One pretty view from my snowmobiling trip

Was it worth it, all for a little blue light?

Adminisk8or

02/13/2024

Well, it was indeed a fun weekend. We took a couple of extra days off to enjoy a weekend away in the mountains in a rented cabin and with snowmobiles.

And it was about as costly as you'd imagine, but not that bad divided up amongst the seven of us that went. We had a great time; we watched movies, soaked in a hot tub, ate delicious meals, shredded some fine snow, and only sunk and tipped very rarely. It was nice introducing my sister to the sport for the first time, and she was great at it, however timid.

I had spent a good chunk of time earlier last week fixing up and preparing a portable router in my possession to bring along. Thursday night, the stars aligned, and as we arrived, we had not been given vouchers to connect to the wi-fi network. But ah, I had found a way to plug in with a wired connection! So, I went to plug my little TP-Link router running OpenWRT into this, and realized I needed to adjust which interfaces were in which zones. As I made this change, I realized a moment too late that I had made a very foolish mistake- I had locked myself out of that router. With only a few supplies on hand, I did manage to reset and reinstall the OpenWRT firmware on that router- and after an hour or three of trying many things, I got it to work! But the result was not so glorious as you might assume...

When you connected to the wi-fi with a voucher code (which we received later that night), you could get a speed of around roughly 30 Mbps. My wired (and I repeat, wired) connection? It got a rough .05 Mbps. Yeah. Now, to be fair, I never tested or researched it, but I halfway suspect it had something to do with how I was connected. There was a PoE injector powering a receiving dish on our cabin, and I had plugged into the LAN port... perhaps somewhere there was my error... or maybe the router has just finally become faulty, who knows.

But that was this week's tech adventure. The motivational story of the week comes from that of a recent video I watched from Veritasium- one about a certain Shuji Nakamura. Here was a man who didn't get much spotlight; one who had not only high scientific improbability against him, but also his boss and his colleagues. While it's not true to say he started from the ground up (years of previous research had long been spent by a good many other thousands), but in his quest to create a functional blue LED, he had to climb his way and keep climbing as obstacles kept blocking further progress.

But that's the cool thing I like about his life's work- he didn't just get through these trials, he used them to his advantage. Early on in his career, he was sent to a lab in Florida to study up on producing blue LED's, but because he didn't have an actual doctorate, everyone treated him as inferior and he just spent his time working on and maintaining the equipment they used. But this very thing was key in his success, because one of the first big breakthroughs he would have to make to achieve his goal was to spend months and months and months disassembling and reassembling his own machine he would later be given to finally find a way to correctly produce a more pure crystal lattice structure.

And that was only the first of several big obstacles blocking the way. And all this on the side, he was constantly being told by his boss and upper management to stop what he was doing, and focus on more productive things. In fact, in the end, before leaving the company, he was not compensated well at all. Even after a later lawsuit to try and gain some of the money that should've been given him for his remarkable work and discoveries, it was only enough to cover the legal fees.

Looking at it from that point of view seems pretty discouraging. Why ever try to build a miracle, if in the end it only brings you sorrow and pain? I don't know if I have a perfect answer to that... but maybe it requires a special kind of vision, or perhaps even just a certain level of hope. How many countless scientists, artists, musicians and all flavor of folks throughout history have really, truly actually lived to see the fruits of their labors? True, movie actors and others often get a fast payout and fame and fortune is theirs... for a moment. But those who really created something of beauty, something of great importance- something that opened up the way people perceive the world around them- these are the people, both sung and unsung, who left their mark on this world.

Maybe I have just a tiny bit of that hope in myself- not that I would usually say I do... at least in those harder moments. And I am by no means declaring myself anything close to the likes of someone like Nakamura. But it's folks like him that inspire me to continue to learn new things and find new ways to accomplish new feats. Whether or not my efforts go noticed, and whether or not I ever am financially rewarded for the great things I hope to achieve, I hope I will always live my life looking forward with an eye for innovation, creation, discovery and progress. And I hope I remember it in those particularly darker days.

And I hope you do, too! Until next time, see ya!