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Archive for June, 2003

Impending Failure

For you bicycle tech heads — what is the expected result of 36 hole, 14 ga spokes, a 390 gm hard anodized ceramic rim with single eyelets used on the rear wheel of a tandem?

The biggest crack in the rim.  My fingers are probably three inches apart.

Something like that, I’d imagine. I thought that I heard a pop on my last ride that sounded like a spoke letting go. Around 1/3 of the circumference, the drive side spokes have pulled the inner part of the rim away from the rest of the sidewall. 6 cracks are clearly visible, I suspect others. This looks like brittle failure to me, probably after a sufficiently large crack initiator formed. I’m guessing that there has been about million cycles (1200 miles), which could put it into the fatigue category. I don’t have any of my materials references handy though, so that’s just a guess.

One of the smaller cracks in the rim.

I have had single eyelet Mavic rims do something similar to this on my road bike, but that was with the old MA rims. They were made out of a softer metal, not hard anodized, with a much more square profile. That rim just pulled a small section of the inner box wall out in a rather slow, progressive failure. This one seemed a little more dramatic.

I want the next rim on this thing to be T6 aluminum, not hard anodized, and double eyeleted. If I can find something even close, I’ll be suprised. A lot of bike wheel parts these days are designed for style — that’s the last thing that I need. Bit I’ll end up with whatever the shop decides to put on, since they are doing this on a warranty basis.

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Solstice Parade

I shot a couple of batteries worth of pictures from the sidelines of the Solstice Parade in Fremont yesterday. Lots of painted cyclists and dancers. A bunch of puppets on sticks. And just a little nudity. The gallery is here.
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fremont solstice 2003-26-pt

The dark side of the force

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fremont solstice 2003-17-pt

tiki stroller

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Pics from the Meetup

David, Jacob, Anita, Clark   - natural low light, so it's a bit blurry.  I like the effect here.

Impressionistic.

David, Jacob, Anita, Clark   - natural low light again

Less impressionistic.

and now with flash

Small Flash, Big Blink

Me, Rose, and Jerry

Me, Rose, and Jerry.

More faces. More names. Will update after research.

Some other faces in the crowd.

The space needle at dusk.

Yer basic Seattle Weblog Picture.

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Redesign

I need a redesign. I need a long. slow. redesign. (no, not a root canal. had one, it wasn’t that bad. lots of novacaine.)

3 years 6 months, 3 oses, 5 webserver machines, 1 url and 1 design. I’ve added css here and there – removed a column or two from the table structure, flipped the logo over, but nothing terribly noticable.

I’d like it to be CSS, I prefer validation, I want more white space, and it has to work in MSIE4.5/Mac and current modern browsers (Safari, Moz, and IE6/win). IE4.5 is a wierd requirement and may require browser sniffing, but I’m not going to make those 2 readers upgrade. Cause then I’d have to support their new configuration. And I don’t want that.

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Some pictures from Seward Park

Went for a little ride yesterday to take advantage of the car closure of Lake Washington Blvd. Once we got to Seward park, we found a bike race. So I burned a few electrons and shot some pictures. It’s quite hard to get my digital camera to actually get the cyclists in the frame, I found it easiest to use the sequential shot feature and take five in a row, just to get one well composed.

The leader early on at seward park

This was the early leader. He got well off the front in the first few laps when the pack wasn’t really interested in chasing.

The chase group - early on

The rest of the pack

The chase group - still early

And more of it.

The pack is strung out

A few riders have caught the leader. They’re looking back down the hill they just climbed to see the gap they have. This is the only tight corner on the course.

Jumping hard to reel in the leaders

Some riders in the pack jump to close the gap.

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Strawberry Harvest

Picked some strawberries yesterday, about a quart. That one harvest may be my best year yet. This is the second year in this bed, so I think the sun and the soil are contributing to the bounty.

strawberry harvest

I’ve figured out a few things the hard way:

  1. Plant in an area with full sun.
  2. Water every few days in May.
  3. Fertilize (lightly) every week in May.
  4. Netting keeps the birds and squirrels out.
  5. They get better the second year in the ground.

Strawberry bed, after picking

Some of the berries are perfectly red, juicy, and sweet, some are kind of flavorless, some are a bit tart, and some have that industrial strawberry flavor that I’ve never tasted in a real berry before.

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Allium

allium in the garden

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Resume – Eric Soroos

Contact Info

email: my first name at this domain
location: Seattle WA

Employment History

  • IDM Services/Western Clearing Corp – Developer (4/2004 – )

    Designed and built a Transaction Gateway for Credit Card, ACH, and Check21
    transactions, including a web application for merchant control and reporting,
    a Windows desktop application to capture and upload check images from scanners,
    and submission and settlement backend drivers for many upstream providers.
    Wrote parsers and generators for ACH, X9.37, and BAI2 files.

  • Contract Consultant (4/2003 -)

    I do ongoing system administration and special project contracts for clients
    that have an investment in the Userland Frontier platform.

  • Social Ecology – Lead Developer and System Administrator (11/1999 – 4/2003)

    First full time employee, responsible for developing knowledge
    management and email contact relationship management software.
    Released 6 versions of the CRM application, from initial 1.0
    release, through several point releases, to a 2.0 rewrite. Managed
    all network and IT operations for an Application Service Provider,
    including web and email hosting, database services, firewall, DNS,
    and server monitoring.

  • KPFF Consulting Engineers – Design Engineer (8/1997 – 11/1999)

    Civil/Structural engineer (EIT level), responsible for analysis,
    production design and Finite Element Analysis modeling. Most notable
    projects included the Weller Street pedestrian bridge and the
    Evergreen Point floating bridge post-tensioning retrofit.

Skills

  • Python – 2 years

    Built a Windows desktop application (using wxPython) to drive check scanners.
    Used Python to build parsers and generators for several banking industry file
    formats: ACH, BAI2, and X9.37. Used Python to submit transactions to upstream
    processors using SOAP or other web services.

  • PHP – 3 years

    Built the Transaction Gateway web interface using PHP. This interface is used
    by Merchants to control all aspects of the transactions that they are sending
    for payment. Technical highlights include an Object/Relational Manager (ORM)
    base object, integration with OCR and Image processing and a generic xml
    web service for sending transactions or querying the system.

  • PostgreSQL – 5 years

    Used PostgreSQL as the data store for the Transaction Gateway. Used stored
    procedures, views, and native permissions to enforce data security. Includes
    column level automatic encryption of data. Ported a contact relationship
    management system from a Frontier native object database to PostgreSQL.

  • Apache – 6 years

    Configured and managed Apache for hosting most of my projects
    over the last few years, relying on proxy, rewrite, ssl, and gzip
    modules. I have recently moved to Lighttpd for resource constrained situations.

  • Userland Frontier / Radio Userland – 7 years

    Experience ranges from static website development to web delivered
    knowledge management and email contact relationship management
    applications. Integrated Frontier-based applications using Manila,
    Mainresponder, and the Website Framework with external components
    using XML-RPC, SOAP, HTTP POST/GET and direct SQL access.

  • Perl – 2 years

    Used Perl to automate the generation of Finite Element Analysis
    models and the post-processing of resulting data. Also used in many
    day-to-day system administration chores at Social Ecology, but
    has not been a primary development language.

  • Linux – 8 years

    Administered Debian Linux for 3.5 years as the primary system administrator for
    Social Ecology. Have continuously operated Linux machines for personal server use since 1999.
    Currently use Debian stable on servers and Ubuntu on the desktop.

  • OSX – 5 years

    My desktop operating system of choice. Deployed as a public web application
    serving platform since version 10.0.

  • Other –

    AJAX, HTML, CSS, XML, Web Services, WSDL, Objective C, Java, Lighttpd/FastCGI

Education

  • MS Civil Engineering – University of Washington
  • BS Civil Engineering – Cornell University

References upon request

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