Freaks at Fred Meyers

I rode to Fred Meyers to pick up some apples for breakfast. As I was locking up my bike to the rack out front, this scroungy guy made a bee line for me and my bike.

'Hey, I'm not going to touch it. Can I look at your shifter thingies?'

I figured why not. He looked at them.

'My buddy says any bike that has those things are worth over $2000.'

I always get suspicous when someone talks about how much things are worth.

"Naw, you can get them on a $500 bike."

'Well, it's a fancy looking bike. You're locking it up here?'

I was using a Kryptonite cable lock and putting it around the tires and the bike. I figured it would be okay. Except for this goon staring at it wondering how much it would be worth.

He looked it over for a while longer and then started walking away. 'Don't know why the hell you'd lock that bike up here.'

While I was quickly buying apples and I kept checking on my bike through the window, making sure the freak wasn't standing around it. The checkout lady said I should bring my bike into the store next time. I'm guessing other customers there wouldn't like it, but when it's early I don't see why not.

Space

I came across the website of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board [www.caib.us] and started reading their report [pdf]. It's kinda large at 248 pages, but so far it's been an interesting read - going over the history of NASA and why the Shuttle was built.

A few years ago I read the book At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program, which covered the X-15 program. It was around before the Mercury missions at NASA and I thought it was very successful. They reached over 350,000' and speeds greater than Mach 6. It seemed like a logical way to reach orbit, but it was canned and money was diverted to NASA.

The X Prize project is underway with many teams trying to put a few people into low earth orbit. Quite a few are taking the same approach as the X-15 did. It seems like the logical way to get into orbit - you take a plane up and can fly it down (unlike the Orbiter which is a large glider).

W32.Blaster.Worm

Last week I got deluged with tons of virus emails, along with everyone else I suppose. Tonight I got the Blaster Worm on my system. Windows would notify me that it had an RPC error and was rebooting, and my machine would randomly reboot. I spent an hour or two getting patches and cleaners. Quite a pain on a 28.8Kbps connection.

Mars!

Since Mars is closer than it'll be in 60 thousand years, I figured I should try and take a few pictures of it. I took a roll of film with my Nikon. I used a few tele-converters to get my 210 mm lens to be effectively 1260mm long. I'm waiting to get the film developed and scanned in - hopefully they'll turn out well.

While I was standing outside in the cold waiting for exposures to finish, I figured I should try and take a few pictures with my digital camera. So here are a few of them:

Mars and stars (100 ISO)

Mars exposed at 200 ISO

Bruce Campbell

I was waiting for a compile and looked at Bruce Campbell's website and noticed his new movie coming out, Bubba Ho Tep where he plays Elvis at 70 years of age. It looks pretty good - because Bruce is in it.

Oregon Coast

Last week Tina and I rode our bikes from Astoria to Crescent City, California. We only had rain on the first day when we were riding from Astoria to our house in Gearhart. After that it was just cloudy in the morning with sunshine after 10 or so.

I've put up pictures in my photo section, have a look see.

I rode with my new Shimano sandals, which were super comfortable and felt as good as normal biking shoes. I ended up carrying my normal shoes as dead weight the entire trip.

On the downhill to Manzanita at 40 mph I was viciously attacked by a killer bee. It ran into my upper lip and clung on to my face with it's stinger. It took me two swiped of my hand to get it off, by which time it had already done it's damage. At the bottom of the hill as snot was running from my nose the pain spread from my face to my teeth. I stood by the side of the road swearing until Tina rolled up and gave me some drugs.

Over the next few days my lip grew to about four times it's normal size. Tina went into stores instead of me because I thought I looked like I had a cleft lip.

We had great views of the ocean as we biked along. I think one of the cool things about biking is that you can stop anywhere and look at things you dont' see from a car. We stopped before Depoe Bay at Whale Cove and saw sea lions hanging out on the rocks.

My wheel died after 2000+ miles in Pacific City when a spoke pulled out a nipple. The next bike shop was in Newport, which wasn't too far to ride on a whobbly wheel (I was too lazy to true up a wheel I was going to throw away.)

That night in Lincoln City we stayed at the hiker/biker campground along with a couple Layla and Jeff. They were pretty cool and were up for ordering a pizza to be delivered. As it was dark, Jeff thought to put out his red blinking light so the driver could find us. I ended up having the pizza delivered to the ranger station and waited up at the campground. A few minutes later a car drove up and a kid jumped out to grab the light.
"Hey what you doing?" -me
'oh, sorry, is this yours?'
"It's not yours. What the hell?"
'I just saw it and said "Score!". Who is it for?'
"Not you."
'Sorry dude.'
And he took off after handing me the light.

Tina made up some kickass burritos while we waited for the pizza to come.

We stayed with Tina's grandma at Otter Rock and used the hot tubs at the condo. It was nice to hang out and not bike - since we had been doing hard biking for 2 days by then.

The next day we rolled into Newport and found the bike shop that had rear wheels. It was a dirty little place that looked like it was a converted apartment. We asked the guy why there was no sign.
"Well, a woman moved in next door and complained about us being a business so we had to remove the sign."
I got the wheel and started to unload my bike to replace the old rim.
The owner ran over, "Hey, you can't fix that here."
I looked at him like he was crazy. My wheel wasn't going to get magically put on. "They take pictures." he said, looking around. "You have to go up to the Library to work on your bike."

So Tina and I rode up the hill to the Library pit stop. As I was swearing at my wheel, Jeff and Layla popped up. They were getting her bike fixed too. We told them about how we had to come up here. Jeff wondered if we had to go to City Hall to fix flats. Tina said we'd go to the the police station to lube the chain.

Later in Waldport we stopped to get some food for dinner (and many snacks.) My back was hurting and I was stretching outside the store when an old skinny man drove up in his car. He started talking to us about the weather and those fu**ing drivers everywhere. He shook his head and looked sad as he complained about bikers not having enough room. He parked and came over to yabber with us. He imitated my stretching and laughed a lot. He even tried to help my back out, which normally I would not want but it really hurt. He was rank with alcohol and cigarettes but was a nice guy. Guess he was our strange person for the trip.

We had more great views of the coast as we biked South into the wind. Normally there is a North->South wind, but this week the wind was reversed. We stopped for blueberries whenever we saw a stand and would order a few pints to munch on.

We ran into another biker, Oliver from Germany, who was on a round the world trip. He was in Seattle and was tired of the bus system and bought a bike to get to San Fransico. He had all of his gear (including hiking boots) strapped to his mountain bike. It was impressive to see this skinny guy ride this bike with all that gear. His tent consisted of a tarp covering his bike with enough space for a sleeping bag.

In Port Orford we stopped at the Crazy Norwegian for some fish and chips. It was as good as I remembered and sure hit the spot. I had a milkshake too, which I should cut out..

In Gold Beach we got a hotel for the night and had microwave pizza. It is a cute enough town, with deer in the yards and a nice view. It's old cemetery is right next to the grocery store though.

The next morning we met up with Layla, Jeff and their friends Tony and his wife for breakfast We rolled over there in Tony's Buick Roadmaster stationwagon. We got to sit in the rear facing seats in the back. It was a little sad to say goodbye to them cos it was fun to run into them on the road all the time.

Our last night was in Brookings where we had a great sunset. I ended up taking like 20 pictures of the sunset - hoping a few looked okay. In town people would ask us where we were going and it was sad to say we were just going to Crescent City 30 miles away. It sounded more impressive when we were near Astoria.

On our way through California (all 30 miles of it) we stopped at a campground for a pitstop and I saw some guy cutting down a branch for firewood. Thought that was a nice touch.

We safely made it to the U-Haul store in Crescent City and picked up our ride back home. It was a little strange to finish a ride at a U-Haul place. The owner called his mom to find out where we could go to get good fish 'n chips and we headed off there for some grub before going home.

We ended up getting zero flats and just had my rear wheel trouble (6 broke spoke and 1 broke rim.) One week was definetly not enough time for a vacation, but it was a nice taste of touring. Hopefully a bigger one will come about soon.

iPod III

Last night I got the iPod to finally work on my home computer. I spent about 45 min uploading songs and no crashes (knock on wood.) I put on my Ani Difranco concerts which have been sitting on my old hard drive in the closet for a few years. There are 2223 songs on the drive, which is pretty cool.

Too bad there isn't an interface that I could use to copy my camera pictures to the iPod on the road. Then I'd have a huge amount of headroom for taking pictures and movies.

Waste 'o time

I just spent the last two days working on a utility that turns out to be worthless. Some of our code was allocating a block of memory and deleting it soon after. Since the code was going to be called multiple times I figured that it'd be smart to reuse a buffer.

I did some tests of reusing a buffer vs. malloc/new. Reusing the buffer was an order of magnitude faster. Great. So I spent a few days creating a factory that would reuse arbitrary lengthed buffers.

I ran some tests today and it was dog slow compared to malloc/new. I am pretty sure the overhead of the factory and the function calls are too much and can't compete.

I'm sure other people already knew this, but I had to waste work time figuring it out. It sucks because I had touted this factory idea as a huge speed up - like 10x - and it wasn't.

Oregon Coast

Tomorrow Tina and I are heading down the oregon coast. Here's an image of the map we're using. We take off Thursday night from Astoria to our place in Gearhart. And then on Friday we're moving on South with all of our gear.

I'm taking my digital camera instead of a SLR, I'm hoping the images will come out clean. I'm thinking it'll save on film and be easier to put on the internet. We'll see.

This is a great map that has the elevation profile and where to go and all that stuff. Just hoping the weather holds out so we don't get too wet.

iPod take II

Last night while uploading music to my iPod the little bugger crapped out on me. It put up the folder icon (unhappy iPod) and refused to turn on. I got it to work in disk mode but that doesn't help when I want to use the thing. In addition, it wouldn't take a charge so it was dying before I could play with it.

So this morning I took it to work and got it to charge in disk mode. I called the store where I got it and they said it's under the 30 day return so I could just return it. He suggested I call their support They have a cool voice recognition setup when you call and it doesn't sound like a computer.

The apple guy said I could try to restore it. My restore program at home doesn't recognize the iPod so I figured I was SOL. I downloaded it fresh from the net and ran it on my work computer (shame shame.) And now it works fine. I'm hoping that when I get home I can use the new program and things will be allright. I had over 10 gig of music on it that I have to reload tonight.

Cyclone

How cool is this picture? It's located on the Nation Weather Services webpage.

New iPod

On Saturday I bought the new 30gb iPod I was very excited since my last mp3 player went kaput.

Saturday night I plugged it into my dell laptop and followed the directions. I was up until 2am trying to get the iPod to be recognized by Windows. I ended up downloading ephpod to use instead of music match (which is terrible.)

I went to bed at 2am, angry that I couldn't get this simple thing to work. In the morning I ignored the direction and what I'd read on the newsgroups and formatted the iPod with Windows Explorer. Then I used ephpod to create directories and could then start copying music over.

I bet that the iPod works seamlessly with Apples, but with Windows it sucked. None of the software that came with the iPod worked and I had to use some 3rd party programs. It's okay now, but what a hassle.

Carrot Top

On Friday, Trey and I went to see Carrot Top at the county fair in Corvallis. I forgot to take my camera and get pics of him or any movies of his jokes. So I'll have to find another show and do it there.

It was the best comedy I've ever seen, definetely worth the $7. :) I know his 1-800... commercials suck, but it wasn't anything like that. He made fun of it all, calling himself a "phone whore."