Stumptown Thoughts

I’ve been asked to cobble together my thoughts on my trip to Portland, to give my impression on the city, the state, and its people. It’s taken me a while to digest and put it into words, because the city doesn’t exactly have a strong flavor. In my five days of taste-testing, there’s just no singular flavor note on the palate that I can mark down in my notebook.

If pressed to find something, it’s this: Portland is a city of abrasive contrasts. That’s the biggest takeaway I have.

From the lips, it’s warm and inviting; from the eyes, it’s paranoid of everyone it doesn’t recognize. The people there will smile and are friendly to the end of the transaction, but behind it is a distrust. You have to be there long enough, as a neighborhood resident, as a frequent customer, to be welcomed and embraced, to be pulled into a long conversation about nothing. Otherwise, you’re just some guy from the street. The homeless problem there is so bad, the housing situation is so exclusionary, that as a tourist, walking around with my black hoodie and black backpack, I felt the side glances, the silent judgments, from those wondering if I was a danger or if I was going to ask someone for weed or bus fare.

The city is caught up in the act of change, like a film scene of a man painfully turning into a werewolf. Once upon a time, it was a manufacturing and shipping town, but with the decline of those industries, Portland’s manual labor workforce is hungry and bored, and all the warehouses, grain silos, docks, railyards, are slowly being emptied out and taken over by land developers. That’s a universal story at this point, but it’s strongly marked there in Portland.

So you have all these areas that are decaying, oily, dirty, fenced off, disused, or otherwise vacated. Contrast that with the verdant beauty of the place; the constant humidity and frequent rainfall means the botanical landscape is always exploding with everything green and orange. It’s a fantastic place if you like forests, hills, mountains, streams, rivers. I wish I could’ve taken more pictures that captured just how beautiful the place is. But in the big middle of it all is this gentrifying grease pit of iron and brick.

I guess with all the paranoia, hope, helplessness, overcast skies, furious growth, middle-class delusions, and distrust in everyone and everything despite all evidence, the city of Portland is me. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I do know that I have no desire to move there. It would consume me before I could ever take it all in. My life here in Austin is just as cold and distant as anywhere else I’ve ever lived, but at least Austin has warm days to help me ignore all that.

I could move there, I guess, but why? I dunno. That’s why my vacation there was more an expedition. I needed to know what it was about, and my five days there showed me, at least on the surface, what was there and gave me a peek at what was underneath. I could be completely wrong; I could find the greatest friends and the most wonderful loves of my life in that weird bond of shared meteorological and financial hardships, but I won’t know without enduring at least a year and a day in its city limits.

And that opens up an existential question that I should ask myself daily.

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Current mood: sullen

Not ready to return to work after a week off. Spent the time with family, so it resembled a vacation but also didn’t.

Oh well. I’m back in Austin, returned to all the aggravations I left last Tuesday. Took only a handful of hours to remember how it feels to have an army of anonymous drones getting in my way at every turn.

Oh well. Fuck Austin.

Portland

Unless some people told you, you’d never know they’d been on vacation.

AUS → SLC → PDX
Lights and sights on Monday nights
Mt. Tabor and its distant neighbor.
Blue to the zoo
Otter under wotter
Trunk punk slunk through his bunk.
Praise for the fallen
Eastbound, drawbridges down.
View in Lan Su
Heaven is a city named Powell
Strong breeze pacifies me.
Goonies never say Die.

Moving Ground

I did some rethinking on the power circuit for my two-way radio in the car. I had read multiple sources that connecting the 12V and Ground wires directly to the battery was the best way to minimize engine noise in the radio, so I went with that guidance and wired things directly to the battery terminals.

As it turns out, my assumption was half correct. The incorrect half could have set me up for disaster. According to an article written by W8JI, a situation could happen where — as a worst-case scenario – my radio is destroyed.

In the case that the radio is grounded directly to the battery, there are two connections coming from the negative post. One is a copper strap that goes from the battery post to somewhere nearby on the chassis body. The other connection is the ground lead to the radio.

So, if the chassis ground strap becomes loose, corroded, or disconnected, then everything in the car that’s powered will try to ground through the only battery connection left: the radio. This will result in instant destruction of its circuit traces and will damage the cable assembly until something either opens, melts, or catches fire.

The correct method for grounding the radio is to bolt the ground lead to a convenient place on the car body as close to the battery ground strap as possible. That way, if the strap breaks, the entire car loses its grounding.

I also learned that modern cars have sensors in the battery cable assemblies that measure how much current is being drawn from the battery. This signal goes to the ECU so it can command the alternator to produce more current. If the radio ground is connected directly to the post, it is upstream from this sensor and the ECU gets an incorrect measurement of current draw from the battery. Putting the radio downstream from this fixes that problem.

Foreground: battery ground post with current sensor. Background: new position of radio ground lead (blue) next to engine ground strap.

With these facts in mind, I made an adjustment to the circuit. I pulled the radio ground connector from the battery post and moved it down to a bolt that holds the ECU bracket. This bolt is mere inches away from the ground lead that goes to the engine block, so I know the connection is solid.

As an aside, I also see some guidance that I should take the fuse out of the ground lead circuit, but I’m not so sure about that. I’ll have to think more on it to figure out what will happen if the ground fuse blows. Will the radio have a floating ground? Will it continue to ground through the ground strap I’ve lashed to the radio body? Will I blow a circuit trace between the radio ground lead and the board’s internal connection to the radio body? I’m not sure.

More improvements to follow.