Mar 29, 2010
When I was in the middle of riding the birkie I mentioned that it would be moderately easy to make a saddlebag support if you had enough steel tubing, a pipe bender, a vice, and a drill. And when I got home and unpacked my (hilariously overfull) handlebar bag I realized that I already had all those things, so there was nothing stopping me from making one myself.
What I didn’t have (or have but can’t find) is a piece of aluminum billet to drill and cut as the seatrail clamp. So after a mere week of looking for it, I decided I’d just bend the support now and then drill and cut the seatrail clamp when I got the aluminum. So after 20 minutes (40 minutes if you count the prototype#0 attempt, which had one of the bends in the wrong place due to my bending one leg from the wrong end. Whoops. At least I’ll be able to use some parts of it when I braze up a porteur rack some time in the future) of fussing with the super high quality hardware store pipe bender, a piece of steel pipe has been converted into an saddlebag support that just needs a bracket & a saddlebag to go onto the midlifecrisismobile.
(Update: And now it’s ¾ths of a project of the day; I found an aluminum stump piece that used to fit around a 4x4, and it’s nice ¼th inch aluminum plate. I’ve hacked
a chunk out of it and cut it into two stout beams, and now have to clamp them together and
drill holes for the seat rails & saddlebag tubing to fit into.)
—orc Mon Mar 29 16:47:50 2010
Mar 28, 2010
I disassembled the rear wheel from last night’s salvage discovery and, after cleaning up (and repacking – there was absolutely no grease left in the drive side bearing race) and polishing I ended up with this nice old french 36 hole hub, which I can, in my copious spare time, lace into one of the salvaged 700c rims I’ve got lying around in the basement.
Maybe I could build it up as a 3 or 4 speed rear wheel(12/16/21/26, maybe?) or embrace my inner nerd and build it up as a fixed gear hub.
—orc Sun Mar 28 21:12:24 2010
Discount has been shoved up to version 1.6.4 with a bugfix for html block
handling, a couple of new feeping creatures, and some additional testcases
that cover the fixes to `code` sections that I put into version 1.6.3.
The defect was that text following the closing tag of a
html block would cause following content to be misprocessed
(besides, of course, the existing defect that that text would
not be processed.) The bugfix is that I now split following
content into a new logical line, so input like
blah blah
foo
which used to output
blah blah
foo
now outputs
blah blah blah
foo
The (creeping) features are
- Ryan Tomayko@github modified his copy of discount to do smartypants with
're, 'll, 've', 'm', and 'd so I sucked those
changes into the baseline code.
- earthboundkid@github suggested the new pseudo-protocol
lang:<whatever> which would expand into
<span lang=<whatever>…</span>
The additional testcases are to catch mishandled backslashes
in code sections (most recently documented at
http://code.reddit.com/ticket/695.) This defect was
corrected in version 1.6.3, and I testcased it then, but
more tests are always good.
I’ve been using it locally for the past week or so, and nothing seems to have
exploded, so that makes it the ideal New Code! for you to download
and play with.
—orc Sun Mar 28 10:43:25 2010
Mar 27, 2010
The only piece of roadside rando junk I saw on the birkie last weekend was a solitary pair of needlenose pliers that were lying in the bike lane on highway 47 just north of highway 8 (and, more importantly, about 800 feet away from the end of the brevet at the Grand Lodge) which I didn’t pick up what with the whole “get to the end of the line and be finished with the brevet” thing. So, to make up for it, when I saw this wrench lying by the side of Skyline just south of Cornelius Pass Road, I came to what would have been a screeching stop if not for it being an approximately 80° upgrade and picked it up.
I guess it’s a spark plug wrench?
I think it might be the right size to use as a wrench for the tension screw on my Brooks saddles, but if not I’m sure I’ll find some use for it.
UPDATE: Tonight I went down to the store and I found some even better rando junk on the way home; a pair of 27" wheels in shiny steel. I don’t know if I can actually use them on a bicycle (they won’t fit into the trek and they’d require more fender trimming than I care to think about to put them onto the mlcm. Plus they’re steel, and weigh a ton compared to the aluminum alloy wheels I’ve got on both bicycles today) but I can pull the spokes off them and then turn around and build them back up as a way to learn how to lace wheels.
—orc Sat Mar 27 11:27:12 2010
Michael Wolfe’s UGB200k is a very nice R200 permanent that I’ve ridden multiple times (3 successfully, one DNF) and will probably ride many times more. But it’s not perfect; it starts down by the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge, which is not the greatest place for services (and, just as important for me, it’s about 3 miles away from home, so I have to get on my bicycle 12! whole! minutes! in! advance! to ride down to start the ride, and then I have to do the same thing all over again to get back home after I finish. Okay, so it’s not a Forest Grove situation where it’s 1h45 out, 2h30 back, but still)
So I was thinking that if I moved the start of the loop a little ways south – down to Bybee & Milwaukie – it would put it closer to many services (2 coffeeshops,five bars, a QFC branch, an ice cream shop, a pizzaria, a sushi joint, three restaurants) and also within about 350 feet of my front door. And while I’m at it, I can extend the loop so that it uses Upper Highland Road instead of Lower highland road (about 150 feet more elevation) and route along Milwaukie to get down to the Springwater Trail in the first place and then back from the Eastside Esplanade to get back to the end of the loop in the last place.
And I was also thinking that this might be a good week to actually draw the map & make up a cuesheet, because after discovering that the Three Capes R300 was inconveniently scheduled for the same day as Silas’s eighth birthday party, I got an incredible itch to do something nownownow and if I did this one I’d be able to see how my thoughts would work out in reality.
I didn’t mention this to anyone; Friday conflicts pretty seriously with people who are employed (And since it was a checkride, there is none of that pesky ACP or RUSA credit; it’s just a R200 for the sake of riding an R200.) So, at the slightly more G-dly hour of 8:08 this morning, I rolled out the door and headed out, alone, towards the east, hoping that I could beat the 8h31 riding time I did when I rode the Birkie last weekend.
That grand plan didn’t last long. I was barely away from home when I rolled over some broken class and punctured the rear tire (which put me on the horns of a dilemma; I’d promised to DQ myself if I had a flat, but here I was almost within spitting distance of home and if I abandoned I’d roll back in before 9am. So I decided, while I was pulling out the newly punctured tube and stuffing my spare (unpunctured, which was a relief) tube into the rear wheel, that I would just pretend that nothing happened and I’d go on my way.) And after I finished repairing the flat and setting out, I became aware that I just didn’t have the same degree of energy that I had when I was riding out to Birkenfield last week. Not 650b slow, but xtracycle slow, and this meant that I’d really have to push it if I wanted to get back in under 11 hours (I almost made it; I rolled in the door at 19:12, so if I hadn’t have had that flat I would have turned in a 10h42 loop even at the 13mph moving average I maintained around the loop.)
Having the flat killed my timings; I made it to Bell Station 8 minutes before the control closed (and I really need to redo Bell Station as an untimed pacing control – I want to use it to force people to route on the Springwater Trail, but I don’t want to risk having them blow their loop if stoplights are against them) and Boring at about 12 minutes before that control closed. Past that I managed to maintain a fast enough pace running uphill so that the really steep ramps (or the obchaindrop, which turned out to be the first way my chain reminded me that it’s overdue for a cleaning and relubing) were more than made up for by the screamingly fast downhills, and I managed to pick up about 30 minutes per control past that point.
And I took pictures this time around – after the embarrassing lack of pictures on the Birkie, I wasn’t going to have my pentax spend most of the trip sitting forlornly in the handlebar bag.
The first pictures I took were of the clearcut on Ridge Road about halfway between Redland Road & Lower Highland Road. I was clicking happily away at the horizon when I realized that there was the freshly dismantled skeleton of some large ruminant sitting basically at my feet (via “oh, that bush looks a lot … like … a – holy shit, that’s a skeleton!”), so I quickly took some pictures of it and then got back on my bicycle to get away, because if whatever it is can take down a big deer, it could probably take down a skinny primate.
The next picture was of the ramp up to Upper Highland Road; I was going to take it as a “haha, I don’t have to go up there!” when I remembered that my reroute said that I did have to go up there. *sigh* – at least the ramp was nowhere nearly as steep at the one I just climbed up (half a mile or so at >10%, ho ho!)
And then there were no pictures for a long time; farmland is pretty, but farmland under a grey sky is not so interesting, and some of the non-farmland may have been interesting, but I encountered it while I was zipping past going downhill really fast, so I wasn’t going to stop, and then when I reached the riverbottoms around Canby my mellow was harshed by a stiff crosswind which took most of my concentration to keep me from being blown off the road.
Until I dropped down to Butteville & the Champoeg Park bike path, which greeted me with a blast of sunlight while I was following the path through the regrowth forest east of the Park. And then (after discovering that the water standpipes near the cabins had been capped for the winter, sniff!) I was too busy trying to get over to OR219 so I could use this crosswind as a tailwind for a while.
And in Newberg (after a blessed 10-15 minutes of being blown along at a reasonable speed for a change) I stopped at the Chapter’s bookstore/coffeehouse for a hot chocolate, and got to see first some rain, and then full sunlight, and then more rain as I rolled north on Tangen Road, then west on North Valley Road.
And then, halfway between Newberg and the control at Gaston, the clouds gave up the ghost, rolled away, and let me finish the ride turtling along in the warm rays of the sun.
The tailwind was nice, because it meant I got to go from just west of Newberg up to past Cornelius at half again as fast as the cross and headwinds we letting me go the rest of the way, and when I reached the climb up to Skyline Tualatin Mountain blocked most of the rest of the wind until I reached the top of the hill near Thompson (at which point I dropped quickly down into the shelter of the other side of the hill, and didn’t get any wind until I hit Naito Parkway and was heading south towards home.)
The final statistics for the loop were
- 13mph moving average. Xtracycle slow.
- 9h34 moving time.
- 11h04 brevet time.
- about 20 little stops to dig out & gnaw upon potatoes and/or chocolate.
And the only thing I forgot to do was to clean the chain before I went out (I took the mlcm out on a short loop in the rain yesterday afternoon, and the rain washed a lot of the boeshield off the chain. As a result I got to listen to the chain going squeakySqueakysQueakysqUeakysquEakysqueAkysqueaKysqueakY for 60 effing miles until I rolled in the door.) Tomorrow I’m taking the chain off, El Duking it, then properly glooping it with Chain-L so it will stay quiet for a more reasonable amount of
time.
And I’ll probably have to replace the rear Nashbar duro tire while I’m at it. It’s starting to get somewhat chewed up after ~1000 miles, and I don’t know if it’s going to last any longer than the Ruffy Tuffies did.
—orc Sat Mar 27 00:48:33 2010
Mar 26, 2010
Dust Mite takes a break in the middle of the UGB200k.bis checkride we took today.
—orc Fri Mar 26 22:37:27 2010
Mar 25, 2010
When we climbed up to the top of Latourell Falls yesterday afternoon it gave me the opportunity to take a ridiculous number of pictures of it as we went along.
—orc Thu Mar 25 14:59:37 2010
Mar 24, 2010
A bunch of tiny flowers grow out of a cliffside near Oneonta Gorge.
—orc Wed Mar 24 20:57:13 2010
The bears hurl stones into Oneonta Creek this afternoon.
—orc Wed Mar 24 20:52:37 2010
A Ruby Junction-bound train is briefly framed by the Airport line’s circular bridge as it departs from Gateway Transit Center.
—orc Wed Mar 24 20:47:40 2010
Mar 23, 2010
Silas enjoys a warm sunny spring day.
—orc Tue Mar 23 22:13:16 2010
Mar 21, 2010
Russell discovered that Lego was making some Prince of Persia kits, but they won’t be available for a few months. So he decided to to avoid the wait and make one himself.
—orc Sun Mar 21 23:59:29 2010
It had been nearly a month since I did my last bike ride of any
reasonable length (a Vernonia loop via Scappoose, returning
on the ex-United Railways bike path & Baseline, et al.)
so I was starting to get ancy to do something more extravagant
than shoving the trek up to Sandy to get donuts (82km, which isn’t
chicken feed, but if I can get there and back in 4 hours it’s not
really that much of a death march, is it?) and for the past couple
of weeks the long range weather forecast had been promising that
March 20th would be warm and sunny.
So, with having several long
loops under my belt without DNFing in various
amusing ways, I was able to sign up to ride yet another
insane loop out of the conveniently located (but not for me)
McMenamins Grand Lodge in Forest Grove.
So when friday rolled around without a weather prediction for
rain, snow, or locusts, I boiled up some potatoes, sorted out
a couple of layers of clothing, crammed everything into
the front bag of the midlifecrisismobile, then set the alarm
for the ungodly hour of 4:45 and went to sleep (at 11pm.)
At 4:45 (after a series of interesting nightmares involving
trying to ride out to Forest Grove. The first one was solely
about trying to ride through riverview cemetery and reaching
the top of the hill at 6:30, which woke me up when I realized
that there was no way in G-ds green earth that I’d be able to
make the next 24 miles out to Forest Grove in the next 30 minutes.
The second one had Forest Grove in Canada, I think, and involved
a shipping service losing the midlifecrisismobile while I rode
up with the ride organizers. Fortunately I got 20 minutes
of sleep after that that didn’t involve any dreams, just blissful
unconciousness) I dragged myself out of bed, guzzled some stone
cold tea and a cookie bar, checked the weather (50°F at 4:45!),
put on a second layer of gloves anyway, then rolled out the door at
5:07am to gallop out to Forest Grove.
Climbing through Riverview Cemetery was slow, but only 20 minutes
worth of slow, and I made really good time the rest of the way out
to the start of the brevet, with only two incidents marring the
trip (the first being that I dropped my chain when I went bumping
over the ex-Red Electric mainline in Beaverton, and the second being
that it was not 50°F in Forest Grove, but 35°F – I reached
the Grand Lodge at 6:56, which normally would have been enough time
to pay, fill out the ORR membership card, sign the waiver, and get
myself into the mob for the start. But, no, my fingers were frozen
stiff and I was laboriously trying to write my name when the rope
dropped and everyone else went scrambling away like very cold
bullets from a gun.
But never mind that (nor the poor midlifecrisismobile, which I
bumped into and toppled over onto its driveside while I was attempting
to write my name) – it wasn’t more than about 5 minutes later that
I rolled out of the parking lot, turned onto Pacific Ave, and bolted
northwest as fast as my (chilled and sleepy) legs could push me. My plan
was to get as far up towards Timber as quickly as I could before the
grades slapped chains on me and forced me to slow down, and I did
managed to catch up to and pass many of the riders (admittedly a
huge subset of the faster riders had obligingly stopped in Glenwood,
so that feat is not quite as impressive as it might seem) before I
dropped the chain again on the initial climb away from highway 6
on Timber road and, while I was unwrapping it from my pedal (MKS
Silvan pedals have little prongs facing inwards which are just the
right size to trap chain, so rewrapping the chain involves some
careful pedal rotation to untrap the chain before I can hook it onto
the chainwheel again) got to see the entire fast pack go zipping on
by, never to be seen again except going the other way.
Not that I didn’t expect this would happen; I am not the fastest
climber around, and a few other people would pass me by as I wound
my solitary way up to the summit. The descent was equally uneventful
(aside from a brief detour to photograph POTB 6164) except that I
was passed by Peg & Lesli, who, happily, were riding at about the
same speed as I was and, even more happily, were willing to allow me
to merge into their little group for what turned out to be the rest
of the ride.
Timber Road, particularly the part from Highway 26 up to the ballpark
of Vernonia, was fairly impressively bumpy, but it followed the Nehalem
River gradually downhill the whole way. Still cold, of course, and
we rolled into the control in Anderson Park it was somewhere in the
ballpark of the mid thirties. And this time I actually managed to
see (but not photograph because my fingers were still cold)
Oregon American 102, which I had completely missed
when I went through Vernonia in February.
After a break (20 minutes?) for muffins, sweetrolls, and some hot
coffee, we were off up Keasey Road for a informational control,
then over a short hill to return to the the Nehalem Highway (SR47)
for the 18 or so miles up to Birkenfield.
18 scenic miles up to Birkenfield, but also 18 bumpy miles up
to Birkenfield. So I was not the only one happy to take a leisurely
half an hour (which was enough to gather in almost everyone else who
was behind us. I think that only Marcello Napolitano and his
extremely low-slung tadpole trike were still
out on the line when we three pulled out of town for the return trip
(which I announced by “well, this is too hard. I’ll just abandon
and ride back to Forest Grove” [which I did, modulo the abandon
part])) before turning around to continue back to Vernonia and points south.
Around Apiary, I found myself (a) in the lead and (b) a good ways
ahead, so I decided to stop and take a picture of Peg & Lesli as
proof that I was not doing this whole thing alone. But when I
pulled the bicycle off the road and grabbed my Pentax out of the
camera bag, it dumped batteries all over the ground because the
wonderfully surfaced road had shaken the battery bay door loose.
*sigh* I could have stayed there and tried to piece it together,
but then I would have been a long ways behind, so I stuffed everything
into my handlebar bag and “sprinted” after them, catching up after
not more than a mile or two.
And in no time at all, we were back in Vernonia (at ~1:30pm, or about
6½ hours after I rolled away from the Grand Lodge.) And it was
warm and sunny, and in the high 60s, which was quite a welcome
change from the somewhat colder morning. So we parked ourselves
at the Black Bear Coffee Company, and settled in for another
nice long break (joined fairly quickly by Lynne and Holden, and
then, after 15 minutes or so, four of the slower group) where I
managed to reassemble my poor camera (but not to go up the street
to get pictures of the shay) in between repacking my
handlebar bag, chattering about handmaking a saddlebag support,
and generally relaxing in an extremely slothful manner for having
already ridden 110 miles that day.
And so, after another nice long pause, we got back on the bicycles and
rolled off towards our second climb up to Timber for the day. A bit
slower than the trip up, but still at a pretty good clip. I found
myself wanting to ride faster than either Peg & Lesli, so after
finding myself a little bit ahead again I pulled off to the side
of the road and managed to snap a couple of (out of focus, alas)
pictures proving that I was not out there by myself. And then I
wedged the bicycle back into my handlebar bag and bolted up the
road after them, catching up on a small bump in the steadily uphilling
road up to Highway 26.
Highway 26 was busy. Really busy. We ended up standing there
for what was easily 5 minutes, waiting for a gap in traffic. And
no gap appeared until a state patrolman (who had been sitting about
1000 feet west writing a ticket for a speeder) drove up and blocked
the eastbound lanes so we could continue. And the feared climb up
to Timber? It’s not so bad from the north; it’s 600+ feet up from
Highway 6, but only 300 feet from Highway 26. It took 20 minutes to
climb up to the summit, and about an equal amount of time to drop
down to Highway 6, which was even busier than Highway 26, and which
was extremely unpleasant to ride alongside down to Glenwood, where
we stopped briefly at the Shell station for the penultimate control.
One pleasant thing about Glenwood was that a strong tailwind was
blowing down from the coast ranges, so when we finished up there
(Lynne and Holden caught up to us soon after we pulled in, and
coalesced into a larger group for the final 13 miles into Forest
Grove) we were blown down Gales Creek Road at an average speed
of somewhere in the ballpark of 18mph.
We tried to run a paceline for the last 8 or so miles into Forest
Grove, and aside from my tending to shoot off the front of the
line despite downshifting so I’d have to spin like crazy (fsvo
“crazy” – I’m a fairly slow pedaller, so my idea of spinning like
crazy might be everyone else’s idea of a regular old cadence) to go too fast,
we stayed together until we crested the hill into Forest Grove,
where it became a disorganized scramble for the end of the line
which we all reached at 5:27pm, or in 10h27 after the official
start of the brevet.
And the weather? Clouds started to move in as we went over the
hill at Timber for the second time, but aside from that it was clear as a bell all
day and the promised evening rains didn’t even materialize until
after 8:30pm (which is when I finally crept through the front
door, after 177 miles and an unfortunate detour up Canyon Road
than resulted in my climbing another 1000 feet or so before
I got home.)
My GPS claims that I was moving for 8h31, so that means we spent
almost 2 hours at controls or stopped waiting for traffic on Highway
26. My moving average on the brevet was 14.5mph, which is 1.4mph
faster than the best speed I’ve gotten on the xtracycle, and is exactly
the slowest speed I can average if I have any plans to ride anything
longer than 200km.
Alas, the Pentax disassembled inself again somewhere between
Highway 26 and Forest Grove, so the next prototype of the handlebar
bag (or generic front bag, if I can sell enough stuff on ebay to
pay for a brazing torch) will need to have a dedicated Pentax
compartment that’s suspended in such a way to keep the camera
from being rattled too badly. And, also alas, when I tipped
the mlcm over in Forest Grove, I think I managed to trash yet
another one of the little handlebar end taillights
that I’ve installed on my bicycles (I’ve purchased on set of
Soma road flares and two sets of Trek-branded clones; two of
the Trek-branded clones, and one of the road flares, are now
dead. I’m going to have to build a taillight circuit and
run them off my generator, and that way I’ll be able to move
the circuit block to someplace (the head tube?) where I can
suspend it and reduce the vibration damage from clattering
over (and crashing sideways onto) rough roads.
The grand total of 177 miles was supposed to be 184 miles,
except that instead of taking the Beaverton-Hillsdale highway
through Bertha & looping through downtown, I took the Canyon
Road branch in downtown Beaverton and didn’t realize it until
I was high enough to make me not want to try and navigate my
way south to my preferred route. And by the time I reached
Skyline Blvd my legs were unhappy enough so I didn’t even
consider doing my traditional Clinton/41st/39th/Crystal Springs
loop to try and get me over 300km for the day.
If I do that, I guess I’ll just have to ride an actual R300.
Too bad the Three Capes loop starts in Forest Grove :-(
—orc Sun Mar 21 22:26:56 2010
Mar 20, 2010
POTB 6164 sits on the mainline in Timber, Oregon. Is it dead and marking the end of track? Is it the Timber switcher (there’s not much in Timber, but there are piles of lumber along the track east of Timber Road)? Is it being used as a MOW engine to maintain the now out of service track west to the washouts in Salmonberry Canyon?
If I had more time I would have poked around, but I was riding the Birkie and was thus on a bit of a time and energy constraint (the 200k Birkie + 86km to get from home to Forest Grove & back made for a fairly long day) and all I could do was scoot up someone’s gravel driveway to snap this picture before turning around and continuing my deathmarch to Birkenfield and back.
—orc Sat Mar 20 21:33:34 2010
Mar 19, 2010
Dust Mite inspects the prototype#0 saddlebag and suggests that it needs a slightly more robust stiffener on the top plate.
—orc Fri Mar 19 22:43:16 2010
Mar 16, 2010
Mount Hood, sunrise, a lenticular cloud, and a pattern of cirrus clouds in the background. Too bad about those pesky power and telephone wires!
—orc Tue Mar 16 09:32:16 2010
Mar 13, 2010
Mavis & Buckley help me test out flickr photo hosting.
—orc Sat Mar 13 10:00:44 2010
Mar 12, 2010
It turns out that the process of getting a static IP from Qwest is nothing more difficult that logging into your online Qwest account and going to an order page. And when you’ve ordered a static IP, you can then go to a rDNS page and set up the reverse dns properly, which means that for the first time in over a decade my home gateway maps the name to and from the IP address.
This is very nice.
It’s not going to last very long, because I got a static address so I can remove pell from the co-lo and move it into my basement (which will put mail, the inn server on pell, and my dns secondary close enough so I can hit the Big Red Switch without having to beg the co-lo into letting me into the server room) but it’s nice to be able to do who and not see someone else’s domain there on the screen.
(part of “remove pell from the co-lo” will involve building a new case & new machine (with a solid state disk,) because the big clunky 4u rackmount case will not be cluttering up my nice empty ¾ths height server rack. Anyone want to buy a 4u server case? I’ve got 5 of them, some including motherboards.)
—orc Fri Mar 12 21:40:26 2010
As part of the grand project of recolo/vpsing my server farm, I’ve set up a flickr account to hold a few photos. The advantage of flickr is that all the photo resizing is done in the bowels of the Yahoo! server farm(s). The disadvantage of flickr is that the free accounts are limited to 100mb, which is approximately 1/20th of the space that I’m currently using for photos on TSFR (it’s not as if it’s hideously expensive to pay for an unlimited account; US$25/year is easily paid for, even in my current poverty-stricken state. But it’s yet another thing that I’d have to keep track of.) But on the other other hand the advantage of flickr is that it’s a hideously popular website, and it would get more possibly-paying eyes looking at my photos. But on the other other other hand I’d have to redo the guts of annotations so I could have the weblog silently shove pictures over to Yahoo!
(*sigh* I wish I could afford to live in the Bay Area. Taking advantage of flickr would be much more convenient if I wasn’t located 750 miles and a state away from the Yahoo! data center.)
—orc Fri Mar 12 21:29:26 2010
As as side effect of moving out of the co-lo, I’ve had to think of new ways of doing secure offsite copies of my various software projects.
Many of my projects are under a popular distributed version control, so there’s a pretty easy way of making an offsite copy of:
(and probably more; look at http://github.com/Orc if you want to see the current list.)
And, as a bonus, I think that github actually uses Discount to do their markdown processing, so it’s almost incestuous to place a clone of its SCCS tree there. And now people can actually marvel (or shudder as they prefer) at how I do my version control (since I don’t believe in the ridiculous practice of sanitizing my SCCS repository so that all you see is the published releases.)
—orc Fri Mar 12 00:41:14 2010
Mar 11, 2010
My increasingly flaky colo has finally reached the point where I can’t keep my computers there anymore, so I need to go out and find myself another place where I can keep my40gb/months of webpages + mail going without driving myself into bankruptcy.
(admittedly, it’s not 40 real gb – the biggest culprits for bandwidth sucking are various crawlers, and I’ve just put in some robots.txt scripts to keep the crawlers off the site except for Sundays. But there’s a huge amount of traffic going into my homepage and weblog even without that, and I’d hate to have those two sites go dark now that they’re basically all of my income (such as it is.))
—orc Thu Mar 11 17:00:19 2010
After Leo died, Chateau Chaos was left dangerously under the cat insanity level. We have since corrected this imbalance by the addition of a replacement male cat, who was named Buckley by the Cat Adoption Team and who is currently the subject of a frenzied name search by the rest of my family, who don’t think much of my suggestions of “Diesel”, “Duck”, “Montague”, or “Lord Buckley.”
—orc Thu Mar 11 09:22:15 2010
Mar 09, 2010
I’m trying to clean out the ridiculous amount of crap in my house, and this is part of it. It’s a Sugino crankset (170mm, 110/74 bcd triple, square taper of course) that I bought on ebay for the midlifecrisismobile several months ago. I ended up not using it because I set the mlcm up as a 1x8 (and when I eventually surrender to age I’ll put a double (52/40) up front to give me the same low gear range as the Trekracycle has right now, but an even more ridiculous upper end) so it’s either going to sit at home forever or go to a better home.
No, I don’t know what model it is. I spent $30 to buy it on ebay, and it came pre-weathered for my viewing satisfaction.
—orc Tue Mar 9 15:47:15 2010
Mar 08, 2010
After a gap of too many months, I finally managed to get back up to Sandy for another important trip to the donut store & another baker’s dozen of shaken, not stirred, donuts. If I take the Springwater Trail, OR 212, then Orient, Kelso, and Bluff Road, it’s only 25.65 miles (41.28km) up there, which means that if I hustle right along (fsvo “hustle”) I can get there in 1h45 and then back home in 1h40 (or faster if I don’t stop to pick up locks that come hurling out of the xtracycle saddlebags after I hit a bump. But I did stop this time) which means that I can deliver almost hot out of the oven donuts to my family almost on demand.
It was cold this morning, but that’s not why the photo is misty – I’d tucked the camera into my hip pocket, so it spent most of the trip up there sitting in a small fabric sauna.
—orc Mon Mar 8 13:56:13 2010
Mar 07, 2010
A north/westbound i205 train approaches the bridge over Johnson Creek Blvd early this afternoon.
—orc Sun Mar 7 16:04:42 2010
Mar 06, 2010
Discount has been hacked up to version 1.6.3 with an almost complete rewrite of the code block and backtick handlers. I’d been reading the spec too restrictively and only checked for one or two backticks to enclose `code` sections. So this meant that ``` code ``` sections wouldn’t process properly, and, worse yet, ``` code `` sections ``` would end up looking almost totally unlike the output from the reference dingus.
And to add insult to injury, I was (incorrectly) processing backslash escapes inside the code handler.
So I ripped out the old handlers, and after a short intermission for a truly spectacular allergy attack, rewrote them so they (a) made a little more sense and (b) worked more like the dingus. And then I published the new release, and here it is to tell the tale.
—orc Sat Mar 6 22:05:43 2010
Mar 05, 2010
It was 23:30 before Dust Mite reminded me what day it was. Ooops!
—orc Fri Mar 5 23:49:01 2010
Mar 02, 2010
When I was out doing errands yesterday (going to the 39th & Holgate Trader Joe’s via a very indirect route) I was briefly stopped at the 99e underpass because the construction company was in the throes of building it.
—orc Tue Mar 2 22:21:41 2010
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