The loss of my Nino as my partner in life was my breaking point. I fell deep into self pity for a while. I have amazing people in my life. Some tolerated my pity party while others gave me just the right direction I needed. Tonight I am extremely content with my life. Furthermore, I’m really excited about my future. I haven’t felt this way in some time.

I’ve had a series of profound realizations about why I am the way I am. They’ve finally come together to form a complete picture that I can work with. The confusion, not understanding why I was doing the things I kept doing, drove me nearly insane. For a while, I could truly see myself going the way of my dear friend Megan.

I have more trials ahead of me. I know what some of them will be. I was scared of them. In particular, I was scared to take them on myself. I realize now, that if I’m going to handle the heavy loads, I need solid ground under my feet. I’m the kind of guy who lives in the clouds. It’s easy for me to float away. I was just making plans to float on off to outter space.

Turns out, there’s a lot of really wonderful people down here on the ground and I just happened to be surrounded by a cluster of some particularly amazing people. I’m proud and grateful to be where I am right now, today. I love my job and my coworkers. I’m proud of the work I’ve done. I love my home and my house mates. I love me, the skills and knowledge I’ve developed, the way I’ve taken care of myself, and the uniqueness that makes me me.

One week ago, I couldn’t sleep or eat. I was begging the universe to give me back the things I lost. Tonight, I don’t miss them. There’s one thing, in particular, that I do hope comes back around, but my reasons are different now.

I’ve lost my fear and am left with nothing but happy. I’ve carried this with me for so long… but I feel like I finally released a demon. This blog entry barely begins to describe the joy.

In 2007, I was hired by a big name health and fitness company to develop an online community. The effort began well, but was quickly derailed by many of the most common mistakes that big companies seem to make. I departed the venture in 2008 and moved on to social media centric projects. I went back to check on their progress and found that the entire community, one that used to be hundreds of thousands of users strong, was wiped from the face of the Internet entirely.

I started sifting through my mental database of experience. I also had a couple of high level conversations about community building. Some of my contacts from the 2007 project have moved on to viable community and social media projects elsewhere. While thinking about the viability of these projects, I was suddenly struck with just how much the atmosphere has changed in the 15+ years since I first fell into the game.

One of my contacts, in particular, hit the nail on the head pretty hard when he mentioned sites like Facebook. Community development changed social networking came onto the scene in force. Now, successful community development plans need to include social media and networking giants. Furthermore, a highly successful community development project can exist entirely on top of the technology platforms provided by these giants.

The entire game is different now. It’s as if the open spaces of the Internet have all been industrialized. Now, instead of building in an open field, you have to find space in a high rise complex. Technology paths are seemingly locked down and users are settled into routines and assumptions that will be extremely difficult to crack. The major game players have establisehd themselves. Some are more stable than others, but the top dogs aren’t going away any time soon.

Is the world a better place now? No. We’ve shaken the world of copyrights and intellectual property. We’ve create new ways to create and share information and media. We’ve empowered people with new technologies. We’ve done a lot of good things. However, if you look at the big picture, the revolution of the Internet has had precious little impact. Propaganda and misinformation are still rampant. Our online experience is still heavily controlled by large corporations. Our connectivity is grossly overpriced. The entire system is laden heavily with scammers, liars, cheaters, and manipulators.

Not only are citizens around the world being heavily fined for violating the intellectual property rights of major corpporations, but major corporations are making profits by respinning the intellectual property the masses are freely creating for them. We don’t own our data, sites like Facebook and Youtube own our data. It is nice that more and more people are beginning to question how and why the system is what it is. Still, there’s precious little momentum for change and what momentum that exists is on the decline.

We’re still mostly a world of consumers. One has but to compare the number of people passionate about the Free Culture movement to the number of people passioante about the iPad to clearly see just how far we are from evolving. We humans spread out from Africa. We constantly discovered new wonderful places to explore and develop. We took rich natural wonders and turned them into poluted cities full of crime and noise. We slashed, burned, dug, and paved our way into our modern metropolis while precious few wrote utopian stories of how things could be. When we finally got the the digital open spaces of the Internet, we treated it the same way.

I figure… if we haven’t figured this out before we leave this planet, we’re going to do the same thing to the Moon, to Mars, and where whatever else we manage to touch.

On the outside, I’ve added a roof rack, rear ladder, and spare tire cover. Mechanically, I’ve had the transmission replaced, transfer case and front drive shaft rebuilt, a/c leaks fixed, rear brakes fixed, and other odds and ends. I attempted to have a leaky front windshield fixed and am still fighting that battle. Inside, I’ve installed a new stereo system. I fabricated a few doors panels to mount speakers on. I am replacing lights with leds. I also got some really neat new seat covers.

I’ve taken Polar Bear backpacking, offroading, and to a crazy party at the slopes. I’m really enjoying the benefits of owning a 4×4 van.

I’ve grossly underestimated the amount of time it takes to do each modification. I’ve invested a lot of time and a fair sum of money working on this van. I very much enjoy it, but I do wish it was going a little quicker. I’ve been posting Polar Bear photos along the way and maintaining a more detailed Polar Bear build thread on the Sportsmobile Forum. I also ran into the owner of the other lifted Econoline with the orange strip I keep seeing. We talk vans a bit, he’s got a nice rig and some interesting build plans.

Next up, I will be: finishing off the front speaker installation, adding bedliner coating around the base of the exterior and the entire interior, fabricating an adapter to install the new driver’s seat, building a subfloor, and installing a house battery. I also have a new visor in the queue. So much to do, one bite at a time.

And that’s how some people want to approach the issue of illegal immigrants in the USA. Everything I know and understand about life aligns clearly to say that building a wall between the US and Mexico is a horrible idea. It’s not like Mexico is mounting an attack and we have to defend the castle. They’re sneaking into the country to find jobs. To cover the issue from my own perspective, I’ll offer three planks and then a plan.

Plank 1: The actual problem.

The most widespread problem with illegal immigrants is the notion that they are a cost burden on government funded social services. This is a legit issue, but it’s also an overly exaggerated issue. There’s also a pile of attached issues that fall out of immigrants being “out of the system.” As an example, an undocumented immigrant can’t obtain a license to drive nor insurance – leading to an increase in uninsured motorists.

Plank 2: Recent rise in illegal immigrants.

From my own memory, illegal immigrants were considered more of a “resource” in the early 90′s, rather than a burden. In any significantly large southern city you’d find a street corner were mostly Hispanic laborers would gather waiting to snag a job. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium it seemed that the attitude shifted. It also seemed that the numbers of illegal immigrants what on a rapid rise. It seemed this way because it was on the rise. After 9/11, the number of illegal immigrants coming into the US increased well over 20%.

Plank 3: We made legal immigration harder.

Something else happened right around 9/11 that just might relate to that huge increase in illegal immigrants. The US made it significantly harder to legally come work in the US. You can find out about some of this here and here and here. It does seem logical that making it harder to do something illegally might increase the number of people doing it illegally. Take, for example, our completely failed war on drugs.

Solution: An easy legal path.

Immigrants flock to the US for one main reason – opportunity. Illegal immigrants take low paying labor intensive jobs. These are jobs that Americans, no matter what they claim, generally don’t want. To the laborers, these jobs provide better income than what they’re able to find at home. If we lose all of these laborers, I strongly believe it will increase the cost of goods and services across the board. Regardless, building a wall and increasing the amount of man power at the borders has not only cost us enormous amounts of money, but it has completely failed. More ironic is the fact that, as our economy tumbles, we’re seeing far fewer illegal immigrants. Unfortunately, we need them now more than ever.

Given all of this, why not create an easy to access foreign worker program. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it was proposed by George Bush. This was the Bush plan previous to 9/11 and was related to NAFTA. Such a program could make it easy to document and track workers. This would create a system where we can regulate access to social services and track the impact of migrant workers.

Wrap Up

The problem is that we’ve resisted the flow instead of working with the flow. Any surfer or martial artist knows what happens when you try to fight a flow of energy much larger than your own. It’s a huge investment. However, catching the wave can take you on a ride you could never otherwise achieve. Unfortunately, I think that most of the public discourse on illegal immigration has turned into petty racial hatred and blaming. When so many lives are negatively impacted, the way our economic slump has done to so many, folks really want someone else to be angry at. Getting “tough” on illegal immigrants is like going outside and kicking the dog when you get mad at your spouse. If we use this negative energy to create our immigration reform, like what we’ve seen in Arizona, we’ll only be digging a deeper hole.

During the drive, we collected a lot of ice on the van. As the road muck spalshed up on Polar Bear and started to drain off, it froze into interesting patterns. The most interesting, by far, was the sea urchin like spikes on the center caps. I’ve never seen anything like it before and it drew a fair amount of attention when we would stop for gas or coffee along the way.

While I haven’t been working on the van a lot, I have been collecting bits and pieces. I snagged some weatherproof plastic cases from the office. They were originally used to transport HP Blackbird computers to trade shows. My intention is to mount them somewhere on top of the van. Unfortunately, I have yet to come up with the best way to mount them. They’re tall enough to be a real air flow issue. They’re also big enough that they cover the entire width of the roof making it challenging to leave a walkway on the roof basket. I’m considering building a platform on the rear and placing them behind the van, but I’m also having trouble making that work just right. I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

I snagged a few other odds and ends along the way. I’ve got a CB radio ready to install. I’m on the lookout for a worn out camper with some basic parts (water, gas, electric). I have some replacement seats and a replacement steering wheel in the garage. This weekend I’m flying back to Texas to borrow my parents spare car. Once I have a backup car, I plan to gut the inside of Polar Bear and start work. I plan to rip out the entire dash, clean everything, and maybe repaint the molding. I also plan to pain the interior of the van before I do the insulation and main buildout.

I’ve long been searching for a pop-up top solution and have only found very expensive options. Meanwhile, I ran into a closeout sale on the aware winning Technitop Roof Top Tent. The price was about $400 less than retail so I snatched it up while I could. The idea is to mount the tent on the roof with one door open to the roof basket and the other door having a ladder to the ground. It won’t give me the headspace of a popup top, but it will give me a place for 2 people to sleep in the summer. I still have the tent in the box. If a good popup top option comes along, I might try to sell it for what I paid.

I can’t wait to actually get started on some modifications. It seems like I spend considerably more time thinking about what I want to do rather than doing it. It will feel good to make some progress. Meanwhile, I’m still haunted by the horsepower of my engine. I’m scared that the build will be too heavy and will turn my van into a slug. Here’s hoping.

Unfortunately, Stephenf missed obvious points. First, the trend isn’t strictly with computers becoming more specialized. There’s also a trend of specialized devices becoming more computerized. Actually, we’ve had specialized devices for a long time. Take a car radio for example. A car radio was once electro-mechanical with no logic circuits. Somewhere along the way car radios became digital devices with lcd displays. Now, folks have full blow media centers inside their automobiles. There exists a giant webbing of technological points and the tendency is for those points to converge – for gaps to be filled in. Netbooks are an example of a gap being filled in. The devices are more powerful than smartphones yet more portable than laptops. Netbooks are popular because they filled a need.

But lets forget about all of that for a while, because it doesn’t actually matter at all. The previously mentioned facepalm had nothing to do with technology trends. Right now, the iPad is being discussed to the far reaches of the globe . The device did not have any features that surprised anyone. Yet, because of Apple’s reputation, the device is important. Apple has a cult following, this is what cults do… And Stephenf’s attempt to rationalize the value of the device with a long winded analysis of technology trends just sounds like desperation.

Maybe the iPad is in alignment with a technology trend. That’s not why the device fails us. It’s not even the lack of Flash support. The problem is the way the system is locked down. Apple cultists don’t care, they’ve already bought into iTunes and their collection of proprietary cables. By the time you’re a priest, you’re a lot less likely to question your religion. For the rest of the world, the ones that just want a simple specialized device for a particular job, we’re all going to buy the one that works with the rest of our toys while costing much less.

I don’t care if the device fails or succeeds. I know that there are enough people who don’t want an oversized iPod that there will be plenty of alternatives on the market. Google, Palm, and Nokia all have superior operating systems to put on competitive devices. All three of these companies have operating systems that can multitask. Go ahead, pretend that doesn’t matter. Even on specialized devices, it matters. Furthermore, all of these systems are far more open.

Being first to market doesn’t make you best. Ask the people who wrote the AltaVista search engine. The go ask the people who wrote the Webcrawler search engine. At the end of the day, the iPad just doesn’t matter.

The new tires are 32″ BFG A/Ts. From the performance of the van, I thought the 33″ tires must have been too large as it was moving rather sluggish. Turns out, that’s just the engine. I probably could go up to 35″ wheels with similar performance. They might be a bit better for offroading as well.

I installed the fender flares yesterday. I couldn’t locate flares designed for my van, so I ordered some Flexy Flares. The day after I ordered them, I spotted a set on a van in the junkyard. Had I known how yesterday was going to go, I would have snagged the junkyard fenders.

Before installing the flares yesterday, I decided to run down to Maaco. First, the touch up paint they gave me dried to a solid block almost immediately. Second, I had rust eating through under a door. Since the rust wasn’t a line item on the work order, they wouldn’t cover it. I think I can take care of it myself. Still, they don’t do a good job of standing behind their work.

So, on the WAY to Maaco, I heard a noise under my truck. Turns out it was the front drive shaft. I somehow left it in 4×4 (front rims unlocked) and the worn out front drive shaft was squeaking. While leaning out of the van, I rolled forward through the McDonalds drive through listening carefully to the squeak. While rolling forward, I scraped one of those big yellow poles. So, when I got HOME from Maaco, I spent an hour rubbing out the big yellow scrape. Now I’ve got a bit of a dent on my fender well. Luckily, the yellow paint came off nicely.

Once that adventure was behind me, I installed the Flexy Flares. This was challenging. Sizing and cutting the flares is a bit of a challenge. Getting them installed yourself is very hard. Nino helped me get them started, but the rest was up to me. I decided to try to skip the part of the instructions where you’re supposed to remove the wheels. After two trips to the hardware store for replacement drillbits, I went ahead and removed the rear two wheels to finish up. It was so much easier to drill straight without a tire in the way. I should have done that to begin with.

All in all, I can’t really recommend the Flexy Flares unless, like me, you simply can’t find fitted flares. They work. In fact, they work exceptionally well for what they do. They bend and twist exactly enough to get the job done. They’re also durable enough to work. It must have been challenging to engineer this trade off. Still, molded and fitted flares produce a better looking end result.

With new tires and sexy flares installed, Nino and I went up to the mountains this morning. We roamed around Sugarloaf and finally found Switzerland trail.

It was exactly what I was looking for. The rail was fairly tame. There were a few spots along the way with some more technical items to play on. The snow varied from none to about 18 inches. We got stuck once. Being the well prepared and responsible guy I am, I hadn’t thought to put a shovel in the van. Luckily, when I cleared out the van the other day, I left the $2 RV sink I picked up at the junkyard. As Nino said, I thew out, “everything but the kitchen sink.” We used that sink and a windshield scraper to dig out way out of the sbow. This is also when I finally manged to get the van into the low range gears.The trail was just challenging enough to feel out what the van can do.

All in all, I’m happy with the way the van performs offroad. It will take me a while to get to know the range of operation better. I do think slightly larger tires are appropriate somewhere down the road. Hopefully, a roof rack is in my near future. If I get one, I’ll have to pick up a shovel to attach to it. Meanwhile, I think I’ll keep my backcountry snow shovel in the van from now on.

The tire prevents the door from swinging open as far as it used to. Still, the door opens past 90 degrees so I think I’m alright. I noticed the inside of the spare rim has a ring of rust. I might hit it with a wire brush and then gloss a little paint over it. Next week I should be getting new rubber and rims. Eventually, I might see about getting a spare that matches the size of the new tires (32″). I’m not going to worry about that for a while.

There’s a pile of exterior mods left. The list looks something like: window tint, rock sliders, bumpers, wire mesh behind the grill, roof basket, new antenna, and a ladder.  Most everything else will be interior. There are still some drive train and engine repairs I want to make. However, since most of those are not particularly critical, I’ll be postponing them for a little while.

Having completed the course, all we need to do is give the DMV a few dollars and we’ll be ready to hit the streets. Well, first I’ll have to actually buy a bike. That will be a whole new adventure.

On Tuesday, I picked the Polar Bear up from Maaco where I dropped over $1500 having a pile of body work done and a fresh coat of their cheapest paint.

Overall, I got what I expected. There were a few pleasant surprises. Maaco did a particularly good job grinding out an unsightly weld and some pile of I-have-no-idea-what stuck to van. They plugged some holes in the body and ground down some rivets.

Unfortunately, there were a few disappointments such as more over-spray than I expected. Rather than futz with them on it, I’ll just do a little cleaning up and touch up myself. They got some white on the grill I just painted black, but I wanted to put another coat of black on it anyway.

For the most part, I’m satisfied. Even though it was relatively dark, when I first saw the van I immediately noticed the difference. It’s nice to have a bit of shine to the paint. I hope that lasts a couple of years. I wonder when I should put on the first coat of wax?