Category: things I have broken

I’m still here

I have had a dearth of posts lately, been busy.

Gonna continue to be busy for the next couple days so don’t look for anything soon BUT…I have two ride reports to relate:

  • Livestrong Century
  • RideAroundMtRainierInOneDay

They promise to live up to all that you have come to expect of your friendly neighborhood blief-slinger.

And just to whet your appetite I have a recent entry into the ‘things I have broken’ category:

Joy’s Couch
I’m just sitting there absently fumbling with the wicker back of the couch while having a nice relaxing conversation and the next thing I know – CRAHK!! – a piece comes off in my lap.

Now it's the Ouch Couch

Yet Another Commute Record (YACR)

This morning, in the cool morning air, I did my last hard sprint intervals before the ride around Mt Rainier* with The Fed.
Sprint intervals are 1 min hard riding (170ish heartrate) followed by 1 min rest (100ish heartrate). I did a pyramid interval and then followed it with about three or four straight 1-1 intervals like this : 1-1-2-1-3-1-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1

At that point I realized I had a pretty good time going so I rested a bit and then went pretty hard through town. Lights could have treated me better but it wasn’t horrible.

In the end I beat my previous record from June 11th (My Commute Record) of 52:35 by 43 seconds.

Distance: 16.75 miles
Time: 51:47
Avg Speed: 19.4 mph

I guess that means a 20 mph average is within spittin’ distance…sigh.

—–

* The ride around Mt. Rainier is 150 miles, 10,000 feet of elevation gain, in one day. w00t!

A Mermaids Helmet

It’s a medium-long story but this shows the results of my latest forays into breaking things –

You can see that there is something sharp and deep that extends right up to the crack line on the helmet. The crack travels from about 9:30 in this picture to about 4:00. In the real world this is right over and behind her right ear.

You should also notice the smoothness of the helmet above the crack and the really bumpy part below which is a perfect relief of the loose rocks and asphalt in the gutter of the road – would’ve been her ear and noggin.

The best part is that The Wee One is just fine, with only a scrape on her elbow and a few small raspberries
on her back and side AND she got back on the Big Wheel right away.

This helmet is garbage now. A new Nutcase is on the way.

My commute record

My previous record was 54:42 via Colman Park – that comes to an average of 18.5 mph for the route.

This morning was pretty still, maybe a 2-4mph southwesterly wind. So if anything I had a tailwind.

It was rainy and a little bit cold so I was starting out with a little bit of an intent for speed – but record breaking times and speed wasn’t on my mind until I found myself bombing down airport way at about 24 mph and feeling good. Incidentally that mile stretch and some of Rainier is where I get the most benefit of any tailwind – so it can be a false sense of “power”.

Anyway, that makes it about 3 miles into my trip that I started to drop some serious coin into my pay-as-you-go slot – I wasn’t watching my average speed so I don’t know where that was but…oh yeah…one more thing.

This morning I re-calibrated my cyclo-computer after some email discussions with ElephantShirtTom and BopOp – it rolled out to 2108mm and before I had it set on 2090. Incidentally this means that I should be right on the money and indeed, my cyclocomputer reads a total distance of 16.76 miles for my route and gmap-pedometer confirms it at 16.77. That’s close enough. 🙂

One other good thing is that I have a new cyclocomputer after my latest one crapped out and stopped calculating speed/time/mileage anytime I got over about 24-26 mph. This one is wireless and there is almost NO delay when I stop – the speed goes immediately to 0.0 mph and the clock stops ticking within 1 second. I liiiiike.

Anyway, back to the ride. I have recently focussed more energy on climbing because of my pending ride up Village Park Road for the LiveStrong Challenge (Still time to donate!) and a Ride Around Mt Rainier in One Day (RAMROD) in late July. I think if I can go 10% faster up hills and “recover” on the flats overall I can get “there” faster. So I did that this morning as best I could and I recall one hill, where I tend to go 14mph I was doing 19mph and another where I tend to do 8mph I was doing 10.5mph. Recovering on the flats worked well at about 22-23mph with any slight downhills at 24mph.

ANYHOO….after all that open road I hit The Great Slowdown in Seattle – stop lights. I was rolling up to stop lights quickly (when I could) and stopping fully (not slowing down real gradually) so that my average speed would stay high and I could take advantage of my quick-stop cyclocomputer. I recovered from the climb (over into Seattle from the lake) on two or three lights through town and then hammered it hard to stay with the traffic and make all the timed lights on Alaskan Way. All of the traffic for the biggest cruise ship in the world didn’t help much near the office but I skirted it pretty well.

Stats for my morning commute (new record).
Distance = 16.76 mph
Time = 52:35
Avg Speed = 19.1 mph (YEAHHHHHHHHHH)

Derailer failer

First of all this morning my bike thermostat read -11.1C when I got on the train. My finger thermostat read “That’s cold.”

Next, on the way down the hill my rear derailer failed, or rather the cable failed and I thought it froze. I was stuck in my 11 tooth cog. For the unintiated that means it was really hard to pedal away from a stop and impossible to climb steep hills.

For the visuals in the audience; think about what it would be like to push your kitchen chair across the floor with a straw.

Anyway, once I got onto the train there were *amazingly* two other crazies bikes.

Great! Maybe one of them will have an idea that’ll help.

There was also this other guy I see a lot; just a regular passenger (read as “stealth” biker). So I attacked my derailer with a fervor to see if I could pull it into a less straw-breaking gear.

The thing about the rear derailer is that it is held in place by the cable and when the cable fails (not frozen) it “defaults” to bottom, the derailer spring is doing it’s work with no resistance.

So the biker says

You need some tension on that thing.

No chance and no help.

Then the stealth biker pipes up

When that happens to me I have just wedged a piece of wood in the mechanism to keep it where I want – in a “higher” gear.

Brilliant! I didn’t have wood but I had some tools. And a few short minutes later I am rolling in my 13 tooth cog. Much more managable for starting what is currently a single speed bike. Visually speaking, we just put a blanket underneath the chair.

The AR System

At the office I am Product Owner / Systems Analyst / meta-developer on a particular project. In this project I am helping to configure a very powerful and complicated suite of applications called the Action Request System (AR System). This system has, among other things, a system server and each application in the suite has it’s own “process”. In this case I was configuring the Assignment Engine (which I think is one of those applications) to perform special actions based on a particular set of rules.

One of the actions it *could* take was one that we didn’t want it to take. We didn’t want the default behavior and in fact we really didn’t need anything to happen
BUT
an idiosyncracy of the system is if there wasn’t an action directive for that process we couldn’t do ANY of the other directives. So the architect, let’s call him Joe, said

Just put a dummy rule in there, do something that will resolve to false.
You mean like If 1+1=3 Then X?
Yeah.

I created the process within which I would put this rule and stopped.
I didn’t want to have to craft the rule, if it didn’t really matter, so I said

What if I just leave it (the rule in the process) blank?
Hm, I dunno, see if it takes it?

It did and I was on my way.

Later, after some other configurations, and a bunch of test cases (translated into about 24 commands) I reported a problem. The Assignment Engine (AssignEng) wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do. In fact the whole system server (AR System) seemed to be having issues.
Joe looked into it for a while (4+ hours) and found, under continued questioning and at my insistence, that I broke it.

The following is a chat extract.

Joe:[] AssignEng Processing 24 pending command(s) of category AE-ASSIGN.
[] AssignEng Processing pending command DoAssign.
[] AssignEng Starting to process DoAssign command.
[] AssignEng **********************************************
[] AssignEng Initialized system.
[] AssignEng AR System Assignment Engine 7.1.00 Build 200708221849
[] AssignEng Initialized access to AR system.
[] AssignEng Found pending command form.
[] AssignEng Initialized. Entering message processing loop.
[] AssignEng
[] AssignEng Checking connection to AR system.
[] AssignEng Connection to AR system is working.

Joe: See those 24 “pending commands” up at the top?
Joe: When it would try to process them…the server would crash…
Lief: ok
Joe: It would do the following:
1) Come up
2) Try processing those 24 commands
3) Die
4) Restart
5) Repeat….every ten seconds until the sever was hosed.
Joe: Nicely done, BTW!
Lief: thanks. : )

Everyone on that team admits they hadn’t seen an application/process/thing like this bring down the main server (AR System) before and that it was broken in an amazing and profound fashion.
All this goes to show that I am not limiting myself to the physical world anymore.

I’m takin this show virtual baby!

The commute bar has been lowered

A couple of things before I get to the meat of this one –

This is about biking, specifically my new bike, and because I spend up to two hours a day on my bike; well let’s just say that she doesn’t have a name…but…she…does seem to have just acquired a gender.

This is about statistics, which is a thing some people who get freaked out about their bikes do. Not all bike freaks do…well for that matter I wouldn’t have considered myself a bike freak in the truest sense of the word except that I have just spent 10 minutes thinking and talking about how I am going to describe to all of you Mermaid lovers just how cool my new bike is, new bikes are in general, and thinking of a clever way to entreat you to read this post anyway.
Oh, and I will be prattling on about statistics related to my bike.

Let’s move on.

This morning I was paying close attention to an unexplained shimmy after about 32-34mph coasting downhill. When I hit 37.8 without a single shimmy** and then proceeded to hit every green light through Renton (NEVER HAPPENS!!!) I decided

This is a good day for a record attempt

** Grumpy may be disappointed to hear this considering how much fun he was having talking about ‘lateral elasticity’ but I am not saying it is MIA just yet. The only difference between yesterday and today is I re-inflated my tires to their proper psi (110) and finally figured out how to properly inflate the head shock. It may have been darn near flat before – I have no way of knowing. Also, I was paying close attention to it…that always makes problems disappear.

I stop at the airport for a shot of albuterol (just in case) and mumble something challenging to myself at a passing rabbit commuter. I caught him at the north end of the airport.

The headwind down Rainier nearly sunk me, that and my left hamstring was troubling me but being the freak scientist that I am I tarried on. Well that and last night I just read that part in the Call of The Wild to La Grande Mermaid where Buck wins his masters foolish bet by breaking a 1000 lb sled loose from the ice and dragging it 100 yards by himself.

Gee!
Haw!
MUSH!!

So I couldn’t give up on a count of a little wind.

After a nice climb through Seward Park (she climbs pretty fast) I came down to the Blvd and found a reverse rabbit*. He looked strong and he was clearly out on a training run. That is, I have a built in excuse for when he overtakes me; he is training and I am ‘commuting’. So I hammered it up to 22mph and in the headwind settled into a mildly strenuous 19mph.

His headlight only ever got smaller.

* a reverse rabbit is another biker that you encounter in your travels that never actually starts in front of you, like a plain ‘ol rabbit. Usually you see them enter in your mirror, this time he came from a side street and pulled in behind.

Another commuter rabbit came and went and soon I found myself closing in on downtown. I ran into a few red lights that killed some time but holy cow, I found a new skill this morning – a high speed sprint and it REALLY goes. The ability to pull on the handle bars makes such a profound difference in the feel of a sprint. I don’t know objectively if I can crank it up any faster than on my Thunderbolt (no gender by the way) but she certainly feels lively and quick and springy and fast.

Now I come into stoplight ‘heaven’, but it’s good cause I can get a breather. Still I wish we could learn from the dutch on this one. I make my way through the chicane of buses, cars, pedestrians, and other bikes down to my straightaway finish – the waterfront.

I engage my newfound skill and sprint up to about 25mph and I top out. I guess I shoulda had something to eat this morning. There is more gear and more go in my body but something gives out and I just don’t have the energy to keep the sprint going as long as I usually can. So I settle into a hard-ish 21 or so, dodge a few tourists bound for the slow boat to Alaska (and some goofball blocking two lanes while performing a textbook 13-point u-turn) and I skim up Wall St.

This time I only slip my wheel once…I am getting better.

My ride statistics (my computer is not calibrated well so on the avg I have adjusted the number based on my time – the rest of the numbers don’t matter too much so I didn’t bother.)
Top speed – ~37.8mph
Distance – adjusted 16.85 miles (reading 17.09)
Time – 58:01
Average Speed – adjusted 17.4 mph (reading is 17.8)
Total odometer – 96.7 miles

As it turns out that was a fun story to recount, I hope the Mermaid lovers weren’t put off by my initial bike-siren and got this far.

More records

I have a thing for just being and doing stuff in extreme weather. Not crazy stuff really, I don’t go searching it out like a tornado hunter or anything, but I like to say “I did X on the coldest/hottest/rainiest/windiest/snowiest day EVARRRRR.”

When I was in Sweden I made sure and stayed up until 00:00 to go out and be in the coldest weather I have ever been in. If memory serves, it was -39˚C (also just about -39˚F). My ears felt like they nearly froze off of my head. I could hear the ice freezing in the trees and popping their limbs.

I rode my motorcycle home from Highline on the Inauguration day wind storm in 1992(?).
I rode my bike home in the drifts of snow last winter and to work in -19˚C windchill

and today…drum roll please…

I can honestly say I rode home on the hottest day EVARRRR in Seattle.
According to the Record Alert on WeatherUnderground site SeaTac reached 39.4˚C (103˚F) today and on that same site I saw Renton Hill reporting 41.2˚C (106˚F) this afternoon at about 4PM.

Okay but how does it FEEL?

The best explanation is by way of my water bottle.
By the time I hit Marginal Way (I had an errand in SoDo that forced me into my least desirable return route) my water bottle that started full of ice was completely melted (it didn’t rattle anymore when I shook it) and it didn’t have any more condensation on the outside.

By the time I hit Tukwila (BECU) it was body temp – I couldn’t feel it’s temperature as I drank.

And the last swigs I took in East Renton tasted like plastic soup.

The good news is that on a bike there is almost always a nice breeze in your face.
As hot as it was (and still is)…I like it.

Weel Daddies Don’t Eat Quiche

So Emma, at about 3AM the other night, woke up with another bad dream…

Mommy! I had a bad dweeem! (sobbing quietly)
Oh honey, It’s okay, it was just a dream.
The Daddy was twying to fwow me into a bit! (sup-sup)
Oh sweetie, that wasn’t real honey it was just a dream.

ah hah

Would our Daddy throw you into a pit? No. He wouldn’t do that would he?

No (sup) the Weel Daddy wouldn’t do that.
(a little perkier now)
Weel Daddies do Up-High, and Buttup-High, and Hipsup-High, and Towwewr.
(thinking of her favorite games)
THAT what Weel Daddies do!
…
Wheh is the Weel Daddy?

He is sleeping.

Oh. Ok, I want him.

Being 3AM I was sleeping like a runaway train; oblivious yet focused.

As it turns out, this was the third bad dweem she has had about me in the past couple weeks. In the other two I was withholding access to her Bibbit pillow and pulling the fuzz off of her Bibbit pillow respectively. Pulling the fuzz off her Bibbit could be construed as nightmarish under almost any circumstances.

So tonight at bedtime she brought it up again:

You the Weel Daddy.
Yes, I am the Real Daddy.
What do Pwetend Daddies do?
Well, that is a good question. But, if they are pretend Daddies can’t they pretty much do anything you want ’em to?
Uh huh…like twy to fwow me into a bit.

Yikes, kid! Knock it off with the Pwetend Daddy fwowing you into a bit already?
I didn’t do it and, frankly, I don’t even know what IT is?

As it turns out, “fwow me into a bit” has been further explained at some length and seems to be her way of saying something related to me (I mean Pwetend Daddy) trying to bite (bit) her big toe. That is really kind of a focus for a lot of things lately. It is where the really big coughs come from and the place that the last scrap of food goes at dinner…I suppose it’s really just ‘land’s end’ on her body.

Anyway, I haven’t exactly gotten to the bottom of “fwow me into a bit” yet and even Abby gave me a quizzical shrug when I looked to her for much needed help.

I guess there is no direct translation.