I have a couple bikes that I just never ride. What should I do with them?
2004 Fuji League
I bought this thing when we first moved to Los Alamos, and I think I even knew at the time that it was a mistake. There's nothing wrong with the bike, it's just that I never ride it. I ran it into the garage once, but it's a steel frame and looks fine. It didn't even mess up the saddle (which is what hit).
Anybody want it?
ALAN
Another mistake. I thought I'd like a single-speed fixed-gear. Boy was I wrong. Fixies are pointless aside from being a fashion statement. Okay, okay, they're a little fun to ride. Maybe I'm just too old for this crap, I don't know.
I still have all the original parts from this bike so I'm going to turn it back into a real bike and then maybe I'll ride it more. It fits me, and the seatpost is stuck at its current height (steel/aluminum = cold weld). It might be tough to sell despite it being a beautiful bike. It might be even tougher to part with.
That means I will have two 700C wheels with gold-colored rims for sale. The front wheel is radially spoked, the back has an ENO flip-flop single-speed hub.
I suppose I could make the Fuji into a fixie, but I can't see the point.
It would be nice to get down to just two bikes. But three would be okay too I guess. I'd have a heavy touring bike, a folder, and a racing bike.
Eventually Amy might want a second bike, not counting the Bike Friday. I wonder what she'll want?
Amy and I took Ginnie and her friend to a birthday party with our bikes yesterday. Two 35-pound kids in a town this hilly is more than a little work, and there's no way I would have made it without my triple chainring. As I crested Conoco hill I shifted the front into the middle chainring, when snap, the cable broke.
The front derailer cable broke in a weird place, too: about three inches down from where the cable emerges from the housing on the downtube. It was a clean break, almost like it was severed. I wish I'd looked at it before I began my ride: checking cables is going to become part of my ABC quick check. Thank goodness it was a shifter cable and not a brake.
Since it was just the shifter, and the front derailer defaults to the lowest gear, I just went on ahead to the party. I wasn't able to pick up any serious speed, but that's okay.
Because of Amy's new blog I'm on the hook to bike in to work now. Thankfully, on Saturday I picked up a new bike:
Albert saw my previous blog entry about wanting a Bike Friday, and emailed me that he was selling one. So I bought it.
It pretty much fits, although the handlebars are about 10cm too far out and a couple inches too low, which means I'm leaning way out on the thing. Not the worst thing in the world, and I'm hoping I can get Green Gear Cycling to make me a new stem. If they make it a certain way, Amy will also be able to ride the bike. That'll be cool.
We started pulling up the carpet today, the goal being to remove the rest of the carpet on the bottom floor of the house. So far it's a fun and destructive activity. The tedious part is removing the staples and the carpet tack strips. It is amazingly gross how much dust and dirt is under the carpet. It does beg the question "do homeowners realize how much dirt they'll collect using carpeting?" Neale vacuumed the hall after we pulled up the majority of the staples with his shopvac, but even after that, there's still this layer of dust that crunches under our feet when we walk on it. Anyway, I totally see how removing the carpet will help with allergies. ew.
Here's the difference between the hallway, which has not been sanded and refinished, and the dining room, which has.
fun.
Actually it ate my File Allocation Table. Twice. Seems it has some bad routines for reading and writing files, and corrupted the FAT. I'm using an R4DS.
Rather than figure out what the problem is, I'm just going to go back to MoonShell.
At the seminar, Amy got certified as an LCI 3. Congratulations, Amy! Now we can really co-teach instead of her just assisting. And that means I get to catnap through half the class now, woo!
At the seminar I worked toward being an LCI coach. I'm not sure where I stand there but the hope is that I'll be able to conduct seminars on my own, which means no more driving 1200 miles if anyone else in New Mexico wants to become an LCI. It also means I'm expected to help out with other seminars. I said I wouldn't want to go anywhere further away than a day's drive. But the league may be able to pay plane fare to ship me around the country, in which case I guess I can go anywhere... as long as I can get my bike there too.
If I'm going to be travelling around the country with a bike, I need to give serious consideration to getting a bike that travels well. I could get a "real" bike with S&S couplings (about $3000), or I could get couplings put on my current bike (about $1000), or I could get a folding bike and a suitcase (about $1300). I'm leaning toward the folder. Bike Friday makes some very nice looking folding bikes that pack into a suitcase; when you unpack it you can turn the suitcase into a trailer by putting some wheels on it.
The other nice thing about a folding bike is that it should be relatively simple to adjust the height of the saddle and the handlebars so that Amy can ride it. I don't know when she'd want to, but if maybe she had to travel, or just wanted a change of pace, she could readjust it to fit her. When Ginnie's older she could do the same.
This is all just speculation, right now I don't need to take a bike anywhere--although it'd be nice on this upcoming trip to Tennessee. It's just something fun to look at.
Amy's been musing about a new pannier. I think she should get one! If I were going to buy a new pannier, I'd get another one of my "Swiss Courier" bags.
These things have many advantages. They're inexpensive, but can also hold whatever sort of bag you happen to favor at the time. I use mine all the time to carry various things like laptop bags, groceries, lunch, or just miscellaneous junk I toss in. Mine only cost $10 or so; the one in this photo is $32, but it comes with a shoulder strap, how's that for fancy.
I got some new glasses because my prescription had changed a bit.
I didn't have Amy, my fashion consultant, with me at the time, so I just grabbed the nerdiest looking frames I could find. Turns out people like how they look on me. Whodda thunk?
When it came time to get the lenses they were trying to upsell me like crazy. As a reaction I asked for the absolute cheapest thing I could get, which was an uncoated thick-as-a-brick lens. That was, I think, a mistake, because everything other than directly in front of me has this prism effect like an out-of-focus CRT monitor. It's awful I tells ya, awful.
Wearing them yesterday resulted in eyestrain and a headache. I'm going to give them one more chance but if I get hurting eyes or brain I'm calling the optometrist to find out what is going on. My old glasses are much, much easier to deal with than these.
Last night we were too late to make it to Dinosaur National Monument, so instead Ginnie played at this amazingly nice playlot in Dinosaur, CO. Then we drove to Vernal, got a $140(!) hotel room at a Motel 6, ate some not-so-great Taco Time, and went to bed.
We woke up this morning, and had some microwave oatmeal and honey. Pro tip: microwave oatmeal and honey is a nice break from the Greasy McGreasepits you tend to eat on the road. We headed out.
For lunch we stopped at a Pizza place in Salt Lake City. It wasn't bad, Amy ordered one of her Fruity McFruitster pizzas with goat cheese and artichokes. Ginnie had a slice of cheese, and I had both. I liked the cheese better, but the McFruitster wasn't awful.
Ginnie watched a total of two movies today, which is way, way down from the last road trip. We talked a lot, and sang a little, and slept, and overall it went really well. The road trip kit Amy made for Ginnie is just great. I advise anyone with kids to ask Amy for tips on a road trip kit.
For dinner we ate at Burger King in Boise. Burger King now has a vegetarian option for the kids meal, which was a nice surprise. Things are a lot different than they were in the 70s. Ginnie spent a good half-hour playing in the human-sized habitrail all by herself, while Amy and I talked about what it's like to have an only child and how her life is going to be.
We're at a cute Motel in Baker City tonight. Ginnie had a blast in the lobby playing with the Toy Yorkie and looking at the lizards and fish in the tanks. Tomorrow we get breakfast at the restaurant next door, it was included in the $50 room fee. This motel is great and we should stay here again. It's called the "Oregon Trail".
I thought my TV computer (Waldorf) was fast enough to decode DVB. I was mistaken, more or less.
It is fast enough to do it as long as absolutely nothing else is going on. But a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 apparently is the absolute minimum required to decode the mpeg4 stream. Wow.
My dad lent me a USB HDTV tuner, a Hauppage HVR 950. It runs a little hot but takes almost no CPU itself just feeding in the MPEG4 stream. Decoding it to my 720p television, however, runs the X server at about 34% CPU and mplayer at 70% or higher. Throw in software deinterlacing and you're sunk.
It's time to go computer shopping.
I'm using dslibris to read a large-ish book. A little smaller than "warbreaker", included in the dslibris source tree. The load time, while tolerable, offends my hacker sensibilities.
The problem, obviously, is that dslibris has to read in the entire XML
tree every time a book's opened. You can't save your bookmarks by
offset into the file, because then you'd be leaping into the middle of
the XML tree (say, in the midst of a large <i> section). Expat might
complain, too, if asked to start parsing in the middle. There might be
some ways to kludge things and speed it up but those would be kludges
and I don't like kludges.
Plucker files were designed to make this sort of random access quicker. The parse tree is precompiled into short(ish) independent segments ("pages" in Plucker parlance). Bookmarks are easier this way because each small segment can be rendered without having to look at any other segments. Since the segments are just a fraction of the total size of the book, seeking to a bookmark involves no more waste than reading the part of the segment preceding the bookmark.
If dslibris did things this way it would lose the cool "page n of m" thing at the bottom and instead have to display a percentage, just like every other ebook reader I've used. I think that's acceptable.
Plucker is in some ways silly because it writes out Palm Pilot data files which dslibris would have to parse. On the other hand, Plucker is fabulous because you inherit a huge tome of pre-formatted book files, plus lots of documentation about, and software for, creating your own. Not to mention the fact that the plucker format is mature and would save a lot of iterative debugging of file formats.
A final option would be to come up with a new format. While fun to design and possibly better-suited to the task, this would ultimately be a burden to support and maintain, and would probably not find as large an audience as something pre-existing.
After going through all this thought process I've decided to take on the project of adding plucker support to DSLibris. It means I'm going to have to code in C++, but I guess there are worse things in the world (like, being forced to eat glass).
Yes, it's been decided. We're getting the rest of the downstairs un-carpeted. Which isn't a word. Anyway, it's time to get rid of the excess allergens that our carpet is so good at trapping. I found a good hardwood floor guy - very responsive, which is so hard to come by in these parts (no offense to New Mexico, but I'm not a Land of Manana type). We're going to take the carpeting up ourselves, and save a little money that way. The only thing that might pose a problem is the entryway linoleum - the guy said he'd be able to do that. He was surprised that the last time we did this with the dining room, the other flooring dude didn't take care of the linoleum himself. So, I'm pleased to hear that he's a go-getter. I asked a question which I now this was critical - do we have to do the bedrooms and living room at the same time? The answer? yes. The hallway boards probably run into Ginnie's room and to make a nice, continuous sanding of the living room into the hallway, into Ginnie's room, we'll need to do it all at once. yay...
Here's the plan: when we get back from Portland/Washington, we'll start moving upstairs (clothes, important toys, etc) and moving the living room furniture and bedroom furniture outside. (he even offered to help do that! but I think we've got it.) Then we'll pull up the carpet in one fell swoop, have fun with mayhem and destruction (well, not really - we can freecycle the carpet), and have the guy come out and do it up right.
The nice thing that I love about our house is that we don't have to go anywhere downstairs while this is going on. We can enter easily through the sidedoor or backdoor, have bathrooms, shower, two bedrooms upstairs, and really live pretty normally. Ginnie can still play in the playroom, we can access the kitchen and dining room all without going into the front area.
I think this means we have too much house. But I still love this house.
I'm writing this down in the hopes that I don't have to go through this thought process again later.
The woozle photo albums have over 30GB in photos, videos, and a couple audio files. This is all running off of a computer above our television set named waldorf. There are no backups. Waldorf is turned on 24/7 and is connected to a UPS so that it can shut down cleanly if the power goes out. We leave it on so that people can look at their pictures whenever they like, but it's also handy because this computer is our DVD and music player, so we don't have to wait for it to boot up.
The hard drive on waldorf is 200GB. The operating system takes up around 2-4GB. Everything not used by photos or the OS is taken up by recorded TV shows, just like a TiVo. Waldorf probably uses about 40 watts when it's idle, which is most of the time. It is probably the most energy-hungry thing in our house.
Amazon offers a service called "S3" that allows you to store files on a massive backed-up file storage thingy. It would cost about $6 a month ($72/year) to move all the photo albums there, and would probably improve performance.
I'm going to keep things on waldorf because it's cheaper and nobody's complaining about performance. Also it gives me control of the images instead of ceding ownership over to some giant corporate entity.
I may at some point in the future implement some sort of caching mechanism to speed up access to frequently-requested photos, but I have a feeling I'm going to find out that access is basically random and there's no good way to predict what images are going to be popular on any given day.
Another option would be to buy a NAS device and hook it up in such a way as to allow us to turn off waldorf. But the energy savings would not be enough to justify the purchase cost. Electricity is still pretty cheap.
We put Hunter on the bus this morning for his first day of preschool at the public school. He has been gone all day and I miss him so much.
It looks like fairies threw up on her walls!
This took me a lot of hours to do, and I just need to get the shades and new curtains up on the little window, and then I'm done. yay.
edited to add the new curtains:
In researching Advair I came across a description of a "Neti Pot". It's used for nasal irrigation. Here's how it works:
You put some water into this thing, then jam it up your nose. Breathe through your mouth and tilt your head to the side. Let the water run up one nostril and down the other. Do this for about a minute and then switch sides. Now you've irrigated your schnozz.
People in this board were saying it pretty much cured their allergies and asthma. A little research turns up that it's considered harmless medically, no side-effects. Why not.
I don't have a neti pot though so I made my own. Introducing the hillbilly neti pot:
This bad boy was supposed to be a watering can, but I figure I can jam it up my nose, no problem. So I did.
Neti Pot Rule #1
Don't use cold, or even room-temperature water. 1-800-discomfort.
So I tried again with what I figured must be about body temperature water and a little salt.
Neti Pot Rule #2
Don't panic!
It was coming out my mouth and out the nostril it went into. It felt freaking bizarre. I coughed. I aborted. Then I tried again, knowing what to expect, and it felt better.
Neti Pot Rule #3
Get one that makes a good seal in your nostril.
The watering can mostly came out the same nostril. So I plugged it up with my finger. Hey, I was alone in the house. Then it started really going.
There was a lot of snot up there.
Neti Pot Rule #4
Try not to think of this youtube video whole you're squirting water up your nose.
I cracked up and lost my groove. It hurt.
So what was the end result? The thing really works! Well, for a couple of minutes anyway. My nose has never, ever been as clear. It was really startling. Then I started gunking it back up with snot. I think it's the Advair making me produce a lot of phlegm.
I tried it again, clear for 5 minutes, then stopped up again.
Will it cure allergies? Asthma? Who knows. Based on my inital findings, though, I think it's worth $20 plus shipping to find out.