secretly get the project back on track by doing a lot of work for free and never telling my customer about it. I double and tripled the hours I was putting in on the project. Never showing this on the bills I would submit.

This was not enough. I doubled and tripled my efforts. The project continued to slide. Slide and slide and slide. Until one day, pop, no more project. This is unfortunate, especially in the current economic times, but it is also a blessing. So with the overall numbness which accompanies such a loss, I began to plan my next move.

-Brian

I awoke one morning and had a feeling that I was out of alignment. That I was not living up to the ideals that I had as a youth. It took me many days to come to grips with this feeling and determine where things went. This change didn’t happen all at once. It is a general erosion of my heart over a long period of time. A series of small excuses and white lies to myself which added up. Once in place I never corrected these excuses and slowly drifted off course. I had by most measurements achieved the good life. I make good money. I have a lot of material possessions. I have a lot of the things that people seems to want. However, for some reason, it didn’t feel right. I wandered for days with a general feeling of misalignment which I couldn’t explain.

Maybe is was just nostalgia. Maybe I would never recapture the feelings of my youth. The absolute ideals which only come from naivity. Maybe I was just feeling the hard times which are so prevalent now. The biggest recession since the Great Depression. The Great Recession. Maybe things just sucked now and I should just be happy for all I have.

Maybe this beer gut is just a factor of growing old. I remember when I was young and I would promise myself that I would never get out of shape. I would point to examples of people who are older and in good shape. I would say I would be one of those people. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe those people stick out because it is so hard to do in this day and age. Maybe I’m just growing old. Growing old sucks.

Maybe I should just be happy that I am better off than a majority of my peers. That’s pretty good, right? I don’t know what it is inside me. I’m a weirdo. No joke. There is something different about me. One of my favorite quotes of myself is “I might be crazy. However, if this is true I cannot uncrazy myself. Trying to uncrazy myself would only make things worse. Worse yet, what if I am sane and then I try to uncrazy myself? Therefore I am best off assuming that I am crazy but being cool with it. If I am crazy, it’s everyone else problem, not mine, right?”

I’m also in a pretty weird financial situation. I have enough in my IRA that my retirement is covered. I don’t have to worry about anything past 70. I don’t have any kids. I don’t have a house. I just have to care for me. I don’t have a lot of responsibilities. I work temporary engineering jobs so that I can take long periods of time off. I spent my youth putting off adventure so that I could get the good job and live the good life. If I use the yardstick I had when I was young, I have succeeded. What more do I have to sacrifice for? I’m fine living a simpler life. A low carbon footprint life.

I sometimes use my life like a science experiment. I propose hypothesis and then test them out on me. I hypothesized that I should take the adventures that I dreamed about when I was young. I needed a grand adventure to ablate the dirt and grime that had collected on my soul. I needed to experience the crazy feeling of living by my wits at 1000 mph. Hurtling down an unknown dark path at breakneck speeds. Unplanned, unscripted, unrestricted life. Life 2.0.

I’m in Holly, Michigan now. Things have slowed down. I’m visiting my grandparents for the next few weeks.

About writing…. So, I’ve been deciding how best to start writing again… I’d like to write something to share with the world. I hope to share a part of my soul with the world. To contribute to our shared culture, perhaps to inspire future generations, to leave my thumb print. It would be nice to make money doing it, but I don’t think that should be the focus. If it makes money, cool, if not I’m going to do it anyway. It’s a labor of love.

I’d also like to involve you… So what I have come up with is that I want to publish a pdf for ereaders. Right now, they are kinda primative, but then again it might take me a long time to finish, right? It’s also real cheap to publish for them. I don’t have to deal with any publishers or anything like that.

It’s like my bike. Nobody can tell me that I can’t ride. Similarly, nobody can tell me that I can’t write (or they can say it but I can choose to ignore them). Since I’d like to involve y’all, I’d like to publish it in a semi-open license. I would like the ereader form to be free, but I would like to reserve the rights to profit from a print version or adaptations to any other media. I’d also like to release is so that you guys can be my editor and maybe make suggestions. Sound good?

I’m going to use OpenOffice to write it. It’s open source, free and compatible with microsuck. I’ll also post each chapter as a blog entry and you can comment on it. The OpenOffice version will have a lot better formating than I can achieve on the website, so I’ll release that document from time to time (after I figure out the license, till then all rights are reserved).

So, now I’m off to write. Expect to see a bunch of posts detailing the entire journey, in chronological order, starting with the prolog… or prelude… or whatever the thing is at the very, very beginning of a story, before the actual story… help me out here people!

So…. I’ve been having some technical difficulties since L.A. The backlight on my laptop went out and I had to purchase a new one. I bought a new Vista netbook. I hate Vista. Hate, hate, hate, hate, loath, hate, dispise, hate…. piss on it’s grave hate.

It came installed with all sorts of useless programs. During uninstalling one of the programs it goofed up my wireless driver. Then I swear the whole OS was about to crap out and fall apart like a house of cards. I honestly can’t wait until I can format this device and install a real OS…. like Linux (DUH!)

Anyway. I wrote two posts. The best and most amazing one was lost when Vista crashed. I’ve replaced it with a page long rant on Vista…. which I probably won’t publish. But you get to see the other post. It’s pretty cool. I wrote it yesterday morning.

There is now way I can keep the blog up and keep a good pace on the road. I promise to rewrite the blog in Michigan. Hopefully into an interactive PDF or web dodad or something. I don’t know. Any suggestions?

Here’s the post:

Gratitude. There is something about my life that slowly squeezes the gratitude out of me. Here, I sit, inside a mexican restaurant full of farm workers. I complain about my life, but any of these people would gladly trade places with me. So would about 95% or more of the world population. Why is it so hard to feel gratitude sometimes?

Maybe because I live among such opulence. I loose sight of what is regular. I’m distanced from what is reality. That is the amazing thing about getting out and exploring. It always centers me. I see first hand what the nature of the world is. It fills me with immense gratitude to be who I am and where I am. It lasts for a while after I get back. It eventually fades, but maybe these pictures, videos and stories will make it last longer this time.

I wish I had Open Office right now. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m an open source guy. Why would I do this? I have to put up with a lot of extra head aches because of it. What would make me do it?

It’s the other 90% of the world. Current software monopolies are just interested in keeping the status quo. Computer hardware is advancing at exponential rates while software sales and licensing practices are moving at a glacial pace. Extremely cheap computers have a chance to radically transform the globe. To interconnect the masses. According to Metcalfe ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law ), the founder of Ethernet, the power of a network grows exponentially with the number of nodes. If each person is a node, then getting these people online will have a transformative effect on the world. They will affect us as much as we affect them.

The current wintel monopoly doesn’t want any part with this dream because it would undercut their current sales models. They are fighting tooth and nail to keep their products from becoming commoditized. They do everything in their power to keep the price points high on their products. They stifle competition in any number of anti-competitive measures because commodititiztation and true competition would kill their bottom line.

It will happen sooner or later. Like a dam holding back an immense body of water, cracks have started to form. Look at netbooks. I’m writing today on a netbook. $290 from Fry’s. A product of this quality and price point would be unheard of only a few years ago. Look at the popularity of the netbook segment. It’s been a growing segment even during the recession. It also make is hard for Microsuck to make a profit. They needed to come out with a cripple ware version of windows 7 to place on netbooks.

This netbook had a ‘trial’ version of McAfree anti-virus, MS Office and quite a few other programs. If I spent $290 on the netbook, why on earth would I then spend $150 for MS Office (or whatever it is), $60 on McAfree, $X on whatever software doodad that is being pushed my way. It’s not going to happen.

I was actually sold a half working netbook. I’m used to Linux which is far more of a complete OS than what is on this netbook. My OS comes with programs to edit video, office apps, programming, games and a million more. All easy to install from one app store. I never realized how bad MS Vista was until now. Worse yet, this netbook is filled with crippleware. I can’t wait to wipe the hard drive clean and start fresh with Ubuntu 9.10.

All things considered, the whole software ecosystem and support, Ubuntu 9.10 is better than Vista. Ubuntu 9.04 was about equal to Vista, maybe a bit better. However, 9.10 finally surpassed it in quality. I think the new app store is a big deal. People are getting used to this idea because of the Iphone. Linux has had it for over 10 years now, but it’s nice to see the rest of the world coming around.

Windows 7 is good. However, windows 7 crippleware for netbooks will suck. I’ve talked to Dell a lot on the phone. They are updating their Linux offering to Ubuntu 9.10 pretty soon. If you are purchasing a new computer, download Ubuntu 9.10 and install it on your old computer. Give Linux a try. Take your pick axe and take a chunk out of the wall. The Berlin wall of software freedom. The support structure of the digital divide.

Crazy talk? Imagine the poor farmer in India. Imagine the child born in the slums with no access to good jobs because he or she didn’t learn how to use a computer. Imagine all the have nots, who will continue to have not, because we are not willing to suffer a little bit for what we believe in. Open, connected and free networks and software are the future. Help bring about the age of post-scarcity. When there is more than enough for everyone.

And be grateful for all you have. 90% of the world would switch shoes with you in a heartbeat.

I’m making good time and it’s getting hard to stop and post. I’m going to bike it out for a while. It might be a while before I post again. Ttyl8r.

I don’t mean to detract from the tradgedy of 9/11 but I wish people would wake up. We invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars (and I believe we spent our selves into a depression) to fight terrorism. If you add up all the deaths on American soil from terrorism in the last 100 years I think it would come out to around 1/12 of the annual death tool due to automobile accidents.

I wish the government would use statistics to determine what the greatest threats to our life, liberty and happyness and address those with the greatest importance. Our spending and concern is all out of alignment with reality.

Unfortunately, fear is a great way to control people. Scared people don’t ask questions. Scared people blindly believe what they are told. We, as a people, have been the victims of a great bait and switch scam to steal our money and freedoms.

We even spend gigantic sums of money to support out automobile habit, the most self destructive aspect of Americanism. Think of all the useless real estate spent on parking. Think of all the dollars spent on our highway system. Think of all the hours lost to congestion.

Think of all the money spent on oil changes, car insurance, repairing cars, gas stations, over passes, pollution, everything. It’s a huge, self supporting adiction. A parasite doing nothing by stealing our resources and killing us slowly.

Think what would happen if we shifted all that spending to mass transit. We could provide transportation for our entire population for a fraction of the cost. It would save thousands of lives every year. However, that won’t happen.

We are American silly, we don’t adapt to reality, we make reality adapt to us. In our arrogant, stupid, silly way, we are destroying the American empire. Unfortunately, before you know it, we are no longer the center of the world. Look at the rise of the European Union and China. It’s time to loose the arrogance and come up with creative solutions that embrace science and reality as it is. Rather than fight reality, adapt to it.

Bend like a reed in the wind.

I’m staying at my first couch surfing house tonight. I’m involved with a group which is kinda like a Facebook for travelors. It’s called couchsurfing.com and I’ve met some really cool people on there. The hard thing about traveling is having a local hookup where you want to go. It makes all the difference in the world. Whenever I meet an international travlor in San Diego, I love showing them around. The site connects travelors with hosts. When I travel, strangers will take me into their home and show me around. When I am home, I take strangers in and show them around. It’s really cool.

Tonight will be the first house that I stay at using the website. I’m meeting up with Mike. I just have to make it to Oceanside and stay awake for the day and I’m good to go.

This ride was rather uneventful compared to last evening. A simple act of continuing to pedal. Over and over and over and over again. Most people would consider it to be monotonous. They underestimate the endorphins. When those start to kick in it’s kinda like meditation.

I never understood distance athletes. I’ve always been a sprinter. I’ve always trained for races that last a few minutes tops. Riding my bike for hours on end is a totally different feeling. There is a threshold area. As long as I stay below this threshold, I don’t get tired. I can ride all day long without any issues. If I go over this threshold I can only last a few hours. I think it’s all about pacing myself.

The high is completely different. I feel like a well tuned machine. My heart is thudding in my chest at about 160 beats per minute for hours on end. Slowly pulling in a deep breath and then exhaling. Treking on and on. When I stop, I’m tired for about 45 minutes, then wide awake. It’s an awesome feeling and I’m eating up the road. I make it to Oceanside around 9:30. Now to find internet so I can do some writing.

The problem is that there isn’t a camp site for miles. Even if there was one close, I would have no idea where it is. I’m way off my maps and my body is quickly starting to shut down. It’s starting to get really cold out too. I need to find a place to sleep. This should be easy. Homeless people do this all the time. It’s urban camping time.

I’ve never done this. I think that’s the biggest issue. When I was planning the trip I knew that I would have to randomly camp out in places that aren’t camp grounds. However, there is a big difference between theory and practice. I started to look for good places to camp out. There are mostly suburbs around here with some strip malls and such. I tried to find somewhere dark behind a home depot, but no luck… and I almost wiped out on a curb. It was black on black and I almost didn’t see it.

I eventually found a place behind a strip mall. It wasn’t perfect. There was a lot of light. But I figured that no one would show up until at least 6 am. As long as I’m gone at the break of dawn I should be fine. I layed out my inflating materess. This is a miricle of science. It’s a self inflating matress pad. I just open it up and a springy material inside it expads the matress and sucks air in. When it’s full, I twist the cap shut and seal the air inside it. I pop out my sleeping bag and make myself comfortable. It’s silent and all the stars are out.

I spend a lot of time just watching the starts. I see the big dipper. I see Orion. I think those are the only constelations I know. I can’t really sleep. I feel that at any moment a car will pull up and tell me to get lost. I wonder if they have a security camera installed? I almost get comfortable enough to sleep, but I never really do. I just lay there for about three hours in a semi awake state.

At about 4:30 in the morning a truck pulls up. It has some workers in it. They go into the back door of one of the buildings. I don’t know if they saw me or not. I expect them to come back and tell me to go, but they don’t. They just seem to ignore me. Maybe they are half asleep. If I had to go to work at 4:30 in the morning, I would be pretty tired too. It really disturbs me to have them so close so I figure it’s best to leave.

I pack up my gear in about 10 minutes and then I’m back on the road. Good thing too. A few minutes after I leave I see a security vehicle tearing into the parking lot. I think the workers called the security detail. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that.

I have to just keep going. It’s not long until the sun comes up so if I can stand the cold for another two hours, I should be fine. The bad thing about the desert is that it also gets bitterly cold. After about 15 minutes of biking I concede that it’s too cold. I didn’t come prepaired for this cold. I hope it isn’t this bad up North. I might have to get some more cold weather gear.

I have to stop and get into my sleeping bag. I’m shivering all over. I’m desperate at this point. I cross a road and see an abandoned field. I just ride into the middle and camp out behind a bush. It’s completely out in the open, but I don’t really have a choice. It’s either camp out now or freeze.

I bed up for about an hour. Then people start to show up. I’m across the street from a college and a few bus stops. I’m not very well hidden. Once the sun comes up, I know I will be spotted. I’m going to risk it. There is a difference between being spotted and being harrased by the police or security. As long as I don’t get in trouble, I’m going to stay here till it heats up.

I guess I’m getting used to being on the road.