Tried to get photos of the bioluminescent red tide (blue waves at night), but they weren't there.  Random night shots at the beach instead:

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As shorter domain names are increasingly unavailable, longer names are inevitably becoming more common.  How long is too long?

Let's look at the top 100, 250, and 1000 domain names listed on Alexa (from http://en.wikipopia.org/toplist/alexa), and examine the distribution of the lengths of all .com/.net/.org names.  Here's the result:

The median length of a top 100 domain is 10 (for example, "google.com", six plus .com), and the median length in the top 250 or 1000 buckets is 11 (for example, "weather.com").  And roughly 90% of all of the top 1000 are of length 15 or less!  That's just 11 characters of creativity, plus four characters of ".TLD".

Sure, short names correlate with older, established companies that were founded when short names were more easily available.  And we shouldn't confuse correlation with causation.  However, there's no doubt that at some point, names become too long to be easily remembered and brandable in the eyes of consumers.

I'd like to see a syllable count if anyone has such data!

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This past Monday at about 2am (up late as usual), I ordered about $150 of parts across 24 different items (screws, bolts, nuts, drill bits, taps, etc.) from McMaster-Carr.  I selected "Ground" shipping instead of "Next Day Air" or pick-up. As usual with McMaster-Carr, I didn't know the actual shipping cost I'd be charged.  That usually makes me hesitant, and on most websites stops me from getting through the checkout process at all, but I'd ordered them from them in the past and had seen them charge roughly the actual rates for UPS Ground.

Monday at 10:30am, my order was tagged as shipped on their website.

And after dealing with processing a near-record volume of orders to ship ourselves, literally as we were walking out from the NerdKits office to hop in the car and go out for a late lunch around 3pm, there was a delivery truck in the driveway with my parts!

Same-day delivery from their LA warehouse to San Diego, even when I selected "Ground".  I probably would have been waiting longer if I had selected "Next Day Air"!

And the shipping charge?  Less than $7, for ~8 lbs and a fairly large box, same day delivery.  It would have cost me much more than that in gas just to drive to their warehouse.

That's an incredible customer experience.  It makes me much more likely to order from them in the future -- even though I will try not to expect same-day delivery again.

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1. Buy window air conditioner unit and milling machine.

2. Outfit milling machine with z-axis DRO.

3. Design bottom-side brackets from 1.500" x 0.375" aluminum bar stock to take the weight of the A/C and also the torque generated by the weight hanging out the window, and to fit around and transfer that weight and torque to the window frame/sill.  Make two on the milling machine.

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4. Use 1.5"x1.5"x0.125" aluminum right-angle stock to form a top crossbar to handle the torque that's now trying to pull the air conditioner out of the window, as to spread that force to the verticals of the window frame.  Screw into the horizontal crossbar of the air conditioner with two #6-32 screws. (Caution: make sure your window frame verticals can handle this force.  Mine could without any issue, but yours might not!)

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5. Use a piece of filler material (cardboard, plywood, acrylic, whatever) to fill in the space above the A/C unit.  Hold it in with two small right-angle brackets, one of which is attached to the top crossbar (shown above), and the other is screwed into the top of the window frame.

6. Enjoy!

It's November 17th, and it's finally time to remove my window A/C (but still sunny and a high of 71 today here in San Diego), so I was finally able to grab these photos.

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Warm and sunny in mid-November...

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After a weekend with a bunch of MIT friends in Las Vegas, and then a Sunday morning trip to see the Hoover Dam, I found myself back in Vegas filling up for the ~300-mile trip home.  However, the car did not want to cooperate, and the gas pump would shut off within 1-2 seconds of starting, sometimes leaving a small puddle above the flap in the filler tube.  I moved to a second pump at the same gas station and had the same issue.  No matter how slowly I tried to add gasoline, it would stop within a few seconds.  After about 15 minutes, I had only added about 2 gallons of gas -- that's almost as bad as charging an electric car!

What's the big idea here?  The gas tank is a fixed volume and is not under much pressure, so when I push a gallon of gasoline into it (which takes < 10 seconds at a typical gas pump), a gallon of air and gasoline vapors has to be pushed out to make space.  If the vapors don't move, then the pressure inside the tank builds, which forces the one-way fuel fill valve between the tank and filler pipe to close.  The gasoline then builds up in the filler pipe and touches the nozzle, which forces it to shut off.  (Click here to see more details and illustration of the automatic shutoff gas nozzle.)  Similarly, if no fresh air can enter the fuel tank as the car is driven, then the pressure would drop and would create a vaccum relative to atmospheric pressure.  So to summarize, air needs to be able to enter the tank slowly while driving (at a rate of at most a few gallons per hour), and air needs to be able to exit the tank rapidly while refilling (at a rate of a many gallons per minute).

Nowadays, the air/vapors exiting the tank are cleaned in order to prevent hydrocarbon vapors from simply being emitted to the atmosphere -- "Onboard vapor recovery" has been mandated by the EPA since 2000.  Now, the path looks something like this (from the Hyundai service manuals website, linked from this helpful forum post):

In fact, this shows less than half of the "plumbing" involved around the fuel tank, so this diagram was a bit confusing as we tried to attack the problem.

On this car, the gas tank filler hose is on the driver's side.  Below is the view from under the left rear tire, which shows three connections.  The left (small) tube goes to the small ports around the main filler pipe.  The middle is the main filler pipe which carries gas to the tank.  On the right is a odd-looking unit which happens to be the "liquid-vapor separator".  I can't be 100% sure, but the hypothesis is that it's just a physically-higher unit which ensures that if one were to really over-fill the tank, liquid fuel would still have a hard time crossing to the canister.

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And below is the view of the same thing from underneath the car.  The large pipe on the left is the main filler pipe, where gasoline goes when refueling.  The liquid-vapor separator is the long rounded object parallel to that pipe, and in this photo, the bottom connection to it is coming from the fuel tank's vent valve (at a point high up on the fuel tank), and the top connection is going into the box on the right of the photo.  The box on the right of the photo is the charcoal canister which collects fuel vapors.  This serves two purposes: one is that during vehicle operation, those vapors can be purged into the engine intake and combusted, which prevents the release of hydrocarbons.  Second is that this is the path for air intake/exhaust for the fuel tank.  The upper (thicker) hose in this photo going to the charcoal canister from the liquid-vapor separator.  The lower (skinnier) hose in this photo coming out of the canister is for the purge system, which sends those vapors back into the engine.

After a little bit of work, we removed the canister assembly, as shown below.  This involved removing two bolts for the canister holder, disconnecting the two vapor hoses, removing an electrical connector, and loosening the zip-ties.

The canister assembly is composed of three primary elements: the canister itself, an air filter which is open to the atmosphere, and the canister close valve, which connects or disconnects the air filter from the canister.  The last two photos in this gallery show the canister separated from the air filter+CCV.

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An unsatisfying conclusion!  Still, that fill-up in Vegas was the hottest the car had probably seen in its lifetime, which makes me wonder whether it may have been related.  Or it could have been the two pumps I tried, or any number of other things.  A learning opportunity, and an opportunity to get more comfortable working on cars, and a working vehicle at the end of the day, so I think I'll call it a victory.

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I recently made this bottle opener on the milling machine from some aluminum bar stock. As you can see from the photos, it has changed a bit since my original CAD sketch, but I've decided to include the drawing anyway.

It's very strong and light. If I were to do it again, I'd probably make it thinner than the current 0.200" thickness, and would reduce the length of the thin extended arm and increase the length of the part before the "hook" to give the user a slightly longer lever arm.

Humberto had the idea of having the step in the thin extended arm to allow it to better deform the metal bottle cap (contacting roughly at its center) instead of simply prying it off (contacting at the far edge of the bottle cap as per the CAD sketch). Any opinions on which is better?

Two photos and a sketch:

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Lunch at "Bar-B-Que House" Ocean Beach (yelp link).

View from the pier at Ocean Beach, San Diego:

24-hour water temperatures:

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Just released my Python command line utility for Notifo, which is an API and iPhone app that allows for easy push notifications to the iPhone. For the source code and more details, see:

http://www.nerdkits.com/files/notifo/

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Thursday 3/25: I got new tires. They broke a lug stud and the broken part is stuck inside the wheel nut. The tire place sent me to a nearby mechanic and said they'd take care of it (paid for by the tire place). I'm informed that they'll get the parts and will call me either Friday or Saturday to do the repair.

Friday 3/26: Hearing nothing, I call the mechanic in the afternoon. They have the lug stud, but haven't been able to get the wheel nut yet. I make sure they have my number, and they assure me that they'll call as soon as they get it.

Saturday 3/27: Heard nothing -- and they're open on Saturdays.

Monday 3/29: Heard nothing. Should have called them, but got busy with work and didn't get to it in time.

Tuesday 3/30: Still hearing nothing, I called the mechanic in the afternoon, and was informed that they got the wheel nut from the dealer, but it was the wrong one, so they're sending it back and trying to get the right one. I'm assured that they'll have it on Wednesday, and they even ask me whether the morning or afternoon is better for me. I say morning, and am told that they'll likely call me around 10am, and confirm that I could bring my car in around that time.

Wednesday 3/31: It's now 2pm. So much for that 10am call. Haven't heard anything, and am about to call them. Any bets?

All for < $10 in parts, and a job that I could probably do myself in about an hour -- but really shouldn't have to.

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Tidepools along the Pacific at Point Loma:

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Just picked up four new tires: "Bridgestone Potenza RE960 AS Pole Position", which were moderately priced and had excellent customer reviews on tirerack.com and discounttire.com.

Unfortunately, while they were doing the work, the shop broke one of the lug studs on the front right side. They only do tires and wheels, so they referred me to a nearby mechanic and said they'd cover it, but it was late in the afternoon and they didn't have the part on hand, so I've got to head back tomorrow. (The mechanic tosses in a "we'll also give you 10% off on an alignment" up-sell.)

Ultimately, we're talking about a $5 lug stud and nut, plus perhaps 20-30 minutes to actually get to it and do the work. Still, it's a reminder of how simple things like a 30-minute new tire installation can turn into a complicated multi-hour / multi-day affair.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to report that the situation was resolved swiftly and painlessly, as an example of humble and competent customer service responding to an unfortunate incident. Of course, until then, I'm torturing myself by dreaming of all the ways that this can go wrong from here...

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I need your help right now to advance this idea to the next round of
PayPal's X Developer Challenge. There are about 50 entries in the
current round, and the top 10 by popular vote advance to the final
round. Can you please take a minute and vote for the idea? Go to this
link to vote:

http://www.nerdkits.com/buckits/voting/

The Buckits system makes for a win-win situation: purchasers win because
they save money by leveraging their social network, and vendors win
because they are able to reach more purchasers.

If you're curious to see a live Buckit in action, go to:

http://www.nerdkits.com/buckits/view/VBMMRMXXG4/

If you'd like to see more systems like this that leverage the power of
your social network to help you save money and enjoy more group
experiences, then please give us your vote and tell your friends to vote
too!

Voting ends tomorrow, Friday 3/05, 11:59PM PST -- so please vote now!

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It's inset so the bottom of it is flush with the bottom of the collar.
All that protrudes is the two screws. This was important to make sure
the arm wouldn't interfere with our work when milling.

It's distance is adjustable radially via the slotted path for two hex
cap screws.

We used a dial indicator and measured a deflection of about 0.002" at
the end of the arm under a heavy hand-applied force (maybe 50 pounds or
so). Hopefully this means the deflection under the drag of the slide
will be negligible!

The end is threaded radially, which is where the digital caliper will
attach.

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We've been working on making a new collar to fit around the mill quill on our Smithy CB1220XL. We started with a 4" diameter by 3/4" long piece of 6061 aluminum. After a bunch of facing / turning / boring / milling / drilling / tapping / sawing operations, we've successfully made the part. We had great results with lathe accuracy, able to get diameters finished to within roughly +/- 0.002" of target.

The outer diameter is arbitrary. The larger bore diameter must fit snugly around the quill collar for a press-fit -- it is then tightened with the two hex-cap screws as shown. The smaller bore through the piece must clear the rotating spindle, but must remain close so as to provide a chip shield for the thrust bearings just within the collar.

We ran into lots of issues with work planning, some of which were due to the reduced work volume of the machine, but most of which were simply due to our original paper design taking insufficient consideration of things like obstruction by the drill chuck, tool cutting lengths, etc.

But it works! It goes on snug and is quickly tightened via the two screws. This replaces a plastic cap included with the machine. However, this version gives us the opportunity to add a Z-axis digital read out (DRO)... stay tuned!

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The backlash is pretty terrible (perhaps 0.020 inches), specifically for
use as a mill, so we have to move toward DRO very soon.

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1/8 through 3/4 in 1/16 increments, arrived today, for the milling head and tailstock. Need to build a MT4-MT3 adapter of some sort so I can use these in the headstock too.

Expecting more toys later this week...

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Even at MIT, the assumed ideas about what one does after graduation are generally limited to two paths: go to grad school, or get a job. And for those that do think about entrepreneurship, starting a company seems to be totally inseparable from "venture capital / go big or go home / burn rate / figure out how to get bought by Google or Microsoft."

In fact, in 2008 I attended a panel discussion titled, "Startups: High Risk and High Reward", which was tremendously interesting, but not at all for what I expected. Instead, it was interesting for me mostly because I found that the panel's perception of "high risk" was simply that the company might not exist in 12 or 24 months to pay a near-or-slightly-below-market engineer's salary, and "high reward" was at most a few percentage points of equity. Maybe I missed the point -- I suppose now that it was really targeted at students considering being an employee of a startup, rather than a being founder -- but to me, "high risk" means that you can't pay the rent if you don't have enough revenue, and "high reward" means getting to do something you love, setting your own course, getting paid for it, and owning a substantial portion of the resulting endeavor.

(If you're curious about these perceptions, Paul Graham further addresses the "I must be part of some institution" mentality that so permeates our society in his essay "How to Make Wealth" under "What a Job Is," and Jonathan Wegener addresses the "Small can be sustainable" issue in a two-part post. Jonathan's article ties in deeply with the concept of being "Ramen Profitable," and I think he does a great job of getting at the math that is so simple but also so vital -- I only wish we could further emphasize the qualitative freedom aspects as well!)

When it became clear that I was headed off to work for myself, in a strictly-bootstrapped, already-profitable company of my own creation, with 50% equity stake, accountable to only my customers, my co-founder, and myself, and no particular exit strategy in mind, each of these elements was almost directly opposite to what many around me expected from a person who is joining a startup!

So to help demystify what this particular self-employed small Internet business owner's job is like, I made a brief log of one workday: Wednesday, December 9th, 2009.

7:30am: While I normally get up around 10am, on this day I woke up early and wasn't able to fall back asleep, so I decided to get going a bit earlier than usual.

After rolling out of bed, I made my 20-foot commute to my office and checked our internal dashboard on my laptop. This let me verify that that our server systems were running properly, and quickly look at some sales and traffic stats, all within a 10 second glance at my screen. Next, I took care of personal tasks: brushed teeth, took a shower, and washed some dishes.

8am: At this point, I got into the meat of my morning, which is a combination of responding to tech support e-mails, e-mail questions from not-yet-customers, and last actually processing all of the orders in the system that had come in both from our website and from Amazon.com. This involved looking at all the orders that we had received in the past day and getting them ready to ship, making sure our estimates of size and weight were accurate, and then preparing a prepaid USPS shipping label for each package, and finally closing the loop by getting tracking information back out to the customer. My co-founder arrived during this time period, and he jumped in to tackle support e-mails and respond to new posts on our forums. This is all of the "nuts and bolts" of keeping the business running smoothly, and ultimately, this is not a business on auto-pilot -- it requires many hours of daily involvement to keep running. (In fact, this day was probably lighter than usual on the number of support e-mails, letting us get to lunch earlier!)

After dealing with e-mails and orders, I updated our statistics spreadsheets. While we have scripted a lot of this to happen automatically, there are a few manual tasks, which included looking at Google Analytics and Adwords data and looking for anything unusual, keeping track of our cash position across bank and merchant accounts and accounts payable, maintaining the state of our inventory counts, and keeping an eye on orders from suppliers. As mentioned before, a great deal of the statistics-keeping is automated, so all this takes roughly about 10-15 minutes.

11:00am: After having taken care of the "nuts and bolts" of keeping everything running smoothly, it was time to get distracted with all the other things I can choose to think about on any given day. I stopped for a mid-morning coffee break. (While our normal instant coffee routine was just fine, the recent addition of a French Vanilla creamer has added tremendously to our quality of life.) Then I replied to a few personal e-mails.

I spent time fiddling with getting our new VoIP business phone line set up. While we don't currently offer phone support, we do need to have a number for various business things, and the real motivator was that since moving to our new space in San Diego, I've been unable to get cell phone coverage at my desk, and have to go outside or into one particular corner of my place to make a call. (In fact, we recently drove by a big AT&T building in Mira Mesa, and I checked my phone and it said, "No Service"!) So we've set up our own system, running our own Asterisk instance and we have a WiFi SIP phone at my desk. This time was spent fiddling with the Asterisk extensions.conf and sip.conf files, as well as 802.11 settings on the phone. (Ultimately, I was able to get it mostly working, and in the following days I made a few changes to get it all operating just as we wanted.)

Next, I followed up on a Craigslist transaction I was working on, doing some research and sending an e-mail inquiry about a Smithy CB1220-XL combo lathe/mill/drill machine that I was interested in buying. (Photos here. We did end up getting the machine!)

1:15pm: Humberto and I left for lunch, which is definitely an opportunity we take advantage of every day to get outside and get perspective and think in broader / strategic terms. This day, we drove to one of our nearby favorites, Habanero's Mexican Grill (see http://www.yelp.com/biz/habaneros-mexican-food-san-diego), which has excellent food, free chips/salsa around lunchtime, and interesting specials on a regular basis. On this day I got their special which was a non-menu item: a Milanesa Plate (thin, batter-fried beef) with rice, beans, some lettuce and guacamole, and some corn tortillas. A photo is below. Definitely a new experience for me, and an excellent meal. We took this opportunity to discuss some bigger-picture plans and how to proceed on various projects.

While at lunch, a call came in from our order fulfillment team who were at work shipping the orders I had put through earlier in the morning. Without going into the details of the issue, we ended up solving it using an iPhone, a 3G connection, and an SSH terminal client app running on the phone, all while we're eating at Habanero's. This is not the first time the iPhone+SSH combo has helped us keep everything running smoothly while on the go!

2:30pm: We returned back to the office from lunch, and I continued to tinker with the VoIP system, and fixed the Caller ID behavior.

3:00pm: That lunch was pretty heavy, so I stopped to watch some TV.

3:30pm: I did some general web surfing as a distraction, and checked out my usual Hacker News, Slashdot, and then a few blogs in our DIY electronics space, like Hacked Gadgets and Hack a Day. I started pondering Reddit's new sponsored listing service, and then got distracted and did some reading about how car starter motors work, in preparation for some future projects.

4:15pm: I was not being productive, so I decided to just take a nap.

5:00pm: Woke up from nap. Started tinkering with one of the new video tutorials projects we have in the pipeline, tackling a strange problem we were experiencing. After a bit of brainstorming, I announce, "Let's add some resistors in these six locations along these digital I/O lines." While a bit counterintuitive from the digital perspective he'd been used to thinking in, we had been building things together long enough that Humberto knew that there's a reasonable chance I'm on to something, so he played along. But even I was somewhat surprised when it just worked! With that problem out of the way, we were all set to start preparing the script for the new video. (This videos was released a few days later as our Multi-Panel LED Array with SPI.)

6:30pm: With one major technical hurdle tackled, and since I'd been up for a while and my girlfriend returned home, Humberto decided to leave, and that was the end of the "official" workday.

While it sounds like a 11-hour workday, the truth is that it never truly ends, and in this case I tried to tackle more support e-mails as they came in later that evening and handle other special requests, while writing some code for yet another future project, and looking over a draft script for the video mentioned above. Weekends are different only in that they usually get started later in the day and no orders get shipped. There's no doubt about it, it's hard work, but it's also a lot of fun, we don't kill ourselves (notice an extended lunch, TV watching, and naptime all included in the "workday"), and we really enjoy helping our thousands of "students" (customers) learn and get empowered and excited with new skills. Customer interactions via e-mail and our forums are a huge part of the day, and that's a constant reminder to us that we're really teaching people something! Here are a few comments we received just during that one workday (edited only for spelling/punctuation clarity):

• "Thanks so much for the prompt reply. I think my son will love the NerdKit!
• "I just sent in my payment. Thanks for your help! Merry Christmas!"
• "Thank you for the prompt response and suggestions. I found another alternative that worked for me that you may be able to offer others in the future..."
• "I bought this for my 11 year old daughter who owns a soldering iron and is not afraid to use it."
• "Hello Mike, Wow -- that was a quick response!"
• "Thanks Mike. You guys are the best."
• "We are very new to NerdKits and I am very excited as this is something my son has wanted to work on for a long time... Thanks a lot for your help. We look forward to being part of this community."

These are mainly from the questions I handled, and I'm sure that Humberto has his own set from the day.

Every day is a mix of nuts-and-bolts execution, forward-looking brainstorming and planning, and technical work. That variety certainly contributes to making this an exciting and enjoyable way to spend a workday. Finally, the feedback from our students (customers) is a constant reminder of the impact we're having as teachers (small business owners). So, to my friends and family, I hope this helps you have a better understanding of what I do on a daily basis, and to the readers who have ever thought about starting their own business or taking their existing projects full-time, I hope you find yourself with a bit more clarity about where that path can take you.

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