May 2008 Archives

a couple nights ago i dreamt that i was walking along a street or a path or a trail and came across a kid, about 10 or 12 years old, either male, female, or both at once, and I gave them my spiritual vanity bracelet, without their asking.

they looked it over and thought the hebrew letters were "cool' and asked what they meant. i told them that i couldn't tell them, they'd have to find out for themselves.

in waking life, i don't wear my spiritual vanity bracelet any more. i carry it with me each day, and the day i had that dream i wore it. but not the day before, and not the day after. to the extent that i was ever on a spiritual journey -- to the extent that i was ever on one any more than any other person ever is -- i have strayed. i have become sidetracked, lost focus.

i read a poignant blog posting the other day, where someone commented that the aging process is a sharpening of focus. in youth, we have a wide focus that narrows each year until we reach our 80s, when our entire world is a little tiny dot of sharp focus.

i'm still too young, it seems, to maintain the kind of focus i had not so long ago. and when i reach 80, what will i have to see in my narrow world-field? Not much, perhaps.

my real-life spiritual vanity bracelet, the one that i still have, was dipped in the pacific shortly after it was made, and again when it was remade, and again and again and once on my wedding day. it swam in the ocean on the beach that i thought was a holy place, but it is just a beach. it was my friend when i was lonely, and it spoke to me when i needed to hear. a while ago, i was drawn there. now, not so much.

i keep it in my pocket, i think, because looking at it reminds me of what an important thing it used to represent for me, of what an important message i made it to whisper to me, whenever i saw it, or felt it, or thought of it. it reminds me now of how unfaithful i've been to my own direction.

but direction is such a fickle thing. a wise man once said, only the insane and the dead are completely sure. longer than my spiritual vanity bracelet, doubt and skepticism have been my companions. whether my "journey" ever had merit was, and remains, unclear.

the spiritual vanity bracelet says "know before whom you stand". it is an exhortation, and a riddle. i have not done it, and like the child in my dream, i do not even know what it means. maybe i will resume my search. or maybe i will continue it, uninterrupted after all, in my own particular... idiom.

because i kept looking at my gps-watch and despairing of my slow pace. 10:45? and then 11:02?! it seemed no matter how harder i ran, i couldn't get my pace under 11:05, toward the end.

turns out i was looking at the time, not my pace. so i ended up running at about 9:35, which is close to my old pace.

heh.

today at the gym, spu, for reasons unknown, brought up the Gorillaz lyric that goes, "linin' them up like ass cracks".

we decided that this is a phrase we need to work into our daily conversation. examples follow.

"Oh, those boxes? Just put them over there. Line 'em up like ass cracks."

"The parking was tight, I had to line up like ass cracks."

"I spent the weekend re-arranging my beer glass collection. I lined 'em up like ass cracks."

The possiblities are endless. In order to count them, I'll start by linin' 'em up like ass cracks.

i cut out dairy for the past couple of days on account of i was having some persistent GI problems, and both my mother and brother are lactose intolerant, my mother having acquired the ailment at about the same age as I am now.

unfortunately, things have calmed down quite a bit. i may actually be intolerant. i'll add some dairy back into my diet, i suppose, a bit at a time next week. if i have to give up morning cereal i can cope. pizza and cheeseburgers? less coping.

a couple of years ago i was forced to drink some soymilk, on multiple occasions, and discovered that it's quite good in oatmeal but a mistake for anything else. i've got some now for my occasional oatmeal breakfast. it's far more expensive than regular milk, though, and less versatile than the real thing.

of course, the whole thing could just be the healing power of time, alleviating the effects of my weeks-ago food poisoning, not to mention my weeks-ago reintroduction of daily coffee. coffee is a big-time GI irritant, as is alcohol. these are a few of my favorite things.

soldering must be easy, because i can't be good at it.

i've wired up 2 out of 8 segments on my 7-segment (har!) display, plus 2 headers (one for power, one for data/clock/load). everything works. some of the joints are ugly, especially where i soldered 4 wires to a single pin. some of the pads appear fused, but my continuity tester and my arduino attest otherwise. the layout is horrendous -- mostly because i have to wire up 36 pins on a 4-digit 7-segment display -- and there are wires everywhere since this isn't a PCB. but it's my first try and it works.

plus, i figured out how to use my de-soldering pump. i'm becoming familiar with the tools.

and to think i was always awful at "operation".

sigh.

it's not that i have nothing to say. it's that i have nothing constructive to say.

back in the old days, it was just 'lil ol' me, and i could say whatever i wanted because it would only ever be about me, and nobody would read it.

content is all about context. context changes the content. i have the same things to say now as years past, but the context of my life changes the same words, the same feelings, to mean something entirely different.

everything old is new again, and everything new is old.

i was fortunate enough to have an awesome beer pal who gave me 3 (three!!!) bottles of russian river's dirtiest beers. i've had one a night for the last three nights. this final beer is so tasty, and the ozric tentacles is so musical, i'm tempted to write.

plus, things are going well in arduinoland, despite my litany of fate-imposed abuses this week, including but not limited to:

- food poisoning
- GERD
- shin injury while running
- back injury while deadlifting
- burn injury while cooking
- also, i was insulted.

not really, i just added that last one.

anyhow, the beers:

Supplication: It had cherries. It was sour. The wife didn't like it. Score! It was awesome. 9 out of 10. Just what I had wanted last month when I wanted a sour cherry beer (but was denied, in some kind of time-warp flash-forward to this week's luck).

Beatification: Too dirty! Dirty dirty dirty, earthy, horsey, and sour as could possibly be. I hated it until the last sip, when I wanted another. I'd gotten to like it! But I still wouldn't count it as my first choice.

Temptation: 11/10. I'm drinking it now. It's pleasingly sour, and sour is its main flavor, but it's also beer. There's malt poking through all that sour! It holds its own! This is the first of the three that I'd say had any kind of balance, and it's an incredible beer. I like it. I like it a lot. I will have more of it. It's not only sour and malty, it's also got some of the dirty brett character of the Beatification, but it's not so over-the-top as to be difficult to drink.

I wanted to crack wise to my pal that he must want to kiss me: he's giving me all these puckering beers. I wanted to, but there were people around, and I didn't want to embarrass him (by exposing his plan in front of others).

yesterday i had nausea, extreme muscle fatigue, and a 100.8F fever. i spent a good part of the day lying on the floor trying to sleep.

today i'm fine.

huh.

my bike chain came off this weekend during my ride. i would have eventually figured out how to put it on, but a friendly mechanical engineer (score!!) stopped and helped me get back on the road much faster than i could have done it myself.

so today, even though i have a fever of 100.8 and feel like teh crap, i really wanted to get the bike fixed. i had called yesterday (when i showed no signs of illness) and they'd assured me they could have the bike ready for me by saturday.

so hops took it down (it fits in her car, not mine) and they told her they could make no guarantees at all. bleh. that upset her, rightly so. then, 3 hours later, they called me and said it was done!! the guy on the phone was more than a little surly, and entirely impatient with my lack of Roadie Terminology. He said he'd adjusted something and greased something. Because it was a cell connection, and because I wanted to make sure they'd actually done something before I went down there, I asked "so what did you change?" he willfully failed to comprehend my question. "changed? i didn't change anything, I adjusted it!" "okay," i said, "adjusted. that's kind of a change. does it still clunk when shifting?" he assured me it did not.

so while i was out and about doing far too many errands for my current state, i swung by the bike shop to verify it was fixed. i met the surly mechanic who had talked to me on the phone. i took it out for a ride.

it still clunked when i shifted, only now it clunked during a different shifting sequence.

so i came back and tried to describe the problem. the mechanic became more and more upset and told me he's adjusted dozens of these bikes and he rode it himself and it didn't make any clunking and it was perfectly adjusted and there's nothing more he can do for me.

somehow i convinced him to ride it and see. he came back after a test ride and said there were no problems.

at this point i figured we had some kind of miscommunication, or, because of my newbishness, i had unrealistic expectations. i tried to explain that i was new at this and maybe the clunk i experience is normal and i misremembered it not doing that before.

he said there was nothing more i could do and put on his "you're insulting my work" face.

it was at this point that the cool employee stepped in. the mechanic handed me off to him. he put me on the trainer and i rode it a little. it did not clunk. i explained that it didn't clunk on the trainer unless you load the wheel as if it were me and my fat arse on the bike on the road. he tightened it up and still no clunk really. i asked cool guy to try it.

cool guy believed in me, when nobody else would. it was a hollywood moment. i could see him riding up and down the street in hte back of the shop, desperately trying to witness what i was talking about.

finally, an LED flashed over his head (i wish i knew how) and he came back. he told me he'd figured it out: it was the chain rubbing on the derailler, because i was not doing the half-click on the front shifter when i was in the highest rear gear.

he went into a lengthy explanation of some chain mechanics, which was great. finally he told me to try riding it with the half-shift engaged. i actually knew about the half-click very well and use it all the time, but did i mention: fever? 100.8? nearly no food all day long?

so i go out and ride the bike. to my disappointment, it still clunked. i didn't want to tell this to cool guy because he so earnestly had thought he'd solved it, and i was ready to admit defeat and just go home and pass out (after ice cream, which at this point i'd decided i needed. did i mention it's upward of 87F out here today? yes, that's not much, but remember: fever. no food. cycling.)

he asked to take it out one more time. again and again he passed the parking lot, trying hard to figure out what the heck i was talking about. another LED flashed over his head and he came back.

he told me he'd figured it out: i was putting too much tension on the chain as i shifted and that's causing it not to catch at teh right time. he went into a lengthy dissertation about how to shift on a mountain bike (?) and how that differs from a road bike. he pointed out how the chain tension goes up when the bike is loaded (i pointed out that i loaded it a heck of a lot more than he did). he said that he had had to learn to relax a little bit before shifting and was positive that this was my problem.

this made sense: this, i figured, was a biking skill that had become second nature for the mechanic and he had not considered (as cool guy had) that i was a newbie and maybe didn't know i was supposed to do that. i got on the bike and it only took 1 lap to realize that the problem was my riding style. not that there was no problem to begin with -- that was real -- but the bike actually was fixed and the clunk went away completely if i relaxed right before shifting.

i thanked the guy a lot and we talked even more. we went inside and i decided i wanted to thank the mechanic for his prompt fixing of my bike. sure, he was a total arse to me, but he did fix my bike in only a couple of hours, and whether it's a good personality trait or not, i am used to technical-minded folks getting upset when you insult their work. but he was busy with another customer and i didn't dare to interject.

so the cool guy and i spoke about some maintenance things, and where i was from, and the weather, and stuff. it's all a dehydrated haze.

finally i got to tell the mechanic that i appreciated his quick fix, and that the bike was fine, i just was shifting wrong. he opened up and smiled a bit and told me some of the same tension stuff i had already just heard, but with less detail and enthusiasm.

finally, we parted on good terms, him giving me a "ride on" or something like that.

i figure it's good to be on good terms with my mechanic even if he's an arse.

my arduino arrived yesterday. i dusted off my brain a little (since it's been 2 years since i've done any C, well, not really, i did one small bugfix to my C code a couple months ago and bungled it) and whipped up an LED flasher with teh arduino.

i've been banging my head against the desk trying to flash an LED with 2 transistors and a capacitor. arduino makes it a little easier. okay, a lot easier. flashing LED was too simple. I made mine talk in morse code.

following is the embarrassingly brittle source code (oh, how nice it was to use ?: again!):

RIP coffee roaster mark I.

i unscrewed things to see if i could replace the drive shaft. unfortunately, some of the screws broke in the process (my popcorn popper just wasn't designed for this use) and now I'm the proud owner of an AC motor and a teflon beanbed but little else.

guess i'm getting a new one.

it had to happen sooner or later, i suppose. my roaster is broken. the bottom half of my stir-crazy/turbo-oven roaster no longer rotates its arm.

most likely it's a dead motor, or a melted (plastic!) driveshaft. i can't see now because it's about 400F and I can't touch it. repairing it is one option, but the handles are already broken (and have resisted multiple repair attempts) tempting me to just get a new one for $30. the drive shaft cap is already fabricated, and that's teh hard part of assembly anyhow.

the internet rocks.

TIMELY.

naturally.

(in truth, one thing i don't need is another thermostat. still, plenty of potential for WATERPROOFED controllers doing stuff in the brewing process).

oh right, i need to brew again, soon.

i went to the "maker faire" over the weekend and saw a couple of cool things. more importantly, though, one day after i'd gotten started learning "the basics" of resistors and batteries and diodes, i got a glimpse of the big picture: microcontrollers!

for some reason, all these years, I have not been doing things with microcontrollers. why not? I'm a lapsed C programmer, and if I may toot my own horn, I'm actually a rather good C programmer. at least, I was, back before I switched to python. now I have my doubts. still, looking at some of the online code samples for microcontrollers, the stuff is rather simplistic. sure, maybe it's harder for more complex stuff, but... maybe not.

my main sack has a microcontroller already, and though he's the man for electronics, he doesn't really know how to program, and for some odd reason, hid the fact that he wanted some help until we were at the faire. so there's that avenue to pursue, and also, i've been looking over the much-hyped "arduino" (they were all over at the faire) and getting a bit jazzed about that.

i already have bits and pieces of a project in mind: a webpage controllable LED matrix to sit on my desk and display inane messages entered by random visitors to my visitorless website. originally, i wanted an LED matrix that would display a snow pattern coalescing into the word BEER. i can combine both, I reckon.

the funny thing is that I've spent several futile hours of frustrated hacking trying to get an LED to flash on my breadboard. it still doesn't work. i've got several more days of reading before it's got a chance of working. but I am pretty confident that were i to order an ethernet-enabled microcontroller and a pre-fab LED matrix, I could have my above project up and running in less than a week.

and then, maybe something useful!

my rear wheel wasn't making adequate contact on the trainer. nothing is wrong with my trainer. it's hard going fast in top gear, as it should be.

i reckon that's good. if i want to do intervals with high resistance, i can. if i want to do intervals with high cadence, i can do that too in my granny gear, which more accurately simulates road conditions (i'm big enough to admit here for all to see that i use my granny on the hills).

that said, i suppose if i'm going to train i ought to train myself to climb hills in a higher gear on account of i hate the hills and the higher the gear the faster i'm over them.

today i averaged 80rpm cadence on my standard sunday ride, with an average speed of 14.7mph.

i usually average 77rpm and i dunno my ave speed. today i also, for the first time since i've become a roadie, ascended ascension drive. it was much quicker than i remembered it, but just as difficult (of course, i didn't used to ride all the way to edgewood by way of cañada before climbing ascension). by the time i reached my turnaround point i had full body shakes. fun! just like the old days.

i also nearly ate it twice at the same stoplight as i struggled to unclip first one foot then the other. that would have been a bummer, in front of all those one peoples.

anyhow, back to my cadence. i noticed that on the hills, including ascension, i was doing 80-90rpm. that's way over my target of 70 and way over what i did last week.

so why so high all of a sudden? i have two theories. first, i started a new workout cycle this past week, and the first week of a well designed cycle is always easy. so i'm comparatively well rested. however, what happens the night before is nearly as important as the overall state of restfulness, and i didn't sleep or eat particularly well last night (though i did have a lot of carbs for dinner, fwiw).

the more likely theory: on wednesday i did 20 minutes of intervals on the trainer. because of an adjustment problem (i think -- i have not yet tested this) the contact between tire and trainer was such that the trainer didn't want to exert force against me, and thus, i was able to do 110rpm in top gear during the intervals.

now, going up hills at 90rpm isn't the greatest way to ride, unless all your hills are only 1 minute long. that certainly describes ascension, but it does not describe all the other hills on the route.

at least on this route, my performance was improved (even with a headwind). not only that, but when doing my 110rpm intervals, i focus on maintaining pedaling form and not jumping. i think i did a good job at that, and today on the road, at 90rmp, i did an even better job.

this leaves me conflicted: continue with what is probably not the greatest training methods, but methods that translate to real performance gains, or adjust the trainer so that i do intervals of hard resistance at a reasonable cadence?

last weekend i took a visit to a warehouse shop that sold all sorts of secondhand junk that local companies liquidated after going out of business. lots of computer chairs, monitors, keyboard, switches, racks, routers, everything.

also, lots of miscellaneous electronic parts.

i was there with my main sack, and he was rather curt with my questions about the purpose and functioning of various electronic parts. that got me thinking: why is my main sack such a sack? also: why don't i know these basic things about electronics?

answers: that's just the kind of sack he is, and there isn't a good reason.

so i ordered a pair of electronics beginner books (the theory being that they would probably both be lousy in one way or another but hopefully they'd complement each other in such a way that together they'd add up to one decent book) and got to reading. yesterday the sack, having been made to feel suitably bad about his rudeness, joined me at the local electronics store to pick out some parts to get me started on circuit building.

a slight detour: it turns out the local electronics store has a big shelf full of NOS (new old stock : original, unsold, 1940s era) vacuum tubes, which is just what i'd need to dink around with my new tube amp to achieve different sounds. a local tube source (assuming they have tubes i can use, i haven't memorized the varieties yet) is a major score. even if i can't use them in my amp, i'd like to bring my electronics know-how up to the level where i can construct a tube amp, and perhaps they'll have tubes for that.

in any case, they had much of what i needed, but not everything. i reluctantly went to radio shack, thinking that they'd suck for that sort of thing just as much as they suck for everything else. i was pleasantly surprised, they're a goldmine for hobbyist electronics, just as they were 20 years ago. i should have gone there first, but then i would not have gotten the warm fuzzies from supporting my local shop (established 1961).

later on we visited Frys and were majorly disappointed. fry's is rubbish, i don't know why i keep thinking otherwise. maybe it's just the PA store. i dunno. maybe i'd go there for an enclosure or something, which looked harder to find at RS, but more likely I'd just order online.

Anyhow, i finally got to tinkering. i got a basic LED circuit working (lesson learned: the D in LED stands for "don't forget it's a diode not a lamp") then moved on to a switched SPST LED circuit, then a SPDT switched dual LED circuit, and then, the biggest challenge so far, I figured out how to design a circuit for my red/green LED, using a DPDT switch (none of the switches were labeled to suggest proper wiring, and by this point, i'd already blown the fuse in my meter, so i had to use reasoning and meterless testing methods to get the layout right).

these circuits are extremely basic, but at the same time, i've only been at it one day. and, though my switched LED circuits are basic, they're quite useful. the last two circuits i made could be used to indicate which checker is ready to ring up your crap at fry's.

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x27!

Another excellent mohawk. At rei today, I saw another guy with a mohawk. His was pretty awesome, but mine was twice the awesome of his, even after i de-gelled it trying on bike helmets.

it's got a curl.

it's got a wave.

it's got a demilitarized zone.

it's twice as awesome as your mohawk.

the engines can't give any less than this! the dilithium crystals will crack!

or something. i was supposed to "ease back into running" today and do a mile. as i was getting started, i realized "even if i go really really slow that's only 12 minutes of exercise, that doesn't even count as exercise". so i ran 2 miles (or thereabouts, stupid poor reception gps receiver!). then i weighed myself when i got home.

oh, i'm that heavy? probably should not have run.

i thought maybe i should increase my distance by a mile for every 5lbs i lose, but you and i both know that i'll increase it as soon as i'm back into the groove, no matter if i've actually gained weight instead of lost it.

sigh. fargen beer hobby.

to celebrate my resumption of slavery to the bean, i ordered a Bodum Santos stovetop vacuum pot.

i know i will sound like a marketroid when i say this, but it is true: a vacuum pot is fun to watch, a neat physics lesson, and best of all, it makes great coffee.

it operates thusly: a pot is put on a heat source, full of fresh water. when the water is heated nearly to a boil, another pot is put securely on top of that one, the connection is sealed by a gasket to be airtight. the top pot has a filter on the bottom, on top of which sits your coffee grounds. a bit of chain dangles from the bottom of the first pot all the way down through the junction and to the bottom of the first pot.

the chain breaks the surface tension of the water and causes it to boil. the boiling water turns to water vapor, which increases the pressure in the bottom pot, which pushes the vapor up into the top pot, where it combines with the beans to brew coffee. when you think it's had enough, you take it off the heat source, the bottom chamber cools a little, the vapor contracts, and a partial vacuum is formed in the lower pot.

the partial vacuum sucks the coffee down from the top, through the filter, and when that's done, you remove the top and pour your coffee out of the bottom.

the resulting cup has as much body as french press coffee but also much brightness that gets missed in french press, and a much cleaner cup than FP.

now, the bodum santos has one killer feature and one drawback. it is my second vacuum pot so i can appreciate both of these. my first vacpot uses a flame source and takes for freakin ever to boil, even if you use preheated water. not only that, the flame source is an alcohol lamp and i have never had any luck maintaining those -- they tend to need wick trimming constantly, or simply not light ever. to that end, i got a yama branded butane burner (but the gorram igniter does not work! argh!!).

the bodum is designed to sit directly on your stove. you know how to use your stove, right? no additional learning required, no wick trimming, no matches. it even works on our electric HOS.

the drawback is that it has a plastic filter, much like a small poker chip nestled ever so slightly above the junction hole. this allows some sediment in the cup, so the santos cup is cloudier/grittier than the yama. the bright side of this is that the poker chip is much easier to clean/maintain than the yama's cloth filter, which tends to taste like either (your choice of) bleach or mold. bleah.

all in all, the bodum vacpot is great, the yama is good (it certainly looks way cooler, like a piece of lab equipment), and vacpot brewing in general is really the way to go.

turns out that keg was not, after all, bottomless.

so long, black death 75 surprise. the last pint was the best one.

that drives my dreams, it's also returned (not related to the coffee, thought, this has been for a couple of months).

among other things, last night i and my paly spu were on the lam for some reason. we were at some kind of rest stop, which i went to use. when i came out, spu and his charge were gone, and there was a police officer. he began to interrogate me, and i wisely asked whether i was under arrest. he said no. i said i wasn't going with him, then, and he got upset. i asked to see his badge, which, for some reason, was obscured, being up on top of his shoulder, facing the sky.

he pulled it down a bit for me to see, it was silver, and bore the name "church of [very litigious psuedo-religious group, widely hated on the Internets]". i laughed in his face, then punched him in his face, and walked away.

a little later, i was at some kind of reception with spu, perhaps we were celebrating our narrow escape from The Man. i looked out through the sliding door, and damned if the fake copper wasn't out there, bayonetting spu's charge! wtF!

i tapped my paly and pointed. we became upset, but i reminded him that i always carry a pocket knife. he opened the glass door, the fake cop stopped stabbing our friend and lunged at me, i deftly deflected the attack with my forearm, and proceeded to slice up the [hated pseudo-religious group] man's torso, much like one slices a mango.

then i woke up.

good times!