The Story of K Street Studio

K Street Studio started out as pretty much just me and a small room, in a small duplex, on a small street, not far from the downtown of Davis, a city that still likes to think of itself as a small town. This little room was stuffed with computers, some dating back to the time of Atari, and graduate school. If you'd like to see Windows 3.11 running on a 486-based PC, or would like to boot up CP/M on a Z80 machine, complete with 8" floppy disks, this is the place. If you thought Valdocs was mere legend then yep, this is the place. But those are from back in my K Street Technology days, when it was known more for hacking hardware than for doing anything useful.

K Street Studio was born when I realized that my hardware adventures had been replaced by writing, video, and photography. For years I had been developing materials for the courses I taught and supervised at UC Davis. Plus I was writing proposals to obtain additional funding for those courses, developing the safety programs for my teaching laboratories and materials characterization facility, writing software for my facility and courses, even creating videos to use in the classroom. Nearly all of this was being done in this little room, after hours, and after Friday. Curious, but there never seemed to be time anymore to rummage through the closet for connectors and fans and LM7505 chips. The soldering iron was almost never getting fired up anymore.

When the deal with UC Davis ended I found myself with a lot of spare time, tons of skills developed while doing the above, and a fairly well equipped office. Well, it looked like I was in business for myself.

At first it was art. I know, dreamer, but I had a compelling collection of photographs taken of a world few ever see, and after putting in a little Adobe Premiere time and getting a fancy printer I was able to generate a little excitement, for a while.

Then I had a software idea, one where you could easily and cheaply merge data and video, specifically, vehicle telemetry and race video shot from a car. It had never been done, and I had been shooting and editing track videos for a while so I knew all about that, and data acquisition was one of my "things". It was perfect. I got an EIN, made K Street Studio a formal business, and got to work. And work. And work. And making progress. I had a demo ready and shared it with a few people, got their comments, and made changes. I was almost done! I wrote the manual and created the help files, started looking into copy protection issues, and I started getting the word out. But somehow completion was elusive. There were always "essential" new features that had to be added, some redesign was necessary and more testing had to be done. The end was always about a month away. During one of those months a competing project was announced at SEMA and this project died.

Other projects included a little consulting, a little writing, creating a CD-ROM for a leading materials science textbook, and developing software for a company in Arizona, and even some PLC/HMI programming for a biogas facility nearby. As soon as those were done and I paid the bills, I did something stupid. I bought a suit and got into a race car. Then I did something really stupid. With a friend, we bought a $200 field-find Opel GT and started turning it into a race car and we had just nine weeks to get it ready.

I promised myself that as soon as this race was over I'd be back at work on my software. Like losing weight, that was the plan. But racing changes you. It does something to your brain. That old line about racing, heroin, and something salty? It's true. We finished that first race, came home and dusted ourselves off, and immediately registered for the next race. I'm sure you can see where this is heading.

After that second race three things became clear. One was that if we cleaned up our act a little we could challenge these people for the class win. Translation, we were past the point of no return. Second, if racing was like heroin, then racing in LeMons was like, well, megaheroin. Between the racing, the crazy cars, the spirit of this whole carnival, once you were in you were not getting out.

The third thing I figured out after only two Lemons races was that there was a story here. Many stories, actually. Stories of adventure, fun, disaster, redemption, validation. Stories where people laugh off the most miserable weekend of their lives and stories of a guy like me who had just found his second calling in life. Racing? No. Not exactly.

I had documented our intitial build on the Opel forums, letting folks there know how we were doing and asking for help with our Opel. After the first race I told them the story of our race, about the ups, the downs, not knowing what were were doing but figuring it out as we went. After the second race I started writing reports to the team, thanking them for all that they did, documenting our failures and accomplishments and lessons learned, and setting things up for the next race. Those grew to become full-fledged accounts of the race, and those became newspaper-like articles, the Tinyvette Times. (Some of this even found its way into our local paper.) And all along our story was building. Before long we did take the class win, twice, and the coveted IOE, and now we are in the hunt for a win in the next higher class. And the team is evolving. We are getting better, even as our roster is starting to change. Our story is definitely building, as is Spank's, CrazyMike's, Sparky Pete's, Overzet's, the Rambler Racing guys, every team in Lemons.

Can you see where this is heading?