Month: February 2012

Crucial m4 SSD for Data Processing

Published February 14, 2012

I’ve been processing some relatively large sets of data at work lately, and I’m running into disk IO issues after kicking off some of the data processing tasks. As an easy way to alleviate this I picked up a 64GB Crucial m4 SSD and stuffed it into my laptop’s optical drive bay via a $20 Nimitz-branded SATA hard drive adapter acquired from eBay. The drive itself was $99.99 from Micro Center, and since I purchased it myself once I’m done working with it I’ll be able to repurpose it in a personal machine of some sort.

While not a panacea nor excuse for my poor habits of bolting together VBScript and GNU command line utilities, it has helped quite a bit. One typical script (immediately post-reboot, with an empty disk cache) takes ~120.234 seconds to run a task from the hard drive and ~28.400 seconds from the SSD. I’ve seen similar speed improvements across the board, and this really helps when I’m prototyping things and wanting feedback as quickly as possible.

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There’s a Rock in my Hops!

Published February 12, 2012

After some fun bike riding I got to brewing another batch of beer; a slight variant on a blonde ale referred to by Cap N Cork as Vegas Gold. This was to have 2 oz of Sterling Leaf Hops in it (these are from LD Carlson), but while measuring them out into two mugs there was a bang of something hard falling into one of the containers.

Reaching into the hops I found this rock, which per my kitchen scale has a mass of ~10g. I thought that one of this bag of hops seemed a bit small, but I figured it was just a little more compact than usual. Since it constituted a bit more than one third of a bag the finishing and aroma additions were a bit short, but I’m sure the beer will be fine. And now I have a hop-encrusted rock!

(Thankfully this was in the bag that I’d been measuring out and not the one that got dumped right into the kettle. While I don’t think the rock is particularly dirty I’m glad it didn’t get boiled in case something odd might have come off or out of it.)

UPDATE: I’d emailed this post to LD Carlson, and a very friendly person there contacted me and ended up sending me some replacement hops which I used in my next batch of beer. Interestingly, they no longer stocked Sterling Leaf Hops, so the ones that I purchased must have been pretty old. Hopefully it won’t mess with the flavor of the beer. Maybe I should stick to pelletized stuff for now on…

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Fat Bikes at River Bends

Published February 12, 2012

This afternoon, in lieu of a lengthy dirt road ride^†, a few folks and I met up at River Bends to ride some snow covered trails. This was quite a bit of fun and I managed to get in just under an hour and a half of moving time. Some of the trails were a bit iffy on the current tires on the Mukluk (particularly the Endomorph on the rear), but it was still a good time. I may want something a bit knobbier next year, but for now I’ll stick with what I have.

The photo above shows James (with the mohawk, who didn’t originally plan to meet up with us but just happened along as we were in the parking lot), Bob, and Nick as they are queued up to cross a stream in River Bends’ Seasonal Loops by walking on a very makeshift bridge. I’d already passed, as did Carlos who was standing a few feet behind me. This ended up being a pretty nice ride, and hopefully I’ll be able to get out for a few more rides this winter. Maybe tomorrow… We’ll see…

^† Mostly due to the 30MPH+ wind gusts and negative-digit-Fahrenheit wind chill.

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Found: Danielle’s Pink Mitten

Published February 9, 2012

Back at the end of January Danielle was hiking at Stony Creek, but lost her mitten while on the Roller Coaster. Despite a post to the MMBA Forum’s Lost and Found section it hadn’t been returned.

Then, last night while out riding Stony Creek in the dark something pink and sparkly caught my eye as I passed a tree. It was Danielle’s pink mitten! Someone had picked it up and set it in the crook of a tree along the side of the trail.

~~Now Danielle has a matching pair of mittens again. Yay!~~

UPDATE: Turns out that she’d declared the situation lost and thrown out the other mitten this past weekend. Oh well.

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Nice Trainer Setup

Published February 8, 2012

I’m pretty happy with the current trainer setup in the basement. It is located in front of the TV but behind the futon so I can watch a movie while riding and Danielle can use the futon (to watch the movie or play games) without us needing to move anything around. My netbook is on a keyboard stand in front of the bike so I can use TrainerRoad instead of a typical bike computer, and the I-beam spanning the basement is directly overhead and serves as a convenient shelf. The kegerator of homebrew is for after.

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Flat (Car) Tire!

Published February 7, 2012

En route to Cap N Cork after work I was about to cross Hayes (on 21 Mile) when I heard a thunk similar to a rock hitting my wheel well. Perhaps half a mile I found myself pulling over and getting out of the car to confirm that my tire is flat. A quick change later and I was on my way, but the nail-sized puncture hole will require some patching work. Hopefully Discount Tire or another local shop will be able to sort it out tomorrow. It looks to be a best-case-possible patchable hole.

Since I was out along side the road I had to use the trunk-mounted screw jack. This worked pretty well, except the thread on the main screw is rather fine pitched, which meant it took quite a few turns to get the vehicle off the ground. This is probably a good feature overall because it means that less effort is required to lift the vehicle, but tonight it meant a good bit more time spent out in the cold.

It’s also probably a good thing that I had one of my bicycle tire pumps with me. I checked the spare before putting it on, and it was about 20psi low. Whoops.

(Note that the second, bottom hole in the photo is not damage but instead one of the places where a stud could be fitted. My snow tires are clearly not studded.)

UPDATE: Fixed for free by Discount Tire. From what the guy at the shop said it was a screw, and a broken off part of it was left inside the tire. I suspect the THUNK sound I heard was the outer part of the screw breaking off, and that would then explain the non-immediate deflation.

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Notched Pink Foam

Published February 6, 2012

This evening before heading home I stopped off at Home Depot and picked up some pink foam to line the inside of the Kegged Beer Cooler / Kegerator collar for additional insulation. It cut nicely and before long I was sticking it to the inside of the collar with hot melt glue. I was even able to notch it to fit cleanly around the tap fittings.

The wire basket fits nicely on top of the foam, and with the basket moved to the other side there’s now enough room for the fourth keg. Not that I have anything to put in it, nor a gas with which to connect it… But it fits!

All that’s left to do on this project is finish off the drip tray and add a Y fitting to one of the gas lines.

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Salsa El Mariachi as 1×9

Published February 4, 2012

This morning I finished converting my single speed Salsa El Mariachi to a 1×9 (one chainring, normal 9-speed cassette) setup with a rigid fork which I think might be nice for springtime dirt road rides. Reusing the old (and relatively light) rear wheel from the Titus meant that this setup is essentially the same weight as when the bike was a single speed. There’s probably a couple more ounces now, but the scale shows it around 26 pounds before and after, so this is a nice treat.

To complete this build I used the following:

· Salsa Ring Dinger (Bash guard / chain guide.)
· N-Gear Jump Stop
· SRAM X9 Long Cage Rear Derailleur (2010)
· SRAM X9 Trigger Shifter (2010)
· DT Swiss X370 / X470 Wheel (old wheel from the Titus Racer X 29er)
· Generic Bottom Bracket Cable Guide
· Jagwire L3 Housing and Caps
· SRAM PC-991 Chain (Leftover / Spare)
· Shimano LX-level 11-34 Cassette

Of all these parts the only bits that I had to purchase were the Jump Stop, shifter, and cassette which were purchased from Amazon, the MMBA Forum, and the MMBA Expo (respectively). Pete helped me out with the bottom bracket cable guide, as he apparently has a stash of them. Everything else was laying around the house leftover from other projects or bikes. Total out of pocket cost for this project was less than $60.

Tomorrow’s plans are for dirt road riding, so to test everything out I set off from home and did a nice paved route up to Stony Creek and back, totaling just under 35 miles. I ended up stopping off twice to visit a friend who works at local fire stations; these (and in particular some of the tools there) were pretty nifty to see. The ride went well overall, and I was able to ride pleasantly fast (for me), regularly seeing 20MPH+ including a 36MPH+ downhill just outside of Stony Creek.

So far the bike is working out really well. With a 34t chainring I had a quite pleasant gearing, spinning out only when on longer/faster downhills. For most things that I did today it was a quite sufficient gearing, and something that I could also see myself enjoying on most local trails.

The knobby Racing Ralph is probably a bit more than needed as a front tire, but for now it’s what’s on the bike so I’ll leave it there. Perhaps I’ll switch to something a bit lower knob in a few days, but we’ll see (Kenda Slant Six, maybe?). For now I’m just hoping to enjoy riding dirt roads on a rigid geared bike with normal MTB-type tires. If we can’t have snow and/or frozen trails and/or properly dry trails dirt roads will have to do.

Here’s two more photos of the El Mariachi in its new 1×9 configuration:

· Sitting against a (unused this year, I presume) piece of snow plow equipment near some local condos.
· Detail of the 1×9 drivetrain.

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Kegged Beer Cooler Upgrades In Progress…

Published February 2, 2012

Upgrades to the Kegged Beer Cooler are coming along very nicely. While not quite complete I’ve build, finished, and fitted a pine and poplar collar, and acquired and installed some taps. I still have to work out the drip tray, insulation inside the collar, and a few other random bits, but it’s almost set.

A year ago when first built it I figured that maybe one day I’d add taps, and a year later I’ve done so. After using a few friends’ taps and getting some nice ideas from how another friend built a collar I figured I’d go for it.

I feel really happy, proud, and fortunate that I have the means and abilities to do so. Growing up my dad and mom would let me help out with a bunch of things that they were working on. From both that and just being allowed to play with things I learned how to try and that it’s okay if things don’t always go right because you can learn and move on. These are very important things to know and I wholly believe that it helps me with most everything I do.

Now, hopefully I can finish off the kegged beer cooler / kegerator successfully and not end up with foaming taps or a poor quality drip tray or something…

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