A few years ago at Stanford, I learned about the movie Into the Wild from my roommate Eric.  He rented it, and I noticed a few seconds out of the corner of my eye.  Then it passed out of memory until the recent reemergence of my wanderlust

I finally got around to reading the book on which the film is based, which is itself an extended version of an article that first appeared in Outside magazine called “Death of an Innocent.”   It recounts the life and eventual death of Chris McCandless, who gave up a life of privilege after graduating from Emory and chose to live as a tramp.  Eventually, he ended up in the Alaskan bush, where survived for over 100 days before succumbing to starvation. (Coincidentally, Eric looks quite a lot like Emile Hirsch, who plays McCandless in the movie.)

Chris McCandless in front of the bus in which his body was found.

Although the book is well-researched, and the movie is enjoyable, I found it difficult to relate to the protagonist.  Chris is clearly a smart kid, with Harvard Law apparently within his grasp, but his thirst for adventure and extreme overconfidence serve to put him in situations that are intractable, perhaps even selfish.  I can’t see myself having the same disregard for my safety.

My experience in the wilderness (many weeks spent backpacking and canoeing beyond the range of cell phones) and education as a boy scout (Eagle Scout here) has led me to embrace minimalism in my gear, true, but I don’t go out there bare-skinned.  I give considerable thought to my equipment.  I bring topographic maps, I bring sufficient food, I bring clothing and shelter adequate for the conditions.  When I go, I am prepared.

My backpack during a trip in Big Basin, California

I will concede that there is a certain appeal to survive with little more than a sharp hatchet.  If you were to stick me in northern Minnesota — ill-equipped — and challenge me to survive off the land, I’m reasonably confident that I could pull it off.  In the worst case, other humans would never be more than a few hours away.   However, based on personal experience and watching lots of Survivorman, I’m doubtful that it would be a comfortable existence.  And if it were in a place less hospitable, like northern Canada, I’m not sure that I would make it out alive.

Survival, of course, is always my goal.  I want to experience adventure.  I want to go deep into the wilderness.  I want the reminders of civilization to be nothing more than the pack on my back.  I want to take risks and scare myself.  But I want to come home when it’s done.  Unlike Chris, I am not running from anything. When I go, I go for the sake of entertainment.

Looking out from a peak towards the Pacific in Big Basin, California

Chris entered the Alaskan bush near Denali National Park along the Stampede Trail.  He was intentionally ill-prepared, having neither the proper clothing for early-season Alaska nor a safe reserve of food.  He wanted to go somewhere “unmapped,” so he didn’t bring a map.   His only concession to reality was his provisioning of a rifle and ammunition, but even those were poorly chosen.

I mean, if hunting is to be one’s primary source of food, wouldn’t one want the ability to reliably take large game?  And if that’s the case, wouldn’t a high-power rifle be appropriate, like perhaps a .30-06?

Not for Chris.  Chris took a Remington Nylon 66, which fires a .22 LR cartridge.  Surprisingly, he managed to bring down a moose with a gun that’s better suited for squirrels — before losing the moose meat to flies and wolves due to improper preservation.

Remington Nylon 66 rifle (.22 caliber)

In the end, McCandless was done in by what biographer Jon Krakauer suspects was the fungus R. leguminicola.  That fungus produces the alkaloids slaframine and swainsonine that, among other things, interfere with digestion, ultimately leading to starvation.  He was found dead by moose hunters in August, 1992.

Was it arrogance that killed Chris?  Bad luck?  Would he have been so cavalier if he hadn’t discovered the old bus he used as a shelter?

I will endeavor to do better on my journey.

The more I value something, the more unwilling I am to risk damaging it.

Yet, I wonder if my unwillingness to gamble with what I value is itself the more corrosive agent.

Sorry about the downtime, folks.  The server that runs this web site (and many others) experienced about 90 minutes of unavailability this evening.

Basically, Apache was tuned incorrectly, a particularly slow dynamic page was getting a lot of requests, and the number of Apache processes grew to a point where the system ran out of RAM.  In an unfortunate coincidence, that was almost exactly the same time that the MSN, Yahoo, Google, and Cuil crawlers all started hitting the site almost simultaneously.  The backlog of connections grew, the system was swapping like mad, and the load average hit triple digits.  Everything came screeching to a halt.

A few minutes later, when an automated alert tipped me off that something was amiss, I nearly had a heart attack trying to deal with the horribly unresponsive system.  Thankfully, I got a handle on the situation.

My initial fear of a malicious attacker appears to be unfounded.  I’m doing a thorough analysis to be certain.

Thanks to the people who emailed me about the outage.  Automated monitoring tools are in place, but when it comes to things like this, I’d rather get a few redundant messages than have the problem go undiscovered for hours.  If you happen to notice strange downtime in the future, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email, IM, or text (preferred).

“Keacher! Where’s that status report?” my boss bellowed.

It was an unusually quiet bellow, completely inaudible to those around me, for in this context, my boss and my self are coextensive. No matter. It’s still a reasonable question.

I seem to like starting named projects:

• Keacher.com: Active. My personal blog since 2001.  At least one post per month for the past nine years.  Depending on my whims, at times a place for personal updates, and at others an outlet for thoughts targeted at general readers.
• BonnevilleClub: Dead. Site dedicated for Pontiac Bonneville owners. Founded it eight years ago, sold it two years ago. New owner killed it.  About a million page views per month in its heyday.  Lots of lessons learned about people management, product management, and asset sales.
• Tagg: Dead. Tagging physical objects with virtual identifiers. Project for a class at Stanford two and a half years ago. Never got traction. Didn’t continue after class. Valuable networking with entrepreneurs and investors.
• Zoitz: On hiatus since 2008. A capricious webcomic for engineers and scientists.  One of the many things I did during a period of unusual productivity in the spring of 2007.  Millions of views over the past three years despite having only a few dozen strips.  A good deal of attention on Digg, reddit, Stumbleupon, and Slashdot.  Still gets tens of thousands of views every month.  Confusion of early strips with xkcd material prompted a drawing style change.  A number of additional strip ideas are in my notebooks; haven’t gotten around to publishing them.  Never figured out how to monetize it.
• Nesota LLC: Active. The umbrella/holding company for my business activities.  Name comes from the final six letters of “Minnesota,” in the style of “Cisco” coming from the final five letters of “San Francisco.”
• Northstartup: Active. The official blog for Nesota, discussing entrepreneurship and topics related to Nesota’s products.
• Whitespacecomic: Inactive. An experiment in ultraminimalist art: just words, no drawings.  Or, put another way, each caption was structured so as to be the punchline for a blank white space.
• Photography: On hiatus. My on-again, off-again relationship with photography is currently in the “off” part of the cycle.  Not really a named endeavor, but I have it on the list anyway.
• Blurity: Active. My photo-deblurring startup, though technically Nesota is the startup and Blurity is a product.  I’m still working to improve the quality to a level that I find acceptable — a prime example of software projects taking longer than expected.  Still, it’s been under development for a solid nine months, and reactions to the initial prototypes have been positive.  I’m more confident than ever that I can pull it off.
• Stopping in Every State: Active.  A half-year road trip to visit and play hockey in every American state and Canadian province.  Scheduled to begin in the summer of 2011.  I’m currently writing the blog as a past-tense retrospective of what in reality are future events.  There is a temptation to switch styles to something a bit more entertaining, akin to my favorite account of a road trip: the “When You Wish Upon a Star” series from Chris Welty’s “Porsching” column.

So there you have it.  Throw in my other current hobbies, like baking, goaltending, backpacking, and writing meta blog posts, and it makes for a full plate.  Good; my productivity tends to increase when I have more to do.

Back to work…

I first met myself — or more precisely, the person I was to become — not long after arriving at Rose-Hulman in 2000.  It was the beginning of a grand adventure, one that would present the opportunities and motivations for me to reinvent my identity and my outlook on life.  I’d vaguely wanted to change some things about myself for a while, but I never really got around to it.  The act of moving to a new state, full of the unknown, provided the necessary motivation.

Adventure.  Yes, life is (or should be) a series of adventures held together by the glue of time.  Said another way, adventures beget stories, and the human existence is defined by our stories.  Man was not meant to grow complacently content.

It was not coincidental that my arrival at Rose was preceded by a road trip.  Not the insane, heavy-drinking blast from the movies, mind you, but a significant 610 mile drive nonetheless.

Many other trips followed during college.  Visits to Chicago and St. Louis.  Skiing in Colorado.  Top-speed runs, pushed by youthful stupidity and limited only by engine governors, to Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and West Virginia.  Dozens of treks between Minnesota and Indiana.  A first trip abroad, to Paris, France.  I found and nurtured a love of travel.

Going to California for grad school was as much about the adventure of living in Silicon Valley as it was about getting an advanced degree.  It, too, was preceded by years of preparation, days of driving, and another dose of personal reinvention.  I loved it.

Now I am enjoying the adventure of entrepreneurship.  I am on the frontier of my soul, pushing forward the state of the art and learning how to become truly self-sufficient.  The goal is to be beholden to no one and nothing but my own ethics.  I’m not there yet, but I’m enjoying the drive.  I am more passionate than ever about solving my chosen problem — the ubiquity of blurry photos — and my movement beyond “the dip” make me confident that the dream is attainable.

Still, over the past month or so the itch has grown to have another traveling adventure.  Another grand tour, perhaps, to echo the one I took six years ago around Western Europe.  The urge boiled over into giddy excitement last night, and instead of sleeping, I took to doing research and sketching potential routes.  The one holding the greatest appeal is deliciously high concept:

“Epic North American road trip.”

Long-time readers of this blog might recognize this desire as nothing new.  The seed was planted years ago by Grandstaff; or more specifically, by his compelling written documentation [Updated: Now using the archive.org capture; see the summer of 2003 in particular] of his trip around the United States.  The spark that jolted the dream back to life came from a far less noble source: the 2010 Kia Sorento Superbowl commercial. (Inspiration comes from strange places.)

Ok, so what exactly does an “epic North American road trip” entail?  Three main goals:

• Visit all 50 American states and 10 Canadian provinces
• Play hockey in each of those states and provinces
• Accomplish all of the travel by driving (except for Hawaii, of course)

Why?  Well, to the extent supported by my limited research, it appears that such a feat has never been accomplished.  There are guys who have run marathons in every state, a guy who is trying to visit every Starbucks location in the world, and lots of people who try to see every stadium for their favorite major-league sport.  I’ve had a long-time desire to play a game of hockey in the birthplace of hockey (i.e, Canada), so playing in every province and every state seems like a reasonable extension.

Other lesser goals for the trip include visiting friends, backpacking in national parks, enjoying the regional seasonal produce, taking photos, and writing about everything.

It will be a minimalist adventure.  A rough sketch of what I’ll bring:

• Ultralight backpacking gear
• Minimal clothes chosen for maximum utility
• Laptop computer with wireless broadband card
• Cell phone (well, probably three of them: an American one, a Canadian one, and a satellite one)
• DSLR camera
• Basic tools and emergency supplies
• Road bike (maybe — that might have to be saved for a future trip)
• Hockey gear

That last item really constrains my vehicle options.  Everything else (well, besides the bike) is small enough that I could probably get away with a sports car.

This is all I brought to Europe when I was there for a month

Part of me wants to do this with the wrong vehicle, or at least with one that adds character.  If I were shooting for the “proper” vehicle, the choice would be easy: Toyota Land Cruiser.  The Land Cruiser is kind of like a Land Rover, except being Japanese instead of British, it doesn’t break down all the time.  It is, apparently, the go-to vehicle for harsh operating conditions in the most remote corners of the world.  Since my main concern would be not getting stranded in the middle of Canada or Alaska, I can be a bit more liberal with my selection.

Maybe an Outback?  Maybe my current Outback?  Perhaps a sports sedan would be better. The BMW M5 would be a classy Gumball-esque choice, and it would be large enough for another person if I found somebody else up for a crazy doing-something-in-every-state trek (not necessarily hockey).  Or, if caution is to be thrown to the wind, maybe a sports car like the GT-R really would be the way to go.

Obviously, all of this won’t be cheap.  In terms of time, I expect around six months will be necessary for a proper tour.  In terms of money, a rough guess might be in the neighborhood of $25,000, excluding the car.  I can think of many worse ways to blow a few grand.  Plus, with wireless broadband and the ubiquity of WiFi, I could continue working on projects for myself (e.g., Blurity) or for others (e.g., freelancing) while on the road.

Expected start date is July 1, 2011.  Let the preparation begin.