Since 1983, I have devoted all available resources to the pursuit of adventure, geek expressionism, and gonzo engineering. The merger of these three obsessions has fueled a playful life of building and traveling with technomadic contraptions, writing about everything from the underlying tech to the romance of the road. Somehow, this became a career. (Before all this, I did real work, including building embedded systems for a few years and writing a textbook about industrial microprocessor design, but life in suburbia inspired long-distance travel... and traditional career plans fell by the wayside.)

After a decade building and pedaling three versions of the computerized recumbent bicycle that is the star of this book, I spent another decade building an amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimaran... while 580-pound BEHEMOTH, the final incarnation of the bike, became a permanent exhibit at the Computer History Museum.

I now live with my cat aboard a 44-foot steel sailboat named Nomadness, and have been working on converting her into a starship with on-board R&D lab, data collection and telemetry tools, extensive communications gear, and a piano.

Details about these and other projects may be found at Nomadic Research Labs, and there is a timeline of hundreds of articles and videos linked from within this book.