Ah, black water. In the context of RVing, the muddy Mississippi is positively sparkling compared to our version of black water. Last year, on our last camping trip, I went to dump said black water and found we had a bit of a problem.
Our black water system has two dump valves. One is on the right side of the RV, right next to the holding tank, and one is one the other side where the dump tube fits for draining into the dump station. I guess there are two so that you have a backup in case one of them fails.
The general dump procedure is to connect the hose, and open the dump valve on that side. Nothing comes out because the other valve is still closed. Then, I go around to the other side and open that valve, unleashing the torrent from Hell. Of course, this means that I'm not able to make sure that the dump tube stays in the hole in the ground so I have to race back around to the other side and hope that the end of the tube isn't whipping around like a garden hose, spewing effluent hither and yon. Don't laugh, it's happened.
I had noticed on a few previous trips that I would get a couple of drips from the valve on the tank side during the course of dumping. It's kind of gross but nothing really bad and frankly, I was kind of hoping it would go away on it's own.
It didn't.
This last time, it was pretty much pouring out of the valve. It happened to be doing this while the campground owner was standing there talking to me about his nice campground. Oops.
Of course, I didn't do anything about it at the end of the year so, with our first trip scheduled for Memorial day a couple of weeks away, I had to fix it.
The first step was to drain the system. I had drained it after the last trip but I had put antifreeze in over the winter so I had to empty that out. I ran the hose into the camper and had Deb put a bit of water in the bowl and flush. I cut off the top of a gallon milk jug and started ferrying buckets of goop from the camper inside to the toilet.
And ferrying.
And ferrying,
And ferrying.
I think I moved about 25 gallons of slurry into the house. Yuck. I called it quits when the water was running somewhat clean.
This weekend, I took a look at the leaky valve. The valve is a knife valve which means that it's basically a gate that you push in to drive a blade across the with of the pipe to cut off the flow. The valve is sandwiched between two flanges and held in place by four bolts in the four corners of the flange. The first thing I noticed was that one of the corners of one of the flanges was completely destroyed. Hmm, I guess that's probably why it's leaking. I got a couple of wrenches to take the bolt out and, as I turned it, the corner just disintegrated and the bolt basically just fell out. Great.
As I looked at the damaged flange, the ramifications began to sink in. If the flange is broken, I can't fasten a new valve between it and the other one since there's nothing to put the bolt into. In order to put a new flange in, I'll have to cut the other one out of course, but it's right next to an elbow so there's not really any room for a coupler that I would have to get to splice in a new flange. As I look at the whole system, I'm coming to the realization that I'm going to have to cut the pipe on the other side of the elbow and re-build the entire elbow and flange assembly. Wonderful.
I go ahead and attempt to undo the other three bolts holding the valve in-place and proceed to twist the heads off of each one. I guess there's a bit of rust going on down here. I finally got the bolts and the valve out. Mercifully, no liquid came out but the smell was less than pleasant.
I also noticed that the other flange, the one that goes into the black water tank is also damaged on the same corner as the destroyed one. The hole in the corner looks like a "C". It might be able to hold a bolt but it could be dicey.
I got on the web to see if there was any info on replacing black water valves. There were a few posts but nobody had any info on what to do when you had to splice in new flanges. I found one post where a guy suggested using MarineTex or equivalent to repair broken plastic parts. I remember Dad telling me about MarineTex and how it was a wonder material - a plastic that hardens into a sand-able, drill-able material that fixes anything. If figured that might be a good thing to use to reinforce the "C" on the tank flange.
This weekend I went to Home Depot to get the new elbow, couplers, and new pipe. Luckily, they had 2 foot lengths of pipe so I didn't have to buy 10 feet of it. Of course, I forgot the MarineTex so I had to go back and get that. I didn't find MarineTex exactly but I found a similar material that they said would do the same thing. Basically, it's like a putty that comes in a "log". You cut off a section and knead it in your fingers which mixes and activates the two components of the epoxy. You press it into place and wait an hour for it to harden.
To fix the "C" I decided to just mash a bunch into the hole and form a new corner. Then I could drill a new hole and have a stronger corner. As I was thinking about how that would work, I realized that I could probably just rebuild the destroyed corner of the other flange in the same way and not have to remake the entire flange/elbow configuration. So, I proceeded to rebuild the damaged corners, applying a layer of putty and letting it cure for an hour, and then repeating the process a couple more times to build up the missing corner.
After building up what I figured would be enough of a corner, I went about getting the holes drilled and the valve installed. The hole with the little damage was easy. I put the valve in place with two bolts in opposite corners and ran a drill through the hole in the valve that was over the repaired hole. The drill zipped through and, when I unbolted the valve, I had nice clean, repaired corner.
I bolted the valve into the other flange and drilled through into my totally rebuilt corner in the same way. I ran the bolt through and found I didn't have enough bolt to get the nut started since I had built up so much putty. I had planned on that though so I got out the trusty Dremel and ground down the hardened putty/corner enough so that I could get the nut on the bolt coming through. I fastened everything together and gave it a quick leak test.
So far, so good. I cracked the rebuilt corner a bit when I was tightening the bolt so I added more putty in the cracks and tried to beef it up a bit more. I'll be able to give it a real test this weekend when we hit the road.
Let's hope she holds.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
GoPro or Go Home
Well, the video bug has bitten me again. It's actually been percolating for a little while now and was born from our bike rides. See, we ride through a bunch of really cool areas and I've always wanted to capture the experience somehow. The solution, of course, is to have some sort of camera that records the ride.
A still camera isn't really practical and not what I want. I don't want to pull over and take a picture. I want to record video that I can then edit and make into a kind of travelogue. There are basically two options - mount the camera on the bike, or mount it on me. Mounting on the bike limits the visibility of the camera as it's fixed in position and can't see the various views I'm seeing in different directions. It also would get a lot of road vibration and probably wouldn't look very good.
So, the solution is to get a helmet cam. Yeah, like the kind the skydivers wear when they jump out of planes. There are two main contenders in the small, relatively inexpensive helmet wars - Contour and GoPro. Initially, I liked the Countour since it was small and relatively unobtrusive (as much as a camera mounted on your helmet can be unobtrusive). Recently though, I'd been hearing a lot about the GoPro so I looked into it further. Here's their promo video
Not that I want to jump off a mountain on my skis or anything but that's some pretty cool video.
Anyway, I did a little more research and decided to go with the GoPro camera. I got a helmet mount and a few other so I could attach it to the bike as well for some other shots.
For a test, I attached it to the top of the car and drove around. Kind of boring footage but I wanted to make sure I aimed it properly and could bring the video into my editor and cut and trim. That all seemed to go okay so, if it ever stops raining, I'll try to get some bike footage.
Should be fun.
A still camera isn't really practical and not what I want. I don't want to pull over and take a picture. I want to record video that I can then edit and make into a kind of travelogue. There are basically two options - mount the camera on the bike, or mount it on me. Mounting on the bike limits the visibility of the camera as it's fixed in position and can't see the various views I'm seeing in different directions. It also would get a lot of road vibration and probably wouldn't look very good.
So, the solution is to get a helmet cam. Yeah, like the kind the skydivers wear when they jump out of planes. There are two main contenders in the small, relatively inexpensive helmet wars - Contour and GoPro. Initially, I liked the Countour since it was small and relatively unobtrusive (as much as a camera mounted on your helmet can be unobtrusive). Recently though, I'd been hearing a lot about the GoPro so I looked into it further. Here's their promo video
Not that I want to jump off a mountain on my skis or anything but that's some pretty cool video.
Anyway, I did a little more research and decided to go with the GoPro camera. I got a helmet mount and a few other so I could attach it to the bike as well for some other shots.
For a test, I attached it to the top of the car and drove around. Kind of boring footage but I wanted to make sure I aimed it properly and could bring the video into my editor and cut and trim. That all seemed to go okay so, if it ever stops raining, I'll try to get some bike footage.
Should be fun.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Big Data
It's the new buzzword. Big Data refers to the vast quantities of information that is being generated and collected by various companies, web sites, governments, whatever. More specifically, it refers to what those entities might want to *do* with all that data.
Working at EMC, we've been dealing with large amounts of data for a long time. Our products (in general) are gigantic disk drives that store and protect "Mission Critical" data for companies large and small. Our Marketing people are quick to point out mind boggling statistics like - the amount of information produced last year is larger than all the of information produced in all the previous years combined - things like that.
Information production is only getting faster and faster too. It's one thing to have to store all that information but increasingly, companies want to be able to *mine* that information. As the amount of information grows, data analysts can apply statistical methods to look for patterns in the data and 1) determine behaviors and 2) predict activity.
So, analysts can look at sales figures and see that people are buying more of one product than another and adjust inventory levels or do other things to make sure their business is positioned correctly. They can also look at the data, combine it with other data and create models that let them predict what people are going to do when this or that changes.
Now, analysts have been doing this kind of thing for a long time - it's not really new. What is new is the amount of data being processed and the need to process it very, very quickly - real-time analytics.
Real-time analytics means looking at the data as it comes in and analyzing it right then. In the past, the analysis had to be performed on small subsets of the data in the "Data Warehouse". The analysis systems were not big enough or powerful enough to plow through all the data, they had to take a sample and hope that it had enough information to provide meaningful insight. Plus, it took them hours and hours to run those models and get an answer
Obviously, if you don't get a big enough sample, you could arrive at inaccurate conclusions. For example, you can take a look at the stock market values over any period of time. Depending on which week you happen to pick, you might conclude that the market is going up, down, or staying the same but that might not represent the larger trend. To get a "better" picture, you really need to look at more data - data that represents a longer period of time. In general, some patterns don't emerge until you get a sufficiently broad look at the data. Thus the dilemma. You need large samples of data to analyze and the bigger the sample, the more time it takes to analyze. But, to beat your competition, you need to get the results in seconds, not hours or days of the traditional systems. You want to be able to look at the cash register as the clerk is scanning items, find what else that customer has bought from you, and offer them an accessory that would beautifully match the dress they just bought today and the shoes they bought last month. Winning!
So the term Big Data not only means the *amount* of data out there but how to process and use that data to gain an edge in business. At work, we've been getting into this more and more. We're no longer interested in just storing the data for our customers, we need to help them mine it and get value out of it.
There are lots of interesting applications. We are currently working with Utility companies to help them figure out how to manage Smart Meter Data. It used to be that the power company would come by every month and read your power meter to figure out how much electricity you used so they could send you a bill. They got a little more advanced by installing meters that they could read from a truck as it drove by your house - no need to get out, find the meter, and write it down.
Enter the age of Smart Meters. These meters will now look at your power consumption and send it back to the Utility company every 15 minutes. So, instead of getting 12 readings a year from each customer, they are now getting 34,000 readings per year from each user. That's 3,000 times more information than they had been getting previously.
Not only are they looking for ways to manage this info, they are looking for ways to *use* it - beyond just sending you your bill. For example, it's really, really, expensive and hard to build a new power plant but there is a never ending demand for power. And it's the peak power demand that is killing the power companies. When everyone comes home at night and cooks dinner or washes clothes on Saturday, they have to have enough capacity to handle the peaks but that capacity goes unused in the valleys. If they could lower the peaks, they wouldn't have to build more plants.
Enter the Smart Meter. The power company can offer you an incentive and say, if you reduce your consumption from 5:00 pm to 11:00 pm - our peak demand time - we'll offer you a rebate (or some other incentive) on your bill. With the Smart Meter, they can tell not only how much power you use but when you use it, and try to adjust your behavior. In some scenarios, they can even tell what kinds of things are using your power and be able to send you a letter that says "We see you have a 1995, Kenmore model C-RAP dishwasher. Newer models use much less energy so we'll give you a rebate if you replace it."
They can also look at the grid of meters and get a better picture of their delivery system. With real-time analytics of the information coming in, they can detect say, voltage variations in a particular neighborhood. They can see that one particular transformer is common to all the affected meters and, using their statistical models, predict that it will fail in 2 weeks. They can then roll a truck to replace it *before* it blows, avoiding down time, angry customers, and unfavorable news reports..
Cool.
Working at EMC, we've been dealing with large amounts of data for a long time. Our products (in general) are gigantic disk drives that store and protect "Mission Critical" data for companies large and small. Our Marketing people are quick to point out mind boggling statistics like - the amount of information produced last year is larger than all the of information produced in all the previous years combined - things like that.
Information production is only getting faster and faster too. It's one thing to have to store all that information but increasingly, companies want to be able to *mine* that information. As the amount of information grows, data analysts can apply statistical methods to look for patterns in the data and 1) determine behaviors and 2) predict activity.
So, analysts can look at sales figures and see that people are buying more of one product than another and adjust inventory levels or do other things to make sure their business is positioned correctly. They can also look at the data, combine it with other data and create models that let them predict what people are going to do when this or that changes.
Now, analysts have been doing this kind of thing for a long time - it's not really new. What is new is the amount of data being processed and the need to process it very, very quickly - real-time analytics.
Real-time analytics means looking at the data as it comes in and analyzing it right then. In the past, the analysis had to be performed on small subsets of the data in the "Data Warehouse". The analysis systems were not big enough or powerful enough to plow through all the data, they had to take a sample and hope that it had enough information to provide meaningful insight. Plus, it took them hours and hours to run those models and get an answer
Obviously, if you don't get a big enough sample, you could arrive at inaccurate conclusions. For example, you can take a look at the stock market values over any period of time. Depending on which week you happen to pick, you might conclude that the market is going up, down, or staying the same but that might not represent the larger trend. To get a "better" picture, you really need to look at more data - data that represents a longer period of time. In general, some patterns don't emerge until you get a sufficiently broad look at the data. Thus the dilemma. You need large samples of data to analyze and the bigger the sample, the more time it takes to analyze. But, to beat your competition, you need to get the results in seconds, not hours or days of the traditional systems. You want to be able to look at the cash register as the clerk is scanning items, find what else that customer has bought from you, and offer them an accessory that would beautifully match the dress they just bought today and the shoes they bought last month. Winning!
So the term Big Data not only means the *amount* of data out there but how to process and use that data to gain an edge in business. At work, we've been getting into this more and more. We're no longer interested in just storing the data for our customers, we need to help them mine it and get value out of it.
There are lots of interesting applications. We are currently working with Utility companies to help them figure out how to manage Smart Meter Data. It used to be that the power company would come by every month and read your power meter to figure out how much electricity you used so they could send you a bill. They got a little more advanced by installing meters that they could read from a truck as it drove by your house - no need to get out, find the meter, and write it down.
Enter the age of Smart Meters. These meters will now look at your power consumption and send it back to the Utility company every 15 minutes. So, instead of getting 12 readings a year from each customer, they are now getting 34,000 readings per year from each user. That's 3,000 times more information than they had been getting previously.
Not only are they looking for ways to manage this info, they are looking for ways to *use* it - beyond just sending you your bill. For example, it's really, really, expensive and hard to build a new power plant but there is a never ending demand for power. And it's the peak power demand that is killing the power companies. When everyone comes home at night and cooks dinner or washes clothes on Saturday, they have to have enough capacity to handle the peaks but that capacity goes unused in the valleys. If they could lower the peaks, they wouldn't have to build more plants.
Enter the Smart Meter. The power company can offer you an incentive and say, if you reduce your consumption from 5:00 pm to 11:00 pm - our peak demand time - we'll offer you a rebate (or some other incentive) on your bill. With the Smart Meter, they can tell not only how much power you use but when you use it, and try to adjust your behavior. In some scenarios, they can even tell what kinds of things are using your power and be able to send you a letter that says "We see you have a 1995, Kenmore model C-RAP dishwasher. Newer models use much less energy so we'll give you a rebate if you replace it."
They can also look at the grid of meters and get a better picture of their delivery system. With real-time analytics of the information coming in, they can detect say, voltage variations in a particular neighborhood. They can see that one particular transformer is common to all the affected meters and, using their statistical models, predict that it will fail in 2 weeks. They can then roll a truck to replace it *before* it blows, avoiding down time, angry customers, and unfavorable news reports..
Cool.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Okay computers, this is getting ridiculous
Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted. Have to get better at this.
I'm a little late on this latest bit of technology but it's still amazing. To set the stage, I've started doing Sudoku puzzles. I held off for several years while Dad, Carly, and Deb all exclaimed how fun it was. In fact, I was a little worried that Dad was on a personal mission to convert everyone to be a Sudoku Jedi Master.
I'm not really into puzzles or brain teasers much so I ignored them as best I could. What finally converted me was I downloaded a Sudoku App for the iPad and tried it. It took a few runs but now I'm hooked. Deb and I now play a game or two on the iPad before turning out the lights every night.
The App itself is pretty amazing. It has different levels and actually has teaching modes to help you learn different techniques to solve the tougher puzzles. While in the puzzle, if you get stuck, you can ask it for hints. It will start by saying something like "Ponder the digit 8". This will usually be enough to help you move on since you can focus on all the 8's and see a move you hadn't noticed before. If that doesn't help though, you can ask for more and it will give more and more specific hints, to the point where it will just fill in the square for you. I have the sound off but I think it makes a little noise like "Jeeeezus!" when it has to hold your hand that much.
So that's cool but not really the reason for this post. I'd heard about Google Goggles which is an app for the phone that let's you do Google searches but in a couple of interesting ways. You can type in your search words like normal of course but you can also just speak your search. You press the microphone icon, say "Nuclear Power", and it will pull up search results just as if you'd typed it in. Amazing, but oh so five minutes ago.
No, to really be cool, you just take a picture of what you want information about. So, take a picture of say, a book or DVD, and Google will bring up information about that item. In the bookstore, take a picture of the barcode, Google will identify it and tell you what the price is on Amazon so you can order it right then.
(Which really sucks for the bookstore of course. Reminds me of a funny picture I just saw. It was the front window of a Borders Bookstore with signs listing all the liquidation sales. There was also a sign that said "No bathrooms. Check Amazon" Ouch!)
Which gets us back to Sudoku. We do the puzzle in the paper on Saturday and Sunday so today I tried a trick I'd heard about. In Google Goggles, I pointed the camera at the puzzle in the paper and took the picture. Google identified it as a Sudoku puzzle!
Then it asked me if I wanted it to solve it.
Two seconds later, it was done.
Hello Sky-Net...
I'm a little late on this latest bit of technology but it's still amazing. To set the stage, I've started doing Sudoku puzzles. I held off for several years while Dad, Carly, and Deb all exclaimed how fun it was. In fact, I was a little worried that Dad was on a personal mission to convert everyone to be a Sudoku Jedi Master.
I'm not really into puzzles or brain teasers much so I ignored them as best I could. What finally converted me was I downloaded a Sudoku App for the iPad and tried it. It took a few runs but now I'm hooked. Deb and I now play a game or two on the iPad before turning out the lights every night.
The App itself is pretty amazing. It has different levels and actually has teaching modes to help you learn different techniques to solve the tougher puzzles. While in the puzzle, if you get stuck, you can ask it for hints. It will start by saying something like "Ponder the digit 8". This will usually be enough to help you move on since you can focus on all the 8's and see a move you hadn't noticed before. If that doesn't help though, you can ask for more and it will give more and more specific hints, to the point where it will just fill in the square for you. I have the sound off but I think it makes a little noise like "Jeeeezus!" when it has to hold your hand that much.
So that's cool but not really the reason for this post. I'd heard about Google Goggles which is an app for the phone that let's you do Google searches but in a couple of interesting ways. You can type in your search words like normal of course but you can also just speak your search. You press the microphone icon, say "Nuclear Power", and it will pull up search results just as if you'd typed it in. Amazing, but oh so five minutes ago.
No, to really be cool, you just take a picture of what you want information about. So, take a picture of say, a book or DVD, and Google will bring up information about that item. In the bookstore, take a picture of the barcode, Google will identify it and tell you what the price is on Amazon so you can order it right then.
(Which really sucks for the bookstore of course. Reminds me of a funny picture I just saw. It was the front window of a Borders Bookstore with signs listing all the liquidation sales. There was also a sign that said "No bathrooms. Check Amazon" Ouch!)
Which gets us back to Sudoku. We do the puzzle in the paper on Saturday and Sunday so today I tried a trick I'd heard about. In Google Goggles, I pointed the camera at the puzzle in the paper and took the picture. Google identified it as a Sudoku puzzle!
Then it asked me if I wanted it to solve it.
Two seconds later, it was done.
Hello Sky-Net...
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Back from the Brink
Dontcha just love computers?
It's weird how the simplest of changes can cascade into a rolling thunder of destruction and mayhem. Okay, nothing actually caught fire, but this has been a rough few days for the Hudgins' Mac.
Here's the story. The newest version of the Mac operating system - 10. 6 (named Snow Leopard) - was released last August or September. I didn't upgrade to it because 1) I'm cheap and 2) I didn't see a compelling need to do so. Snow Leopard was slated as a release with a lot of fixes under the hood and without a lot of fancy features. It was however, supposed to speed things up. Any hint of an idea where this is going???
So, a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to start work on another iPhone application. Actually, it will eventually be an iPad application - for the new tablet computer that Apple is releasing. It's basically a giant iPhone-looking device but it has some new features and I thought it would be fun to write a program for it. Well, I went to download the software development kit for it and found out that I needed to upgrade to Snow Leopard in order to use it. What the heck, it's about time anyway right?
I ordered it from Amazon and it came in a few days. I went through the install process and got it all up and running and was amazed - at how slow everything was. Programs were taking forever to launch and then ran at a snail's pace once they were up. Oh crap! This is not good. I asked Mr. Google what the heck was up with this and was greeted by page after page of people having the same problem - terrible slow downs after upgrading. Hmm. I guess I should have done that search *before* I did the upgrade...
I limped along this way for a few days and ran into the next problem. I went to start Parallels - the program that lets me run Windows programs (Quicken) on the Mac. When it tried to start, it politely told me that the current version wouldn't run on Snow Leopard and I would have to upgrade it (Parallels) to the latest version. Argh! Okay, I bought that online and downloaded it and installed it. That program is a pretty big drain on the Mac anyway and now, with the machine limping along as it was, it was essentially unusable. Something had to be done.
I should point out that I had chosen to do an upgrade of Snow Leopard as opposed to a clean re-install. There are two schools of thought on this. Some people think that you should just wipe your disk clean and start fresh while others maintain that the upgrade process is good enough that you don't need to "clean house" beforehand. Of course, if you do the clean install, you've got to have good backups of all your stuff because a clean install means deleting everything on the disk. I actually have two methods of backing up the computer - I use Time Machine which takes hourly backups of the system and stores them on a different disk and I also have Mozy which backsup over the network to some big disk in the sky somewhere.
Despite all those precautions, there is always a fear that you've missed some critical file in your backup plan or something won't come back when you try to restore. Not to mention that a fresh install also implies that you reinstall all your applications (as opposed to recovering them from the backup) so you need to have all your registration codes for all those programs you bought. That's why I decided to do the upgrade instead of the clean install.
After trying every manner of voodoo to get my system even workable, I decided that I needed to wipe it out and start clean. I went through all my files and made sure I had backups of everything as best I could and then fired up the Disk Utility to wipe things out. I swear I stared at the "Do It!" button for about 5 minutes before casting my bits into oblivion.
Once the installation was complete, I cautiously fired up the browser to see if things were back to normal or hopefully, even faster. When programs launch on the Mac, they "bounce" in the Dock at the bottom of the screen as they load. Before the reinstall, my web browser was taking about 25 bounces before a window would appear and even then, it wasn't fully loaded. After the re-install, it launches in about 2 bounces. Oh yeah!
I've spent the better part of today getting things re-installed and working again. I've re-downloaded all kinds of programs, pulled activation keys out of old emails, and basically tweaked things back to the way they were before the big reset. The whole license key thing is fraught with opportunities for disaster. I thought I had one today when I tried to reinstall Parallels. When I bought the upgrade earlier, I just installed it over top of the old version and it went fine - besides from being slow.
When I reinstalled it today, it asked for my Activation key which I got when I bought the upgrade, but then it asked for the Activation key for the original version that I upgraded over. Oh cool! I think I bought that about two years ago. I have no idea what that code is! I looked through old emails, looked at the manual, found the original install disk - no Activation key. I called support and asked them if they had any record of my Activation key. Nope, they don't have it and can't generate one for me. Great! The guy on the phone did say that the key should be on the original CD. I double checked the CD again, this time looking at the back of the CD jacket, and viola! There was the key. I entered that in and was able to complete the installation. Wow - that was close!
There are probably other problems still lurking - like programs that I rarely use that I didn't re-install and will go to use one day, or files that I haven't restored from backup. We'll see.
It has been a long and arduous process but I'm so glad to have my speedy computer back, that I think it was worth it. I think...
It's weird how the simplest of changes can cascade into a rolling thunder of destruction and mayhem. Okay, nothing actually caught fire, but this has been a rough few days for the Hudgins' Mac.
Here's the story. The newest version of the Mac operating system - 10. 6 (named Snow Leopard) - was released last August or September. I didn't upgrade to it because 1) I'm cheap and 2) I didn't see a compelling need to do so. Snow Leopard was slated as a release with a lot of fixes under the hood and without a lot of fancy features. It was however, supposed to speed things up. Any hint of an idea where this is going???
So, a couple of weeks ago, I got the urge to start work on another iPhone application. Actually, it will eventually be an iPad application - for the new tablet computer that Apple is releasing. It's basically a giant iPhone-looking device but it has some new features and I thought it would be fun to write a program for it. Well, I went to download the software development kit for it and found out that I needed to upgrade to Snow Leopard in order to use it. What the heck, it's about time anyway right?
I ordered it from Amazon and it came in a few days. I went through the install process and got it all up and running and was amazed - at how slow everything was. Programs were taking forever to launch and then ran at a snail's pace once they were up. Oh crap! This is not good. I asked Mr. Google what the heck was up with this and was greeted by page after page of people having the same problem - terrible slow downs after upgrading. Hmm. I guess I should have done that search *before* I did the upgrade...
I limped along this way for a few days and ran into the next problem. I went to start Parallels - the program that lets me run Windows programs (Quicken) on the Mac. When it tried to start, it politely told me that the current version wouldn't run on Snow Leopard and I would have to upgrade it (Parallels) to the latest version. Argh! Okay, I bought that online and downloaded it and installed it. That program is a pretty big drain on the Mac anyway and now, with the machine limping along as it was, it was essentially unusable. Something had to be done.
I should point out that I had chosen to do an upgrade of Snow Leopard as opposed to a clean re-install. There are two schools of thought on this. Some people think that you should just wipe your disk clean and start fresh while others maintain that the upgrade process is good enough that you don't need to "clean house" beforehand. Of course, if you do the clean install, you've got to have good backups of all your stuff because a clean install means deleting everything on the disk. I actually have two methods of backing up the computer - I use Time Machine which takes hourly backups of the system and stores them on a different disk and I also have Mozy which backsup over the network to some big disk in the sky somewhere.
Despite all those precautions, there is always a fear that you've missed some critical file in your backup plan or something won't come back when you try to restore. Not to mention that a fresh install also implies that you reinstall all your applications (as opposed to recovering them from the backup) so you need to have all your registration codes for all those programs you bought. That's why I decided to do the upgrade instead of the clean install.
After trying every manner of voodoo to get my system even workable, I decided that I needed to wipe it out and start clean. I went through all my files and made sure I had backups of everything as best I could and then fired up the Disk Utility to wipe things out. I swear I stared at the "Do It!" button for about 5 minutes before casting my bits into oblivion.
Once the installation was complete, I cautiously fired up the browser to see if things were back to normal or hopefully, even faster. When programs launch on the Mac, they "bounce" in the Dock at the bottom of the screen as they load. Before the reinstall, my web browser was taking about 25 bounces before a window would appear and even then, it wasn't fully loaded. After the re-install, it launches in about 2 bounces. Oh yeah!
I've spent the better part of today getting things re-installed and working again. I've re-downloaded all kinds of programs, pulled activation keys out of old emails, and basically tweaked things back to the way they were before the big reset. The whole license key thing is fraught with opportunities for disaster. I thought I had one today when I tried to reinstall Parallels. When I bought the upgrade earlier, I just installed it over top of the old version and it went fine - besides from being slow.
When I reinstalled it today, it asked for my Activation key which I got when I bought the upgrade, but then it asked for the Activation key for the original version that I upgraded over. Oh cool! I think I bought that about two years ago. I have no idea what that code is! I looked through old emails, looked at the manual, found the original install disk - no Activation key. I called support and asked them if they had any record of my Activation key. Nope, they don't have it and can't generate one for me. Great! The guy on the phone did say that the key should be on the original CD. I double checked the CD again, this time looking at the back of the CD jacket, and viola! There was the key. I entered that in and was able to complete the installation. Wow - that was close!
There are probably other problems still lurking - like programs that I rarely use that I didn't re-install and will go to use one day, or files that I haven't restored from backup. We'll see.
It has been a long and arduous process but I'm so glad to have my speedy computer back, that I think it was worth it. I think...
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Regular Expressions
OK, we're going to take a trip to Geek World today and talk about Regular Expressions.
One of the things that computers are really good at is finding things right? You type in what you want to find and the computer goes off and finds "matches". The trick, of course, is being able to clearly tell the computer what you want to find. Most people have experience searching for things on the web where you simply throw as many terms at the search engine as you can to try and narrow down the results list.
Let's say you are searching for a dentist in your area who does laser teeth whitening or something like that. You could search for "Dentist" but the list of results would be rather large and mostly irrelevant to your area. You could refine the search by typing "Dentist laser" and that might narrow it down some. You could type "Dentist Laser Uxbridge teeth" and that would be very precise but that might be overly restrictive because you might not get Dentists in the next town over. So clearly, you have to find just the right combination of specificity and generality to get the results you want.
But I'm not going to talk about web search engines. I really want to talk about searching for text in a file - say looking for the word "shrimp" in a Word document. Obviously, that's pretty easy to do. You click Edit, Find..., type in "shrimp", hit OK, and Word shows you all the occurrences of shrimp in the document. OK, but what if you wanted to find both shrimp and shrimps? Or what if you only wanted to find shrimp if it was the first word in a sentence? What if you wanted to find the word shrimp only if it was the first word in a sentence or if it was followed by the word Gumbo and make sure the 's' in shrimp was capitalized? That's probably easy enough to do by hand but what if you had a file with 500,000 lines of purchase descriptions from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory that you had to process like that?
You need a way to precisely define a pattern that will match this relatively obscure combination of letters and possibly perform an operation on some of those characters automatically. You need a Regular Expression.
A Regular Expression - or RegEx - is a pattern matching language that is used extensively in Geekdom. It's an truly powerful and complex system that lets you perform amazing feats of text manipulation. Here is a simple Regular Expression that matches an email address. A web developer might use this to verify that someone registering is entering a proper email address:
^\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$
Yeah, so that's a bunch of gobblty-gook right? Yup, with great power comes great...difficulty. It's very difficult to express a text pattern that is precise where you need it to be but flexible enough to include variations that you want to be flexible about. An email address is something@something.something. You know the @ sign is in there but the other stuff is pretty much whatever you want right? Well, no. Email addresses can't have spaces in them so you have to throw those out. You can use dot and underscores but not dashes. There are a few other rules about a proper email address as well. So, specifying exactly what you want to match can get tricky. It's especially tricky because you have to use characters - the very things you are trying to find - to specify the pattern you are trying to specify. The result can be extremely cryptic as you can see above - and that is a simple one!
There is a funny saying that everyone learns when first starting with Regular Expressions. It goes something like this:
"So you have a problem you want to solve with a Regular Expression. Now you have two problems."
Indeed, you could easily spend more time writing and testing a regular expression to make a change than you would have if you had just paged through the entire document and made the change by hand. I know. I've done it.
As I kind of hinted, RegEx's are used to find and optionally replace so here's a simple example. Different text editors allow you to specify the search pattern and the replace pattern in different ways but for now we'll just show things like this:
Search: cat
Replace: dog
The characters 'cat' are a RegEx pattern. Same with dog. They are "literals" and do exactly what you would expect - they match themselves.
If I wanted to find all the occurrences of either 'cat' or 'Cat' and replace it with 'dog', I could do something like this:
Search: [c|C]at
Replace: dog
The '[c|C]' pattern says lowercase 'c' *or* (the | symbol) uppercase 'C', followed by a and t.
So, there are special symbols used in the expressions to add flexibility. Of course, this use of special symbols presents a problem. The vertical bar symbol - called a pipe symbol - is a special symbol that means "or" - this *or* that. But what if you really wanted to find a pipe symbol in your text. You need a way to tell the pattern to not treat it as meaning "or" but to actually match itself. To do that, you "escape" the symbol by putting a '\' in front of it like this \|. So if we wanted to find something like 'car|truck' and replace it with 'car and truck', we would say:
Search: car\|truck
Replace: car and truck
Yeah, I hear you. What if you want to find the '\' symbol. Well you escape that with a '\' so it looks like this '\\'.
Now back to our example of replacing cat or Cat with dog. We wrote the expression to do that but it might have a problem. What if the word 'catalog' was in our document. The RegEx would convert that to dogalog which is probably not something we want. It's a perfect example of how RegEx's can do things you never intended if you aren't properly precise. So actually, what we wanted to do instead of replacing 'cat' with 'dog' is replace ' cat ' when it is surrounded by spaces to ' dog ' surrounded by spaces. That would limit it to the *word* cat and we wouldn't accidentally match other words that happen to have c-a-t in them.
Except, what if cat is at the end of a sentence and is followed by a period not a space? We want to include that right? So we really want to find a space, c-a-t, and either a space or a period. Or a comma. Or a semi-colon. Maybe it's c-a-t followed by anything *but* another letter. That's an example of how a RegEx might *not* do things you intended because your pattern isn't properly lenient.
Developing a pattern that does match what you do want and doesn't match what you don't is a real challenge. Whole books have been written on developing Regular Expressions and the web is full of tutorial sites for it if you are interested. What prompted this post was a problem I had the other day. I had a file that consisted of 5000 lines of information that I needed to import into a database. It was arranged something like this
[barcode],[Date] [Author] [Notes]
[barcode],[Date] [Author] [Notes]
or
ISG000002421, 10-23-2009 10:23:34 Jsmith This is the description, of product A...
ISG000002456, 10-24-2009 9:10:04 JDoe More notes that contain text...
and so on...
Pretty straightforward but there were some problems. First, I needed to separate the barcode section from the rest of the text with a pipe '|' instead of a comma. Easy enough it would seem just find all the commas and replace them with a |. Not so fast though bucko. There might be commas in the notes section that I don't want to replace so I had to find only the commas that came after the barcode value. Hmm, there might be barcodes mentioned in the notes section though so I really want to find only the commas that come after the barcodes that start at the beginning of the line. Here's the pattern that matches that:
Search: ^ISG\d+,
The caret - ^ - matches the beginning of the line, the ISG matches itself, the \d matches a digit (zero through 9) and the + means one or more of the preceding items (the digit), and then the comma and a space that you can't see. OK, so that's what I want to find but what do I want to replace it with? I can't just replace it with a | because I'd replacing the whole pattern - the barcode and the comma with just the pipe character. I'd lose the barcode. Since I'm matching different barcode patters - the \d+ that matches sequences of digits - I don't really know what to replace it with. Fortunately, RegEx's will remember the patterns that they match and let you put those matches back during the replace. Here's how:
Search: ^(ISG\d+),
Replace: ^\1\|
I've added parenthesis around the barcode pattern. This says "remember this pattern, I'm going to use it later". Then I use \1 in the replacement pattern which corresponds to whatever text was matched in the parenthesis in the search, followed by the pipe character (which I have to escape because it normally means "or" in a regular expression and I want it to actually mean | here).
So that should fix that but there were a few other problems. The notes section sometimes had quotes around them and I didn't want that. I didn't want to remove any quotes that were inside the notes, just the ones that might be around the whole notes section. That was pretty easy too:
Search: ^(ISG\d+\| )"(.+)"$
Replace: \1\2
This says "find everything up to the first quote character and remember it in pattern 1. Then match the everything up to the quote before the end of the line and remember it in pattern 2. Replace all that with what is in pattern 1 and pattern 2. Since the quotes were not in the patterns that were remembered, they get dropped.
The last problem was tougher. It turned out that some of the notes actually contained multiple entries. So the notes section might look like this for some lines:
ISGxxx | 10-24-2009 10:2:23 This is note 1 11-2-2009 9:3:13 This is note 2...
I really needed to separate those multiple notes into separate lines for the same barcode. I won't go into the pattern that I built that let me do that. Suffice it to say that it was rather complex. It probably took me about 30 minutes to figure out the patterns that I needed but it probably saved me about 3 hours of tedious, error prone, hand-editing of that 5000 line file. Fun stuff.
One of the things that computers are really good at is finding things right? You type in what you want to find and the computer goes off and finds "matches". The trick, of course, is being able to clearly tell the computer what you want to find. Most people have experience searching for things on the web where you simply throw as many terms at the search engine as you can to try and narrow down the results list.
Let's say you are searching for a dentist in your area who does laser teeth whitening or something like that. You could search for "Dentist" but the list of results would be rather large and mostly irrelevant to your area. You could refine the search by typing "Dentist laser" and that might narrow it down some. You could type "Dentist Laser Uxbridge teeth" and that would be very precise but that might be overly restrictive because you might not get Dentists in the next town over. So clearly, you have to find just the right combination of specificity and generality to get the results you want.
But I'm not going to talk about web search engines. I really want to talk about searching for text in a file - say looking for the word "shrimp" in a Word document. Obviously, that's pretty easy to do. You click Edit, Find..., type in "shrimp", hit OK, and Word shows you all the occurrences of shrimp in the document. OK, but what if you wanted to find both shrimp and shrimps? Or what if you only wanted to find shrimp if it was the first word in a sentence? What if you wanted to find the word shrimp only if it was the first word in a sentence or if it was followed by the word Gumbo and make sure the 's' in shrimp was capitalized? That's probably easy enough to do by hand but what if you had a file with 500,000 lines of purchase descriptions from the Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory that you had to process like that?
You need a way to precisely define a pattern that will match this relatively obscure combination of letters and possibly perform an operation on some of those characters automatically. You need a Regular Expression.
A Regular Expression - or RegEx - is a pattern matching language that is used extensively in Geekdom. It's an truly powerful and complex system that lets you perform amazing feats of text manipulation. Here is a simple Regular Expression that matches an email address. A web developer might use this to verify that someone registering is entering a proper email address:
^\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$
Yeah, so that's a bunch of gobblty-gook right? Yup, with great power comes great...difficulty. It's very difficult to express a text pattern that is precise where you need it to be but flexible enough to include variations that you want to be flexible about. An email address is something@something.something. You know the @ sign is in there but the other stuff is pretty much whatever you want right? Well, no. Email addresses can't have spaces in them so you have to throw those out. You can use dot and underscores but not dashes. There are a few other rules about a proper email address as well. So, specifying exactly what you want to match can get tricky. It's especially tricky because you have to use characters - the very things you are trying to find - to specify the pattern you are trying to specify. The result can be extremely cryptic as you can see above - and that is a simple one!
There is a funny saying that everyone learns when first starting with Regular Expressions. It goes something like this:
"So you have a problem you want to solve with a Regular Expression. Now you have two problems."
Indeed, you could easily spend more time writing and testing a regular expression to make a change than you would have if you had just paged through the entire document and made the change by hand. I know. I've done it.
As I kind of hinted, RegEx's are used to find and optionally replace so here's a simple example. Different text editors allow you to specify the search pattern and the replace pattern in different ways but for now we'll just show things like this:
Search: cat
Replace: dog
The characters 'cat' are a RegEx pattern. Same with dog. They are "literals" and do exactly what you would expect - they match themselves.
If I wanted to find all the occurrences of either 'cat' or 'Cat' and replace it with 'dog', I could do something like this:
Search: [c|C]at
Replace: dog
The '[c|C]' pattern says lowercase 'c' *or* (the | symbol) uppercase 'C', followed by a and t.
So, there are special symbols used in the expressions to add flexibility. Of course, this use of special symbols presents a problem. The vertical bar symbol - called a pipe symbol - is a special symbol that means "or" - this *or* that. But what if you really wanted to find a pipe symbol in your text. You need a way to tell the pattern to not treat it as meaning "or" but to actually match itself. To do that, you "escape" the symbol by putting a '\' in front of it like this \|. So if we wanted to find something like 'car|truck' and replace it with 'car and truck', we would say:
Search: car\|truck
Replace: car and truck
Yeah, I hear you. What if you want to find the '\' symbol. Well you escape that with a '\' so it looks like this '\\'.
Now back to our example of replacing cat or Cat with dog. We wrote the expression to do that but it might have a problem. What if the word 'catalog' was in our document. The RegEx would convert that to dogalog which is probably not something we want. It's a perfect example of how RegEx's can do things you never intended if you aren't properly precise. So actually, what we wanted to do instead of replacing 'cat' with 'dog' is replace ' cat ' when it is surrounded by spaces to ' dog ' surrounded by spaces. That would limit it to the *word* cat and we wouldn't accidentally match other words that happen to have c-a-t in them.
Except, what if cat is at the end of a sentence and is followed by a period not a space? We want to include that right? So we really want to find a space, c-a-t, and either a space or a period. Or a comma. Or a semi-colon. Maybe it's c-a-t followed by anything *but* another letter. That's an example of how a RegEx might *not* do things you intended because your pattern isn't properly lenient.
Developing a pattern that does match what you do want and doesn't match what you don't is a real challenge. Whole books have been written on developing Regular Expressions and the web is full of tutorial sites for it if you are interested. What prompted this post was a problem I had the other day. I had a file that consisted of 5000 lines of information that I needed to import into a database. It was arranged something like this
[barcode],[Date] [Author] [Notes]
or
ISG000002421, 10-23-2009 10:23:34 Jsmith This is the description, of product A...
ISG000002456, 10-24-2009 9:10:04 JDoe More notes that contain text...
and so on...
Pretty straightforward but there were some problems. First, I needed to separate the barcode section from the rest of the text with a pipe '|' instead of a comma. Easy enough it would seem just find all the commas and replace them with a |. Not so fast though bucko. There might be commas in the notes section that I don't want to replace so I had to find only the commas that came after the barcode value. Hmm, there might be barcodes mentioned in the notes section though so I really want to find only the commas that come after the barcodes that start at the beginning of the line. Here's the pattern that matches that:
Search: ^ISG\d+,
The caret - ^ - matches the beginning of the line, the ISG matches itself, the \d matches a digit (zero through 9) and the + means one or more of the preceding items (the digit), and then the comma and a space that you can't see. OK, so that's what I want to find but what do I want to replace it with? I can't just replace it with a | because I'd replacing the whole pattern - the barcode and the comma with just the pipe character. I'd lose the barcode. Since I'm matching different barcode patters - the \d+ that matches sequences of digits - I don't really know what to replace it with. Fortunately, RegEx's will remember the patterns that they match and let you put those matches back during the replace. Here's how:
Search: ^(ISG\d+),
Replace: ^\1\|
I've added parenthesis around the barcode pattern. This says "remember this pattern, I'm going to use it later". Then I use \1 in the replacement pattern which corresponds to whatever text was matched in the parenthesis in the search, followed by the pipe character (which I have to escape because it normally means "or" in a regular expression and I want it to actually mean | here).
So that should fix that but there were a few other problems. The notes section sometimes had quotes around them and I didn't want that. I didn't want to remove any quotes that were inside the notes, just the ones that might be around the whole notes section. That was pretty easy too:
Search: ^(ISG\d+\| )"(.+)"$
Replace: \1\2
This says "find everything up to the first quote character and remember it in pattern 1. Then match the everything up to the quote before the end of the line and remember it in pattern 2. Replace all that with what is in pattern 1 and pattern 2. Since the quotes were not in the patterns that were remembered, they get dropped.
The last problem was tougher. It turned out that some of the notes actually contained multiple entries. So the notes section might look like this for some lines:
ISGxxx | 10-24-2009 10:2:23 This is note 1 11-2-2009 9:3:13 This is note 2...
I really needed to separate those multiple notes into separate lines for the same barcode. I won't go into the pattern that I built that let me do that. Suffice it to say that it was rather complex. It probably took me about 30 minutes to figure out the patterns that I needed but it probably saved me about 3 hours of tedious, error prone, hand-editing of that 5000 line file. Fun stuff.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Double Your Reds, Double Your Fun
I finally gave blood again after skipping the last several drives. The Red Cross is almost like the telemarketers - once they have you, they keep pestering you to give, give, give. The last time I gave, they had trouble finding my vein and it was not a pleasant experience. They were digging around my arm with the needle and I ended up pretty bruised. They even cut me with the needle as they were pulling it out. Needless to say, I wasn't too keen on going through that again so I begged out of the last several drives.
They called again recently and I figured it was time to try again so I headed over there on Monday. When I got there, they asked me if I wanted to do "Double Reds". This is where they hook you up to a machine that runs your blood through a centrifuge that separates the red cells from the plasma. They keep the red cells and pump the plasma back into you. Since they give you back the plasma, they can take two pints worth of red cells and not leave you dehydrated, hence the term "Double Reds".
Things didn't start off very well. They again had a hard time finding my vein. The first two ladies couldn't do it but the third one got things going. It wasn't nearly as bad as the previous time but still somewhat irksome. Another benefit of the Double Reds procedure is they use a smaller needle which is more comfortable. I guess.
So they got the blood flowing and the machine started working. I watched the blood being pumped through all kinds of tubes and circular pumping wheels. After a while fluid that looked like beer started filling up a bag hanging on the front of the machine. It acutally had a foamy head on it! The nurse said that was my plasma and would get pumped back into me after they got the first pint separated. Just behind the "beer bag" I could see another bag filling up with blood - presumably the extra rich red cells.
They mix the plasma with some saline which is at room temperature - meaning cold - so when they started pumping it back in, my arm started getting very chilly. I could see the plasma bag draining as my little micro-brew was injected back into my arm. My arm was a little cold but I soon started feeling my lips tingle. I wondered if my core temperature was being lowered and making me shiver in a weird way. I also started feeling kind of tingly in my chest. I asked the nurse about it and she said it was from the citrate they add to the saline (not sure why they add that).
After the plasma bag empties, they pump out another pint of blood, separate it out, and pump the plasma back in for round two. After it was all done, I was still a bit tingly but I didn't have to sit at the "Canteen" table since I hadn't really lost any fluid. I felt pretty good but decided not to go to Deb's Aerobic class that evening. Tonight though (Wednesday), I went to another aerobics class and basically couldn't keep up. I guess it will take a while to regenerate those cells and be back to full aerobic capacity.
They called again recently and I figured it was time to try again so I headed over there on Monday. When I got there, they asked me if I wanted to do "Double Reds". This is where they hook you up to a machine that runs your blood through a centrifuge that separates the red cells from the plasma. They keep the red cells and pump the plasma back into you. Since they give you back the plasma, they can take two pints worth of red cells and not leave you dehydrated, hence the term "Double Reds".
Things didn't start off very well. They again had a hard time finding my vein. The first two ladies couldn't do it but the third one got things going. It wasn't nearly as bad as the previous time but still somewhat irksome. Another benefit of the Double Reds procedure is they use a smaller needle which is more comfortable. I guess.
So they got the blood flowing and the machine started working. I watched the blood being pumped through all kinds of tubes and circular pumping wheels. After a while fluid that looked like beer started filling up a bag hanging on the front of the machine. It acutally had a foamy head on it! The nurse said that was my plasma and would get pumped back into me after they got the first pint separated. Just behind the "beer bag" I could see another bag filling up with blood - presumably the extra rich red cells.
They mix the plasma with some saline which is at room temperature - meaning cold - so when they started pumping it back in, my arm started getting very chilly. I could see the plasma bag draining as my little micro-brew was injected back into my arm. My arm was a little cold but I soon started feeling my lips tingle. I wondered if my core temperature was being lowered and making me shiver in a weird way. I also started feeling kind of tingly in my chest. I asked the nurse about it and she said it was from the citrate they add to the saline (not sure why they add that).
After the plasma bag empties, they pump out another pint of blood, separate it out, and pump the plasma back in for round two. After it was all done, I was still a bit tingly but I didn't have to sit at the "Canteen" table since I hadn't really lost any fluid. I felt pretty good but decided not to go to Deb's Aerobic class that evening. Tonight though (Wednesday), I went to another aerobics class and basically couldn't keep up. I guess it will take a while to regenerate those cells and be back to full aerobic capacity.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Live from Ubuntu
Back up. I've been using this third generation, hand-me-down laptop that was originally purchased for Kyle for his High School graduation present in preparation for heading to college (four and a half freekin' years ago!). After Kyle got his Macbook, this laptop went to Carly who used it until she got a Macbook for her graduation and then I inherited it. Sigh...
I've been using it downstairs to browse while watching TV or just lounging so that I'm not always sitting in the computer room (or for when Deb hogs the main machine). It's actually not bad for a Windows machine. Over the last couple of days however, I started getting virus warnings that the virus scanner was unable to fix. Who knows what all the kids had put on this thing so it's integrity was suspect anyway. So, I could re-install Windows or I could try Linux.
Linux is an open-source operating system that is built on a version of the Unix operating system which powers the big data center servers. Linux is supported by enthusiasts who contribute things to it to make it better and support all kinds of things. One problem with Unix (and therefore Linux) though is that it was designed for computer nerds and is really not suitable for the general public. For example, here's how you turn off the sound that plays when you login:
nftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds --type bool false
Yeah, that ain't gonna play in Kansas.
So, various organizations have come up with packages to make Linux more friendly to the average user. Ubuntu is one such organization and is relatively popular so that's the one I chose. Ubuntu gives each version a different name. This one is Karmic Koala. Others have been Jaunty Jackalope, Hardy Heron, you get the idea. Way to take yourselves seriously guys...
Anyway, with the laptop still running Windows, I downloaded a CD image of the Ubuntu installation CD and burned it to a blank CD. Then I rebooted the laptop to boot from the CD and it went through the installation process - wiping Windows off the machine. No going back now...
It went through pretty quickly and in about a half an hour, I had a new system. Only problem was that the wireless network wouldn't work. Hmm. One kind of catch-22 with this stuff is that all the fixes and updates are basically only available over the internet so, in cases like this, in order to fix your internet connection, you have to have a working internet connection. Ruh-Roh.
It's not as bad as it seems though. Usually, the wired network connections will work so I took it upstairs, connected the cable from the router to the laptop and established a glorious, soul-saving, all-things-are-now-possible, connection to the web. Yeeh-Haw!
I then set about the process of figuring out how to make the wireless connection work so I could use this thing downstairs. With a bit of Googling and tweaking and fiddling, I was able to make the wireless card work again and got connected. I'm now downstairs, sitting on the couch, typing this post.
I've spent most of the morning (while the blizzard rages outside) trying to get the automatic updates running so that security patches and system upgrades can be downloaded and applied. I *think* I've got that working but it hasn't been fun.
Not really sure about the whole Linux thing overall though. Twenty years ago, all this tweaking and modifying would have been a lot of fun but now I just want things to work. Still, it's free and all I really need is a web browser and that's working so I can't really complain too much.
What I really need to do is turn this thing into a Hackintosh - a regular PC laptop running the Mac operating system. THAT would be cool!
Sunday, December 06, 2009
First Snow
By the time we got home, we had some pretty good accumulation and by the morning we had this!
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Winter Leaves
Doing some more playing with Photoshop filters to turn pictures into paintings. This one came out especially good I think.
More "art" on the Flickr page.
More "art" on the Flickr page.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
TSO - Epic FAIL
A few months ago, I heard a radio ad for an upcoming concert by the TSO - Trans-Siberian Orchetra. You may have heard of them. They got popular from their rock-infused versions of some Christmas songs a few years ago. Each year, I hear people saying they went to the show and how good it was so I decided to get some tickets. I was going to surprise Deb but I had to make sure she didn't schedule something over the date so I ended up telling her what it was. Her reaction was - shall we say - muted.
So last Thursday, we headed out to the DCU center in Worcester for our date with destiny. Strike one was the jacked up parking prices at the surrounding garages. I had just been to a hockey game here a few weeks ago and paid $10 for parking. This time however, it was $20. Isn't that illegal?
We found our seats in the arena and waited for things to start. The stage was packed with all kinds of lighting rigs and framework and it really looked impressive. After we sat down, a group of people filled in the seats behind us and one guy in the group started telling the rest of the group how great this was going to be - and we got to listen. It seems he's seen the show about a hundred times and kept telling his friends how this was going to blow their minds. He liked to announce "We've got a virgin here! A TSO virgin" referring to one of the people in his group. The really disturbing thing was that I think he was referring to a woman who looked like it was his mother (and Grandmother to the kids in the group) - Ugh. He would also follow this announcement - and pretty much any other statement with a creepy "heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh" laugh.
He and another guy in his group talked about all kinds of things relating to the concert. They explored the quality of the position of these seats as opposed to being on the floor or on one of the other sides and how we should be able to see all the lasers and flames better. They told the "virgin" that they were going to be watching her face when things start up because she's just not going to believe it. It was pretty much like when you watch a movie with someone who's seen it before and they constantly say "Ooh, get ready, this part is funny."
The best part however was when they tried to estimate the size of the crowd. It started with "How many people do you think will fit in the arena" and one of them said "Probably about 90 to 100 thousand." I just about fell out of my chair. The DCU center is your typical multipurpose small city basketball/hockey/RV show arena and there is no way it seats more than about 15 thousand people. The other guy answers back "No, probably no more than 30 to 40 thousand since one end of the arena is blocked off for the stage." I figure 10 K max. One guys says "Yeah, they give $1 for each person to charity at each show so that's really great." A few minutes later, the guy snags an usher and asks the seating capacity. She says "12 to 13 thousand." "Oh."
Just before the show starts, local radio personalities (I guess) get on stage with some band members and present the check to the local charity. The amount? A little over 8 thousand dollars. From behind I hear "So if they give a dollar per person, that means... umm... there's... (frantic, complex calculations going on in his head), 8 thousand people here. Hmm, I guess we low balled that one huh? Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh" No, you twit, you over estimated it!
Soon, the lights go down,the crowd whoops it up, and our buddy says "Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh. Get ready to be blown away. Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh." The lighting rigs light up with some blue lights. "Heh-heh-heh." They start raising up (apparently "like magic"). "Heh-heh-heh." The band then launches into a heavy metal version of some Christmas song. They have a drummer, a couple of keyboard players, a bass player, and then two guitarists and a violin player running around on stage playing various solos and guitar/electric violin licks. I felt a sense of "Oh crap" washing over me as they ran around and played. The guitarists had their guitars slung way low and would run to one side of the stage and stand with their legs spread apart while they ripped out a lick or two. They they would run to some other position, take a pose and do some more. The violin player (a female I think) would also take dramatic pose positions and periodically point her bow straight up and wait for hoots and hollers from the crowd. It was like a KISS concert! WTF!?
At one point the two guitarists each ran to opposite sides of the stage and the violin player was in the middle. Suddenly, their little stage areas began to lift up and the crowd went wild. Was it by magic? No, it was due to the scissor jacks that were completely exposed just hoisting the platform up. They could have easily put some black fabric in front of the platform that would unfold as the platform went up but nah, the Kubota jack from Taylor Rental will be fine with no covering. At one point, the light cage that lifted up at the start got into the act. It came down and went up a few times and the lights changed colors. Awesome!
Then, it got better. A narrator came out and began telling a Christmas story/poem - in the style of an evangelical preacher. At one point, I felt like turning to Deb and smacking her in the forehead to drive the demons from her soul. I only found out today, from reading the review in the paper, that the story was about a lost angel who was traveling around the world, observing the hardship and heartache of people until he/she/it found the Prince of Peace. At first I thought that meant she was looking for Michael Jackson but then I figured out who it was. Now, I'm fine with the story and the message but it was just so poorly done - the rhymes seemed like what a 10 year old would come up with to make things fit, and the delivery was so over the top - that I just couldn't stand it. The pattern was that the narrator would tell a little story and then the band would launch into a song - that basically had nothing to do with the story segment we just heard (I guess). At one point, snow (soap?) started falling from the light rigs in the ceiling and lasers began blasting around the arena. "Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh." Yeah, this was pretty cool - back in 1982 buddy.
Deb and I finally reached our saturation point and decided to leave. I have to admit that there was an ulterior motive. My weekly soccer game had been moved to Thursday and I had taken my stuff on the off chance that the concert would be over in time to make the game. I didn't have to twist Deb's arm though - she later said she was hoping I wasn't really enjoying it and was ready to leave almost from the beginning. Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
The irony is that I've since Googled the TSO, found their web site, and listened to some of their songs. I actually kind of like some of them. I think the over the top, amateurish production was what ruined it for me (Deb says "Nah, they just suck").
So, if you are a TSO virgin, I suggest you stay that way. Their ain't no morning-after pill for this mistake.
So last Thursday, we headed out to the DCU center in Worcester for our date with destiny. Strike one was the jacked up parking prices at the surrounding garages. I had just been to a hockey game here a few weeks ago and paid $10 for parking. This time however, it was $20. Isn't that illegal?
We found our seats in the arena and waited for things to start. The stage was packed with all kinds of lighting rigs and framework and it really looked impressive. After we sat down, a group of people filled in the seats behind us and one guy in the group started telling the rest of the group how great this was going to be - and we got to listen. It seems he's seen the show about a hundred times and kept telling his friends how this was going to blow their minds. He liked to announce "We've got a virgin here! A TSO virgin" referring to one of the people in his group. The really disturbing thing was that I think he was referring to a woman who looked like it was his mother (and Grandmother to the kids in the group) - Ugh. He would also follow this announcement - and pretty much any other statement with a creepy "heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh" laugh.
He and another guy in his group talked about all kinds of things relating to the concert. They explored the quality of the position of these seats as opposed to being on the floor or on one of the other sides and how we should be able to see all the lasers and flames better. They told the "virgin" that they were going to be watching her face when things start up because she's just not going to believe it. It was pretty much like when you watch a movie with someone who's seen it before and they constantly say "Ooh, get ready, this part is funny."
The best part however was when they tried to estimate the size of the crowd. It started with "How many people do you think will fit in the arena" and one of them said "Probably about 90 to 100 thousand." I just about fell out of my chair. The DCU center is your typical multipurpose small city basketball/hockey/RV show arena and there is no way it seats more than about 15 thousand people. The other guy answers back "No, probably no more than 30 to 40 thousand since one end of the arena is blocked off for the stage." I figure 10 K max. One guys says "Yeah, they give $1 for each person to charity at each show so that's really great." A few minutes later, the guy snags an usher and asks the seating capacity. She says "12 to 13 thousand." "Oh."
Just before the show starts, local radio personalities (I guess) get on stage with some band members and present the check to the local charity. The amount? A little over 8 thousand dollars. From behind I hear "So if they give a dollar per person, that means... umm... there's... (frantic, complex calculations going on in his head), 8 thousand people here. Hmm, I guess we low balled that one huh? Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh" No, you twit, you over estimated it!
At one point the two guitarists each ran to opposite sides of the stage and the violin player was in the middle. Suddenly, their little stage areas began to lift up and the crowd went wild. Was it by magic? No, it was due to the scissor jacks that were completely exposed just hoisting the platform up. They could have easily put some black fabric in front of the platform that would unfold as the platform went up but nah, the Kubota jack from Taylor Rental will be fine with no covering. At one point, the light cage that lifted up at the start got into the act. It came down and went up a few times and the lights changed colors. Awesome!
Then, it got better. A narrator came out and began telling a Christmas story/poem - in the style of an evangelical preacher. At one point, I felt like turning to Deb and smacking her in the forehead to drive the demons from her soul. I only found out today, from reading the review in the paper, that the story was about a lost angel who was traveling around the world, observing the hardship and heartache of people until he/she/it found the Prince of Peace. At first I thought that meant she was looking for Michael Jackson but then I figured out who it was. Now, I'm fine with the story and the message but it was just so poorly done - the rhymes seemed like what a 10 year old would come up with to make things fit, and the delivery was so over the top - that I just couldn't stand it. The pattern was that the narrator would tell a little story and then the band would launch into a song - that basically had nothing to do with the story segment we just heard (I guess). At one point, snow (soap?) started falling from the light rigs in the ceiling and lasers began blasting around the arena. "Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh." Yeah, this was pretty cool - back in 1982 buddy.
Deb and I finally reached our saturation point and decided to leave. I have to admit that there was an ulterior motive. My weekly soccer game had been moved to Thursday and I had taken my stuff on the off chance that the concert would be over in time to make the game. I didn't have to twist Deb's arm though - she later said she was hoping I wasn't really enjoying it and was ready to leave almost from the beginning. Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
The irony is that I've since Googled the TSO, found their web site, and listened to some of their songs. I actually kind of like some of them. I think the over the top, amateurish production was what ruined it for me (Deb says "Nah, they just suck").
So, if you are a TSO virgin, I suggest you stay that way. Their ain't no morning-after pill for this mistake.
Monday, September 14, 2009
We Did It - And I Never Want To Do It Again
I had been contemplating the title of the blog post that would report on the status of our century ride all along the road. At first, when we started out in the rain, it was something like "Wet and Wild". Then it was something about the scenic forest and ocean area of Dartmouth. At about mile 95, it changed into the one you see now - and I wasn't too sure about the first part coming true.
Let's start back at the beginning. It had been raining for several days leading up to the ride on Sunday so we didn't get much extra riding in during the week - OK, none. We did a couple of aerobics classes but that's not quite the same. It was supposed be partly cloudy on Sunday but when we woke at about 4:30 to drive down to Dartmouth, it was raining. Well, maybe it will be clear down there...
We got to the start at around 6:30 or so and checked in. They gave us a little wrist band and a cue sheet that gives the directions. We had thoughtfully brought a clear plastic sheet holder that we were going to put the cue sheet in and pin to the back of my jersey so Deb could navigate us around the course.
When they handed us the sheet, Deb and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was an 11x17 sheet with about 4 point type listing all the turns. Deb's sunglasses are not bifocals so there was no way she was going to be able to read that thing.
Luckily, they also "arrow" the route which means that they spray paint little directional arrows on the road at all the turns. We'd actually ridden with the group that puts on this ride once before and they really do a good job with this and it worked perfectly on this ride.
Anyway, we rolled out of the parking lot at about 6:50. There wasn't a mass start at all. People just dribbled out as they got registered. I had figured we would just follow people around the course but there was nobody visible in front of us when we started. The roads were wet and I got the usual spray in the chin that I've come to love so much. A little way down the road we started to see other people who had started before us and we reeled them in one by one. I now know how this works. The people who are slow start first to give themselves plenty of time to get around the course. The fast guys arrive late and hammer past all the slow pokes.
At probably around 15 miles, a group of two people who had been slowly gaining on us for awhile finally caught us and we stayed with them until the first rest stop at 30 miles. They would pull away from us on the uphills and we would catch back up on the flats and downs. I should take this opportunity to point out that "The Flattest Century in the East" is anything but. It doesn't have "climbs" like we have around here but it was pretty rolly - much more so than I was expecting. It was a little bit frustrating too. We could stay with pretty much every group that we got with until the road turned up a bit. Then, we had to decide if it was worth the energy expenditure to try and hang with them to the top or just let them go and hope to catch. We did a little of both but, in hindsight, we probably should have just let them go.
At the 30 mile checkin, we refilled a bottle, stretched a bit and then headed back out. We actually felt pretty good - those miles had gone by pretty quickly. Less than a mile from the stop, we see something in the road which doesn't look normal. As we get closer, we realize that it's a rider lying in the road - not moving. There are a couple of people standing around looking concerned. We stop and Deb gets off and goes over to see what's up. Apparently a dog had run out and caused the crash and the guy couldn't move his hip/leg. One of the other people called for an ambulance and Deb sat down on the road and let this guy lean on her so that he wasn't trying to hold himself in an awkward, non-painful position. I sure wouldn't want to have a heart attack out there because it took the ambulance about 20 minutes to get there. They relieved Deb of her duties and we set off again.
I don't really remember much about the ride to the next rest stop. It was very scenic and we were still feeling pretty good. It was only at mile 47 so the stops weren't spaced evenly apart. We stopped but didn't have any food. We felt like the Cliff Bars would be better then the PBJs that they had. We got water and stretched and just chilled for 10 minutes or so. The weather was still damp but the roads were starting to dry out little by little. The next stop was another 20 plus miles down the road at 70 miles. Still, we again felt a little rejuvenated when we got back on the bike.
This next stretch took us to the coast and was really quite pretty. At least I think it was. By this point, the sun had come out and the temp was heading up. The pain was also starting to build and I don't think I was able to savor the full ambiance of the area. It was a long way to the third rest stop and I was mercifully glad to see it. Just before we got there, I was thinking that I was probably going to have to stop soon regardless.
At the stop, we sat, laid down, stretched and basically vegged for awhile. We had a PBJ between us, got water, and chilled some more. We also noticed that my odometer said we were at mile 72 while this stop is a mile 70 according to the cue sheet. Hmm, sounds like my odo is reading a little generous. It also indicates that we are going to have to ride until my odo says 102 miles, not just 100 - crap.
Deb and I hatched a plan that we would break up the last 30 into 3 sets of 10 miles. Our easy ride at home - which we call the Llama loop because it goes by a llama farm - is 10 miles so we figured it was just 3 of those. Yeah, easy peasy.
We started off again and this time we didn't feel so rejuvenated. Clearly, I was feeling it more than Deb. I had a tough time getting going again. I felt pretty good on the flats but as soon as we had any kind of uphill, the power went out of my legs. We got to around mile 83 and found a grassy spot to pull over and rest. It was kind of frustrating to have all those people that we passed, now passing us but, as Deb said, it's better than passing out and falling over. True dat.
After a few minutes, we mounted up again and headed out. At the next 10 mile spot, I was feeling not great but OK so we kept on going. Big mistake. After another few miles or so, I was in serious pain and having trouble just making my legs go around. Unfortunately, we were in some woods with no real place to pull over and rest. At about mile 100 (on my computer), I had to stop. We found a grassy lawn with a shade tree. It took me awhile to get my breathing down and my legs were pretty much toast so we sat/laid there for awhile. Finally, I managed to get to my feet and get on the bike. The last three miles back were tough but manageable and seeing the UMASS Dartmouth campus come around the trees was like finding an oasis in the Sahara.
We found the car, picked up our t-shirts, and had a burger (I know). I even had a quick massage to try and put some feeling back into my neck and shoulders.
I should point out that all this pain and suffering is from my perspective only. I don't mean to suggest that Deb was in nearly the kind of pain that I was. She said she felt pretty good - just a little sore. Clearly, she handled this much better than I did - she says it's because she's the professional athlete (aerobics instructor) after all. She came home and did laundry while I laid in the recliner, unable to move. I hate it when people show off.
So we did it. It's a milestone to say we have done. And, while I said at the top that I never want to do it again, as I type this on the day after, and the pain has subsided, I could see that someday, I might consider doing it again.
Nah.
Let's start back at the beginning. It had been raining for several days leading up to the ride on Sunday so we didn't get much extra riding in during the week - OK, none. We did a couple of aerobics classes but that's not quite the same. It was supposed be partly cloudy on Sunday but when we woke at about 4:30 to drive down to Dartmouth, it was raining. Well, maybe it will be clear down there...
We got to the start at around 6:30 or so and checked in. They gave us a little wrist band and a cue sheet that gives the directions. We had thoughtfully brought a clear plastic sheet holder that we were going to put the cue sheet in and pin to the back of my jersey so Deb could navigate us around the course.When they handed us the sheet, Deb and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was an 11x17 sheet with about 4 point type listing all the turns. Deb's sunglasses are not bifocals so there was no way she was going to be able to read that thing.
Luckily, they also "arrow" the route which means that they spray paint little directional arrows on the road at all the turns. We'd actually ridden with the group that puts on this ride once before and they really do a good job with this and it worked perfectly on this ride.
Anyway, we rolled out of the parking lot at about 6:50. There wasn't a mass start at all. People just dribbled out as they got registered. I had figured we would just follow people around the course but there was nobody visible in front of us when we started. The roads were wet and I got the usual spray in the chin that I've come to love so much. A little way down the road we started to see other people who had started before us and we reeled them in one by one. I now know how this works. The people who are slow start first to give themselves plenty of time to get around the course. The fast guys arrive late and hammer past all the slow pokes.
At probably around 15 miles, a group of two people who had been slowly gaining on us for awhile finally caught us and we stayed with them until the first rest stop at 30 miles. They would pull away from us on the uphills and we would catch back up on the flats and downs. I should take this opportunity to point out that "The Flattest Century in the East" is anything but. It doesn't have "climbs" like we have around here but it was pretty rolly - much more so than I was expecting. It was a little bit frustrating too. We could stay with pretty much every group that we got with until the road turned up a bit. Then, we had to decide if it was worth the energy expenditure to try and hang with them to the top or just let them go and hope to catch. We did a little of both but, in hindsight, we probably should have just let them go.
At the 30 mile checkin, we refilled a bottle, stretched a bit and then headed back out. We actually felt pretty good - those miles had gone by pretty quickly. Less than a mile from the stop, we see something in the road which doesn't look normal. As we get closer, we realize that it's a rider lying in the road - not moving. There are a couple of people standing around looking concerned. We stop and Deb gets off and goes over to see what's up. Apparently a dog had run out and caused the crash and the guy couldn't move his hip/leg. One of the other people called for an ambulance and Deb sat down on the road and let this guy lean on her so that he wasn't trying to hold himself in an awkward, non-painful position. I sure wouldn't want to have a heart attack out there because it took the ambulance about 20 minutes to get there. They relieved Deb of her duties and we set off again.
I don't really remember much about the ride to the next rest stop. It was very scenic and we were still feeling pretty good. It was only at mile 47 so the stops weren't spaced evenly apart. We stopped but didn't have any food. We felt like the Cliff Bars would be better then the PBJs that they had. We got water and stretched and just chilled for 10 minutes or so. The weather was still damp but the roads were starting to dry out little by little. The next stop was another 20 plus miles down the road at 70 miles. Still, we again felt a little rejuvenated when we got back on the bike.
This next stretch took us to the coast and was really quite pretty. At least I think it was. By this point, the sun had come out and the temp was heading up. The pain was also starting to build and I don't think I was able to savor the full ambiance of the area. It was a long way to the third rest stop and I was mercifully glad to see it. Just before we got there, I was thinking that I was probably going to have to stop soon regardless.
At the stop, we sat, laid down, stretched and basically vegged for awhile. We had a PBJ between us, got water, and chilled some more. We also noticed that my odometer said we were at mile 72 while this stop is a mile 70 according to the cue sheet. Hmm, sounds like my odo is reading a little generous. It also indicates that we are going to have to ride until my odo says 102 miles, not just 100 - crap.
Deb and I hatched a plan that we would break up the last 30 into 3 sets of 10 miles. Our easy ride at home - which we call the Llama loop because it goes by a llama farm - is 10 miles so we figured it was just 3 of those. Yeah, easy peasy.
We started off again and this time we didn't feel so rejuvenated. Clearly, I was feeling it more than Deb. I had a tough time getting going again. I felt pretty good on the flats but as soon as we had any kind of uphill, the power went out of my legs. We got to around mile 83 and found a grassy spot to pull over and rest. It was kind of frustrating to have all those people that we passed, now passing us but, as Deb said, it's better than passing out and falling over. True dat.
After a few minutes, we mounted up again and headed out. At the next 10 mile spot, I was feeling not great but OK so we kept on going. Big mistake. After another few miles or so, I was in serious pain and having trouble just making my legs go around. Unfortunately, we were in some woods with no real place to pull over and rest. At about mile 100 (on my computer), I had to stop. We found a grassy lawn with a shade tree. It took me awhile to get my breathing down and my legs were pretty much toast so we sat/laid there for awhile. Finally, I managed to get to my feet and get on the bike. The last three miles back were tough but manageable and seeing the UMASS Dartmouth campus come around the trees was like finding an oasis in the Sahara.
We found the car, picked up our t-shirts, and had a burger (I know). I even had a quick massage to try and put some feeling back into my neck and shoulders.
I should point out that all this pain and suffering is from my perspective only. I don't mean to suggest that Deb was in nearly the kind of pain that I was. She said she felt pretty good - just a little sore. Clearly, she handled this much better than I did - she says it's because she's the professional athlete (aerobics instructor) after all. She came home and did laundry while I laid in the recliner, unable to move. I hate it when people show off.
So we did it. It's a milestone to say we have done. And, while I said at the top that I never want to do it again, as I type this on the day after, and the pain has subsided, I could see that someday, I might consider doing it again.
Nah.
Monday, August 24, 2009
College Ho
As Carly got in the car for the trip to UNH, Deb proclaimed "College Ho!" After a few seconds of awkward silence, she said "No, I mean, we are off to college!"
And so began the day of dropping off Carly for her first year of college. We had packed the Rav to the gills with all of her stuff and, I think, probably put Wal-Mart into the black a few months ahead of the typical retail turnaround that would otherwise occur on the day after Thanksgiving.
We got to school easily enough and joined the hordes of students (with their parents) moving into the dorms. They have vast armies of volunteer students with large laundry bin-type containers that come to your car, help you load, and take up to your room so it's actually not that bad. Carly is on the fifth floor of Bixler Hall so we had a long wait for the elevator to hoist the bin to the top. We actually had to take the stairs so they could fit more bins in the elevator. Did I mention it was about 90 degrees out and about 90 percent humidity?
We got to her room and found that one of her roommates had already gotten her stuff in. Just after we got there, her other roommate and her family arrived. So, we had about 12 people crammed into this room that barely holds three, in the stifling heat, unpacking cart loads of stuff.
Here's Carly and Deb apparently trying to figure out which side of the sheet faces up or something.
And here's another that gives another look at the room.
After we got settled, we went for lunch at the cafeteria and then to the bookstore to get a power strip, and a few other things. I expect a letter from Wal-Mart shortly asking why we didn't go to the local store in New Haven to get them.
After that, we all gathered under a tent in the quad to hear all the official welcomes and messages about the beginning of the journey. I remember it all being very meaningful and motivating back when Kyle went through it. This time however, it was just plain hot and I was ready for it to be over.
At about 3:30, the parents were "dismissed". We said our goodbyes but Deb wouldn't let me take a picture - something about her allergies acting up suddenly...
The drive back was long. Partly because we were contemplating the start of new life chapters for all of us, partly because we were making a list of all the things we had to bring to her that we forgot or didn't take, and partly because I tried an alternate route home and ended up in the countryside of Connecticut behind various forms of John Deere farm machinery.
Deb actually sent a few text messages to Carly on her phone - and Deb doesn't "text".
Yeah, things are changing.
And so began the day of dropping off Carly for her first year of college. We had packed the Rav to the gills with all of her stuff and, I think, probably put Wal-Mart into the black a few months ahead of the typical retail turnaround that would otherwise occur on the day after Thanksgiving.
We got to school easily enough and joined the hordes of students (with their parents) moving into the dorms. They have vast armies of volunteer students with large laundry bin-type containers that come to your car, help you load, and take up to your room so it's actually not that bad. Carly is on the fifth floor of Bixler Hall so we had a long wait for the elevator to hoist the bin to the top. We actually had to take the stairs so they could fit more bins in the elevator. Did I mention it was about 90 degrees out and about 90 percent humidity?
We got to her room and found that one of her roommates had already gotten her stuff in. Just after we got there, her other roommate and her family arrived. So, we had about 12 people crammed into this room that barely holds three, in the stifling heat, unpacking cart loads of stuff.
Here's Carly and Deb apparently trying to figure out which side of the sheet faces up or something.
And here's another that gives another look at the room.After we got settled, we went for lunch at the cafeteria and then to the bookstore to get a power strip, and a few other things. I expect a letter from Wal-Mart shortly asking why we didn't go to the local store in New Haven to get them.
After that, we all gathered under a tent in the quad to hear all the official welcomes and messages about the beginning of the journey. I remember it all being very meaningful and motivating back when Kyle went through it. This time however, it was just plain hot and I was ready for it to be over.
At about 3:30, the parents were "dismissed". We said our goodbyes but Deb wouldn't let me take a picture - something about her allergies acting up suddenly...
The drive back was long. Partly because we were contemplating the start of new life chapters for all of us, partly because we were making a list of all the things we had to bring to her that we forgot or didn't take, and partly because I tried an alternate route home and ended up in the countryside of Connecticut behind various forms of John Deere farm machinery.
Deb actually sent a few text messages to Carly on her phone - and Deb doesn't "text".
Yeah, things are changing.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Tandemania
Well, we've been training for this century coming up in September for awhile now. Way back in May when I signed us up, I looked up all kinds of training plans for comfortably completing a century. They were basically 10 or 12 week plans where you gradually increase your mileage such that you could do a 60 or 75 mile training ride. If you can get to that point, the little bit extra on the day of the big ride would be easy.
Of course this was in May so we had plenty of time... You know where this is going don't you.
The weather this summer has been really rainy so it was very tough to get rides in. Not to mention that there just isn't time during the week. This was going to be a struggle. We have been gradually building up the ride length but it's slow going. Last week we put a long one in and by the time we got back to Uxbridge, it was really hot. I "bonked" - ran out of energy on the last bit up the hill to the house and just about died. That was only 40 miles. I think the cause was not enough water and not enough electrolytes.
Early on, I had started looking into energy replacement stuff. The newest thing is a carbo gel that comes in little packs that you rip open and squeeze into your mouth. I had no idea what they were like but I bought a box of those and tried them on one ride. It tasted like cake frosting which is kind of a weird thing to eat when you are tired and thirsty. It was hard to really tell how well they worked precisely but I seemed to feel better during the ride and not so blown afterward. I then decided to try Cliff Bars. They seem to get pretty good reviews for taste, energy, and being relatively good for you. I picked one up at a bike store in the middle of a ride and man, it was great! It tasted good and it was something to chew and "eat" as opposed to simply swallowing the energy goo. What I hadn't gotten though was any kind of electrolyte replacement drink. The gel and the bars have salts in them but I guess not in the quantity that you sweat out so I think that had something to do with the "bonk".
Anyway, after the ride, I happened to notice a spot on the tire where the casing was showing. I went online and bought a new tire and also some Cliff Shot sports drink mix and some more Cliff Bars. I also got a new pair of sunglasses. The ones I had been wearing continually slip down my nose and don't sit on my face evenly. It's risky buying glasses without seeing how they fit but I took a chance.
The stuff arrived on Friday - yesterday - so we took a ride - about 25 miles - after work. The glasses fit great and were a joy! I didn't put the new tire on because it would have taken an extra 15 - 20 minutes and I figured I could get a few more miles out of the current one.
Today, we got up at about 7 to either ride if it was not rainy, or go to an aerobics class if it was. Well, the streets were kind of wet but it was clear and getting hot so we got on the bike. I again opted not to put the new rear tire on the bike...
We planned out a ride of about 45 miles. Here's the ride laid out at MapMyRide.com
We were going along pretty good until right at mile 30. BAAM! The rear tire blew. Yup, right where the worn spot was, the tube blew through the torn casing. Guess I should have replaced that tire. Blown tubes are no big deal - they happen all the time and we have a patch kit and spare tubes to fix them. Blown tires on the other hand are not good. You can't just put a new tube in there because, a tube at around 115 PSI will just squirt through the hole in the tire and blow again. The jury rig fix for a torn tire is to use a dollar bill to "boot" the tire - line the inside to prevent the tube from coming through. The fabric of the bill - folded over - is strong enough to keep the tube from coming through - theoretically.
We are basically out in the middle of nowhere so I guess we'll have to try that. We could call Carly and have her bring the new tire but let's just see if we can fix this. Open up seat bag to get tire levers to remove the tire - no levers. Oh yeah, Kyle takes them and puts them in his bag when he goes for a ride alone - Argh!. OK, I guess we call Carly. Get cell phone from plastic bag in my pocket. Hmm, the screen is blank. Press button - "Battery drained, Shutting down" it says before going dark again. I repeat this to Deb and she smiles her wry smile - "I guess we are walking then."
Just then, an elderly man comes out of a small house and he walks over to us holding a tiny baby turtle that he says he raises in his backyard. Hmm, OK, "Um, we've got a mechanical problem with the bike, do you think I could use your phone to call someone to help us?" He says "Sure, just let me take this little guy down to the pond."
He comes back and leads me into his house as I'm trying not to drip all over the place. I call home and get the machine. "Pick up Carly, pick up!" Nothing. I call the neighbors but get their machine as well. I then try Monique Cote since they have a phone number that is very easy to remember (I have everyone's phone number - on my cell phone that is dead).
She answers thankfully, finds a spare key to son Nate's truck and says she will pick us up. We agree to meet at the vacant lot of a burned down restaurant that we passed about a mile or two back. I thank Ma and Pa Kettle and head back out to Deb who, by this time, has been supplying sustenance for all the mosquitoes in the forest. We start walking back toward the restaurant to wait for Monique. She shows up not too long after we get there, we load up the bike in the back, and head back home.
At home, after I put the new tire on the back, Deb asks if I want to continue the ride. It's kind of hard to get back in the mood but we really didn't get the full ride in so I say OK. Just then, the sky opens up and, in full sunshine, pours for about 5 minutes. We look at each other, shrug, and get on the bike and head out.
It's not really raining but the roads are wet and the spray coming up from the tires is soaking us. The rooster tail from the front wheel is mostly blocked by the downtube of the bike but as I make small steering corrections, the wheel swings out from under the tube and throws the stream up which hits me in the chin. Mmmm, tasty! Deb, of course, has what we know looks like a skid mark all the way up her back from the stream off the back tire.
We stop in Douglas at a little coffee shop for some ice coffee. This is the new "carrot" for Deb. We have to stop for ice coffee about halfway through the ride to give her "a purpose". I now know that's the reason she suggested continuing the ride - she hadn't gotten her ice coffee.
In Douglas, we decide to try a different route to loop back home. Neither of us knows Douglas however so we end up thoroughly lost taking random roads that "seem" like they will take us the right way. Eventually, we find some familiar roads and complete the loop, adding another 15 miles for a total of 45.
I spend the next two hours cleaning and re-lubing the bike.
Despite the setbacks, we feel pretty good about our progress. We are no longer totally spent after a ride of this length (although my neck and shoulders are sore) so we are thinking we might just be able to do this. Oh man, I shouldn't have said that...
Of course this was in May so we had plenty of time... You know where this is going don't you.
The weather this summer has been really rainy so it was very tough to get rides in. Not to mention that there just isn't time during the week. This was going to be a struggle. We have been gradually building up the ride length but it's slow going. Last week we put a long one in and by the time we got back to Uxbridge, it was really hot. I "bonked" - ran out of energy on the last bit up the hill to the house and just about died. That was only 40 miles. I think the cause was not enough water and not enough electrolytes.
Early on, I had started looking into energy replacement stuff. The newest thing is a carbo gel that comes in little packs that you rip open and squeeze into your mouth. I had no idea what they were like but I bought a box of those and tried them on one ride. It tasted like cake frosting which is kind of a weird thing to eat when you are tired and thirsty. It was hard to really tell how well they worked precisely but I seemed to feel better during the ride and not so blown afterward. I then decided to try Cliff Bars. They seem to get pretty good reviews for taste, energy, and being relatively good for you. I picked one up at a bike store in the middle of a ride and man, it was great! It tasted good and it was something to chew and "eat" as opposed to simply swallowing the energy goo. What I hadn't gotten though was any kind of electrolyte replacement drink. The gel and the bars have salts in them but I guess not in the quantity that you sweat out so I think that had something to do with the "bonk".
Anyway, after the ride, I happened to notice a spot on the tire where the casing was showing. I went online and bought a new tire and also some Cliff Shot sports drink mix and some more Cliff Bars. I also got a new pair of sunglasses. The ones I had been wearing continually slip down my nose and don't sit on my face evenly. It's risky buying glasses without seeing how they fit but I took a chance.
The stuff arrived on Friday - yesterday - so we took a ride - about 25 miles - after work. The glasses fit great and were a joy! I didn't put the new tire on because it would have taken an extra 15 - 20 minutes and I figured I could get a few more miles out of the current one.
Today, we got up at about 7 to either ride if it was not rainy, or go to an aerobics class if it was. Well, the streets were kind of wet but it was clear and getting hot so we got on the bike. I again opted not to put the new rear tire on the bike...
We planned out a ride of about 45 miles. Here's the ride laid out at MapMyRide.com
We were going along pretty good until right at mile 30. BAAM! The rear tire blew. Yup, right where the worn spot was, the tube blew through the torn casing. Guess I should have replaced that tire. Blown tubes are no big deal - they happen all the time and we have a patch kit and spare tubes to fix them. Blown tires on the other hand are not good. You can't just put a new tube in there because, a tube at around 115 PSI will just squirt through the hole in the tire and blow again. The jury rig fix for a torn tire is to use a dollar bill to "boot" the tire - line the inside to prevent the tube from coming through. The fabric of the bill - folded over - is strong enough to keep the tube from coming through - theoretically.
We are basically out in the middle of nowhere so I guess we'll have to try that. We could call Carly and have her bring the new tire but let's just see if we can fix this. Open up seat bag to get tire levers to remove the tire - no levers. Oh yeah, Kyle takes them and puts them in his bag when he goes for a ride alone - Argh!. OK, I guess we call Carly. Get cell phone from plastic bag in my pocket. Hmm, the screen is blank. Press button - "Battery drained, Shutting down" it says before going dark again. I repeat this to Deb and she smiles her wry smile - "I guess we are walking then."
Just then, an elderly man comes out of a small house and he walks over to us holding a tiny baby turtle that he says he raises in his backyard. Hmm, OK, "Um, we've got a mechanical problem with the bike, do you think I could use your phone to call someone to help us?" He says "Sure, just let me take this little guy down to the pond."
He comes back and leads me into his house as I'm trying not to drip all over the place. I call home and get the machine. "Pick up Carly, pick up!" Nothing. I call the neighbors but get their machine as well. I then try Monique Cote since they have a phone number that is very easy to remember (I have everyone's phone number - on my cell phone that is dead).
She answers thankfully, finds a spare key to son Nate's truck and says she will pick us up. We agree to meet at the vacant lot of a burned down restaurant that we passed about a mile or two back. I thank Ma and Pa Kettle and head back out to Deb who, by this time, has been supplying sustenance for all the mosquitoes in the forest. We start walking back toward the restaurant to wait for Monique. She shows up not too long after we get there, we load up the bike in the back, and head back home.
At home, after I put the new tire on the back, Deb asks if I want to continue the ride. It's kind of hard to get back in the mood but we really didn't get the full ride in so I say OK. Just then, the sky opens up and, in full sunshine, pours for about 5 minutes. We look at each other, shrug, and get on the bike and head out.
It's not really raining but the roads are wet and the spray coming up from the tires is soaking us. The rooster tail from the front wheel is mostly blocked by the downtube of the bike but as I make small steering corrections, the wheel swings out from under the tube and throws the stream up which hits me in the chin. Mmmm, tasty! Deb, of course, has what we know looks like a skid mark all the way up her back from the stream off the back tire.
We stop in Douglas at a little coffee shop for some ice coffee. This is the new "carrot" for Deb. We have to stop for ice coffee about halfway through the ride to give her "a purpose". I now know that's the reason she suggested continuing the ride - she hadn't gotten her ice coffee.
In Douglas, we decide to try a different route to loop back home. Neither of us knows Douglas however so we end up thoroughly lost taking random roads that "seem" like they will take us the right way. Eventually, we find some familiar roads and complete the loop, adding another 15 miles for a total of 45.
I spend the next two hours cleaning and re-lubing the bike.
Despite the setbacks, we feel pretty good about our progress. We are no longer totally spent after a ride of this length (although my neck and shoulders are sore) so we are thinking we might just be able to do this. Oh man, I shouldn't have said that...
Monday, August 10, 2009
Ships and Salsa
Saturday was Deb's birthday of course and it just so happened that the EMC Latin Leadership Interest Team (ELLIT) was sponsoring a "Salsa Cruise" in Boston Harbor that night. Well, since we've been taking all these dance lessons it seemed like a great opportunity to bust some moves! A couple from our class - Gary and Judy - joined us for the trip into Boston. They own Vaillancourt Folk Art and make amazing figurines of all kinds.
We managed to find a parking spot in Boston and make our way to the dock and the boat. The boat was actually really nice - it was really nicely decorated and very large. There were two decks and the top deck had an opening that looked over the dance floor. We found a table and watched the people come on board. There were a few people I knew from EMC but it turned out that this was not exclusive to us. This is a weekly cruise and apparently quite popular. We grabbed a plate of food from the buffet, which was very good, and waited for things to get rockin'. We didn't have to wait very long. They fired up the music and we hit the floor. They played a lot of actual Salsa speed music which is very fast. Ironically, as the music gets faster, you do less complicated steps so it wasn't very difficult. We were also able to do our rumba and Cha-Cha's when it slowed down a little. They even threw in some popular hip hop style songs that were fun too. The dance floor was very very hot and I was embarrassingly drenched from the effort. We had to go out on deck to cool off at one point.
Another thing that was heating up the dance floor was the girl who was sitting at our table. She was a tiny thing who was poured into a dress. Here name was Reena and she was from St. Petersburg - Russia! When she got out on the dance floor, Gary and I joked that we felt this strange compulsion to open up our wallets and look for 1's. As we were dancing, a circle formed on the dance floor of the type where each person goes out in the middle and shows a couple of moves. Well, this girl went out and didn't stop. Seconds later, Deb goes out and joins her and they both practically set the place on fire. Muy Caliente!
Anyway, we had a blast despite being way too old for this kind of thing. Our knees and feet paid the price on the walk back to the parking garage - but we'll probably do it again...
We managed to find a parking spot in Boston and make our way to the dock and the boat. The boat was actually really nice - it was really nicely decorated and very large. There were two decks and the top deck had an opening that looked over the dance floor. We found a table and watched the people come on board. There were a few people I knew from EMC but it turned out that this was not exclusive to us. This is a weekly cruise and apparently quite popular. We grabbed a plate of food from the buffet, which was very good, and waited for things to get rockin'. We didn't have to wait very long. They fired up the music and we hit the floor. They played a lot of actual Salsa speed music which is very fast. Ironically, as the music gets faster, you do less complicated steps so it wasn't very difficult. We were also able to do our rumba and Cha-Cha's when it slowed down a little. They even threw in some popular hip hop style songs that were fun too. The dance floor was very very hot and I was embarrassingly drenched from the effort. We had to go out on deck to cool off at one point.
Another thing that was heating up the dance floor was the girl who was sitting at our table. She was a tiny thing who was poured into a dress. Here name was Reena and she was from St. Petersburg - Russia! When she got out on the dance floor, Gary and I joked that we felt this strange compulsion to open up our wallets and look for 1's. As we were dancing, a circle formed on the dance floor of the type where each person goes out in the middle and shows a couple of moves. Well, this girl went out and didn't stop. Seconds later, Deb goes out and joins her and they both practically set the place on fire. Muy Caliente!
Anyway, we had a blast despite being way too old for this kind of thing. Our knees and feet paid the price on the walk back to the parking garage - but we'll probably do it again...
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The Camper
I remember when we first bought the camper - probably close to ten years ago now. Dad said "You can pay for a whole lot of hotel rooms for the cost of that thing." That's certainly true but we've had a lot of fun with it and all in all, I think it was a good purchase. As you know though, those things aren't really built to the highest of standards and the punishment they take going down the highway and sitting still for long periods of time really takes its toll and ours is starting to show its age. Actually, it's been showing its age. It's now starting to drool and act crotchety.
A few weeks ago, we were getting ready to go up to Vermont in the annual trek to the Vermont Quilt Show. We've been going every year for the past several so Deb and the other ladies can browse the Mecca of quilts and I and the other guys can sit back at the campsite and sleep. Deb had gotten a quilt accepted to boot so it was a special trip. It was just Deb and me this time - no kids and no other couples. I plugged in the camper the night before to charge the battery and cool down the fridge in prep for loading up groceries and heading off on Friday. On Friday, we loaded up and got ready to go but when we unplugged from power, the fridge wouldn't light. It usually takes a few tries on the first trip of the season because the gas has bled from the line and it takes a while to fill back up. This time however, nothing was happening. Hmm.
The other thing that was happening was that the battery disconnect switch was acting flaky. It's a momentary rocker switch that "kicks" on when you press it but it was refusing to stay on. All indications were that the battery was not giving enough juice. In order to determine if it was the battery, I pulled the Camry over to the door of the camper and used jumper cables to connect the Camry battery to the RV power cables. Once I did that, everything seemed to work fine. Great - dead battery. OK, so we'll hit Wal-Mart on the way up the road and get a new one.
Went to Wal-Mart, got battery, powered it up, no fridge. Crap! Hmm, I can hear the fridge trying to light but it doesn't catch. I end up using the butane grill lighter outside in the fridge panel to get it to light. I actually had no idea where the flame really was supposed to be but I just kind of waved the burning lighter around an area that looked like it might be a burner and yelled to Deb to "Hit it!". The burner lit, we closed it up, and headed North.
A few miles down the road there is a stoplight and as we come to a stop, we smell burning something. Hmm, is that smoke coming from the hood area? We pull into a gas station, get out and see that the left front wheel is smoking. I can't even touch the hubcap it's so hot. Great! We turn around and pull into a auto/RV shop to see if they can take a look. They said that it looks like the brake is seized up but there's nothing they can do. OK, well, there's nothing for it so we head home. At this point, I can feel a tug to the left as we are going down the road. The section of rt. 146 just before our exit is really torn up and we are getting rattled to bits and, after one particularly hard jolt, I feel the tug to the left go away and the whole truck feels normal again. We get off at our exit for home, look at each other, say "Screw it", and get back on the highway and head North once again.
We didn't have any more problems with the wheel but all throughout the trip, the electrical system kept kicking in and out. There are various beeps when the disconnect is doing it's thing normally so now, as we are driving, we get random disconnect beeps. Deb and I just look at each other - "Did you hear something? Nope, I didn't hear anything."
Another thing that we have been struggling with for years is the side mirrors. They are on long arms in order to see past the sides of the camper and these arms are designed to fold in if needed. Well, they decide to fold in ALL THE TIME! The wind blast on them, coupled with the violence of all the potholes and rough patches just swings them in rendering them useless. The one on Deb's side is the worst. She is constantly having to roll her window down and push it back out so that I can see what's to the right of me. She has tried all manner of friction inducing wedges to try and keep it from folding and she uses everything at her disposal - drinking straws, toll booth tickets, camping maps, anything. Nothing works. I've tried tightening the bolt that is supposed to give it some resistance but it never lasts for long. In a display of wondrous engineering, you have to fold the mirror back to get access to the bolt that you have to tighten to keep it from folding. Yes, you have to fold the mirror, tighten the bolt, and then try to unfold the mirror, overcoming all the friction you just put on the bolt to keep it from folding. Huh? I'm sure some design engineer got a bonus for that one.
Anyway, we made it the 4 1/2 hours up to the top of Vermont with no further problems. It was forecast to rain all weekend and it rained pretty much the whole way up there but when we got there, it was clear and beautiful. We cooked dinner and tried to light a campfire but the mosquitoes drove us indoors so we played cards inside. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the microwave. Last year, during the last camping trip, when we plugged in the power at a campsite, the microwave, which normally just dings and waits for you to set the clock, actually seemed to come on and "cook" for a few seconds. Deb noticed it when I was outside connecting the power so I came in to look. Hmm. None of the buttons on the control panel were working. I flipped off the breaker to remove power to it and then flipped it back on. Sure enough, it came on and "cooked" for 3 or 4 seconds, shut off, and was unresponsive to the buttons. I repeated the power cycle and this time noticed that when it powered up, the display said, in cryptic LED characters "2.5 oz Baby Food", ran for 5 seconds, and turned off. Yes, the microwave has decided that it needs to warm up 2.5 oz of phantom baby food when it gets power and then lapse into a coma until shocked into another round of baby food cooking the next time. So that's another thing that's broken.
The next day, we got ready to head to the quilt show which means disconnecting from power and using the battery to keep the fridge cold. Sure enough, when I disconnected from power, the fridge wouldn't work. I opened the battery compartment to find the wingnut on the battery hold down "bolt" gone and the battery jostled about in the compartment - cool! I grabbed some zip-ties and made a "chain" from them to fashion a hold down strap and we headed over to a Lowes to look for something to use as a hold down. I finally found a turnbuckle with hooks on both ends that did the trick. Unfortunately, the fridge would not run and the battery disconnect was acting flaky again. I dropped Deb off at the quilt show and headed back to the campsite. As much as I would have loved to join her and browse the hundreds of quilts, I felt like I should get the camper back on AC power so the food in the fridge didn't spoil. It's a scarafice I felt I had to make.
Anyway, long story a little shorter, we drove home with no fridge and various CO2 and gas sensors going on and off as they intermittently got and lost power, mirrors folding in, and the "Service Engine Soon" light on. Did I mention that the camper was up for inspection in June? Did I mention that that service engine light will cause an automatic "fail" of the inspection?
I took it in to get the service done and the inspection completed this past week. When the guy called me to tell me the story, he actually chuckled when he started the conversation which, of course, means "this is not good". That's exactly what it meant.
We do really like camping...
A few weeks ago, we were getting ready to go up to Vermont in the annual trek to the Vermont Quilt Show. We've been going every year for the past several so Deb and the other ladies can browse the Mecca of quilts and I and the other guys can sit back at the campsite and sleep. Deb had gotten a quilt accepted to boot so it was a special trip. It was just Deb and me this time - no kids and no other couples. I plugged in the camper the night before to charge the battery and cool down the fridge in prep for loading up groceries and heading off on Friday. On Friday, we loaded up and got ready to go but when we unplugged from power, the fridge wouldn't light. It usually takes a few tries on the first trip of the season because the gas has bled from the line and it takes a while to fill back up. This time however, nothing was happening. Hmm.
The other thing that was happening was that the battery disconnect switch was acting flaky. It's a momentary rocker switch that "kicks" on when you press it but it was refusing to stay on. All indications were that the battery was not giving enough juice. In order to determine if it was the battery, I pulled the Camry over to the door of the camper and used jumper cables to connect the Camry battery to the RV power cables. Once I did that, everything seemed to work fine. Great - dead battery. OK, so we'll hit Wal-Mart on the way up the road and get a new one.
Went to Wal-Mart, got battery, powered it up, no fridge. Crap! Hmm, I can hear the fridge trying to light but it doesn't catch. I end up using the butane grill lighter outside in the fridge panel to get it to light. I actually had no idea where the flame really was supposed to be but I just kind of waved the burning lighter around an area that looked like it might be a burner and yelled to Deb to "Hit it!". The burner lit, we closed it up, and headed North.
A few miles down the road there is a stoplight and as we come to a stop, we smell burning something. Hmm, is that smoke coming from the hood area? We pull into a gas station, get out and see that the left front wheel is smoking. I can't even touch the hubcap it's so hot. Great! We turn around and pull into a auto/RV shop to see if they can take a look. They said that it looks like the brake is seized up but there's nothing they can do. OK, well, there's nothing for it so we head home. At this point, I can feel a tug to the left as we are going down the road. The section of rt. 146 just before our exit is really torn up and we are getting rattled to bits and, after one particularly hard jolt, I feel the tug to the left go away and the whole truck feels normal again. We get off at our exit for home, look at each other, say "Screw it", and get back on the highway and head North once again.
We didn't have any more problems with the wheel but all throughout the trip, the electrical system kept kicking in and out. There are various beeps when the disconnect is doing it's thing normally so now, as we are driving, we get random disconnect beeps. Deb and I just look at each other - "Did you hear something? Nope, I didn't hear anything."
Another thing that we have been struggling with for years is the side mirrors. They are on long arms in order to see past the sides of the camper and these arms are designed to fold in if needed. Well, they decide to fold in ALL THE TIME! The wind blast on them, coupled with the violence of all the potholes and rough patches just swings them in rendering them useless. The one on Deb's side is the worst. She is constantly having to roll her window down and push it back out so that I can see what's to the right of me. She has tried all manner of friction inducing wedges to try and keep it from folding and she uses everything at her disposal - drinking straws, toll booth tickets, camping maps, anything. Nothing works. I've tried tightening the bolt that is supposed to give it some resistance but it never lasts for long. In a display of wondrous engineering, you have to fold the mirror back to get access to the bolt that you have to tighten to keep it from folding. Yes, you have to fold the mirror, tighten the bolt, and then try to unfold the mirror, overcoming all the friction you just put on the bolt to keep it from folding. Huh? I'm sure some design engineer got a bonus for that one.
Anyway, we made it the 4 1/2 hours up to the top of Vermont with no further problems. It was forecast to rain all weekend and it rained pretty much the whole way up there but when we got there, it was clear and beautiful. We cooked dinner and tried to light a campfire but the mosquitoes drove us indoors so we played cards inside. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the microwave. Last year, during the last camping trip, when we plugged in the power at a campsite, the microwave, which normally just dings and waits for you to set the clock, actually seemed to come on and "cook" for a few seconds. Deb noticed it when I was outside connecting the power so I came in to look. Hmm. None of the buttons on the control panel were working. I flipped off the breaker to remove power to it and then flipped it back on. Sure enough, it came on and "cooked" for 3 or 4 seconds, shut off, and was unresponsive to the buttons. I repeated the power cycle and this time noticed that when it powered up, the display said, in cryptic LED characters "2.5 oz Baby Food", ran for 5 seconds, and turned off. Yes, the microwave has decided that it needs to warm up 2.5 oz of phantom baby food when it gets power and then lapse into a coma until shocked into another round of baby food cooking the next time. So that's another thing that's broken.
The next day, we got ready to head to the quilt show which means disconnecting from power and using the battery to keep the fridge cold. Sure enough, when I disconnected from power, the fridge wouldn't work. I opened the battery compartment to find the wingnut on the battery hold down "bolt" gone and the battery jostled about in the compartment - cool! I grabbed some zip-ties and made a "chain" from them to fashion a hold down strap and we headed over to a Lowes to look for something to use as a hold down. I finally found a turnbuckle with hooks on both ends that did the trick. Unfortunately, the fridge would not run and the battery disconnect was acting flaky again. I dropped Deb off at the quilt show and headed back to the campsite. As much as I would have loved to join her and browse the hundreds of quilts, I felt like I should get the camper back on AC power so the food in the fridge didn't spoil. It's a scarafice I felt I had to make.
Anyway, long story a little shorter, we drove home with no fridge and various CO2 and gas sensors going on and off as they intermittently got and lost power, mirrors folding in, and the "Service Engine Soon" light on. Did I mention that the camper was up for inspection in June? Did I mention that that service engine light will cause an automatic "fail" of the inspection?
I took it in to get the service done and the inspection completed this past week. When the guy called me to tell me the story, he actually chuckled when he started the conversation which, of course, means "this is not good". That's exactly what it meant.
We do really like camping...
Monday, June 08, 2009
Graduation Day
Preliminary launch number two was completed this weekend. It was great having Mom & Dad come up for the grand event and it was a beautiful day as you can see. Lots of inspirational words and wishes and just an all around great day.
Later that day was the Safe Graduation party which Deb masterminded decoration-wise so we worked on that all evening until the kids got back from a trip to Boston.
Pretty good stuff.
Later that day was the Safe Graduation party which Deb masterminded decoration-wise so we worked on that all evening until the kids got back from a trip to Boston.
Pretty good stuff.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Coming Century
I did it. I signed us up for TFCE - The Flattest Century in the East. Yes, normally it's Deb who gets us into these things but it was me this time. A Century is, of course, a 100 mile bike ride and is roughly equivalent to a Marathon for runners in terms of goals and relative difficulty.
I did one once before, back in California, a little over 20 years ago...Hmm.
I had heard about this one last year and wanted to do it but they only allow a limited number of signups and I missed the cutoff. This year, I marked the signup day on my calendar and got in. I signed up both Deb and I so that we could ride the tandem but kind of neglected to tell Deb that I was going to do this. When I told her we were signed up, well, let's just say she did not jump for joy. The draw for this ride is spelled out in the name - Flat. As I think I've mentioned before, tandems don't do hills very well. Actually, they do downhills very well. It's the uphills that they struggle with. OK, it's the riders who struggle with the uphills. The bike doesn't give a crap.
Anyway, tandem riders really like flat rides so I figured this should be easy. Right?
Yeah, except that I happened to mention my plan to another guy who had ridden this ride. He said that "yeah, it's flat. But it's along the coast and it's rather windy." Great.
Whatever, we're signed up and we'll give it a try.
In order to do this, we've got to start riding - the ride is on September 13 - so I got the bike down and enlisted Kyle to help me do some clean up. We removed the chains and cleaned them and the gears and generally spruced things up a bit. I don't know if I've ever posted a picture of this bike so I found a stock photo of our bike. If you click on the picture of the bike at the top, you can get a larger picture of it. It's got fancy "aero" wheels with minimal spokes that are "just as safe as regular wheels". Notice the rear seatpost. It's got a little shock absorber for the Stoker's (the rider in back) bum. On a tandem, the Captain (the guy in front) is suspended between the wheels and gets a pretty smooth ride. The Stoker on the other hand, sits right over the rear wheel and takes the brunt of rough roads. The road shock is made worse by the fact that the Stoker can't see approaching potholes and therefore can't "brace" for the impact. The seatpost shock helps to lessen some of the punishment. You can't really see it but the brake levers on the front handlebars double as gear shifters as well. You squeeze them like normal to apply the brakes and push them side to side to shift gears. It's pretty much the coolest invention for bikes ever.
Speaking of gears, this bike has ten sprockets on the rear wheel and three on the pedal for a total of 30 gears. Some gear combinations aren't useful but it's still a huge range, and it's needed for the extremes the tandem faces - very low gears for grinding up steep hills and very high gears for bombing down the other side.
It's a really nice bike and we really enjoy it (but check back again on September 14th...).
Monday, May 25, 2009
Do the Zoo
As you may know, Carly was "laid off" from the Whitin Community Center early in the year. She had been working in the Fitness Room cleaning equipment, washing towels, and giving tours to prospective members. The Center is struggling so they had to let a bunch of people go and Carly got the ax.
This was not good given the current economic situation and the fact that she needed to build up some cash for next year's college expenses. I was anticipating an agonizing job search process but one day she came home and said she got a job at the Zoo (or at least had an interview lined up). The Zoo, is the Southwick Zoo, located in the next town over - Mendon. It's just about the most unlikely place to have a zoo but it's actually quite well known and very large and well done. Carly had her interview and they hired her on the spot!
She mostly works in admissions and the gift shop and regales us with tales of kids who pull all the plush toys down from the shelves and the people who spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if they should get the "All Access Pass" or buy individual tickets for the various attractions (or some such calculation). One time she was working in the "Build an Animal"-type area where the kid picks out an animal to make and they fill it with stuffing and decorate it. I guess it's like "Build a Bear" at the Mall (I've never been there). Anyway, she said she was getting ready to fill the animal with stuffing which involves holding the empty animal "skin" over a nozzle that spews (apparently at a rather high velocity) stuffing into said animal. She told the girl to WAIT until she got the animal completley over the nozzle before she (the girl) pressed the "Fill" button. Of course, the girl hits the switch BEFORE Carly has the skin on the nozzle and Carly ends up being blasted in the face by animal stuffing as the girl shrieks with laughter. The girl does it one more time before Carly thinks to turn off the master switch to disable the "Inject" switch so she can get the animal lined up properly.
She seems to enjoy the job however and is happy to be making some money again. She said tonight that her little stint in unemployment has taught her to be a little more frugal than she had been so I think that's a good thing.
This was not good given the current economic situation and the fact that she needed to build up some cash for next year's college expenses. I was anticipating an agonizing job search process but one day she came home and said she got a job at the Zoo (or at least had an interview lined up). The Zoo, is the Southwick Zoo, located in the next town over - Mendon. It's just about the most unlikely place to have a zoo but it's actually quite well known and very large and well done. Carly had her interview and they hired her on the spot!
She mostly works in admissions and the gift shop and regales us with tales of kids who pull all the plush toys down from the shelves and the people who spend 15 minutes trying to figure out if they should get the "All Access Pass" or buy individual tickets for the various attractions (or some such calculation). One time she was working in the "Build an Animal"-type area where the kid picks out an animal to make and they fill it with stuffing and decorate it. I guess it's like "Build a Bear" at the Mall (I've never been there). Anyway, she said she was getting ready to fill the animal with stuffing which involves holding the empty animal "skin" over a nozzle that spews (apparently at a rather high velocity) stuffing into said animal. She told the girl to WAIT until she got the animal completley over the nozzle before she (the girl) pressed the "Fill" button. Of course, the girl hits the switch BEFORE Carly has the skin on the nozzle and Carly ends up being blasted in the face by animal stuffing as the girl shrieks with laughter. The girl does it one more time before Carly thinks to turn off the master switch to disable the "Inject" switch so she can get the animal lined up properly.
She seems to enjoy the job however and is happy to be making some money again. She said tonight that her little stint in unemployment has taught her to be a little more frugal than she had been so I think that's a good thing.
Mass Historia
One of the cool things about Kyle's Scholarship is the stipend that he can access to support a summer as an unpaid intern at some company, presumably to get experience related to his major. Basically, they will give him $4,000 so that he doesn't have to work at Wal-Mart or some such place to make spending money for the upcoming school year. This being "technically" his last summer off from school, he had to access it or lose it. Back in January, we started to periodically ask him what he needed to do to set that up. Of course the answer was always "I've got plenty of time".
Well, it turns out that there was a deadline to getting all the paperwork turned in - including finding the place that you were going to work at - back in April. He actually realized it about a week beforehand and tried to meet with his advisor and people at the career center but with tennis matches and practice, he didn't make it.
I was none too pleased with his procrastination and I sure as heck didn't want to leave $4,000 on the table so I called the career people to see what we could do. Well, after explaining that most kids get their summer internships lined up in February, the lady said that the deadline wasn't that critical and he could still access his stipend. He just needed to find something - quick. He got a list of potential places and sent his resume around to them. I also contacted some people that I knew to see if they needed anyone. It wouldn't have anything to do with History but the lady said it didn't have to be directly related so I figured what the heck. Kyle even asked me if maybe EMC might "hire" him so I checked there too. My other sources didn't need anyone and EMC doesn't do unpaid internships. He hadn't heard back from anyone either so it was looking pretty bad.
One of the things our group at EMC does each year is volunteer in some community project. Last year, we worked on houses for the Habitat for Humanity and this year, we planted crops at the Community Harvest Project farm that feeds many hundreds of people in central Mass. They are always looking for volunteer coordinators - people to manage the volunteer planters and workers that they have come in and help - so I mentioned it to Kyle. He was interested and, since it was the only game in town, called them up and arranged to meet with them. A couple of days before he was to head to the farm, he said that he got an email from the Massachusetts Historical Society saying that they could use an intern! After a few negotiations back and forth he was in (and told the farmers to pound sand).
Well, the Mass Historical Society is conveniently located in downtown Boston so Kyle had to figure out how to get there... We found their website and got directions (which say, by the way, that parking is horendous and you really should take public transit). We plugged the location into the GPS and it says it will take about an hour to get there. We figure he should leave at 7:00 am to get there for his 9:00 appointment.
The next day, at 6:50 am, not hearing Kyle stirring, I went into his room to find him fast asleep. "What's up" he says. "It's 6:50." "Crap. My alarm didn't go off." So, he ambles out of bed and proceeds to leisurly get ready. I'm practically helping him put his clothes on and he's just casual as can be. He finally says "Would you just relax. I've got plenty of time." He finally rolls out of the driveway at about 7:20.
I head in to work and Deb calls me at about 8:30 asking if I've heard anything from him yet. Nope. I send him a text message asking if he found it OK. At about 9:13 I get a reply "Just finished parking." It took him another five minutes to walk from the parking garage to the building so he was about 20 minutes late. Hmmm. Luckily, it was not a big deal (he is unpaid afterall). He said they are very laid back and very accomodating. His first day was spent unfolding letters (bills) and placing them in other folders. He was a tad bored but he wasn't complaining - much.
After navigating the Mass Pike and Boston traffic he figured he really should find another option so we plotted his trip via the commuter rail system. The next day, he rode the train in to the Back Bay Station for a short walk to work. I got a call a few minutes after his train was due to arrive - "I'm not sure where I am". Great! I quickly pulled up Google maps and we figured out where he was and I got him going in the right direction. That day he did more unfolding and some transcribing. At the end of the day, they happened to get a shipment of old books from 1812 or something, written by a French speaking guy and they wondered how they would translate it. Kyle said "Um, I speak French." So the next day he was researching the information in these letters trying to figure out where this guy was and what he was doing. Based on Kyle's translation and research, he figured out that this guy was in the Dominican Replublic and logging the cargos of incoming ships from around the world. Pretty cool for his third day.
We still haven't gotten the stipend payment sorted out so I hope we actually see this money. I'm racking up the commuter rail bills so I sure hope this works. I think Kyle's actually going to see about $100 of this $4000 by the time all the expenses are accounted for.
Well, it turns out that there was a deadline to getting all the paperwork turned in - including finding the place that you were going to work at - back in April. He actually realized it about a week beforehand and tried to meet with his advisor and people at the career center but with tennis matches and practice, he didn't make it.
I was none too pleased with his procrastination and I sure as heck didn't want to leave $4,000 on the table so I called the career people to see what we could do. Well, after explaining that most kids get their summer internships lined up in February, the lady said that the deadline wasn't that critical and he could still access his stipend. He just needed to find something - quick. He got a list of potential places and sent his resume around to them. I also contacted some people that I knew to see if they needed anyone. It wouldn't have anything to do with History but the lady said it didn't have to be directly related so I figured what the heck. Kyle even asked me if maybe EMC might "hire" him so I checked there too. My other sources didn't need anyone and EMC doesn't do unpaid internships. He hadn't heard back from anyone either so it was looking pretty bad.
One of the things our group at EMC does each year is volunteer in some community project. Last year, we worked on houses for the Habitat for Humanity and this year, we planted crops at the Community Harvest Project farm that feeds many hundreds of people in central Mass. They are always looking for volunteer coordinators - people to manage the volunteer planters and workers that they have come in and help - so I mentioned it to Kyle. He was interested and, since it was the only game in town, called them up and arranged to meet with them. A couple of days before he was to head to the farm, he said that he got an email from the Massachusetts Historical Society saying that they could use an intern! After a few negotiations back and forth he was in (and told the farmers to pound sand).
Well, the Mass Historical Society is conveniently located in downtown Boston so Kyle had to figure out how to get there... We found their website and got directions (which say, by the way, that parking is horendous and you really should take public transit). We plugged the location into the GPS and it says it will take about an hour to get there. We figure he should leave at 7:00 am to get there for his 9:00 appointment.
The next day, at 6:50 am, not hearing Kyle stirring, I went into his room to find him fast asleep. "What's up" he says. "It's 6:50." "Crap. My alarm didn't go off." So, he ambles out of bed and proceeds to leisurly get ready. I'm practically helping him put his clothes on and he's just casual as can be. He finally says "Would you just relax. I've got plenty of time." He finally rolls out of the driveway at about 7:20.
I head in to work and Deb calls me at about 8:30 asking if I've heard anything from him yet. Nope. I send him a text message asking if he found it OK. At about 9:13 I get a reply "Just finished parking." It took him another five minutes to walk from the parking garage to the building so he was about 20 minutes late. Hmmm. Luckily, it was not a big deal (he is unpaid afterall). He said they are very laid back and very accomodating. His first day was spent unfolding letters (bills) and placing them in other folders. He was a tad bored but he wasn't complaining - much.
After navigating the Mass Pike and Boston traffic he figured he really should find another option so we plotted his trip via the commuter rail system. The next day, he rode the train in to the Back Bay Station for a short walk to work. I got a call a few minutes after his train was due to arrive - "I'm not sure where I am". Great! I quickly pulled up Google maps and we figured out where he was and I got him going in the right direction. That day he did more unfolding and some transcribing. At the end of the day, they happened to get a shipment of old books from 1812 or something, written by a French speaking guy and they wondered how they would translate it. Kyle said "Um, I speak French." So the next day he was researching the information in these letters trying to figure out where this guy was and what he was doing. Based on Kyle's translation and research, he figured out that this guy was in the Dominican Replublic and logging the cargos of incoming ships from around the world. Pretty cool for his third day.
We still haven't gotten the stipend payment sorted out so I hope we actually see this money. I'm racking up the commuter rail bills so I sure hope this works. I think Kyle's actually going to see about $100 of this $4000 by the time all the expenses are accounted for.
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