Month: November 2013

When I was 8 years old I tried to build hovercraft.

I started with my sister’s blowdryer, took the fan out of the plastic housing and fitted it into a hole I carved into a soapbox derby car .

So here’s how it went down. I sitting on the edge of my bed leaning over and working on the floor. I was holding onto my hovercraft while reaching over to plug the dryer into the socket. So far so good.

Next I grabbed the switch dangling between the wire from the wall to the wire routing to the fan and flipped the switch to High. I wanted this hovercraft to fly.

I must have been touching one of the hot wires when the circuit closed.

I remember hitting the back of my head on the wall of the bedroom and everything going black for a split second, then just stars and spinning. When I regained my senses I looked down and the switch was black and melted. The fan never came on.

I’ve done some light electrical work as a homeowner, tapping into existing lines to wire new switches, installing ceiling fans. If the jobs are any bigger than that, I call a professional.

Today I’m cleaning out the electronics bin. It’s comprised mostly of power cords, vga to dvi cables, usb cables, cat5 cables – but also some things that I’ve carried around for a long long time. A Canon film camera, a tape (tape!) personal recorder, 2 VTBooks – essentially graphics card on a chip used to run multiple monitors prior to… all the manufacturers supporting multiple monitors and all these hard drives.

Apparently I copied a Morcheeba album to all my computers because I’ve found it on all but 3 of these drives.

Today I’m voiding warranties, wondering why I thought the files on these machines were so important and reformatting hard drives before I recycle them… made think of that time I tried to build a hovercraft.

Here’s a Morcheeba song.

Beautiful cinematography from Camp4Collective:

“Known as one the big prizes in the Karakorum, K6 West had been attempted in the past by strong teams, notably the Americans Vince Anderson and Steve House and Slovenia’s Marko Prezelj who in 2007, despite making the first ascent of nearby K7 West (6858m), were forced to abandon efforts on K6 West due to too much snowfall.”

From Planetmountain.com

The video:

[vimeo 80299271 w=500 h=373]

K6 West First Ascent from Ian Welsted on Vimeo.

This is great.

[vimeo 80158395 w=500 h=281]

ARCADE FIRE – HERE COMES THE NIGHT TIME from Seinfeld2000 on Vimeo.

I’m working on something that I’m super-excited about.  Ideas have been percolating for over a year and I’ve been coding and designing off and on for about that long. It’s software, naturally.

I’m writing it in Scala using the Play Framework. There was a lot of start/stop last year. I started building it in Django (Python) and then was convinced to halt and look at Play. It’s going really well and I hope to have an MVP ready sometime in January. Still lots of details to work through – but it’s moving. Feels great.

Software product design can be such an amorphous “thing” but only succeeds through the synthesis of so many thoughts and ideas and conversations. I’ll try to write more about software product design and maybe use some anecdotes from this project as it gets further along.

It’s taken me a very, very long time to be back in a position where I felt excited about something I was building. I remember the early days of Clearwired in Albuquerque sitting at the Cherry Hills library in a study cube writing the first version of a CMS (Blend) that I went on to sell many times over.  It’s that second thought, that self-doubt that what you’re creating is good enough or that you have the requisite skills to “be creative”.

Sometimes it’s just the force of will to write the code, to solve a problem in a creative way. Good stuff. Creativity is work, it’s really that simple. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves.