Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
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Last night someone very special made stuffed shells for dinner, and now I’m eating leftover ones for dinner tonight at work. This is very, very tasty. I only wish I had some of the super-awesome garlic bread that was also made by said super-special person.
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There is an unexpected preauthorization for $14.99 from Black Singles on my HSBC credit card. It was just over a year ago that there were other unexpected charges on this card resulting in it being cancelled and a new number issued. I’ll be calling HSBC in the morning.
At least this time it didn’t happen just as I was leaving on vacation.
UPDATE: HSBC is waiting until the charge posts or not. This worries me slightly, as a preauth shouldn’t happen without card number and expiration date, which is a mighty hard combination to guess.
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Setting out for a ride from Mt. Clemens at roughly 12:30pm today we headed out to Metro Beach and back along the pavement. The spring thaw has made the trails sloppy and unridable, so pavement is the only current option. The excellent weather that we’ve been having was perfect for riding a springtime paved weather bike ride, exactly the kind of shakedown the Titus needed so I could get a good feel for the bike geometry, shifting, new bar, etc. I logged roughly 22.2 miles over 1:34:04, making for a moving average of 14.2 MPH.
Such a nice day. :)
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After running some errands and visiting the bike shop Danielle and I headed over to Neehee’s for some Indian food. We’d never been here before, and the location on Grand River Ave. Being without a sign and colocated with a grocery store in the far corner of a strip mall its particularly hard to find, but it was worth it. Specializing in Indian street food we’d wanted to try it for a while, but on our last attempt to visit we couldn’t find it, and later perusing showed that they were closed then.
Our lunch consisted of Onion Pakoda (as seen above), a Mysore Masala Dosa, and Chili Paneer. While absolutely wonderful tasting this was far, far more food than we should have ordered; easily enough for three people. Next time we won’t order so much, but there definitely will be a next time.
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I’ve been working on a video camera system for my bike. The project is just getting started, but today I made the PCB for the power supply. You can see it above fit inside of its project box (a RadioShack 3x2x1″), or you can see the bottom side with solder and traces here.
It’s been a few years since I last etched a PCB, and as I’d run out of photoresist developer (a lye solution) I decided to make due with what I had readily available and laid out the board by hand, drawing it in pencil and marker and using nail polish as resist. I’m quite happy with how it came out. The many-year-expired tin plating chemicals that I had sitting around the basement even worked, giving it a nice tarnish-resistant silver finish.
This PCB and housing is designed to hold two eBay special step-down DC to DC switching regulators (buck converters) to get 5 VDC and 12 VDC from a 14.8 V 3000mAh LiPo battery pack. The 5V will power a SanDisk V-Mate solid state video recorder and the 12V a VioSport Action Cam 3. All of this together with an 8GB microSD card should allow for the continuous filming of eight to nine hours of mobile video while fitting in a small bento-style bicycle bag.
Now to wait for the rest of the parts to arrive so I can put it all together. The camera and recorder are here, I’m just waiting on the hand grenade battery and charger, bento bag, regulators, and powerpole connectors. Hopefully this won’t be too bad for a ~$200 project. The video quality should be decent as shown by this intentionally shaky test which features Danielle and Roxie (warning: contains dog nose) and single-charge recording length should be long enough to capture any bike ride that I might choose to record. More photos are available here, if you’re interested.
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After some friends headed to Belize a few weeks ago for some sailing and general relaxing they brought me back this really, really cool set of coasters. With each being made out of four strips of different woods (mahogany, black poison, red wood, and billy webb, as illustrated in this photo) they are quite neat looking. I just added four rubber feet to each and now they re in the living room ready for use. They look particularly great on the tables in there.
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After trying out cross-country skiing a coupletimes I decided it’d be good to get my own set of skis and supporting equipment. Thanks to end of season clearance sales at REI I was able to get everything seen above for US$243.40, after tax, plus another $16 for the REI shop to mount the bindings and give the tips and tails of the skis an initial hot wax.
I had one problem with REI, as when I went to pick up the skis this afternoon I noticed that the bindings weren’t sitting flat against the ski, and there appeared to be a bit of flashing around the screw. The person I was working with immediately agreed that was wrong and looked into it. It turns out that the skis are pre-drilled for NNN bindings and the person doing the installation of my SNS bindings simply screwed them into those holes. Apparently that doesn’t work quite right and also put the binding at the wrong point for the skis to be properly balanced. While this was immediately rectified, had I not noticed this I would have ended up with improperly set up skis.
Tomorrow I’m meeting some friends at Stony Creek at 11am for skiing. Hopefully the conditions will continue to be good and I’ll do well with the new equipment. I’d spent almost an hour weighing out the UK11.5 vs. UK12 boot size, but I’m pretty sure that the final choice of UK12 was the appropriate way to go. The skis are sized based on weight, and the poles are the same as I’d last used at Stony Creek and felt comfortable with, so they should be fine.
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This is my first attempt at making bubble tea. I made some black tea with milk, sugar, vanilla extract, and some boiled boba balls. It’s decent and drinkable, but I think in the future I’ll have to boil the boba in sugar and water and add more milk to the mixture. The boba is a bit bland, and the tea is far too British tea-like and lacking the sweet rich treat flavor that I’ve come to associate with bubble tea.
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Here’s the view from my office as Winter Green II, our landscaping company, cleared the parking lot around my condo. There is now an 8′ pile of snow at the end of each parking spot, and a small strip next to Danielle’s car which I’ll have to shovel off. I believe that we’ve received 4″ – 5″ of snow thus far today.
Good thing my network connection is staying up solidly, as working from home is a much better option than a couple hours of driving through slushy, icy crap.
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Today Erik, Kristi, Jon, Jeff (who is in town for a long weekend) and I headed out to Stony Creek for some cross country skiing. It was an absolutely wonderful day for and I finally got a good feel for the motions involved. Now I really want to get some equipment of my own so I can head out without needing to locate a rental first.
Everything went really well today, except for two equipment failures. Both Jon and Jeff’s left shoes, which use the older Nordic Norm bindings, had their soles partially let go. Jeff’s was bad enough that he couldn’t lift or turn his ski. The point where his failure occurred was particularly bad, as we were right in The Pines, a particularly twisty mountain bike trail. Thankfully my belt was of a style that allowed his shoe to be lashed back together near the binding (photo) and he was able to continue out the day happily (photo of a happy and warm Jeff with a lashed up shoe).
Just before the ride, right when getting to the parking lot, Kristi gave me the incredibly nifty hat seen above. Beyond just warm and water-shedding wool, being hand-knitted by her, and include nifty random binary it’s also large enough to fit on my head and cover my ears. It’s great! I immediately donned it and wore it for the ski instead of my boring, not-great stretchy stocking hat and was very comfortable the whole time. This is now my go-to winter hat. Here is another photo of it laying flat, but the image above (or here) shows its structure and design much better. And yes, I am eating a pancake in that photo.
Here’s a KML of today’s ski if you want it, and here’s a photo showing my belt frozen into a D after Jeff removed it from his foot. Now the belt is hanging in the bathroom to dry so I may wear it tomorrow.
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