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Month: October 2008

Autumn Storms

Being sick I decided it’d be best to stay home and work from here today. I normally don’t take time off work for being sick, but I’m feeling spinny, didn’t sleep well, and I’m having difficulties talking. Sitting at work today would just be awful, and I’d probably be making other people sick.

On the upside, I’m sitting here looking out the window as a gentle autumn storm is starting to roll through, removing leaves from trees. It won’t be very long until wanders in the woods are through tall, thick gray sticks over soft, decaying leaves. This will be nice.

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Sick!

Yep, I’m sick… What I thought was just some irritated tonsils yesterday has shown itself to be a full-blown cold. Sinuses are filling, throat hurts, and I feel spinny and spacy and drunk. Fun, eh?

I hope I’m better by Wednesday, as that’s Danielle’s birthday and we’re supposed to go to a French cheese event at Zingerman’s Deli.

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Coupons.com Sucks

Coupons.com requires you to install some special software for diabetic coupon printing, and it specifically does not work in VMs.

My grandma needed some coupons printed which are related to an arthritis drug called Zostrix (note the rel="nofollow") but was having some problems doing so. My mom also had such problems, so I decided to give it a go using my shiny new printer.

It turns out that the coupons for this drug are printed via Coupons.com, but when I went to use their service I was informed that it didn’t support my browser (FF3 on a Mac). Switching over to a VM running IE7 under XP I found that the site requires one to install some sort of silly coupon printing software in order to do the printing. Since I was using a VM I took a snapshot then attempted to install the software, at which point I received the above error.

The damned software refuses to install in a VM.

At this point I’m just not going to print the coupons… I don’t want to cruft up my normal or work machines (the only interactive non-VMs I have) with such crap, so there’s not much more I can do. Digging around a bit more on it, I found this writeup called A Closer Look at Coupons.com which details quite a number of questionable things done by this software.

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2008 Massive Fallout: Success

Jeff, Rob, and I (Steve) after finishing up our ride in Massive Fallout 2008.

Yesterday I rode in the 2008 Massive Fallout, a very large group mountain bike ride which routes through four of the best mountain bike trails in the area. I did three of the parks: Stony Creek, Bald Mountain, and Addison Oaks, riding along for most of the route with three other guys, Jeff, Rob, and Jeremy.

Per my bike’s computer I rode just over 46 miles. While I’ve ridden a longer distance in one go before, this was a much more difficult ride because of all the single track, amazingly fun climbs, etc. Here is the original map of the available routes [PDF] and here is marked-up map showing the approximate route we rode.

I only fell once, and that was during a fairly quick downhill part in Bald Mountain, where when going around a sandy curve at the bottom my front wheel started to slide out and I just went down. The only damage was a slightly scraped elbow, knee, and calf, and a slight sore thigh. Nothing bad at all. Today I’m just a bit worn out feeling still, but not sore. Still, I think I’ll wait a day or three before getting back out on the trails.

(Also: I keep thinking of getting a Surly Cross Check for riding non-mountain bike stuff. It’d be perfect for rides to Metro Beach, up the trails, stuff like that. I keep talking myself into and out of getting one, with the price of ~$1k being the biggest reason holding me back.)

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Paved Night Ride

Everyone who was on the ride around Mt. Clemens except for me. Left to right is Perry, John, Marty, Nick, and Mike.

Here, have a photo of everyone who went for a ride tonight from Mt. Clemens High School to Metro Beach and back, except for me. It’s not a very good photo. This one of Marty and Nick is better, despite the huge amount of noise from the high ISO.

After getting home from the ride I stuck the extra RAM in the printer and my Mac, and everything seems to be working great. The printer (Xerox Phaser 6130N) got a 1GB Crucial SO-DIMM (CT12864AC53E) to bring it to 1.1GB and the Mac Pro got 4GB of RAM bringing it to 7GB. I now can run multiple VMs with ease and deal with multiple large image files without a bunch of paging.

It’s been a good day and a good evening.

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Xerox Phaser 6130N

Xerox Phaser 6130, which was $249 via Costco.

A few weeks back I mentioned that I really needed a new printer, as my old HP LaserJet 5L had mostly ceased working. Well, last week Costco had a Xerox Phaser 6130N listed on their site for $249 shipped, with a Tripp Lite surge protector and USB cable.

I ended up jumping on this deal, because it has all the features I was looking for in a printer, except a duplexer, which really isn’t that important anyway. In short, this is a networked color laser which speaks real Adobe PostScript 3 (Wikipedia PostScript article), making it properly usable from any OS without silly Gutenprint (GIMP-Print) drivers and their crappy dithering.

The price was also outstanding, as Newegg sells this printer for $359.99 and most other places want even more than that. I also made a quick trip over to Crucial for a $16.99 piece of CT12864AC53E should bring the total RAM in the printer up to 1152MB. That ought to make printing complex documents fast.

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Budweiser American Ale

Budweiser American Ale poured into a glass. This is actually quite good for a macrobrew beer. Just as good as Sam Adams beers.

I have a confession to make.

This beer?

I like it.

It seems that the venerable old (and now non-American) Anheuser-Bush has decided to take on mid-size decent brewers like Sam Adams (Boston Beer Company) by actually brewing a decent, widely available beer.

While it’s not the best beer I’ve ever had and would probably find itself near the bottom of a beers-I-like scale, it’s just as good as any of the relatively easy to find in bars smaller beers like SNPA, Sam Adams’ Boston Ale, or the Goose Island beers.

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Cedar Point

Looking up at Wicked Twister as we waited in line to ride it.

A few months back Danielle and Sarah had received free tickets to Cedar Point for donating blood at an American Red Cross event at Eastern Michigan University. So, on Saturday Danielle, Sarah, Bo, and I drove down to Sandusky, OH and the park.

After a breakfast at Perkins (sort of like Denny’s or IHOP, but not crap) we headed into the park.

Part-way through the day we were going to take the train back to the front of the park, visit the car, then get some food, but weirdly we ended up running into Brian Cors and his wife Debbie. They were waiving to us from the train and while it took us a few minutes to recognize them from that far away, eventually we realized who they were and made arrangements to meet up with them. We all wandered around together for the rest of the day, in and out of the HalloWeekends haunted areas, and on various rides.

Here’s the list of rides and attractions visited between Danielle and I, in order:

Troika (Thrill Ride)
Wicked Twister (Roller Coaster)
Corkscrew (Roller Coaster)
Witches’ Wheel (Thrill Ride)
Gemini (Roller Coaster)
Cedar Creek Mine Ride (Roller Coaster)
Mean Streak (Roller Coaster)
Cedar Point & Lake Erie Railroad (Tranquil Ride)
Iron Dragon (Roller Coaster)
Mantis (Roller Coaster – Steve only)
UNDERTAKER U (Haunted House – Danielle only)
Terror Island (Scare Zone)
Raptor (Roller Coaster)

In order to get a better feel for using the Olympus Stylus 850 SW I brought it along on the trip, so there’s a few photos of the rides and such available. These photos can all be seen here in the album Cedar Point (October 2008) if you would like to see them.

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NiteRider TriNewt Beam Shots

NiteRider TriNewt Wireless: High

Having acquired a NiteRider TriNewt Wireless headlight for biking I wanted to compare it to my other lights, so I put together a small setup in the garage to see how they all compare.

In short, none of the other lights I have compare to the TriNewt.

These test shots were taken in my garage with both the light being tested and camera set up on my workbench 30 feet from the garage door. A Robin Myers Digital Imaging Gray Card (buy them here) was propped up along the base of the door for use as a color reference, if needed. All comparison photos were taken with a Canon EOS 20D and a Canon 24-70 f/2.8L lens at 24mm, ISO 100, f/11, six (6) second exposure, with the white balance native (aka “As Shot”). This exposure was based on an automatic test exposure of the target using the NiteRider TriNewt on high and chosen to set an upper limit of brightness.

Here’s the items and their results:

NiteRider TriNewt Wireless: High · Low
Planet Bike Blaze: Single Setting (On)
2D Cell Mag Lite w/ OEM 3W LED Upgrade: Single Setting (Focused As Narrow As Possible)
Planet Bike Superflash: Steady Mode
Reference Overhead Lighting: Two 300W Incandescent Bulbs

It’s pretty obvious that the TriNewt on either Low or High blows everything else I’ve had away. I can’t wait to try this out in the woods.

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