Kevin Warnock

In a recent post, I complained about the very high price of blank label stock for ‘cheap’ handheld label makers.

I concluded that the smart thing to do is use a computer to compose the labels, and print on tractor fed labels with an old-school dot matrix printer. The price differential is astounding. It costs about 25 cents per label to use a ‘cheap” handheld label maker. It costs about 1/2 cent per label to use a computer and dot matrix printer. I decided to use a 10 cent pen to handwrite headings on my manilla file folders, and skip both of the above options.

This crazy pricing for labels made me think of another example of crazy pricing for an even more commonly used product — dental floss.

10,000 meters of white sewing thread for $10.45. If this were dental floss, the price would be nearly $300, but why?

Why does dental floss cost about 2.5 cents a foot in retail quantities? While it’s not the same thing, I can buy 10,000 meters of white sewing thread for $10.45, or roughly 1/10th of a cent per foot – about 1/25th the price.

Dental floss is not sewing thread, so floss probably costs more to make. For the sake of argument, let’s agree it costs twice as much as sewing thread to make. That should mean someone should be able to sell it for 2/10th of a cent per foot

Now, if I could just find a source for a spool of dental floss the size of commonly available large spools of sewing thread, I’d be thrilled.

Such a roll of dental floss would probably last for 5 years. It’s simply crazy that something everyone in the world should be using daily can only be bought in tiny little rolls that costs dollars for a few dozen yards. The price per inch is outrageous compared to bulk sewing thread like you see in dry cleaners on their industrial sewing machines.

If there were a facial tissue box sized roll of dental floss, it could be housed in a pretty box the size of those covers they make for facial tissue boxes. These boxes could have a hinged lid and could become an attractive bathroom accessory in every house in the developed world. A progressive company with real manufacturing connections should source the dental floss and make the decorative boxes. I’m thinking Ikea or Costco should take this project on.

I’ve read that each dollar one can take out of ones monthly budget, if saved and invested properly, turns into $700 at retirement! This country has a huge problem with people not having enough savings for retirement. If we could just stop fritering away money on overpriced essentials, we could collectively save enough for retirement, with no reduction in standard of living. Think how convenient it would be to buy dental floss twice a decade instead of once a month. Dental floss doesn’t go bad and you need it constantly. Why buy in tiny quantities when huge bulk quantities are still small in size.

Somehow Costco got us to buy dozens of rolls of toilet paper at once. I’ve read that toilet paper is the best selling product at Costco. I think some company can get us to buy a lot of dental floss at once as well. Who will it be?

The above thinking can be easily applied to dozens of household essentials we’ve been trained to buy in tiny packages. Why can I buy a gallon of liquid handsoap, but I can’t buy a gallon of gel underarm deodorant? I’m pretty sure deodorant doesn’t spoil, and if there were a way to refill the 3 ounce packages it’s now exclusively sold in, that plastic dispenser might get used for years instead of weeks. I haven’t done a rigorous analysis, but I suspect that if one were to alter how one buys necessities as described here that one could retire with at least a quarter million additional ‘free’ dollars, provided one started buying in bulk at age 18 and wisely invested the savings until age 67. Anybody want to run some numbers? Maybe there’s an online company to be started here where the huge waste of household essentials in tiny packages can be wrung from the system?

In a future article, I’ll get started on why we might be better off requiring the installation of bidets in all home bathrooms. Care to guess why?

As you know, I am in the process of reconverting my RTS bus conversion. I did a minimum conversion in order to legally title it as a motorhome in California. The California Department of Motor Vehicles inspected and signed off on the conversion and changed the title to ‘automobile housecar.’ This entitled me to register and insure it as a motorhome, which costs less than a passenger bus to insure. I had to do this conversion quickly, and I didn’t have the time to create the type of vehicle I really wanted. I sold my old MCI bus conversion recently, and that gave me the funds to redo aspects of my RTS conversion.

One of the most severe problem with my first conversion of the RTS was that I didn’t insulate it. I left the existing insulation in the walls and ceiling. That insulation was fiberglass encased in plastic wrap. It was thin and not particularly effective. I’ve since discarded this insulation and have received a written quote from Tri County Insulation in Santa Clara, California some time back now. I couldn’t have the work done because I didn’t have the money at the time. Now I do, thanks to selling my MCI conversion. I’m back in touch with Tri County and they still want to do the work. I hope to get the RTS spray foamed in the next week or so, if all goes well.

One of the other problems with my RTS is it did not have a generator. It has installed a powerful Trace SW4024 inverter with a bank of Trojan T105 batteries. This system can power up to 4,000 watts of AC appliances at once. It’s a true powerhouse. It’s discontinued now as I’ve had it since 2001, but you can still get them on EBay, and it’s still considered the gold standard of inverters for bus conversions.

I’ve thought a lot about what kind of generator to install in my RTS, and this article details my plans.

Wrico International 8,000 generator

The normal way bus nuts handle generator power is to put a 5,000 to 20,000 watt diesel generator in a storage bay. This can cost $5,000 or more, and these monsters weigh perhaps 400 pounds and consume half a gallon of diesel per hour, which is way too much for a modern future oriented vehicle.

What I have in mind is a propane engine driving a large frame 24 volt alternator. The 24 volts DC would be routed through the Trace SW4024 inverter I mentioned above, and this would give me up to 4,000 watts of AC power. This inverter can sustain that output continuously if it is ventilated enough to keep it cool. I don’t forsee any situation where I would need to push it to the limit full time however.

I want to use propane because the emissions are cleaner, and the fuel is easier and safer to handle than gasoline. It’s also cheaper, in part because road tax is not added to the price per gallon. But another huge benefit is that propane doesn’t go bad like gasoline does, so the generator stays cleaner and is easier to start after long periods of non use. Gas generators are notorious for getting gummed up with stale fuel and being hard to start if not used frequently enough. I already converted my Honda eu1000 generator to propane using a kit from US Carburation Kit Center, which sells kits for numerous generators and engines. You send them the carburator from your engine, and they modify it and plumb it to accept propane. Then you reinstall it on your engine and hook up a source of regulated propane and your gasoline engine now runs on propane. It’s simple.

The discount tool store Harbor Freight sells gasoline engines for unbelievably low prices. For example, with a 20% off discount coupon one can always find online or in some print magazines, an electric start 11 horsepower gasoline engine can be purchased for under $300 including sales tax! This is a fantastic deal. One could buy a spare to keep on board for on the road replacement if something went wrong with the primary engine.

Harbor Freight 11 horsepower gas engine

My idea is to use a big enough alternator to take full advantage of the 11 horsepower output, but to choose pulleys so that even when the engine is running at idle speed that useful DC power is produced. This may take more than one pulley, like in a drill press, where the operator can change the speed by manually grabbing the stopped V-belt and putting it on a different pair of pulleys.

These Harbor Freight engines run at 3,600 RPM at full output, but their idle RPM is much lower – I would guess around 1,800 RPM. I predict that the noise output drops dramatically at idle, like the Honda EU series of Inverter based portable AC generators. I’m sure the fuel use drops dramatically as well. I suspect that even at idle an 11 horsepower engine can produce at least 3 horsepower. This is around 1,000 watts of power when converted through an alternator and inverter to AC. This is enough power to run a mini-split 9000 BTU air conditioner. If I need more power, I can just adjust the engine throttle to run the engine faster, and more power will come out. I should be able to rig up a remote throttle control so I could change the engine speed from inside.

One of the main reasons bus nuts go with huge diesel generators is the big ones usually run at 1,800 RPM and are water cooled. By running an 11 horsepower generator at idle, I hope to get to the 1,800 RPM speed. Now I need to make the generator water cooled… but how?

When I was thinking up my efficient motorhome air conditioning idea, I discovered how inexpensive car radiators can be. They can be had for under $100 each for smaller ones. Even the smallest should be fine for my application, as cars have engines much larger than 11 horsepower.

My idea is to build a soundproof box for the engine, and put a car radiator inside the box with the radiator fins directly in the path of the airflow from the engine fan. Then, connect this radiator via rubber radiator hose to a second radiator outside the box, which could be close to or far from the box, as needed. An electric fan mounted on this outside radiator would send air over the fins to cool them. A water pump would circulate water between the two radiators, and this pump would be powered directly by the starting battery for the engine, which is constantly charged by the built in alternator on the engine which keeps the starting battery fully charged. So, the pump would only run when the engine is running, which is what the plan requires.

The dual radiator system will make the generator system quiet because the generator box no longer needs a large fresh air source, so the box can be sealed and insulated, except for a small pipe to provide combustion air and a small pipe for the combustion exhaust. The area of these two pipes should be under 2 square inches. This is almost nothing compared to how much area would be needed to directly air cool an 11 horsepower engine.

Another huge benefit to my proposed system is that the box can be custom fit to just contain the engine and radiator. This won’t take much space compared to building box for an air cooled generator, which would need multiple sound baffles and sound foam in the baffles to quiet the noise. With my design, I predict the volume required is 1/2 to 1/3 what would be required otherwise.

Since the air in and exhaust out portals are so small, it will be difficult for any engine fire to cause catastrophe, because an engine fire couldn’t get unlimited oxygen to burn. It will be a simple matter to build a trap door for these inputs and outputs that will snap shut if there is a fire, and with no oxygen, the fire will go out almost immediately. Many RVs and bus conversions burn to the ground when a generator catches fire, so my proposed system will save money and lives if widely adopted by others.

The trap doors I envision would be spring loaded, and held open with meltable links that would melt and come apart if they get too hot, as they would in an engine fire. This kind of trap door is used in HVAC systems to slow the spread of fire in buildings, so the technology is proven and cheap.

For extra safety, a propane detector can be installed that is linked to a gas shutoff valve. When the detector senses propane, the shutoff valve loses electricity, and since it’s spring loaded as well, it closes and shuts off the flow of propane. An engine without propane or oxygen won’t burn for long.

Now that I’m a TechShop member, I have access to a metal shear and bending brake. A shear will cut sheet metal like scissors cut paper. A bending brake will bend sheet metal. Thus, I can make the engine box out of steel or aluminum, for added fire safety. I am taking a class in TIG welding at Techshop on January 24, 2010, so I hope to be able to weld the box seems to be certain the box can be tight enough to stop a fire.

I’m thinking about mounting the generator I describe here on the roof deck I envision for my RTS, over the driver’s compartment. The inverter is now installed in the back of the RTS, but I have built a special compartment in the front stairwell, under the passenger seat. I did this because large inverters hum when on, and I want that noise as far from the bedrooms as possible. My RTS has two bed areas, one mid ship and one in the rear. So if the inverter is in the front stairwell area, with two residential doors separating it from the closest bed area, I don’t think anyone will be able to hear the inverter, even if parked in a quiet spot. I need to check the RV code book to see if there is a restriction to roof mounting generators. I don’t suspect that there is one, but I want to do things correctly. The big benefit to roof mounting is the engine will be outside the living area, so I can just direct the exhaust out of the box into the atmostphere, without having to worry about the safety concerns of running exhaust pipes through or underneath living areas.

I’ve thought about the above generator concept quite a bit, and I like the idea. It’s more efficient to use an alternator to charge batteries than to use a conventional AC generator to power a battery charger to charge batteries. Alternators are designed to charge batteries, and they are cheap and plentiful, though the Ample Power brand alternators I linked to above are not cheap!

I love the idea that I can dial in how much power I need, to balance noise, fuel consumption and charging rate to best suit the circumstances. I hope to build this system this year, and I’ll certainly post pictures and test results here to my blog. Please subscribe if you’re interested in updates to this entry.

Marathon Coach bus conversion. This is not Kevin's conversion, but a finished professional conversion that costs over USD $1,000,000.00. This is to give you a rough idea what the plan is, though Kevin's will be much less fancy but more more green. It will also cost much, much less to own, complete and operate.

I’ve touched on my bus conversion project before. Today I will start writing about it in more detail.

The bus is a 1994 TMC 80206 “RTS”. The engine is a Detroit Diesel Series 50 rated at 275 horsepower. There are but 4 cylinders, down from 6 or 8 in most large buses. Fewer cylinders often mean better milage, just like with cars. This bus gets 11 miles per gallon on the freeway, which is outstanding for a vehicle that weighs so much and pushes so much air out of the way.

When I bought the bus in 2007, my plan was to do a quick conversion to a motorhome and then go on a six month tour of the United States with my girlfriend at the time. She hadn’t yet graduated from university, so there was time to finish a rudimentary conversion. She wanted to take a break after graduation and before starting her career, but sadly, she got offered a great job at Stanford University that she had to accept, since it came through a family introduction. She was most unhappy about not getting to take a break, and I was too, as she never had another break from full time work, and now we’re no longer together. That we never got to take the bus out for even one night really breaks my heart.

Life goes on, and there will be new girlfriends and I hope, another marriage, and, I hope, children.

My enthusiasm for the bus is still strong, and I will finish the project and use the conversion. I’ve invested too much to just sell off the partially finished project, and I would get next to nothing if I sold it today anyway.

Since this is a blog post and not a book, I will focus on just a small part of the project today, the air conditioning system.

Most bus conversions handle air conditioning while parked by installing a large diesel generator, in the 5,000 to 15,000 watt range, and use the power to run 2, 3, 4 or even 5 powerful yet not efficient air conditioners at once, to cool the entire interior simultaneously. Owners that live in hot regions have to run the generator and the air conditioners 24 hours a day for the duration of their travels, it can be that hot out. When I drove my first bus conversion across the United States from California to New York in 2002, I typically ran my 6,500 watt generator from morning until bedtime, which cost me about $20 a day in gasoline, and gas was much cheaper back then. It would simply not be cost effective to build a new conversion that uses so much fuel just to stay cool inside. So I have in mind something better, which I will write about here.

I have in mind covering about more than half the roof with 10 250 watt photovoltaic solar panels. These will cost about USD $7,000. In full sun, they will output 1,250 watts of power at 24 volts DC. Run through my Trace SW 4024 inverter, this is enough to power a 9,000 BTU mini-split air conditioner with a 20 SEER rating. This means the AC will draw about 450 watts of power at 120 volts.

9,000 BTU of cooling is not enough to cool a 40 foot bus conversion all at once, especially one with a full set of original side windows like mine has. The way I will handle this is to break up the inside into smaller zones. Right now there are three zones, the driver compartment, the living room and the bedroom. Eventually there will be one more zone, the guest bedroom, for 4 altogether.

I don’t need to occupy all the rooms at once, and I hate the noise that air conditioners make, so I have a plan to distribute the cool air from the one air conditioner to where it’s needed.

The plan borrows from the commercial air conditioning world, where cold water is used to cool rooms, as opposed to cold refrigerant, as is used in residential room air conditioners.

I plan to modify the inside portion of the mini-split air conditioner so that I submerse the evaporator plate, the part that gets freezing cold, in a large tank of water. This will cool that tank of water over time to about 35 degrees F. Then, I will use this cool water to pump through a distribution system of pipes in the ceiling of the bus to ‘heat exchangers’ in each room, or zone. Since cool air falls, these heat exchangers will be in the ceiling as well. Think of them as mini car radiators. Hot air in the room will pass over the cold fins and be cooled. The cool air will circulate down into the zone since cool air falls. The water inside the heat exchanger will pick up heat from the surrounding air. This heat will be carried back to the large water tank to be re-cooled by the mini-split evaporator that’s immersed in the tank. The mini-split will capture the heat from the water and send it outside the bus to the condensor part of the mini-split, which will be fan cooled on the exterior roof of the conversion.

The beauty of the above system, if it works, is that there won’t be any noisy fans inside the rooms. The inside part of the mini-split will probably be silent since the fan isn’t needed to push warm air over the evaporator. There may be a small noise made by the circulation water pump, but I suspect that it won’t be audible.

The heat exchangers should also be silent. It may turn out I will need a small fan near them to optimize their performance, but a quiet computer muffin fan or two should be sufficient.

Since the zones are fed by cold water in PEX plastic pipe, it should be easy to change which zone is being cooled by flipping regular water valves. No special certification is needed to install water piping, but installing copper tubing for AC refrigerant is not easy.

The final benefit of my proposed system is the sun can be used to cool the water tank during the day, but then the coldness of the tank can be ‘harvested’ at night to keep the sleeping zone cool throughout the night, without running a noisy and fossel fuel dependent generator. When I drove across the country in 2002, I hated to run the generator all night long, as even with ear plugs I could barely fall asleep it was so noisy.

When I add the 4th zone, the master bedroom will be tiny, at about 50 square feet by 4 feet high, or 200 cubic feet. I will have removable 3 inch thick insulating window panels I can press into the window openings to really insulate the compartment. The bedroom door will be weather stripped and insulated, perhaps itself 3″ thick. This will mean that the water tank is not trying to cool a particularly large area. With a 24 volt celiing fan circulating air over a heat exchanger, I think I will have found an essentially silent and free nighttime air conditioner for touring the world in hot weather.

I would love to use ceiling fans in the other zones, but sadly there is not enough ceiling height except over the bed to install a full size ceiling fan.

I can’t take credit for the idea above to dismantle an air conditioner and submerse the evaporator plate in a tank of water. This is routinely done by indoor gardeners trying to use liquid cooling to cool powerful grow lights. They take apart a $100 window air conditioners and bend the copper piping to the evaporator plate to dangle it in a tank of water. Once this water is cooled, it’s piped into the grow light fixtures themselves, which often draw a lot of power and so get very hot. The hot water from the fixtures is piped back to the water tank, where the window air conditioner again cools the water for the next cycle. i found videos online demonstrating the technique. I won’t link to them since these indoor growers appear to be growing illicit crops, which I frown on and have nothing to do with. But I do admire the ingenuity of the growers, and I thank them for helping me formulate my above plans.

While doing my research on this system, I found a venture backed company doing something similar to what I propose, but for commercial installations. They use relatively cheaper grid electricity during the night to freeze a multi hundred gallon tank of water, and during the hot day they melt that block of ice to cool the building. This is clever because grid electricity rates are much lower at night, when the grid is relatively lightly loaded. The company has products installed, and it looks good. I don’t plan to go all the way to ice because that would require something other than a cheap mini-split air conditioner, and I want to keep this system cheap and built from off the shelf commodity parts so it can be repaired anywhere should it malfunction. Also, mini-split air conditioners are available in very high efficiency models, such as 20 SEER. This is an astonishingly high number compared to the non-regulated rooftop RV air conditioners most bus conversions use, which can be around 10 SEER. Going from 10 to 20 in SEER cuts the power used in half, which is a really big deal when you have limited roof space for solar panels, and the panels cost a fortune for enough of them to run even one moderate sized air conditioner.

During the day, I would just cool the living room, of course. I have sliding shades on the windows, and silver reflective mirror on the outside of the glass, which cuts dramatically the heat infiltration through the windows. I also plan to make some 3″ thick removable panels I can press into the window opening to really insulate the windows I don’t need to be transparent. I suspect it would be much more energy efficient in fact to block all 6 windows in the living room and turn on my compact flourescent lights during the day, rather than to leave one or more windows unblocked. The living room is separate from the driver’s compartment, which is full of air leaks due to the transit bus front door, which can’t effectively be sealed. The door between the living room and the driver’s compartment will be insulated and weather stripped. I’ve often wondered why doors are so thin. The walls are often six inches thick but the doors are 1 3/4″ thick. Why not make the doors also 6 inches thick, filled with high density closed cell foam, similar to a SIP panel for house construction? This would require a new type of door knob and lock, but that is an opportunity to sell more expensive hinges and door hardware. I think thick doors should be required by code for all construction, residential and commercial, interior and exterior. Thick interior doors would cut sound transmission and make it easier to implement zones in buildings. The current practice of heating an entire home when the occupants are often in just one room needs to cease. Each room should be insulated from the others, and there should be a way to temper each room individually. How about the idea of having a switch similar to a light switch in each room? To be effective, each room will probably need two parallel systems – one quick reacting and one slow reacting but more efficient over the long time. I have such a system in my bedroom in my house. I have a 400 watt panel heater that contains no fan and thus takes hours to warm up the room. I also have a forced air wall heater that can heat up the room in a few minutes. When I enter the room and it’s freezing, I turn on both heaters, and then turn off the forced air heater after a few minutes. Then the slower acting convection panel heater takes over maintaining the temperature indefinitely. What could work perhaps would be hydronic floor water heating plus a forced air unit for rapid heating. It might even be that both heating systems could be hot water based, with a large heat exchanger mated with a powerful fan for rapid heating, and in floor piping for maintenance heating. I’m quite serious about this scenario, and I can see it being the dominant style of heating worldwide 100 years from now, with the water heated exclusively by solar hot water heating panels.

I can’t promise all my bus conversion posts will be this long, as this took some real effort to write. Please write me a comment if you like or dislike it. I would love to get a discussion going in the comments about the pros and cons of my ideas presented here.

I discovered the box in the upper right to subscribe to this blog has been broken for some time, so I don’t have as many subscribers as I otherwise would have. If you liked this post, and would like to subscribe, please type in your email address in the little box in the upper right. I won’t write useless nonsense to you, I promise. Thank you.

2011 calendar - photo by Tatsuo Yamashita, via Flickr Creative Commons license, commercial use

This year is going to be different from the last ten years.

I view the last ten years as my ‘lost decade.’ I sold my first Internet company in 2000, and haven’t had a big success since. Yes, I invented the online office suite with gOffice.com in 2004 and got married in 2008, but I should have gotten more done in 10 years.

It’s time to reinvent my life and create a new path for myself.

Part of my plan is to dramatically expand my circle of friends and acquaintances. I am somewhat shy by nature, but I’ve gotten much less shy in recent years. I credit my wife with that because she is outgoing, and that rubbed off on me. I’m much more likely today to start up a conversation on the subway or in the grocery store line or at the library than even two years ago. I can even give my card to total strangers that I’d like to photograph. I was always scared to approach subjects, but once I started doing so, the reactions were great and it was easy and even fun. What was I so scared of?

I’d like to make friends with interesting people who are doing interesting things. In addition to meeting people in person, I view this blog as a conduit to meet the kind of people I’d like to make friends with. I’m going to do that by starting to write more frequently on more subjects, and see how that goes. So, if you read something here that strikes a chord with you and you think we’d have something in common, please send me a comment or email.

In no particular order, here’s a quick list of some of the accomplishments I hope to achieve in 2011:

• Sell my old bus conversion. It’s a 1967 MCI 5a. I drove it in 2002 to New York City and back from San Francisco, so it’s road worthy and reliable. It’s fun to drive and has a lot of character.
• Establish a vibrant household with interesting roommates where we grow our own vegetables and fish and cook together twice a week. See a description of the house and what I have in mind at SanFranciscoHouseForRent.com.
• Finish my new bus conversion to a degree where I can use it for travels. It’s a 1994 “RTS” that gets outstanding mileage and looks great. There’s a lot to do, and I’m looking for bus nuts to get involved in the project. Read about bus conversions at one of my favorite web sites BusConversions.com
• Learn more of C# so I can accept a wider variety of programming work. I am now a VB.NET developer primarily, but sadly this language is decidedly uncool, even though it still works great.
• Continue my programming consulting practice at Silveroffice, Inc., and increase my customer base.
• Install new rain gutters on my house.
• Replace my car with a diesel model I can fuel with biodiesel.
• Start to establish myself as a writer and public speaker about green homes and sustainable living. This is a big goal, and one I hope I make real progress on. I am passionate about this subject, as you will see in future posts.
• Years after graduating from Brooks Institute, make money at least six times this year selling my services as a photographer. I specialize in photographing people, either alone or in groups. I’m particularly good with couples, and I pride myself on making people feel comfortable, even if they’ve never been photographed by a photographer before. You can see my work at my photography website photography.KevinWarnock.com.

This list will keep me plenty busy. Remind me to post a follow up on December 31st, 2011 if I should forget…

Drawing by Vanessa Chow August 15, 2010

Yesterday, December 9, 2010, I was attending a new member mixer at the Commonwealth Club at 595 Market Street in San Francisco. In the lobby there was a display of artwork by particularly young artists. The above drawing by Vanessa Chow, age 7, caught my eye as being particularly good. I would be thrilled if I could create such a good drawing. I snapped this photo with my Apple iPhone 3GS, so the quality is lower than you usually see here. Sorry about that.

I enjoyed the Commonwealth Club mixer very much. I met one of their volunteers, Angie Adler, who patiently and with great enthusiasm explained what to expect should I join as a member.

I plan to attend three upcoming events:

The first is a talk by Timothy Ferriss on January 6, 2011 at 6:30pm. He’s the very busy author of The 4 Hour Workweek, a book that advocates freeing up time for pursuits that really matter to you by working smarter and dramatically more effectively so fewer hours are required. I’ve read this book at the suggestion of my friend Gleb Budman, who works much more than four hours a week at his very cool company BackBlaze.com.

The second talk, on January 13th, 2011, is by Michael Milken, the infamous junk bond king of the 1980s. Milken invested in my first company Hotpaper.com, Inc. (now part of Purple Communications, Inc.) via his participation as a limited partner in Angel Investors LP, the also infamous Ron Conway led startup fund of the late 1990s. I’ve never met Milken, but I did read of his life in a book published soon after his famous legal troubles. I am eager to see him in person, as when I’ve read his recent work, he appears to be quite thoughtful and interesting.

The third talk, on January 25, 2011, is by Novella Carpenter and Joan Gussow. I don’t know of Joan, but I did read earlier this year Novella’s fascinating book Farm City. In Farm City, Novella describes how she and her boyfriend raised two full size pigs in their apartment backyard in a dangerous part of Oakland, California. The book is riveting as she describes how they dumpster dove behind fancy restaurants for food for the pigs. Full size pigs eat LOTS of food, and she could not have afforded to purchase food for them. One of the craziest stories she related is when a homeless person walked up to her while she was scooping up discarded fish parts into buckets behind a seafood restaurant. As she was scooping the slop from black plastic garbage bags, the homeless man tried to give Noella a crumpled dollar bill, to relieve what he saw as her sad plight of being reduced to scavenging for such unappealing food for herself to eat. She declined the extraordinary offer.

She’s a really funny writer, and the book still warms my heart months after I finished it.

First page of Kevin Warnock's patent for online typesetting

I invent lots of things.

One of the things I’m most proud of is online document creation. I started this work in 2002, founded the first true online office suite company, Silveroffice, Inc., in 2003, and launched the first true online office suite in 2004. The suite continues operating to this day, although it’s not ‘a success’ like I hoped for when I began. But I continue to have high hopes for the site, and I still devote energy to it. I haven’t done much with the site for years now, but just recently I’ve started working on it again, in the last few weeks. Great things are happening again.

I own a patent for online typesetting, and I thought my readers might like to actually read the patent, so I’ve loaded it on my blog here: US20040073708. While this appears to be just an application, the patent has been issued.

I am a photographer.

I started taking pictures seriously when I was in 7th grade. In college, I switched my attention to the view camera, an Omega 45F which used sheets of film four inches by five inches in size.

I like to photograph people, but people move around a lot. This makes it difficult to focus precisely, especially using a view camera, since there is a lag from when you focus to when you can take the picture, since the film has to be inserted a sheet at a time, which takes a few seconds. As a result, it’s safer to use a small lens aperture, which increases the depth of field. But a small aperture requires more light, which requires larger flash equipment which costs more money. A small aperture also makes more parts of the picture sharp, not just the main subject. But with photographs of people, it’s often an advantage for the background to be out of focus, to direct the eye of the viewer towards the person.

As a result, for the best effect, it’s ideal to not use a small aperture to assure the person is in focus. But it’s really difficult to focus accurately at a large aperture. The famed late photographer Richard Avedon for many years did the cover shots for Vogue Magazine. He used a view camera that held sheets of film eight by ten inches in size. These cameras have a very shallow depth of field, and precise focusing is called for. His focusing was so precise that the tip of the nose and the ears of the model would be out of focus. Not enough to be objectionable, but enough to enhance.

I now shoot with a modern digital SLR camera, the Canon 5D Mark II. This is the best camera I have ever used. It shoots stills and video. Most of the shots and videos on this blog were taken with this camera.

What I wish is that Canon would update the firmware of the 5D Mark II so that when I press the shutter, the camera takes 3 or 5 pictures in quick succession, adjusting the lens focus automatically between exposures, starting with what the camera’s best guess is for the best focus. Then I would have the camera take 1 or 2 shots on either side of the camera’s best guess. Ideally, the degree of focus shift should be adjustable by the photographer, depending on the situation. When taking portraits with a telephoto lens wide open, perhaps a 3% and 6% shift fore and aft of the camera’s best guess would make it more likely one of the 5 shots would be perfectly sharp. When this camera is focussed perfectly, you can make 20 x 30″ enlargements that just shine.

Since Canon has not offered this feature, to my knowledge, I manually bracket my shots by hand, in manual focus mode. This is tedious, and not really that repeatable, as while I try to rotate the focus knob perhaps a milimeter between shots, who knows how well I do this from picture to picture. But even with the uncertainty of bracketing focus by hand, the results are worth the trouble. I can now confidently fully blur the background but have a tack sharp subject. This has improved the quality of my photographs of people dramatically.

Modern DSLR lenses contain swift motors, and modern DSLR cameras contain swift shutter cocking mechanisms. Combined, I am confident a camera could shoot a 5 frame focus bracket set in under 1 second. Yes, the subject may move or blink during this flurry of exposures. But the rewards of getting really tack sharp pictures shot wide open are worth the occasional missed frame. I find I often shoot over 1,000 shots per session due to my manual focus bracketing, and even then I can’t fill up my 32 gigabyte memory card once.

The incentive for camera manufacturers is selling more cameras, since if every shot takes 5 shutter releases, cameras will wear out sooner and need to be replaced. I believe Olympus already offers focus bracketing on a consumer level camera . But, to my knowledge, no camera on the quality level of the Canon 5D Mark II from any manufacturer offers the feature I propose here. I hope this feature becomes available on all autofocus cameras.

There exist products to do focus bracketing for macro photography, including software that will combine many photographs into one super sharp photo that would not be possible to take in one exposure. Here are two links to such products: Stack Shot electronically controlled focus rail, Helicon Focus imaging combining software. These products don’t appear to address my wants for wide aperture people photographs, but while doing research for this blog post I discovered these technologies and I think they are very important for macro photographers, so I am linking to them here. Here is a picture of the control panel for the Stack Shot electronic focus rail system linked to above.

Stack Shot Controller for automatic macro focus bracketing

I am writing this post from TechShop in Menlo Park, California. TechShop is a membership do it yourself shop. They have a wide array of tools so costly and large one could not own them and keep them at home, unless one had a really large house and was prepared to devote most of it to a workshop.

TechShop Menlo Park, California USA

I am really excited right now, as TechShop will soon open a branch location in San Francisco, just a block from the Moscone Center convention center. This location is easy to get to from my house as the Muni Metro stops at Montgomery Street, just a few blocks from the new TechShop.

I joined TechShop today as a full member of the as yet unopened San Francisco branch. One of the perks is that one can use the Menlo Park shop free of charge until the San Francisco branch opens, which could happen any week now. It’s supposed to open this month, but apparently the more realistic opening time is next month.

I got a thorough and exhaustive tour of the Menlo Park TechShop from a very enthusiastic employee named Mel. I told him about my desire to one day build extremely green homes from ocean shipping containers, and he got it immediately. He advised getting started as soon as possible as he said the media will love this idea, and there is an upcoming TV show to be shot at TechShop next year that would probably like to cover a project like this provided it’s beyond the idea phase.

I’ve been thinking about Green Homes, my code name for the project, particularly feverishly this month. Many of the intriguing ideas I’ve worked up in my head for my bus conversion apply to shipping container based green housing as well. I really want to help make the world a better place, and I’ve become a huge fan of the movement away from so-called McMansions towards more realistic sized homes.

I’ve struggled with how I would promote such a business and make sales. I have decided that among the best ways to spread the word would be to make a prototype home and take it on tour, the way Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Houses does with his small conventionally constructed houses. Shipping containers are heavy, so I can’t tow one with my car. But, thankfully, I have a bus conversion that can tow a large trailer. I checked today and it appears there are hitch mounting points in place, as I saw connection points to let the vehicle be towed from the back. These anchor points are massive.

A shipping container home will be heavy, as a 20 foot container empty weighs nearly 5,000 pounds. By the time I add granite counters and tile floors the weight could be up around 10,000 pounds. Even for a bus conversion this is heavy, but there’s a cool product that I read about first just last evening. It’s called Tuff Tow. Tuff Tow is a pair of wheels you install into the trailer up front by the hitch. These wheels are freeway capable, and are on a swivel mount. These wheels can support up to 2,000 pounds. The idea is that the large majority of the tongue weight of the trailer is offloaded onto the Tuff Tow device, and only a few hundred pounds is placed on the actual vehicle hitch. This means my bus conversion would only have to deal with pulling the container, and not with potentially huge vertical axis forces, which would be especially high going over bumps and dips in the road at speed. The Tuff Tow costs $1,700 but it will make towing a heavy green home painless for the tow vehicle, and it will mean I can detach the home from the tow vehicle without jacks, I believe.

Tuff Tow device to reduce trailer tongue weight loads

I can envision myself driving around North America showing a self contained green home, giving speeches, participating in panel discussions, educating politicians, inspiring students and generally being an advocate for more efficient living. I think I would be a good television guest, and that I could direct my sales skills towards persuading people to change their aspirations for an ever larger home. While a bus conversion might seem to be a counter productive tow vehicle due its huge size, my conversion gets 11 miles per gallon as it’s a 4 cylinder, not an 6 or 8 cylinder like most bus conversions. A bus is long and heavy, which makes for safer towing of a heavy trailer. But the real benefit to using the conversion is that I can avoid the heavy footprint and cost of staying in a hotel while on tour, as I can stay up front in the conversion. If I tried to stay in hotels with a shipping container home hitched to a 15 mpg pickup truck, I don’t know where I would park the combo, as I doubt many hotels would want me to take up five parking places to rent one room. The bus conversion is also a great demonstration of small and efficient living, so visitors would be able to see two compact homes at once, which I think increases the public relations value of any tour.

While I don’t yet know if it’s possible, my current plan is to weld trailer axles directly to the shipping containers, fabricate  the A shaped hitch, install a Tuff Tow unit up front and tow the container without attaching it to a trailer, as the container would itself be a very durable self contained trailer. I’ve not seen such a trailer before, so this might well be one of the key early inventions of mine in my quest to become a green home entrepreneurial leader.

From what I’ve seen and picked up from the several hours I’ve now been at TechShop, I am hopeful that by my membership here that I will be able to make quick progress towards making my first green home, using many of the amazing tools and resources they have here.

As I wrote here some time back, one of the projects I would like to work on is to develop low cost environmentally responsible housing by recycling into dwellings the millions of empty ocean shipping containers clogging storage yards around the world. I’ve been using the name Green Homes in my head as I think about this project.

I decided to snap up http://GreenHom.es since it’s available. This .es domain uses the same trick I used with my bus conversion domain ILoveBus.es.

If you have an interest in green housing and like the idea of repurposing used ocean shipping containers, please get in touch with me, as I would like to talk to people about my ideas.

I was reading a story on TechCrunch.com today, the influential technology blog based in Silicon Valley. The story says First Round Capital has set up an echange fund for their portfolio companies to use to diversify their risk. The idea is founders will put some of their stock in this fund, and if they go out of business, they will share in the results of the companies in the fund that have successful exits.

I think this is a great concept, and it’s particularly great that a venture firm is sponsoring it, since to participate you have to have received an investment from this firm. So participating startups are already going through a tough screening process to get in. I hope more venture firms set up funds like this.

I do have a question: Would it be possible for the entrepreneurs to hold their ‘exhange shares’ of the other companies in the fund within their Roth IRAs? To my knowledge, you can’t have your own Roth IRA buy stock in your own startup. But it is OK to have your Roth IRA buy stock in tiny private startups, provided you don’t work on them at all. So I suspect there is a way to get these exchange shares into your own Roth IRA. Maybe by segregating the shares in your own startup from the shares in all the other member companies.

The beauty of having your Roth IRA hold startup stock is that if there’s a big exit, you pay no capital gains tax, even if there is a Google sized exit. Then you could have your Roth IRA sell the stock and diversify. The downside is if there is a loss, you can’t deduct your losses on your taxes, as far as I know.

I’m not a lawyer, so don’t act on this without consulting with one. I have had my Roth IRA buy private company stock several times, so I know that can be done. Not many financial institutions will handle this transaction. For example, Fidelity won’t. But T Rowe Price will, and their fees are reasonable. I pay $35/year for them to hold private stock in my Roth IRA. I think there was a $100 fee to set everything up in the beginning.

Here’s the link to the TechCrunch story that inspired this post: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/first-round-capital-entrepreneur-exchange-fund/