This Space for Rent

Picture of the day

A mongrel duck (a half-mallard, if you're playing D&D) attempts to intimidate me into feeding it. If it worked for great-6*10⁷ grandpa, it should work now.

It would have worked better if the size ratio of me to the duck was closer to the size ratio between me and great-6*10⁷ grandpa, but, alas, this is not the case.

—orc Wed Nov 19 20:39:16 2008

Cute baby picture of the day

The bears play their own variant of Clue (their variant had clone troopers and battle droids, and was somewhat short on the detecting part of the game.)

—orc Tue Nov 18 21:53:22 2008

Domestic vermin picture of the day

—orc Mon Nov 17 18:48:36 2008

Not just a pretty face

It’s not one of the super-huge loads that people have carried on their Free Radicals, but a weeks worth of groceries carry themselves very well, even including the traditional xtracycle shimmy (which is easily avoided by simply going faster.)

If it had been raining, the trip would have been more challenging (I need to carry a lightweight tarp for those days,) but on a sunny day like today it’s perfectly fine to sail down the avenues with our dinner peeking out of the top of the grocery bags.

—orc Sun Nov 16 15:33:50 2008

Picture of the day

Our new “brick” sidewalk, in the light of the moon. With this little light, you can’t easily see that it’s not quite finished yet, at least until you walk over it.

—orc Sat Nov 15 20:31:58 2008

And it hasn’t collapsed yet!

The triple threat of bad weather, a cold, and trying to finish redoing the front sidewalk before the city rolls in and charges us US$5150 to slap down a concrete slab has seriously cut down on my riding, but I've managed to get about 200km onto the bicycle since I tightened down the last bolt on this ridiculous thing. And the only thing that’s making unhappy sounds is the saddle, which has started to go squeaky-squeaky every time I push too hard in a too-high gear (I try to keep in a 52:18 gear as much as possible, but it doesn’t take too much of a headwind before I run out of steam and — accompanied by a chorus of squeak-squeak-squeak-squeaks — have to go down to 52:20 to maintain a reasonable pedalling rate) and which will need the loving touch of 3 in 1 oil to make it STFU until it finishes delaminating and I have to start selling my body on the street to buy a somewhat more durable replacement.

—orc Fri Nov 14 22:36:13 2008

Out on the line

—orc Fri Nov 14 21:35:35 2008

Picture of the day

It’s been raining a bit over the last few days (including a spectacularly wet morning yesterday; I went out on the bike to take some clothing to Goodwill, with the intent of going out on the line afterwards, but the 20mph headwind with extra downpour managed to get all the non-raincoated parts of me soaked to the skin by the time I'd reached Tacoma Street, which is not much more than a kilometer away from home. I didn’t want to test my water solubility, so I revised my plans slightly and went right back home after dropping off the Goodwilled clothing) and some of this rain has gone to putting every little creek and river around Portland into flood stage. Ordinarily Johnson Creek sits quietly in the distant channel, instead of flooding up over the bank and trying to cut a new channel closer to the path, but today it wanted to prove that it could cause flooding all by itself.

—orc Thu Nov 13 21:31:36 2008

Domestic vermin picture of the day

—orc Tue Nov 11 21:17:01 2008

Railroad picture of the day

EPT #100 in the foreground, EPT #5100 in the background. EPT #1202 is out of view to the left, and EPT #187 is still nowhere to be found.

—orc Mon Nov 10 22:18:11 2008

Railroad picture of the day

EPT SW-1 #100 sits on the OLCC spur (in the Milwaukie industrial park) at about 12:20 today. (Industar 50-2, 1/90th second @ f5.6)

—orc Sun Nov 9 13:27:08 2008

Domestic vermin picture of the day

Leo and Mavis are extremely interested in a lacewing fly’s attempts to mate with our living room chandelier.

—orc Sat Nov 8 22:58:11 2008

New Code!

Discount has (finally) been rolled up to version 1.3.0 with the addition of documentation for all of the new features I put in for the 1.3.0prexxx series.

To recap the feature list, I've added

1. In the theme program, if I pass it a directory argument it will attempt to open the file index in that directory.
2. Add the flag MKD_STRICT, which disables superscript (A^B ≠ A^B) and sane handling of A_B
3. Add blockquote-as-division processing; a blockquote that has a first line of >%ident% expands to

    <div class="ident">
          .
          .
          .
    </div>
   

   instead of the traditional

    <blockquote>
          .
          .
          .
    </blockquote>
   

4. Extend list processing to enable alphabetic lists;

    a. this
    b. is a
    c. test
   

   expands to

    <ol type=a>
    <li>this</li>
    <li>is a</li>
    <li>test</li>
    </ol>
   

   (enabled with -enable-alpha-list)
5. Add table of content support; if discount is run with the MKD_TOC flag, <hN>’s are name=d, and the function mkd_generatetoc() will dump a nested list containing links to every header in the document.
6. Add the new function mkd_xhtmlpage(), which dumps the document wrapped in a skeletal html page, with the title taken from the header block and styles taken from any <style> blocks.
7. Add the new demo program makepage, which is a program wrapper around mkd_xhtmlpage()

And I've fixed a few bugs and boundary conditions:

1. Single-character ETX headers now work.
2. Null lists don’t cause core dumps any more.
3. Don’t set subblock paragraph alignment unless that subblock actually has content.
4. Zero the input buffer every time I finish processing it (I was getting lookback errors with relaxed emphasis.)
5. An inline code block now needs both beginning and ending `’s
6. When processing lists, don’t kick header blocks out of the line.
7. Correct list processing so that

    - A
    1. B
   

   produces a single <ul> list, not a <ul> list followed by a <ol> list.
8. Do not superscript items inside a title.
9. The line ## should now expand to <h1>#</h1>

Have I missed anything? Perhaps I have, but there’s only one way to find out — grab this New Code! and see if the smoke comes rolling out of your computer or not.

—orc Sat Nov 8 20:31:00 2008

Friday (not) Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite has managed to collapse itself into a Schrödinger waveform and made itself impossible to accurately detect, so to take its place here’s a picture of a giant squid trying to eat my bicycle.

—orc Fri Nov 7 22:34:41 2008

An interesting story about bicycle damage

If you look closely at the Trekracycle picture in my previous post, you might notice that the poor pedal looks somewhat raggedy on the outside end. That’s because once upon a time (17 years ago, on Oahu) someone in a Corvette decided to turn off the road into their driveway without bothering to check to see if there was someone between their car and their driveway. Fortunately for me I was travelling far enough back so I could crank the wheel over to the far right when my field of vision suddenly filled with Arrest-Me Red, and fortunately managed to get the bicycle turned far enough so that the offending Corvette crunched into me right at that pedal instead of against the front wheel, and also fortunately for me the pedal stuck into the car long enough for me to get the bicycle turned out of the way and to not get flipped and used as an informal road surfacing.

Every time I look at it, I'm reminded that I need to be extra-paranoid when I'm on the public roads. One right hook is enough for a lifetime.

—orc Fri Nov 7 16:58:26 2008

Ready to ramble? (pt 4)

A fully functional trekracycle.

I probably would have been better off just going out and buying a Kona Ute, but if I'd done that I wouldn’t have been able to puzzle out just how to radicalize a less than perfect bicycle.

The finished bicycle contains parts from Rivendell (a Nitto F15 handlebar rack, a Sheldon Brown memorial fender nut), Clever Cycles (the Free Radical kit and the additional embarrassingly named attachment plate I needed to clip the Free Radical to the chainstays), Mike @ Clever Cycles (the warranty-killing surgery on the Free Radical), Western Bike Works (the Planet Bike fenders and the pink handlebar tape), Team Estrogen (a blinky taillight and the silver reflective tape that’s plastered all over the Free Radical), my local bike shop (new SRAM chain, Salsa Delgado 36-spoke rear wheel, 7-speed (13-32) Shimano cassette, Jagwire rear brake cable, Shimano brake cable housing, the yellow reflective tape that’s plastered all over the Trek frame, and a few random bolts (two to replace the rear FreeLoader bolts, which vibrated themselves out of the Free Radical when I went out for a hour yesterday, and one to attach the front of the rear fender to the Free Radical)), and, finally, my local hardware store, which provided the zip-ties I'm using to keep the wiggly snake that is my rear brake cable from wiggling loose.

The magpie-style colo(u)r scheme is not deliberate, but I don’t regret it. I like bright colo(u)rs, and the only change I would be likely to do would involve a bright screaming pink powdercoat.

When fully loaded up with U-lock, grocery bags, camera, water, cookie bars, patchkit, a spare tube, tire irons, and me the total weight is about 230 pounds, or me and about 45 pounds of bicycle. The additional 10% is noticable, particularly on upgrades, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing me down as much as I thought it would be (at least on short (<35km) trips along the flat-flat-flat Portland Traction Trail — more steeply graded routes may suffer a bit more of a speed penalty,) and this means that if I decide to go out for really long rides, I can pop in at the Big Big Store and pick up ice cream as a bribe before I return home.

—orc Fri Nov 7 16:34:09 2008

Ready to ramble? (pt 3)

After a brief trip out on the line sans rear brake (and averaging about 13.5 mph, which is down about an mph from my last trip sans free radical,) I took a bus over to the LBS (there is a short but really steep drop on Woodstock just west of 39th, and I don’t want to go blasting down that grade without having each wheel braked thankyouverymuch) to get a longer rear brake cable and housing. I didn’t want to cut the cable housing too short, so I was extra-paranoid when I measured, as you can see by this elegant wiggly snake that’s slithering down the seat stays towards the new rear wheel.

Amazingly enough, this arrangement actually works. I spent a little bit of time futzing around with trying to get the Cane Creek SCX-5 cantilever brake braking properly, but when that continued to fail I punted, pulled the Mavic 26" to 700c cantilever adapter plate out, drilled it for my old caliper brake, and used that instead. And now the silly thing actually brakes, which makes up for the host of kludges attaching it to the rest of the bicycle.

—orc Thu Nov 6 20:51:38 2008

Dealing with a dead refrigerator in the most fattening way possible

When a refrigerator dies, you can keep eggs edible for a while by bunging them into a cooler and packing them with freezy packs. After a while, though, it becomes tedious to step over and around the cooler whenever you're navigating through the kitchen and you need to deal with the eggs now if you don’t wish to have them become little aromatic death bombs.

Thank goodness for the Moosewood Dessert Cookbook and the everyday biscotti recipes found therein. It would be a shame to have the eggs go bad when they could be helping me replenish my caloric reserves after riding around (or trying to properly install the rear brake) on my bicycle.

—orc Wed Nov 5 21:57:54 2008

Ready to ramble? (pt 2)

• On the plus side, the trekracycle goes like a bomber. It feels really heavy, but I seem to be able to get it up to cruising speed in my traditional gear without any trouble.
• On the minus side, the rear brake, um, doesn’t actually brake. Part of that is because of the vast towering pile of bodges which is my construction technique (I foolishly cut off the cable too short, so I'm stuck with it diving into the brake at a steep angle) and part of it is that I didn’t plan the rear brake properly (which was why I cut off the cable too short.) Fortunately most of the braking on a bicycle is done with the front brake, so I can still stop the bicycle without having to wait for several hundred feet while the cantilever brake asks the tire to please consider slowing down, please? I'll go downtown and see if the people at Clever Cycles have any of the special xtracycle super-long brake cables for sale, and then I can revisit the whole “maybe the bicycle will slow down now, okay?” concept in a more fruitful manner.

—orc Wed Nov 5 10:39:40 2008

Ready to ramble?

The new rear wheel arrived at the LBS today (actually yesterday, but I didn’t check the phone messages until late at night) and I finally got the damned bicycle all assembled.

There was much excitment when I realized that the Xtracycle assembly instructions referred to a different version of the Free Radical than the one I actually had in hand (it chatted on about how important it was to wind various restraining straps around the body of the extension. The straps I had were not even long enough to do this, but they came with little hook thingies that attached to bosses that were not described in the instructions. After puzzling it over for a long time, I finally realized that the little pink anodized knobbies that came with the kit were intended to be screwed into the bosses, and then I could attach the hook thingies onto them and make the panniers about as tense as I was by this time of the project.

The less said about the new cantilever brakes the better. The rear brake cable drops down from where the top tube is welded to the seat tube, and until I threaded it under the old rear brake mount it was attached to the cantilever at such an acute angle so that the brake wouldn’t brake no matter what. Now it brakes. Poorly, but it brakes. A future enhancement will be to run the brake cable along the down tube and under the bottom bracket (along with the two derailer cables) and then up to the cantilever.

The resulting bicycle weighs a ton. Before I put on the Free Radical, the adapter plate that shifts the cantilever mounts from 26" to 700c positions (Clever Cycles didn’t have any 700c Free Radical kits because Xtracycle has decided that there’s no call for cheddar in these parts,) the new Delgado wheel, and the important but heavy kickstand, the Trek weighed in at ~22 pounds. It’s not quite so light now — from picking it up, I think it’s about 34 pounds right now, and I haven’t loaded up the panniers with my essential tool kit and a U-lock yet (the Trek by itself was such a quaintly old machine that I felt safe with a simple cable lock. But now that I've tossed another US$700 into the thing, I think I've made it enough more appealing to the light-fingered classes so that a cable lock would be a “yoo hoo, here I am! Come and steal me!” sign) — and it’s going to be really interesting seeing how much I'm slowed down when I take it out for my next long(ish) ramble around east Portland.

(The OOF picture is because the el-cheapo MIR-1 40mm lens I used is just a little bit out of adjustment. At least the blurriness hides the bodge I made of rewrapping the right handlebar.)

—orc Tue Nov 4 22:56:27 2008

Picture of the day

—orc Mon Nov 3 20:53:44 2008