wiredfool

Another year, another STP. As with last year, we rode the tandem for a couple of days to get to Portland, to ride the bus back for 3 hours. Once again, we didn’t get that many pictures because we were busy doing whatever we do on a bike for 10 hours a day.

Riders are leaving at sunrise.

Last year, we had the tandem for three weeks before the ride – this year we basically didn’t ride in the three weeks leading to the ride. That’s not the best way to train. Not that I actually train for this sort of thing. But the difference between riding and not riding while ‘not training’ is a big one.

The sun also rises.

For the first time in the 4 that I’ve done this, there has been a significant headwind. This time there was a 10-15mph breeze from the south for 50-70 miles. It usually picked up later in the day, just to be helpful.

Raiders wait in the rain to cross the bridge.

Like three of the other 4 times I’ve done this, it rained. Not too heavy, not too unplesant or cold. The Saturday evening and the first half of Sunday was wet. One of the two riders who offered to pull through did so in the rain. Of course, he didn’t have a fender.

We rode over that. It’s under construction with steel plates and bolts in the roadway. We didn’t even get to do the banked 270 degree turn at the bottom at full tilt this year, cause it was wet and we were being cautious.

There weren’t as many drafters this year, probably because we weren’t going as fast. A few people asked, a few just jumped on. We climbed well, passing a good number of single bikes — even some Litespeeds. But 50 miles in each day, we were feeling the burn.

Next year, and there will be a next year, we will need to ride a little more in the weeks leading up to it. I need to get the aerobars adjusted correctly so that my upper arms can relax. We’re going to take more pictures. And we’re going to get some friends on tandems to come with us to paceline. With feeling and 4 part harmony.

A grab bag of what came off the camera this week. Warning. Cat Pictures.

I’m still amazed that I can get pictures of spiders’ webs.

When he sleeps around the house…

World Traveller class.

Chair, with paws and tail.

A couple of my few readers (using xp/ie6) have told me that they can’t see some of the images on this site. Furthermore, after not seeing my images, they can’t see any others ’til they close the browser. I’ve checked logs, changed image locations, added spare apache processes to the server, changed the ways I’m referencing them, removed .pngs and they still get the errors.

I think that this page from microsoft describes the problem. Only I’m pretty sure that every recent image on this site has been run through imagemagick, at least to resize them to web resolution.

Coincidentally, Tim Bray has an article about choice in browsers: the upshot being that there are alternatives to IE, and they are taking the lead. Competition is good, and there are at least a couple good non-IE browsers for most platforms these days, built around either the Opera, KHTML, or Gecko engines. (Safari, Opera, Omniweb, Mozilla, Galleon, Konq, Phoenix, Camino).

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?

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.

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.

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.

The dark side of the force

tiki stroller

Impressionistic.

Less impressionistic.

Small Flash, Big Blink

Me, Rose, and Jerry.

Some other faces in the crowd.

Yer basic Seattle Weblog Picture.

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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.

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.

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 rest of the pack

And more of it.

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.

Some riders in the pack jump to close the gap.

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