Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
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This traffic control device (which is essentially a timer) may just be the world’s largest 555 timer.
This was seen at the corner of 22 Mile and Shelby Roads while on a bike ride this evening. I headed from home, up to River Bends, out the back part of it, over through Clinton River Park Trails (which were rather muddy), and then wound through neighborhoods back towards home. Total of 22.3 miles in 1:44:27.
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…just a quick photo from yesterday’s impromptu bike ride from when we stopped at Paint Creek Cider Mill and split a bag of cinnamon sugar doughnuts about 30 miles into riding. As Nick said, due to five people being present and a dozen doughnuts in the bag, a few of us had to “take one for the team” and eat three… Mmm…
Yesterday’s weather could have been a little nicer as sprinkling rain was a little was a little unpleasant at times, but otherwise it was a nice cool autumn day. I’m really looking forward to a couple months of this type of ideal riding weather.
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This morning, along with help from Jeremy Verbeke and Scott Retford (and Bob Costello last night in collecting the Lexan) the kiosk at the River Bends Trailhead was completed. This involved hanging the signs, covering it all with Lexan, and fitting some wooden strips that I cut and drilled last night (picture). Here is a photo of Scott and Jeremy standing next to the kiosk right after we completed the sign hanging.
This kiosk (along with much of the trail signage) was donated and build by Spencer Wood and Troop #242 as part of Spencer’s Eagle Scout project. It’s a nice improvement on the standard MMBA Kiosk Construction Plans, is extremely well built, and should last for years. This is one of the best constructed trailhead kiosks that I’ve seen.
The signage includes a trailhead-specific version of the map, a QR code allowing easy download of a PDF of the map to one’s smart phone, and some basic trail rules. The kiosk also features a sign from Aktion Club, a Kiwanis program for people with disabilities who helps with maintenance of the first mile of two track trail.
This completes the current River Bends trail system allowing us to move on to the next phase. I just recently received approval to expand the single track even further, so once the mosquitos start dying off and leaves start falling from trees construction on this next segment can begin.
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Past experience with wildly varying data has prevented me from trusting GPS-based devices for accurately logging distances while riding mountain bike trails, but after hearing reassuring reports of modern units and seeing how useful it could be to have one unit logging data for all three of my bikes and automatically aggregating it I decided to give it a go. I purchased a Garmin Edge 500 cycling computer and a GSC 10 wheel speed / pedaling cadence sensor a month ago and after beginning to use it things seemed quite accurate, but I continued to be a bit suspicious that it may not be providing as accurate of data as it could. So, I decided to do some tests.
The results of these tests have shown that when the Edge 500 is used in conjunction with the GSC 10 it is just as accurate as a wheel-based computer and can be relied on to provide sufficiently accurate distance measurements while riding curvy mountain bike trails. Coupled with all the extra data that the system can log (heart rate, location, temperature, cadence, etc) it’s quite a nice system for recording data.
Without the GSC 10 (using only GPS-based data recording) the Edge 500 showed drastic undermeasurement, 20.70% on a typical Southeast Michigan trail ride and 33.87% in a worst-case test scenario.
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There is a UI bug in iTunes 10.4.1 which causes the rewind (<<) button to become highlighted when switching to the Mini Player. This causes unexpected behavior when one Cmd-Tabs to iTunes and presses space intending to pause the music. To replicate this issue do the following: - Bring the normal iTunes window to the foreground. - Note that the Play / Pause button is highlighted. If it's not, press Tab to move the highlight to it. - Double-click a track to begin it playing. - Click the + or press Shift+Cmd+M to switch to Mini Player. - Note that the rewind (<<) button is now highlighted instead of the Play / Pause button. This was tested with iTunes 10.4.1 on OS X 10.7.1. UPDATE: This appears to finally have been fixed in iTunes 10.5.3.
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Tonight beer, being sipped while writing this post and some research into a particular GPS-based bike computer, is Odell Brewing Company’s Myrcenary Double IPA. This is very much a slow-sipping super-hoppy beer, exactly the kind that I love to spend two hours with while working on personal projects in the evening.
This bottle of beer is the last one of the outstanding selection of Colorado beers brought back by some friends on a recent trip to Colorado.
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Today I broke another spoke; the same one that was quickly fitted as a replacement before the Hanson Hills XC race by a guy from Grayling’s The Bicycle Shop. I guess 2.5 months of riding on a quick (and much appreciated) fix isn’t too bad. The wheel is wobbling a bit so I won’t be riding this bike until I can get it fixed up.
I was surprised by how it broke. Much like the last time I was riding along pretty trivial single track, a short and relatively smooth uphill section at Stony Creek and not going over anything more difficult than a front lawn. Suddenly I heard a BANG sound, stopped to look at the wheel, and saw one end of a spoke hanging into the center near the hub.
Oh well, that’s life I guess. I can’t complain too much, as I’ve got at least 2466 miles (likely more, as not all were logged) on these wheels. I’ve got some 291mm spokes here from building up a wheel set back in April. DT Swiss’ Spoke Calculator is recommending a 293mm spoke, but hopefully I’ll be able to make do with something 2mm shorter.
UPDATE: The replacement spoke did the trick. Wheel’s held up for ~30 miles thus far.
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Thanks to a suggestion from Bill Edgerton and Danielle’s concurrence there are now two Althea / Hibiscus Syriacus / Rose of Sharon bushes planted on each side of the sidewalk, next to the driveway, replacing the two dead shrubs. Two different colors were purchased a Chiffon (blue) for closest to my place and an Aphrodite (pink) for the space across the sidewalk, next to my neighbor’s place. They were planted in decent size holes, placed on a cone of clay, surrounded potting soil, sprinkled lightly with slow-release fertilizer, and topped with the sand/clay/dirt mixture that was dug out of the holes. Each has been been watered and lightly rained on, so hopefully they’ll take and fill in these spaces nicely.
Click here if you’d like to see all the photos of the new shrubs, including the tags.
On the topic of growing things, this year’s flowers (and herbs and such) have come along very nicely since they were planted back on May 22nd. The sage went from forlorn to full, Danielle’s Meyer lemon tree has lemons on it, the nicotina around the tree has filled in, and the purple plant has practically exploded. Compare this photo of the porch from three months ago with this one taken this afternoon.
If you’re interested, the rest of the 2011 Flower photos can be seen here.
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Near my condo along the driveway there are were two rather large, pleasant looking shrubs (old photo here), but over the last two years they’ve become increasingly sickly, and this year they simply failed to grow. The one furthest from my house is shown above, and the one next to my bedroom can be seen here. This evening I found myself sufficiently tired of seeing the dead sticks coming out of the ground and decided to replace them.
Armed with a Pulaski that I keep around for trail work I put on steel toe boots and headed out to remove the stumps. All of this wasn’t needed, as with a gentle wiggle and a slight tug I was able to remove the bulk of each one; no tools needed. A little bit of work with the adze end of the tool helped remove the decayed roots, and after a bit of raking it’s as if they disappeared.
Tomorrow Danielle and I will look for some replacement shrubs, likely something that grows 6′ – 8′ high and around 4′ – 6′ wide so that it’ll nicely fill that space. A plant which flowers would be nice, but something like a burning bush might do nicely as well.
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Here is a bottle of The Bruery’s Mischief, given to me by my sister and brother-in-law (Sarah and Josh) as part of a wedding gift. Because of the 750mL bottle and 8.5% ABV I’d been saving this for a bit, and last night was the perfect time to try it. I really enjoyed this beer, and it was a spot-on hoppy Belgian ale. I really enjoyed this, and if it were available in Michigan I’d definitely pick it up sometime in the future. I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out for it next time I’m in Ohio.
(Oh, and yes, I way over-exposed the photo. Bringing it back to normal levels left the top of the blass almost completely blown out. At least the bottle is nicely visible and the beer is its proper color.)
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