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Space Debris Hit My Dad?

Published September 4, 2012

Back in 2000-2001, just before my dad retired from the Detroit Board of Education, he was standing outside of the school that he worked at with a coworker when glowing hot blocks — one of which is seen above — began raining down from the sky around them. No aircraft were visible overhead, and being glowing hot, partially melted, and seemingly made of ceramic, I strongly suspect that this was space debris. At almost the size of a box of matches and with a mass of only about 5g it’s terminal velocity near ground level couldn’t have been very high, which would explain how they could have been hit by them and not injured.

I’d forgotten about this until my parents mentioned it to me this past weekend when I moved this object from it’s place of display while helping them around the house. My dad had recently read a news article about a woman who was hit by a small piece of a disintegrating Delta II and can’t help but think that maybe he and his coworkers should be added to the (very short) list of people on Earth who have been hit by space debris.

A number of other photos of this object can be see here. It’s a little dusty from sitting out for a few years, but the hollow cells and ceramic-like appearance are pretty visible.

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…to Richmond

Published September 3, 2012

It’s been a while since I last rode to my parents house, so with family plans in the afternoon I set out from home just after 11am, hoping to arrive a bit after 1pm. The last time I did this ride it took me just shy of two hours and I was left very winded with sore legs. This time I beat my previous time by twenty minutes and felt like I could have pushed myself harder. Sure, I was on a different bike, in different weather, and dressed differently†, but I figure all of that riding earlier this year has actually made a difference.

Here is the ride data uploaded to Strava, if you’re interested. No, I don’t have a wheel sensor on that bike, thus no cadence and GPS-only speed.

Here’s a few more photos that I took during recent rides:

· Start of the east loop at Holdridge, known as Gruber’s Grinder. This is a slow, rough, but fun ride.
· Mushrooms found somewhere along Gruber’s Grinder.
· Ducks in a park in Lake Orion while stopping near the end of a ride with Scott.

Now, back to work for a couple of weeks, then off for another two. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a bunch of autumn riding (read: hopefully cool, dry weather) in during that time.

† On the last ride I was wearing typical winter riding wear and on a full suspension 29er with a knobby front tire. This time I was in typical summer jersey and bib shorts on my older Specialized Rockhopper Disc with a 29″ front wheel and two Small Block Eight tires. I doubt the suspension and clothing was responsible for 20 minutes, though.

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Hammer-based Water Bottle Repair

Published September 3, 2012

The water bottle seen above was given to me during a Fun Promotions race at Bloomer a couple years ago when I was on a team with Nick, Marty, and I believe Kristi. It’s a rather nice stainless steel bottle, and I’ve regularly used it since then, quite frequently while working on mountain bike trails. Finding itself stuffed in bags with tools and tossed on the ground in the woods it has become quite scratched.

When out at Addison Oaks a couple weeks ago doing some mapping of the new connector trail it slipped out of my bag a couple times, landing on corse gravel. Dents from this are visible, and they resulted in the bottom becoming so domed that the bottle was more like a Weeble.

With a couple of carefully placed blows from a dead blow hammer flattened it back out and now it’s as good as new. I’ve got half a mind to remove the remainder of the finish and have a brushed stainless steel bottle, but for now I think I like its distressed character. I also prefer this bottle over SIGG and other similar bottles, as the inside can be scoured, and the threads are very large and round. SIGG (et al)’s fine threads scrape my upper while drinking, and I don’t like having to worry about not scratching the liner.

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Quick Sandal Fix

Published September 2, 2012

The toe of my most-frequently-worn sandals became detached a few weeks back, and had started peeling back and getting things stuck in it while walking. Instead of buying new sandals I decided to try patching them up with Shoe GOO. I was unable to get the sole to wholly sit in place so there’s a slight gap, but over the course of a few days I was able to fill this in and provide a decent cap. It’s not the best looking, but hopefully it’ll hold up. I should probably get some new (and more attractive) sandals as well.

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Gaffer’s Tape for Emergency Bike Repairs

Published August 29, 2012

I recently came into possession of a roll of fluorescent green Pro-Gaff gaffer’s tape. To date I’ve got little experience with gaffer’s tape, but from playing with and reading up on it, it appears to be the sort of tape that does everything that one ascribes duct tape to do, but probably actually does it. Most specifically, it has less vinyl and a finer cloth structure in the tape itself, and the adhesive is synthetic rubber and designed to be removed cleanly.

As a result of this, I replaced the duct tape wrapped around my bicycle pump handle with some of this tape. I think that, should the need arise to use tape for emergency bicycle repairs, this will be the tape of choice. The cloth leads me to believe it’ll be a very functional tire boot, and the finer adhesive seems like it won’t stick to itself as readily, a problem which generally renders a piece of duct tape unusable.

Shown above is my Crank Brothers Power Pump Ultra with seven or eight turns of tape wrapped around the handle. I’ve been quite happy with this pump so far; it’s just worked every time I’ve needed to use it.

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Tailwind Racing’s Medals are Shiny

Published August 26, 2012

Today was Tailwind Racing’s Stony End of Summer Classic race, and I found myself competing in it. A bit surprisingly I ended up coming in fifth, which got me a medal, shown above. This is the first time I’ve received any medal in a race since some of the Lake Orion High School weeknight races three years back. These are pretty nice medals. There is a sticker on the back which lists the race, class, and place.

This was a really fun race. It was somewhat hot, humid, and a bit dusty, but it was fun. Everyone that I encountered was really courteous and good about passing and being passed, the course was a good length without having an irritating extra short/steep sledding hill at the end. My official time ended up being 1:50:55.399 with laps of 35:49.943, 37:46.442, and 37:19.014. Only once did I almost throw up, but I was able to get that under control and keep going without any problems.

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Titus Frame Damage

Published August 26, 2012

While out riding at Highland last weekend I fell over on the Titus. I slightly injured my shin, but also took a few scrapes out of the down tube. This is the first scrape-type damage done to the bike in 2.5 years of riding it (and the only frame damage), so it’s a bit frustrating. Still, I guess it’s not bad after that much riding.

This isn’t anything that should cause any problems (it’s just cosmetic), so that’s at least good.

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Addison Oaks MTB Route in OpenStreetMap

Published August 19, 2012

With the upload of OpenStreetMap changeset 12787189 I have finished adding all of the hiking and equestrian trails, intersection markers, and mile markers needed to draw a second generation version of CRAMBA’s Addison Oaks map. This data includes the still-under-construction connector trail which’ll create a new park entrance at Indian Lake and Lake George and provide a safe route to Addison Oaks East and Oakland Township’s Cranberry Lake Park. I also added all of the named routes through the park as found on the official park map, including the specific hiking, biking, and equestrian permissions and restrictions.

If all goes according to plan, the next version of the map will show the actual locations of the C and D trails, shared hike/bike/equestrian (on C only) areas in the west of the park while highlighting the MTB route. The mountain bike route (trail F) frequently crosses these trails and occasionally shares their route, so I want to better illustrate the interplay between them all. This next version will also be based on OpenStreetMap data, which beyond the benefits of being CC BY-SA licensed should make it easier to update and use for future planning.

The only things I have left to add to OpenStreetMap before it’ll be usable for drawing a complete map of the park are a few campground roads and the B loop, a relatively flat and straight hike/bike loop around the campground in the northeast of the park. I’ll probably record that route the next time I’m at the park.

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External Intel 320 SSD

Published August 17, 2012

A couple weeks back, the Intel 320 SSD in my iMac failed, leaving the machine unbootable and the drive appearing as an 8MB volume. This drive was replaced with a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and the Intel drive was returned for warranty replacement.

Having no immediate need for another SSD but not wanting to have this one laying around I decided to put it in a Macally PHR-S250UAB external enclosure and use it as another piece of fast storage on my Mac. While the installation went well I’m not quite happy with the performance. Despite being connected via FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b-2002) couple of benchmark tools report only around 80 MB/sec read and 65 MB/sec write while the spinning piece of rust inside the computer reports something like 105 MB/sec read and 107 MB/sec write. It’ll be much lower latency than a spinning disk, but I’m not sure it’ll provide improvement over the internal disk, especially for things I was hoping to do with it like running VMs.

Maybe I’ll give it a try on my work laptop for VMs there, or maybe I’ll see if it’d work out well in Danielle’s Macbook Pro.

The photo above shows the external enclosure with an Intel-provided case sticker applied to the top in place of Macally’s branding. Except for the residual curved blue logo pieces at the end that didn’t fall outside of the cutoff area, I think this worked pretty well. Here is a photo of it all being assembled.

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