This Space for Rent

Out on the line

Mount St. Helens is visible in the distance as I ride along the Sauvie Island side of the Columbia River.

—orc Sat Mar 31 22:01:09 2018

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

A nice cup of mite

—orc Fri Mar 30 23:40:49 2018

Shopping

The end of the month shopping trip. I’m leaving the lowriders on the emergency randonneuse even when I’m not using them, because I want to see if they vibrate to pieces after chugging around on the gravel streets in east Portland.

Note that the groceries are heavy enough so they’re flattening the rear tire & the yak tire just a little bit. It was interesting taking this rig around corners and dodging potholes, because the Yak really wanted to keep tipping over after I stopped turning.

—orc Fri Mar 30 20:49:41 2018

Buckeley Animal Wright, 2008(ish)-2018

It turns out the cancer came back with a vengeance, and after five days of feeling sickly followed by one day of feeling good, Buckeley fell into a swift and terminal decline (he could only sleep in someone’s arms, his balance completely vanished, and by the time we took him to the vet for his trip to kitty valhalla he was having trouble breathing) and we had no option left except a swift and merciful death.

9 years of him, which was a lot but nowhere near enough. Fuck cancer, and not in a good way, and fuck mortality in general. I’m not a believer, but nevertheless I hope that there is a kitty vahalla and we can cuddle him again after our warranties expire.

—orc Thu Mar 29 16:06:04 2018

Dozing

We gave Buckeley some opiates to help deal with postoperative/postinfection pain, and he’s taking advantage of them to catch up on sleep.

—orc Sat Mar 24 23:15:47 2018

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Buckeley & Dust Mite doze on the bed

—orc Fri Mar 23 22:43:24 2018

Glass vs. sealant

Too much of a divot for the sealant to seal at 90psi, but enough for it to seal at 40psi. Which is not enough air pressure if I don’t want the machine bottoming out on any sort of substantial bump in the road. So I need to pull the tire, put a patch on the inside, then stick everything back together with new sealant and see if a patch + sealant works better than just sealant.

—orc Sun Mar 18 22:26:32 2018

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

9×9" is too big for a Dust Mite rack

—orc Fri Mar 16 22:16:22 2018

Shopping/testing, round three or four

These panniers can’t carry as much cargo as the Bob Yak can, but they can carry enough to exercise the lowriders.

—orc Sun Mar 11 20:20:33 2018

Stupidly trivial New Code!

flickr’s photo sharing spits out non-xhtml html for photo embedding, so if I embed my photos here I end up with pages that don’t validate on the w3c’s validator. There are a bunch of things that don’t validate, but the most egregious is that the <img> tags aren’t self-closing, which the validator screams bloody murder over.

So imgfix – only on github for now, because dumb and trivial – which walks files and adds a self-close to every unselfclosed <img/> tag it finds. There is still the problem of a flickr-only extended attribute (so the flickr image displaying javascript can find flickr images) and the occasional non-utf8 non-ascii character, but closing the <img> tags clears the vast majority of the errors that the w3c’s code finds.

Now I have to tweak the scripts around annotations so it automatically runs when I do a new post.

—orc Sun Mar 11 16:05:37 2018

Non-computer work

A 9×9 René Herse-style lowrider rack; I’m assembling the side panels first and then making a dummy fork so I can braze the mountpoints on. This rack has the lower mountpoint stay off-center because it’s going to be attached to a fork that has a mountpoint on the back of the fork leg, so it needs, even on the destination low trail fork, to be offset. (My prototype Herse-style rack, where I assembled the lower stay while the panels were mounted to the fork, is a bit more asymmetric than this one. It doesn’t matter quite so much on a rack I’m personally using – G-d only knows that symmetry is not one of my strong points – but this rack is for someone else and I need to take some care so that it’s not embarrassingly obvious.)

The top rail is not finished yet, either; I’m going to braze ball bearings into the ends of the rail so that it will look less unfinished.

—orc Sat Mar 10 18:24:50 2018

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Cleaning the microwave, Dust Mite-style

—orc Fri Mar 9 23:18:16 2018

Shopping

Taking the scenic route home from Trader Joe’s

—orc Tue Mar 6 16:03:15 2018

And finished

Prototype René Herse-style demountable lowrider racks, sans Dust Mite but with all of the various bits and pieces brazed together and ready for stress testing (grocery shopping; since I don’t bike camp or tour these racks are otherwise pointless for me.) And now that I’ve put a pair of them together, I know what I need to do for jigging up actual production racks.

—orc Sat Mar 3 19:41:22 2018

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Test fitting a pair of panniers onto a lowrider mockup.

—orc Fri Mar 2 22:28:47 2018