Distant Winter

A cold day in Portsmouth. Seems like an eon ago, but was really only a few years.

Duncan Fine-O-Meter

Found in Middleburg, Virginia.

Disused. Unused. Maybe even unwanted.

Where the myth of the country squire is a live and well.

Though somehow further dispelled by this rusty red box.

Did you see that it's held onto the parking meter with exhaust pipe clamps?

My Bicycle Economics

I last rebuilt my bicycle in 2006. I bought a donor bike that had newish parts and frame problems from Packrat, payed far to much money to have them both shipped to New Hampshire from Colorado, waited 6 months, then combined them in the garage in the summer after my first year of grad school.

The donor bike had lots of newish parts, while the original bike, an early 1990's GT had everything worn to knubbins: gears, brakes, shifters, especially the front chain rings. To my surprise, just about everything transfer perfectly, except the headset tube was a wee bit shorter on the old bike, necessitating a fat stack of washers to make up the gap.

Since that point, the bike has gone on mostly without incident. The rear dérailleur cable snapped a few years ago, and every few years the tubes have gone through a rash of flats and required replacement. I exhausted every bottle of bicycle lube anyone had ever given me, and bought my own for the first time out of genuine need. I have scrubbed the drive train down a few times.

Generally though, I just get on and yank chain.

I estimate that I ride about 100 trips per year... I'm a fair weather commuter and would rather drive or take the bus during a snow storm. In NH, that mean a 12 mile round-trip commute. Here, the distance is closer to 10. Over 8 years, those distances have added up: roughly 9,000 miles, while the expenses really haven't. Receipts aren't handy, but $430 seems about right for everything involved, mostly shipping and tubes. That's like $53 per year, and 4.7 cents per mile.

I'm pretty sure that's cheaper than shoes, and thus cheaper than walking.

Headcase Matches the Footsleaves

There was a cute ginger girl in the bout this weekend.

She had a cool swirly colored helmet that matched her socks.

That's style.

Spare Derby Photo II

When I took this photo, my mind thought this skaters fall seemed unusual and awkward, something along the lines of "that's what you get when you put wheels on your feet", but nothing that was a read flag.

It was only later that evening, going back over the photos when the realization struck Booba Fett had taken a hit, lost control, and done the splits while at speed, and was then simultaniously trying to stop, not hit anyone, and not displace a hip.

ow.

Garden Progress

 May 26 2013

I wasn't planning on gardening originally, then our friends gifted us some extra tomato plants. Still, I was unsure about putting in the effort, until the plants, still in tray, started to produce tomatoes.

I built a raised 3 x 6 x 2 planter out and filled it with "organic" gardening soil. My choice in soil turned out to be just the thing to stunt the plants for a few months.


June 17 2013

Tomatos have been in the bed long enough for the zuchini to come up. I had thought and hoped that by planting them in a bed with fresh soil, they would flourish. However, they did nothing for a long time.

June 27 2013

I built a second planter out of scrap wood. The city was tossing pallets, so I filled the back of the station wagon and cut the nails between the boards with a sawzall. Only a fraction of the pallet wood was long enough to easily construct a planter without a radical redesign, and I ended up using some other scraps from around the house for the 6' members.

 June 30 2013

Since the soil I bought for the first planter didn't seem to be very good at support plant life (though it was great at supporting mold!), I bought 18 cu. ft. of soil from the garden and landscape supply store. They also sell bulk premixed soil at a ~40% discount over bagged. Next time, I'll take a trailer instead of a station wagon.

July 1 2013

Facing north. The garden gets full sun all day long. That also means it needs some extra attention, as it evaporates water quickly.

 July 7 2013

Green bean sprouts in the second planter, after a week. This soil works much better.

July 7th 2013

Slime mold explosion in the first planter. I ended up using a shovel to scrape it off the sides and soil, and I had to pick it off the zuchinni. The first batch of soil wasn't done compositing when the company bagged it. Ew. My veggies are trying to grow in that.

July 19 2013

Artificial rain watering the beans.

Orderly Movement of Molecules

How to talk a gas into spending more time in one place than another.

Sleep well, sweet dog cow

As previously mentioned, my old mac died. While I had toyed with the idea of continuing to push it down the road as the central computer where stuff gets done, the number of road blocks beyond the slowly shrinking stack of ATA hard drives has only grown. Some are philosophical: the array of computing resources has grown to encompass the mac, a laptop, with windows gaming machine, the linux home server, the girlies old laptop, the girlies new macbook, the TV computer (really just a dvd player that usually boots windows but sometimes BSODs). There's no reason to try to use all that stuff constantly... it becomes a time suck. Then, the availability of powerpc software and the degrading apparent speed of html5, HD video, and vast piles of photos was becoming painful. Combing resources onto a faster machine is the order of the day.

So, we appear to be ambling in the general direction of productivity. I ordered a few terabyte drives and 4 gigs of ram for the windows box, and installed ubuntu in a dual boot configuration. Windows for all those games, linux for actually doing work.

The two major hurdles to transition, which were ultimately preventing a sooner move, was the email archive and the photo library.

Moving the photo library ended up being simple, enough, just copy the directory, and the IPTC keywords embedded by Shoebox were browsable by most of the photo management tools I tried. I ended up sticking with Shotwell, as Darktable made adding keywords a chore and it lacks a coherent full screen browsing experience. (You can't go to a Darktable collection, open a photo in full screen, and sequentially move through the photos, using the delete key to remove unwanted images. ) So, you can hope to see more photos in future posts. And future posts, now that I've gotten this mess cleaned up.

Email was somewhat tricky. I really wanted to be able to import Mail.app email into Thunderbird. Sadly, there is no T-bird filter for that, and Mail.app stores messages in individual .emlx files. I found a few, rather old scripts (ruby and perl) for converting .emlx to .mbox format, but neither of them worked to my satisfaction. The perl script would have required a lot of hand holding to deal with the many mailboxes to import from the mac, and the ruby script was written based on a depricated library, and needed more re factoring than my slightly greater than 0 ruby skills could muster.

The mac was able to keep itself together long enough to just export the mailboxes to mbox and then ultimately copy them to the server where the data would be safe.

That all took a bit to figure out. I wanted darktable to work well... it's so blindingly fast that one feels dismay when using anything else. It's not as fun to wait for a split second between photos closing and loading.

 We appear to be rolling again.