Chubby Grum Grum

Sharrows

2010-12-03T09:06:00.004-06:00

Sharrows are those chevron shapes you see on streets sometimes that indicate that car drivers should be ready for bikes in the lane. It's an explicit direction to cars to share the lane. It's a feature I like, although there is a debatable downside since drivers may assume that the absence of sharrows means bikes should not be present. The most prominent example in my neck of the woods is on Dean Keeton St.

My attention was recently directed to a study (an actual! scientific! study - find it here) showing the benefits of installing sharrows, especially in reducing the risk of one of my greatest fears: dooring. Dooring is when a parallel-parked driver opens their door in front of a biker in the "door zone" who is then forced to choose, in a split second, between attempting to stop, hitting the door, or swerving into the lane (there may or may not be a car there, and there's probably not time to check). It's definitely a great way to get the heart pumping and circulate adrenaline.

The best way to avoid being doored is to ride outside the door zone. If you have to ride to the side, take the lane early when there are parallel-parked cars, and watch for tell-tales on parked cars. Brake lights switching off or interior lights turning on are a good sign that the driver-side door is about to open. I also have a habit of looking in the side-view mirror to see whether there is a person in the driver seat. I never assume that person sees me and slow down or give a wide berth in case the door opens.

When a sharrow is installed, a bike rider can have more confidence riding in the lane outside the door zone, and many of these things are not an issue.

Be safe, ride hard.

Where I've been

2010-11-12T08:21:00.006-06:00

In case anyone's been wondering why there hasn't been a post in 15 months, here's what happened. I got real busy working on this:

Woo hoo!

Then we went to Mexico to celebrate.

Then I got real busy being a post-doc, still at UT.

Back when I used to blog regularly, it seems I generated most interest on this blog by posting about my Dynamic Crosstown and about bike commuting in Austin, so here's an update:

I still commute almost every day on a bike. My back-and-forths take me about 80-100 km each week. After three years on my Crosstown 7, I've racked up almost 13,000 km (8000 mi). It's still holding together nicely, although I think I'm going to need to replace the shifter and cables and give the rear axle a good cleaning to make the shifting a little more precise. Shifting has been finicky lately. Also, the cranks are a little creaky. They probably need to be greased and tightened. Overall, though, no major complaints.

During the summer, I used the new Capitol Metro Red Line commuter train, because sometimes, it's just too hot to go both ways.

If you're still reading, post a comment to say hi.

Cheers!

Safe Passing Law SB488

2009-07-01T13:42:00.003-05:00

Our dear governor, Rick Perry, recently vetoed a bunch of bills. Some, like the one allowing the state to take kids from homes for interviews away from their parents, I was glad to see. Others, however, we not OK. I'm speaking in particular of SB488, which would have established rules to protect bikes and other non-car users of roadways. Of particular interest in this bill was a clause establishing a safe passing distance of 3ft. Making this into a law would give bikers some (currently lacking) specific legal recourse in the case of side-swipes, mirror hits, right-hook crashes, and eventually increase biker safety in the state of Texas. Governor Perry didn't want to create another class of protected citizens (classic conservative response) and vetoed it, despite overwhelming congressional and public support. I often side with the conservative political point of view, but not this time. Our laws and culture are biased toward cars on the roads and the legal system can be hostile to bicyclists.

So what can you do? You can go sign the petition at Bike Texas like I did, and make sure that the issue doesn't go away. Even if you don't commute or recreationally ride a bike, sign it anyway. It'll take less than 2 minutes, max.

Thanks.

Too Darn Hot!

2009-06-26T13:51:00.004-05:00

Time to break the months of blogging silence with my second annual whine-about-the-heat session. It's been busy in the lab.

I was so proud of myself for continuing to bike through the Texas summer. I was that studly biker who never let the weather get him down, cold or hot. That was until this week. Today is our twelfth consecutive day over 100°F, and starting Wednesday it was just too darn hot to ride. I learned that by experience, riding home through the 103.5°F afternoon. I drank liters of water; I rode very slowly; I followed the shade, and when I got home, I lay down on the couch and didn't recover for over an hour. Believe it or not, I wasn't even that sweaty because I didn't exert too hard getting home, but I was just sapped. I thought I was conditioned for the heat, but some days it's just too much.Yesterday and today, I came on the bus. Yesterday, we set a daily record with a high of 107°F, and today at 2:00, it's 103°F and climbing. Yes, I'm enjoying the bus.

Courtesy of the Weather Underground, here's a record from a small weather station near our house, showing high, low, and average temps for the week.

Extreme Ice Survey

2009-04-10T10:25:00.002-05:00

I heard about this on NPR the other day, and then I recently discovered the website for the Extreme Ice Survey. I have now spent far too much time watching time lapse video of glaciers. This is really cool stuff. You should watch at least a couple of these videos and find out a little bit about the project.

Maybe it's just my own Arctic adventure on Spitsbergen Island, memories of which were recently rekindled by a National Geographic article on the effects of global warming there, but I've always had a fascination with the arctic, glaciers, and geology in action. Watch and enjoy, and please let me know what you think.

Commuter Tires

2009-03-26T16:27:00.003-05:00

By request (I'd say popular demand, but that's a bit pretentious, and there was only one request) I'd like to say a few words about tires for commuter bikes.

I used to work for the research and development branch of Michelin North America, and now I have a fondness for tires. I cannot help but notice them on cars (my wife used to laugh about this, now she just rolls her eyes and nods politely), and I am a firm believer in paying for quality.

If you've read this blog before, you probably know that I devote many of my posts to describing my experiences with my Dynamic drive-shaft bicycle. If you've read my reviews of that bike, you may know that I was disappointed with the quality of the tires that they supplied with it. In particular, because I have fenders and because removing the rear tire is less than convenient, the puncture resistance of those tires was unacceptable. I was having to repair a flat on at least a weekly basis.

That led me to one of the best $30 purchases I've made for my bike. I visited my LBS (Clown Dog Bikes) and requested Kevlar commuter tires, and the guy there handed me a pair of CST Selecta Kevlar tires. These tires have a steel bead, a Kevlar carcass (forgive the tire-nerd lingo, that's the weave inside the rubber that provides the strength and shape for the tire), and a reflective strip in the sidewall. There is a very light, directional tread pattern, which for a road bike doesn't serve a whole lot of purpose. The tread pattern is designed in such a way that it does not induce a vibration or noise during rolling (as a mountain bike tread would do, for instance) and may provide some help with water evacuation (although in my experience with tire design, the swoopy directional patterns tend to be more marketing hooplah than functional features).

What's to say about a bike tire? Well, in 6000km, I have had to patch my inner tube precisely two times: once because of bad rim tape, and the other time because of a nasty sharp nail that could have pierced plate armor. Note that when I ride my wife's bike (to which I retired the original tires provided by Dynamic), flats occur on about a weekly basis, more or less, over the same route. The Kevlar works.

What else? The reflective strip, after two winters' worth of riding through dirty sandy black road water, is still visible in my car's headlights (and this camera's flash). There is at present no sign of that strip separating or coming out of the sidewall.

Last of all, the tread. I see only modest signs of chunking. There is still plenty of tread depth left. The photo above is of the front tire, which spent 5000km at the more aggressive rear axle. I'm guessing these are only about halfway through their life on this bike. I ride moderately aggressively and with a heavy backpack.

From the NY Times - Dear AIG, I Quit!

2009-03-25T09:47:00.004-05:00

May I direct your attention to this article in the NY Times? It does much to expose the hype and distraction surrounding the AIG payments, which in fact are not bonuses as the media hyperventilatingly call them.

Parking

2009-02-16T11:55:00.002-06:00

I was reminded today one of the big reasons why I commute by bike: parking. Today I am picking up my wife from the airport and had to drive to school so I can leave straight from here. I thought that I would just suck it up and pay a few bucks for parking in the garage so that I wouldn't have to hunt for a spot. The sign at the garage stated that times greater than 2-1/2 hours cost $10, so being the cheap grad student that I am, I pulled out and went hunting. After some extended searching, I found a spot about 6 blocks away from my building and squeezed my minivan into a tight parallel parking spot.
Some of you who do this every day may be rolling your eyes at my complaining, but how can you get used to this? Call me spoiled rotten, but I love passing long lines at red lights and stop signs, and I love even more rolling right up to my building without having to hunt for a spot.
And on that note, have you ever stopped to notice how much urban space is devoted to parking? Take a few minutes and imagine yourself as an alien visiting earth for the first time and trying understand why our cities are the way they are. You might be tempted to think that growing cars is a major agricultural activity by the devoted to the Mighty Automobile.

6000 km

2009-02-09T20:39:00.003-06:00

Today the odometer on my Crosstown 7 flipped 6000 km. My average speed over the life of the bike (342 hrs) is 17.5 km/hr, or 11 mi/hr. I'm the first to admit that I'm not the next Lance Armstrong, but remember that number includes all the time I walk the bike or go slowly accompanying a daughter on a ride up the street and back. I started riding it in August of 2007, so that's an average of 315 km/month over 19 months. Since my commute is about 20 km/day, that means I've been able to ride almost 4/5 days. (Some days are partial commutes when I pick up Ian at Tae Kwon Do and ride the bus home with him.)

Now that I'm back on the bike after the recent repairs, it's nice to be riding consistently every day. This morning was rainy and wet, but I was still able to pull my daughters to school in their bike trailer without rooster tails or chain cleanup. Fenders are a must on a commuter, and have I mentioned before that the drive shaft is nice for not requiring a lot of messy maintenance? This was the first rain in a long time, so the water on the road was really dirty and oily. Yuck! There's more on tap over the next few days, but I don't really mind. It's nice to be out in the weather, whatever it is.

Back in the Saddle

2009-02-05T11:11:00.005-06:00

I promised to upload some photos of my restored Dynamic Crosstown 7. (Shhh, I'm using a lab camera to take and post these while our own camera goes in for warranty repair.) So here they are. Note: I saw a little video blurb called BrightBike about putting reflective tape on your bike and decided to get visible. In addition to adding to the cheese factor and increasing visibility, the white tape on the top tube covers up and inappropriate "Tempo" logo. This bike is not the Tempo model but uses the Tempo frame, apparently.

When I went to go buy the reflective tape, I brought Caroline with me, and she got into her head that she needed a new bike helmet and that I was going to get her one at the hardware store. I did some fast thinking and convinced her to accept her own $2.50 package of reflective tape instead. Of course she chose the read and white candy stripe pattern, some of which ended up as decoration on her helmet and some of which ended up adorning the drive shaft cover on my bike. (And yes, that's a spare pair of socks I keep at my desk that you see. I didn't notice it in the photo before.)

Eliza came out with me while I was working on the bike. She, my Little Helper, wanted to participate, so I set her to cleaning the spokes and hub. Everything's nice and shiny now and it looks more or less brand new.

I had mentioned previously that I was having trouble with the shifting. A new cable and sheath and a good clean-out of the rear hub fixed that problem. I had a little bit of worry when I noticed that the gears were grinding during my first commute on the new frame. That turned out to be a simple error on my part of not sufficiently tightening the right-side axle nut on the rear hub. It was allowing the bevel gears to get out of alignment and grind. It was very easily fixed.
I'm happy to be back in the saddle again.

Write your senators!

2009-02-04T12:11:00.002-06:00

A quick call to action regarding the upcoming stimulus bill. Apparently, there is all kinds of finagling for new road building projects at the expense of mass transit and rail projects. I read a recent article in Time that pointed out that our investments should be in repairs and maintenance rather than new roads and highways. You can see the reasoning below.
May I suggest a letter something like this:

Dear Senator,
I am writing to urge you please to make sensible decisions regarding transportation in the upcoming stimulus package. Mass transit and high-speed rail project fund must not be raided for further road building. In addition, highway dollars should be channeled toward repair and maintenance. This will increase safety, provide jobs, reduce the growth of sprwal, and reduce future expenses in maintenance and repair. By contrast, new road project, while they do allow for ribbon-cutting and pork boasting, only increase future maintenance burden and encourage sprawl and therefore petroleum dependence. Please resist the political expedience of new highway projects and emphasize our existing infrastructure.
sincerey,

You can find your representative here and your senators here.

Framed!

2009-01-29T22:27:00.005-06:00

The frame arrived this evening. Unfortunately (arghhhh!) my camera has a "lens error" and won't focus now. We have lost more cameras to lens errors. Bummer, because I wanted to document the rebuild with photos. Oh well... Maybe I'll just nab a stock photo:

I'm surprised by how light the frame is. Total shipping weight including the box and packaging was 6 lbs. It's nice and shiny and new and looks just like the old one with two small exceptions. First is a "Tempo" decal which tells me that the frame is common with the Tempo model. OK. The second is another small lug of some sort on the seat stay just above where the brake mounts are.

Dynamic, per my request, sent the frame with the steer-tube bearings pressed into place already, so the only other tricky thing I have to do is press out the left-side bottom bracket fitting. I'm looking forward to getting going on it tomorrow when I get home. It will be nice to be back on my regular commuter.

The Magic Which Lies Outside

2009-01-27T09:34:00.004-06:00

I've started reading a book called Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. The author, John Stilgoe, gives voice to something I've never been able to articulate but which speaks to me love of being outdoors. Let me quote for you:

Get out now, Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of our centruy. G outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. Forget about blood pressure and arthritis, cardiovascular rejuvenation and weight reduction. Instead pay attention to everything that abuts the rural road, the city street, the suburban boulevard. Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore.

With long explanations about how bicycles and shoes are the perfect exploration vehicles and how cars insulate and disconnect us from our environment, he goes through and describes how to explore the built landscape. This is not a but about nature, but about the history of human impact on nature which is hidden in plain sight all around us. I am about half way through the second chapter, and we're discussing the rights of way associated with railroads and electric lines.

It's amazing how you can see the impact all around once you have the right mindset and know what to look for. For instance, I have noticed things about the power lines in the neighborhoods that I drive through. In my neighborhood Allandale, all of the power lines run between the back fences of the houses, and the blocks are long and thin. As a consequence, the trees along the street (all placed 15 ft back from the road, so neatly you can sight along them) do not have to be trimmed. South of Allandale Rd in the Rosedale neighborhood, however, it's more patchwork, and in many places, power lines are strung along the fronts of houses, thus producing all sorts of grotesque shapes in the trees where the utilities have come in to hack them back. Although I'm sure Austin Energy prefers the easy access of street-accessible lines, it sure makes for ugly trees.

There are chapters to come on mail, strip malls, highways, main streets, dead ends, and more. I'm looking forward to developing some skill at exploring the magic which lies outside. Maybe some days I'll take some more time on my ride to or from work and explore a little. I look forward to sharing with you and inspiring a little exploration of your own.

Driveshaft Disassembly

2009-01-25T18:12:00.003-06:00

Today I finished stripping my Crosstown 7 in order to replace the broken frame. That involved removing the driveshaft assembly, cleaning it out, and re-greasing it. The bottom bracket came out by loosening the three screws on the left-hand side. Here's what the inside looks like. Somehow, dirt managed to get in there, but I don't think that had any consequence on performance, since the whole front crank case is sealed.

Here's what the front crank-case assembly looks like fresh from the bottom bracket.

Loosening the three screws on the other side allowed me to open the case and remove the gears for cleaning. Initially, the inside of the crank-case was full of grease, which I removed with clean rags.

I noticed that the gear ratio was 11:27. Because 27 and 11 are both prime, each tooth on the shaft eventually interacts with each tooth on the bevel gear, and no wear pattern develops. After cleaning everything up, I closed it up again and shot it full of fresh Teflon grease.

Here's what the rear end of the drive shaft looks like. This is where the 7-speed internal hub connects. The hub is similar to the chain driven version except for the bevel gear in place of the chain cog.

The next step is to receive the new frame and reassemble. I'm expecting the frame on Wednesday, so I'll post photos of the reassembly process then.

Stripping the Frame

2009-01-24T21:37:00.003-06:00

As I said I would, I started to take apart my Crosstown 7 in preparation for replacing my broken frame. So far, this job has been about what I expected, with no surprises. I started by removing the bike rack, seat post clamp, and rear fender, which all came apart as an assembly. Then I removed the brakes.

Then I removed the front brakes and unhooked the shifter cable, which allowed me to remove the handlebar, with everything still attached. At this point, my neighbor Emily saw me over the fence and offered me the use of her husband Jeff's work stand. I accepted, and boy what a difference that made. That enabled me to remove the kickstand and take off the cranks. Fortunately, I had a crank extraction tool from a previous project. Without a crank extractor, that task is near impossible and guaranteed to mess up your bike.

One interesting thing to note here is that when you add grease to the crank, it eventually comes out through the bearing on the right side near the crank arm seal, which makes it kind of messy since this spot is tough to clean with a rag with the crank arm still installed. In the photo below you see a year and a half worth of grease accumulation. The color of this grease when clean is light brown, almost white. A couple of times I had added shots of the green marine grease that I use for my water-brake dynamometer at school. I plan to open this up and clean it out thoroughly and re-grease with the white teflon grease supplied by Dynamic.

In a way I'm glad for the opportunity to get inside my bike and see how it all goes together, although this process is time consuming and no so convenient. I'll take the challenge to learn a little about bike repair rather than complain. Here's how I left things when it got too cold and dark to keep going tonight. (My workspace is the back patio. I miss my garage workshop.)

Frame Update

2009-01-23T12:37:00.002-06:00

Micro-post here: as promised, Dynamic shipped my frame yesterday. This morning I got the shipping notification from UPS. It should arrive next Wednesday. I hope to start posting disassembly photos this weekend.

Video: US Airways Flight 1549 Lands in the Hudson

2009-01-22T09:46:00.005-06:00

The story of the landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River has been really powerful for me. The pilot of that flight, Chesley Sullenberger, is my kind of hero. I'm thankful that neither a single death nor any major injuries occurred as a result of the landing, and the passengers tell a consistent tale of a calm, collected, women-and-children-first evacuation. That happened as a direct result of his cool head, his quick thinking, and a little bit of divine intervention. It could so easily have been otherwise.

At the time of the rescue, there were helicopters with video cameras all over the scene, and the rescue was pretty well documented. So why am I blogging about it now? Well, I knew it would only be a matter of time before a video of the landing surfaced, and I wanted to have something constructive to offer to my readers instead of another rehash of the events.

Here it is, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard, unedited, and no sound track. The splashdown occurs at 2:02, and if you stick around for a couple of minutes, you can see people emerge, fall off the wing, get pulled back up onto the wing by other passengers, and eventually get picked up by the ferries.

Commuter Tires

2009-01-21T11:02:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, I dusted off my wife's Raleigh hybrid bike to ride it in to work since my regular commuter has a broken frame. I enjoyed the change of feel and posture on the ride in and was starting to think this might not be so bad after all. Then on the ride home that all changed. After picking up Ian at his Tae Kwon Do class and attaching the tagalong trailer, we started our 3-mile ride home. Not far into the ride, we got a flat.

Of course, I had not switched my seat bag and tool kit over to the Raleigh, so we were stuck (literally) out in the cold. Fortunately, our route lies close to the bus route, so we walked a block over to the bus stop. Fortunately, the bus is on a 20-min frequency, and was supposed to have been made more frequent by the addition of several evening buses. Unfortunately, that is just a wild dream, and we waited for more than 45 minutes with no bus until my dear sweet wife finally came and picked us up. At least we got to have some father-son heart to heart time.

Three things went wrong. (1) I switched to a bike that did not have Kevlar tires. My regular bike has Kevlar tires, and in a year and a half of riding with them, I have gotten exactly one flat. On the first day with these other cheap tires, I'm dead on the roadside. (2) I did not pack the tool kit, which would have allowed me to make a roadside repair. I've gotten out of the mindset of needing it because I almost never do. (3) I had faith in the public transportation system. In principle, I'm a big believer in public transit, but Austin's Capital Metro has just not got it together with the P.M. buses. Nearly every time I've tried to take one in the afternoon or evening, I end up with a long (40-45 minute) wait.

Moral of the story. Be prepared!

The downside of aluminum frames

2009-01-19T17:32:00.006-06:00

It's time for an update on my Crosstown 7 (see all the articles here). This is a shaft-driven bike from Dynamic Bicycles, most similar to the currently available Crossroad 8. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the bottom bracket was starting to move side to side more than usual, and I thought that was probably not a good sign and that it would suffer a fatigue failure. Well, today, as I was riding home, I noticed the frame get loose and start to creak. When I stopped to look it over, I noticed a nice big ugly crack where the seat tube meets the bottom bracket. That's not supposed to happen. Unfortunately it's an inevitable consequence of aluminum butt-welded frames, and I think that the design of the bottom bracket on this shaft driven bike may have amplified the stress or strain in that area. Since purchasing the bike in August 2007, I have put 5900 km (3670 miles) on the bike. It's the 22" frame, and I'm a heavy guy (~215 lbs) and carry a heavy (~15 lb) back pack on the book rack, and I tend to have more of a stoking rather than a spinning pedal style, so it's safe to say that I'm a heavy user, but not unusually so.

When I got home today, the first thing I did was to locate my warranty and confirm that there is a lifetime guarantee on the frame. I called up Dynamic and told them what happened, and I was very pleased to hear and immediate "Man, I'm so sorry that happened to you. We'll get a new frame shipped out to you right away." We went over the details of what I need, including agreeing to how much I would need to put together, and was I able to do the things, and did I have the right tools, etc. The attitude I got was 'what can we do to make this right for you as quickly as possible?' and I have to say that I appreciated that. I've had some very poor customer service experiences before, but not with Dynamic. Others have complained about them, but it's just not been my experience, I've always found them to be friendly and helpful.

I'll post again when the new frame arrives, and maybe I'll document the repairs that are necessary.

In the mean time, keep on biking, and click on over to support my friend Margo in her New Year's resolution to start biking to work again. Leave supportive comments, and ask her to blog about the very funny story of when we rode home together one time...

How is a Man Like a Peach Tree?

2009-01-06T13:47:00.006-06:00

I recently read about peach trees that they need a certain amount of cooling in order to be productive. That is, if they don't spend a minimum number of days below a certain temperature, then their fruiting is limited. I wonder whether there could be a hormonal or other chemical basis for a similar response in humans...

This morning, for example, I awoke to a dreary drizzly day, with temps in the 40's F. I experienced a brief struggle between the desire to ride in on my bike and to ride to the bus stop and enjoy reading a book on a nice warm dry ride. I was starting to express this to my wife and had got as far as saying that I was thinking of riding to the bus stop when she interrupted (innocently, I'm sure) to say what a great idea that was. I had, after all, mentioned more than one how drizzly and cold it was outside.

Then the oddest thing happened, at the top of my street, where I turn left for the bus stop and right to ride all the way in, the whole struggle came back to life and the desire to ride through the invigorating weather bubbled up inside, and before I knew any better, I was accelerating down Daugherty, to the right. I arrived at school slightly damp, but quite recharged. It's as if I need to be cold in the winter. If I don't get chilled down enough days, then the endless heat of summer becomes oppressive and unbearable.

Does that make any sense? Am I completely crazy? Is there possibly any physiological basis for this?

And just in case anyone's paying attention, I've put about 5700km on the Dynamic Crosstown 7 now. It's still doing well with no major problems. The shifter has lost a little precision, and I have a little trouble downshifting into 1st. I don't know whether the indexes in the shifter are wearing out a little or maybe the shifter cable is dirty. I just can't get it quite right with the adjuster barrel. At some point it will become irritating enough for me to take it all apart and clean it out, but for now it's not that big a deal.

Also, I think it's always done this, but the other day I noticed that the bottom bracket does deflect quite a bit to the left on a right-side down stroke. Not so with the left-side. Hmmm. No problems yet, but I wonder whether this will turn into a fatigue failure at some point.

Change.org

2008-12-21T20:47:00.004-06:00

Obama has set up a website (www.change.org) for people to write in to propose ideas in the new administration. I've posted a link on the left for you all to click on to promote cycling infrastructure as part of his new economic stimulus package. Give it a whirl. You actually vote by clicking on the vote count button on the page that this links to.

Cold cold cold

2008-12-10T21:18:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was balmy and humid, in the mid 70's for most of the day. Then in the Texas tradition of unpredictability, the weather turned. In a matter of hours, the temperature dropped 40°, and it began to snow big fat wet snowflakes. That, in Austin, is a newsworthy event.

The snow, of course, did not stick to anything other than a few car tops and house roofs, and it was all gone not long after the sun came up, but we take what we can get.

It's amazing, though, how quickly I forget what it's like to be cold on the bike. I rode in today, like every day, and became reacquainted with that unique and uncomfortable feeling of being cold and hot at the same time. My clothing consists of an undershirt, a long sleeved cotton henly-style shirt, a felted wool pullover (by Swandri), and a wind-breaker shell that I can zip up and down to control wind exposure. In addition, I wear thick wool socks in my biking shoes, full fingered gloves, and a custom-knit wool cap with ear flaps that goes under my bike helmet. This getup is the result of many winters' worth of refinement; in particular, it was the Boston winters that truly forged my winter biking style. While I don't stop to admire myself in the mirror, but I've been told I'm quite a sight to see...

It takes a little while to get used to it again, though, and this morning was no exception. With a stiff headwind blowing 35° air at my nose, I quickly became reacquainted with the cold-nose, cold-finger, warm core phenomenon. It usually takes about 5-7 minutes of painful effort to get my body heat up until I'm comfortable, and during the warmup there's the terrible tradeoff between riding fast to warm up and getting chilled by the wind at higher speeds. The best way to warm up, really is a hill, where effort is high and speeds are low...

...which brings me to a funny thing. I've long noticed that biking vigorously moves the blood to concentration becomes more challenging. My wife can attest to this since I can't remember anything she tells me when I get home until I've had a moment or two to wind down. So, I've noticed on cool days that it seems like there is a specific place (Rosedale Elementary, if you happen to live in Austin and know where that is) where the air gets warmer on my ride in to campus. I have always attributed this to the heat island effect and to the quirks of local geography. Today, as I was pondering body heat and the best way to warm up, I finally realized that this is not the case at all, and that the air probably does not get warmer at all. The truth is that Rosedale Elementary is at the top of a killer hill, and that I'm warmer at the top, not the air around me... With all the blood in my legs, this has been hard to realize, but I'm sure that's it. It was certainly the case today, when the ride became tolerable at the top of that hill, and I even started to sweat a little in spite of my frozen nose and pinkies.

I'm happy for the cold weather, and I will soak it in and store it up for the summer months that are coming all too soon.

Expedition photos, and my web site

2008-11-27T21:05:00.001-06:00

When I was in High School, my family lived for a year in Cambridge England. As part of that experience, I attended a British boys' school (it's co-ed now), which sent a small expedition to the Arctic island of Spitzbergen. My parents offered me the opportunity, and I took it.

Recently I scanned the photos from that trip and uploaded them to Picasa. Then I made a web page to show them off. Find it here. Please don't expect to find much on the rest of the site; there are tidbits, but not much. I don't do this professionally, and I'm busy with a lot of other things. But at least the expedition photos are all commented and in good order. I hope you enjoy them.

I hope that one day, I'm able to provide my own children with the same kind of incredible opportunities that my parents gave me.

BTW this post is cross listed at my other blog.

Two Little Biking Rants

2008-11-13T11:48:00.003-06:00

One for the cars:

Why do cars feel the need to accelerate and swerve to get in front of me at a stop light or stop sign!!!?? We're both going to stop anyway, and I'm probably going to pass you on your right anyway. If you don't leave me room to pass, then that's just really rude, and if you do leave me room, what's the point?

And one for the bikers:

Why not stop at stop signs? Especially when there are cars two deep in each direction, when you blow through without a care in the world, it disrupts the turn-taking and does all bike commuters a big disfavor by pissing off the drivers. I'm sympathetic to blowing stop signs on empty residential streets if you at least make a motion of slowing down, but out in the busy-traffic public? Come on!

Yeesh!

Pedal Therapy

2008-11-08T21:05:00.005-06:00

I wish I could convey the kind of day it was today: sunny, cool, and quiet with an out-of-place rising current of nonsensical irritation that made me realize I needed to get out and exercise. I realized that I'm addicted to my bike. I found myself looking for an excuse to get out and ride somewhere, so I convinced my son (with whom I had recently snapped out of an unpleasant downward dance of mutual aggravation) to hook up the tagalong trailer and come with me to get a part to repair my chainsaw. On the way, I remember that I had something on hold at the library, so we zipped in to pick it up. Then we spent some time wandering around trying to find the repair shop. While we were finishing up there, I realized there was an archery store nearby that I had always wanted to visit since Ian has expressed some interest in getting a bow. (He's actually made several that work pretty well but have subsequently broken.) Well, it didn't take too long to realize that it was a very high-end store and the least expensive option for a beginner youth bow was far above what I wanted to pay. We went on, and I decided to make a small detour to see the new library branch that's going in, and we happened to be by a friends house, so we stopped in for a visit and a fudgesicle. Then it was home. The trip was about 10 km all together and took something like 2 hours.

I'm sure I wouldn't have wandered around like that in a car. I'd have been worried about gas and taking too long and getting home and probably wouldn't have been paying attention to my surroundings enough. The bike is kind of a refuge for me: I pray, sing, think, listen. It provides a comfortable solitude that is not lonely and that the car does not provide, so I find myself seeking out opportunities to go out and bike.

Plus, there's my odometer obsession, and I was looking for a way to flip 52oo km before the end of the week. I bought the bike (my Crosstown 7) in August of 2007, so that's 5200 km in 16 months, or an average of 325 km per month, or about 83 km per week. Most weeks that I bike I go about 100 km or a little bit more, and there are weeks that we are gone that I don't bike at all, so that seems about right.

Today as we were in the final stretch coming home, the bike felt good, the wind was the perfect temperature, and there was a certain freedom to being out and about with no expense and no stress. It was therapy.

Robocalls

2008-11-01T16:05:00.002-05:00

We have had no fewer than 7 Robocalls on behalf of Senator Cornyn, Congressman McCaul, Senator Obama, Senator McCain, Larry Joe Doherty, etc. Yeesh! We've just stopped answering the phone today, it's so crazy.

Biking Pork

2008-10-07T16:04:00.002-05:00

I read here about a piece of pork that got into this $700b bailout bill. The pork is a bill which offers corporations a $20/commuter/month tax credit per cycling employee. While I agree in principle with the result, I have to say I'm not impressed that a senator switched his support of the bailout because of this earmark. Some might call this compromise in action, but I tend to see it as a selfish hold-out for a pet interest. Can I get an Amen, anyone?

Here's the relevant snippet of H.R. 1424 (in full here):

"To provide authority for the Federal Government to purchase and insure certain types of troubled assets for the purposes of providing stability to and preventing disruption in the economy... (Enrolled as Agreed to or Passed by Both House and Senate)"

...

SEC. 211. TRANSPORTATION FRINGE BENEFIT TO BICYCLE COMMUTERS.

(a) In General- Paragraph (1) of section 132(f) is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(D) Any qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement.'.
(b) Limitation on Exclusion- Paragraph (2) of section 132(f) is amended by striking `and' at the end of subparagraph (A), by striking the period at the end of subparagraph (B) and inserting `, and', and by adding at the end the following new subparagraph:
`(C) the applicable annual limitation in the case of any qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement.'.
(c) Definitions- Paragraph (5) of section 132(f) is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(F) DEFINITIONS RELATED TO BICYCLE COMMUTING REIMBURSEMENT-
`(i) QUALIFIED BICYCLE COMMUTING REIMBURSEMENT- The term `qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement' means, with respect to any calendar year, any employer reimbursement during the 15-month period beginning with the first day of such calendar year for reasonable expenses incurred by the employee during such calendar year for the purchase of a bicycle and bicycle improvements, repair, and storage, if such bicycle is regularly used for travel between the employee's residence and place of employment.
`(ii) APPLICABLE ANNUAL LIMITATION- The term `applicable annual limitation' means, with respect to any employee for any calendar year, the product of $20 multiplied by the number of qualified bicycle commuting months during such year.
`(iii) QUALIFIED BICYCLE COMMUTING MONTH- The term `qualified bicycle commuting month' means, with respect to any employee, any month during which such employee--
`(I) regularly uses the bicycle for a substantial portion of the travel between the employee's residence and place of employment, and
`(II) does not receive any benefit described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) of paragraph (1).'.
(d) Constructive Receipt of Benefit- Paragraph (4) of section 132(f) is amended by inserting `(other than a qualified bicycle commuting reimbursement)' after `qualified transportation fringe'.
(e) Effective Date- The amendments made by this section shall apply to taxable years beginning after December 31, 2008.

Try as I might, I could not locate the section 132(f) referred to in this final copy. I suppose that's why they hire full time staff, to sort through the tangled wording of such bills. Anyway, shouldn't a bill to provide a tax incentive for bicycle commuting be voted on as a bill to promote bicycle commuting? Here's a short list of some of the other gems tucked away into this one:

renewable energy credits
tax credit for fuels used by the steel industry
clean coal technology investment credit
CO2 sequestration tax credit
biofuels tax credits
plug-in electric vehicle credit
tax deduction for energy efficient buildings
tax deductions for domestic hydrocarbon production
railroad track maintenance
indian employment tax credit
duty suspension for wool products and wool research fund
Sec 401 "permanent authority for undercover operations" !!!
Sec 503 "exemption from excise tax for certain wooden arrows designed for use by children"

These are but a few of the many many many tag-ons to this bill. I think we're getting a heck of a lot more than we've bargained for on this one...

Shizknit

2008-10-07T15:58:00.002-05:00

I kind of dig this blog I found called "She Knits Shizknits". She's into biking, knitting (surprise), spinning her own yarn, and general geekiness. Anyway, lots of interesting Xtracycle experience is posted there. Xtracycle is becoming quite the rage in the biking blogosphere these days...

Why??!!

2008-09-26T13:52:00.003-05:00

Why is it so stinking easy to get distracted while working on paper manuscripts? They're both due next Wednesday, and I really don't have any time to waste...

At all.

Too Hot

2008-09-23T22:08:00.003-05:00

I am here to testify that even if one grows up in Texas, it does not guarantee a love of hot weather. For seven and a half years, I lived on the east coast, two and half years in Boston, and five in upstate South Carolina. In both of those places, September is a month of respite, of enjoying the coolness of fragrant Autumn breezes from the north, of the gorgeous colors of deciduous trees. Then, for some strange reason, I moved back to Austin, where a 10 degree dip in the temperature only barely gets us out of the 90's. Augh!

We got a brief little hiatus after Ike hit, but it's beginning to feel a lot like summer again. For the last week and a half, I have enjoyed not sweating profusely while biking home in the afternoons. In the graph above, it's usually at the max temperature that I make my ride home, and today was well into the 90's again. To think that a week ago I was actually a little cold on my morning ride!

The weatherman says we should have a slow, steady decline in temps for the rest of the week, but after having lived elsewhere and realized that this is not normal, I'm getting impatient for those Autumn breezes. After graduation, it's Northward Ho! Anywhere with four seasons!

It's time for a new seat

2008-09-09T09:58:00.003-05:00

Alas, my faithful and intimate companion is close to retirement. I speak of my bike seat, which has served me well for many years. It took me a while to find just the right one, and I have a few old seats in my shed which did not pass muster before, inevitably leading to numbness and later to soreness on account of being too soft. Many recreational seats are marketed for their padding, but after more than a few miles, all that squishy padding ends up acting like a tourniquet on some pretty important arteries. I will say no more.So, the question arises of what to replace with. I'm thinking of two options, and they represent two quite different approaches. The first is less expensive, will not last as long, but would probably be OK for several years more. The critical feature is the cut-out, as shown in the $40 example below:

The other option appeals to the pay-for-quality buy-it-to-last-forever side of me, which is the fabled Brooks saddle:
You have to read the website and look at a couple of pages of Google search on "Brooks Saddle" to understand just how truly special it is. It is in fact a stretched leather upper that breaks in over a month or two and becomes personalized to one's own particular shape. There are plenty of stories of people riding the same saddle for 50 years and more. Apparently, after it's broken in, it more or less disappears from underneath you and you don't notice it any more. The only catch for me at present, and the reason that I hesitate, is the usual $80+ price tag. It is ill-advised to buy one used since it may have broken in on someone else's bottom...

So, that's the dilemma. I'll post a photo of the new saddle once I've decided.

Escalade Hybrid ??!!

2008-08-27T23:40:00.005-05:00

Will somebody please explain this vehicle to me? I just don't understand the buyer who would fall for this automotive equivalent of the triple-cheeseburger, chocolate shake, biggie fries, with a diet coke. Conspicuous but conscientious consumption?! Is such a thing possible? There is a close second in absurdity in the Escalade EXT luxo-sport-truck.

I think the owner is trying to say, "I have style and am very high class, but I want you to think that I can do useful things with my truck or escape to the great outdoors, but I can't possibly afford to scratch the $1000 white-diamond tri-coat paint." I'm a cowboy, but I'm an urbanite? Does this make sense to anyone? If you get the marketing dynamic, please post and help us all out...

This is no small part of the reason I felt I had to leave the automotive world I was in, but more on that later.

Igor Kenk, Gold Medal Bike Thief

2008-08-22T12:11:00.003-05:00

The police have apprehended Toronto's and possibly the worlds most accomplished bike thief. Igor Kenk (don't you just love mug-shots?) was found with 2,865 bicycles in his possession, all of them stolen. He was also found with a fair stash of crack, cocaine, and marijuana. Apparently, he had them all organized by make and style and was purportedly waiting for the Oil Crash or a spike in commodities prices to come so that he could sell or melt them. Kenk's nominal job was running a used-bike shop (wonder where he got his stock), and was something of a sideways philanthropist since he hired local transients and mental out-patients to nab, maintain, and organize his bikes. During public viewings of the stash, around 1/4 of the bikes have been claimed by their owners.

Yeesh!

(get the full story here)

Chinese Gymnast Age Controversy

2008-08-22T10:37:00.002-05:00

May I direct your attention to a nice piece of Google-hacking at Stryde-Hax (here and here) which shows evidence of Chinese governmental tomfoolery with regard to the ages of He Kexin and Yang Yilin. The story has also broken (first, maybe) at the New York Times, here.
Didn't we all suspect this all along? My profound sympathy is toward these Chinese girls. Rules are rules, but apparently they are new rules, because I think Nadia Comenici was 14 when she scored her perfect 10.0.

Review: Between Silk and Cyanide

2008-08-20T10:45:00.001-05:00

I just posted a review of this book to GoodReads. Enjoy:

Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945 by Leo Marks

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a fascinating book about Leo Marks' experience in the codes division of the SOE, the British organization responsible for handling spies during the second world war. Not only do we get to find out a lot about the mechanics of how it all worked, what the codes were, and the British side of the Englandspeil/Nordpol game with Col. Giskes, but we also get some insight into the personalities and culture that allowed the SOE to be, at the same time fantastically successful in managing some spy networks and profoundly abstruse about recognizing and remedying their own mistakes.

For instance, Marks was a master at deciphering coding mistakes by stressed out agents and saved many lives by not requiring them to resend messages coded with the same key, etc. He would take bathroom breaks to solve 'indecipherables' and reencode them properly in such a way that the Free French would not realize that he had cracked their precious code, but at the same time saving their agent.

However, his own narrow focus and the turf wars of those around him allowed the Germans to capture dozens of agents and tons of airdropped supplies. Read London Calling North Pole for an account by the German colonel in charge. It was frustrating to think of how many lives could have been saved or how much more quickly the war might have ended if some of the British officers had been less concerned about their own fiefdom and more concerned about a common cause. We are left wondering what might have happened if there had been a spirit of cooperation instead of competition between the geniuses at Bletchley Park and those at SOE codes section.

All in all, I recommend this as a fascinating character study of a civilian in the war effort. It is full of interesting stories and anecdotes, and should be accessible to a general audience. However, those with an understanding of and appreciation for cryptography and espionage will especially enjoy this book.

View all my reviews.

Declining Gas Prices?

2008-08-19T15:28:00.003-05:00

Don't get too used to declining gas prices. By many expert opinions (alas, I am no expert, but I agree anyway) this current dip in the price of gasoline is temporary. There's an article in the New York Times today about the oil industry and their struggles to find new production sources. The general idea is that the independent oil producers, ExxonMobil, for example, while awash in profits, are struggling to open up new production. One reason is political: as more countries nationalize their oil production, they are simultaneously restricting outside investment, with the result that, for example, American companies are not so free to go exploring in Nigerian oil fields. A second reason is closely related: there are not many more big new fields to finds, so those who have them are becoming more protective. Have you heard enough rhetoric about American dependence on foreign oil? Imagine the feeling in oil-rich countries about foreign consumption of their own precious oil. Think Russia wants to sell to just anyone? Think again: it's a big power position for them to hold large reserves.

The Peak Oil folks have been saying this kind of thing for years. Many of them have predicted this kind of thing, and they are going crazy on their websites with not-so-subtle "We told you so" proclamations. See here, here, and here for examples. Many people misunderstand the idea of Peak Oil to mean that we're running out of oil. That is not the case. There will always be oil to pump. The problem is one of macro-economics. As demand grows past supply, the price will start to rise steeply. What we're going to run out of is the cheaper-than-water oil that we've built our economies around. Think there's an oil-company conspiracy? It's just the economics of natural resource depletion playing out. Here's a snippet from the article:

The scope of the supply problem became more clear in the latest quarter when the five biggest publicly traded oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, said their oil output had declined by a total of 614,000 barrels a day, even as they posted $44 billion in profits. It was the steepest of five consecutive quarters of declines.

While that drop might not sound like much in a world that consumes 86 million barrels of oil each day, today’s markets are so tight that the slightest shortfalls can push up prices.

Along with mature fields, the companies have contracts with producing countries whose governments allocate fewer barrels to oil companies as prices rise.

“It has become really, really difficult to grow production,” said Paul Horsnell, an analyst atBarclays Capital. “International companies have a portfolio of assets in areas of significant decline and no frontier discoveries to make up for that.”

One reassuring point is that at least in the developed world, people are rapidly shifting away from ridiculously conspicuous consumption. Hummer sales have plummeted, and the carmakers can hardly sell new SUV's and pickups. Almost every car ad on TV now either offers $8k-10k discounts on SUV/trucks or trumpets the high mileage of the small cars they sell. Americans have scaled way back on driving and gas consumption. That is in large part what's responsible for the current dip in prices. That and the strengthening dollar. However, in India and in China, where fuel prices are highly subsidized, demand continues to grow largely unabated, so we shouldn't expect the current decline to last.

What should we do? Remember, "where your treasure is, there also will your heart be. (Matt 16:21)" The things of this world will pass away, so focus on the heavens. In an age and culture where car/house=identity, there is a real and living Person who can give us the incorruptible life...

Also, you can ride a bike to save money on gas. ;-)

Announcing Daddy Magic

2008-08-19T10:32:00.002-05:00

I started a new blog, focused on my experiences as a father, called Daddy Magic. Check it out if you're interested in that. I plan to keep Chubby GrumGrum as my eclectic mix of biking, graduate life, and sustainability issues. Enjoy!

It's Hot!!!

2008-08-01T12:01:00.002-05:00

We are about to break an 83 year old record for the most days over 100°F here in Austin, according to the Statesman. In my own particular corner of the world, the implication is that it's like biking home through an oven. My water bottle is about 1.5 L, and I usually finish it about 3/4th of the way home, and I usually have to cool off a little bit before going inside, where the air-conditioning (set to 81°F) is too cold for me and give me chills if I transition too quickly. Yeesh!

The high temperatures tend to introduce a few new creaks and squeaks on my bike, too. For a while, I started experiencing rim-flats, when the cheap rubber rim tape that came with my bike got too soft in the heat and allowed the inner tube to expand through the spoke holes and touch the spokes nuts. Whoever thought that would happen? Easy to fix with some better quality cloth rim tape, but annoying nonetheless. In addition, the grease in my drive line has thinned out noticeably in the hot weather and I have to re-grease more frequently and notice a bit more friction, which doesn't really help the body heat issue. Finally, there's a new creaky noise in the cranks (not the one I blogged about earlier) that got a little better when when I tightened the cranks but never really went away. It's not there in the morning, when it's cooler, but appears faithfully in the afternoon when when the heat's on and I'm baking my way home.

This is the time of year also brings out the perverse phenomenon of what I call "summer frost bite." I noticed it recently when my advisor walked into the lab wearing a sweatshirt. Many of the area secretaries also bring sweaters during the summer months. Apparently, Texans feel the need to show off how well our air conditioners work, so in many of the offices and labs, the thermostat is set below 70°F. Try walking in from outside, with your skin at 102°F and adjusting 30° down. The worst eve case of this was when I lived in an all-bills-paid apartment with roommates who kept the air at 66°F. I think I actually got sick one time after a bike ride. Fortunately, I'm alone in my office much of the time, and I've found the thermostat control...

A Poor Man's Pannier

2008-07-29T10:04:00.007-05:00

One of the keys to surviving hot weather on a bike is to get as much wind on your skin as possible. Because I carry a laptop in my pack-pack to and from school, so getting my bag off my back is an important part of managing the heat. I like the idea of mounting a pannier that I could stick my bag into, but they can be kind of pricey. Decent ones typically run $50-$100. I may have mentioned the cash-flow situation with graduate school before, but especially in my case, minimizing expenses is a high priority.

That's not to say I want to go cheap, but I definitely don't want to spend unnecessarily, so I thought about other solutions. As a matter of fact, on first returning to school, I purchased a cheap back-pack from eBay that looked like it would be a good deal, but it fell apart half-way through my first semester. I replaced it with a very well-built and only slightly more expensive ($50) Super Deluxe Book Pack from L. L. Bean. It turns out this pack has a very strong handle on the top that turns out to be very useful for attaching it to my bike.I rummaged around and found that the rack that holds my bicycle baby-carrier was removable, and I had a few bungee straps. I installed the bike rack, and then, using the two S-hooks from a rubber bungee-strap, I secured the pack handle to the top of the bike rack, as shown in the photo. Then I used two more bungee straps: one to sling under the bottom of the bag to help take some of the strain off the handle.
You can see it as the brown/yellow cord in the following photos. The other bungee strap wraps around the outside of the pack to hold it against the side of the rack so it doesn't move around while I'm riding. In order to make sure the shoulder straps don't get caught in the spokes, I cinch them tight and tie the loose ends around the padded part of the straps. This arrangement has worked really well for me this summer so far. The cost was zero, the improvement in comfort was substantial.Last of all, let me make one more plug for L. L. Bean. Their products are really focused on the end-user, and I don't get the feeling that any corners were cut in design or production. And you just have to love the sign they post in their stores and on the web:

Fly Like an Eagle...

2008-07-24T09:00:00.002-05:00

A long-repressed but still smoldering ambition of mine is to become a glider pilot. I've built and flown an R/C glider and long been a fan of computer flight simulation, but there's nothing like the real deal.

So today, I saw this article in the Austin American-Statesman about Gary Osoba's recent world record setting glider flight. The flame has been fanned a little bit. This is not really a practical dream until after graduation and a new job have improved the cash-flow situation, but consider the dream to be alive.

Spotted: Crazy Naked Cyclist!!! (PG-Rated)

2008-07-22T17:05:00.005-05:00

Here's commuting in a style unique to Austin, methinks. Dena, secretary for our research area, spotted this guy on her way home from work and had the presence of mind to snap a photo. Apparently, she's seen him before, "dressed" in a white thong...

Can you believe one of my lab mates thought it was me at first because of the bike trailer!!!??

ROFLOL!

Sanity in the Debate Over Food and Agriculture

2008-07-21T10:28:00.002-05:00

I was deeply affected by reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals recently. In it, I discovered that there is a myth of the pastoral farm that is in stark contrast with the reality of the modern food production system (see the Meatrix), and that much of what we call food is entirely synthetic. Profits from food manufacture go up with the amount of processing that the manufacturer provides, leading us to a tremendously processed food supply. Reading this was a good way to get inspired to pay attention to the source of our food and start to visit the local farmers' markets.

One thing nagged at me, and Pollan only paid passing reference to it in his book. That is the question of how can you scale this up to serve the whole country, or more to the point, the whole world? It is impossible to read the book and not fall in love with Polyface Farms, but the fact of the matter is that we do not have the land or the resources to feed everybody from farms like Polyface.

I was pleased to see a little piece in the Austin American Statesman on this today called "Microgreens for the Masses". In it, the author outlines some practical recommendations for change with a very sensible realpolitik tone. If you're interested in this kind of thing, click on over. Then write your senator...

Death of the Mosquito Killers - Attack of the Killer Mosquitos?

2008-07-18T09:36:00.006-05:00

Does anyone else feel like the mosquitos have been especially vicious this year? It's probably due to the milder winter and stagnant pools in the creeks hereabout, but it's also a possible foretaste of things to come if bat populations take a dive.

My sister sent me this article from NaturalNews.com describing a massive bat die-off along the east coast due to something scientists are calling White-Nose Syndrome. Bats are found dead on the floors of their cave with a white fungus on their nose or pneumonia in their lungs. Leading the list of suspects are the pesticides used to control mosquitos in the wake of West Nile Virus hysteria. (How many people actually died from West Nile Virus? About 120/year nationwide in the last few years. See here.)

I'm not sure what the status of Austin's beloved colony of Mexican

Free-Tailed Bats is, but I sincerely hope that they hold strong in the face of the epidemic. This is one more reason Divine Intervention may not be necessary for the Apocalypse.

Head on over to Bat Conservation International if you're interested in finding out more about White-Nose Syndrome or taking action to help out.

A Little Update on the Bike

2008-07-12T23:49:00.005-05:00

I recently received a comment from Jeff on my review of the Dynamic Crosstown 7 bicycle. (Amazingly, SiteMeter tells me that page is consistently my best draw, followed by my visit to Mellow Johnny's. Go figure...) Jeff was influenced in part by my review to take the plunge on a shaft driven bike, and he has outclassed me entirely by setting up a whole website to detail his experiences. His complete honesty has shamed me somewhat and caused me to realize that I'm a little guilty of something we might call "wishing away buyer's regret." That is, having plunked down a fair chunk of change for the bike, I'm determined to like it, facts supporting or no. Jeff has been undeterred by the size of his investment and freely given vent to both frustration and praise for his bike. Why would I not learn a little from him and share the good, the bad, and the ugly? Besides, I'm approaching 4000km (2400 mi) on the bike, and it's been almost a year since I bought it, and that's far enough for a pretty good assessment of long-term issues.

First of all, the drive-line. Now that I have the gear greasing figured out, it's pretty much transparent. I just don't notice it. I can ride 500-600 km between shots of grease, and this is not an issue for me. In fact, it's a big advantage. I really don't miss chain maintenance. At all. (If you read Jeff's site, you'll find he's greasing every 75 mi or so, which to me seems way too often.)

My main drive-line complaint comes intermittently on hot days when I get a "tunk" sound once per pedal revolution when my left crank is straight up and down. Faster cadences make it louder than slow. Light pressure and very hard pressure make it go away, and if the temperature is below 90°F, I don't hear it. It's always over 90°F in the summer in Austin, and I only get about half the time. Although it's only a minor annoyance, I wish I knew what it was.

Build quality. It's a little late for me to talk about build quality since I already mentioned the state of the wheels on receipt, but I did purchase a Park TM-1 spoke tension meter and tuned up the wheels. This is a necessary item of maintenance anyway, and I probably should have done it 2000km ago, but it feels like a new ride now, and I'll make this a regular date with the bike in the future. Regarding build quality, everything else is holding up well, and no other defects have come to light.

One last unspoken complaint relates to getting the driveline. This may seem a little obscure to all but the few Dynamic-owner readers that I have here, so feel free to skip on by if you want. Early in my setup, I was having trouble with grinding gears that turned out to be a problem of sorting out the proper kind of grease to use. During the process, though, I found I could make a big improvement to the feel of the drive line by adjusting the number of spacers on the rear axle. These are thin shim-stock washers that go between the hub and the drop-out to properly align the bevel gear with the drive shaft. The bike came with three fitted, and I improved the feel of the drive line noticeably by removing two of them. Later, the teflon-based grease solved the rest of the grinding problem, but I recently put them back in, just for kicks, to see what would happen, and I had to pull over and take them back off because the drive train became rough and the friction increased. I'm guessing that my gear set has probably worn in to its current arrangement and that putting them back in a long time ago wouldn't have had the same effect. Again, this is minor, and probably only of note to anyone else searching the net for information on shaft drives.

So I set out to try to complain a little bit about my bike, but I've ended up dismissing all of my complaints as minor. The fact remains, I like the bike, and I don't (honestly now) regret choosing it over a more conventional one, even after 4000km through Texas heat.

Independence Day Parade

2008-07-05T22:28:00.005-05:00

Our neighborhood does its own Independence Day parade, complete with speeches from our local politicians, free ice-cream from Amy's Ice Creams, Lemonade from Jim-Jim's Water Ice, and plenty of small-town flair right in the heart of Austin. First of all in order to get into the spirit of the day, and second to avoid bringing home big bags of candy, we decided to decorate our bikes and ride in the parade. Actually, I had very little to do with the decoration. Hannah bought the supplies and made us pipe-cleaner Mohawks, and the kids shooed me away while they decorated my bike in secret.
The parade was led by a contingent of Revolutionary War garbed actors. Then there was a section with fancy cars followed by the bikes, trikes, and strollers. Those who wanted could enter the contest for best decorations, and the results were announced at the end, after the political speeches. All in all this was a fun way to get out on the bike (my son's scowl notwithstanding) and wave the Grand Ole Flag.

Gas Prices

2008-06-20T12:05:00.003-05:00

I've been keeping a little bit of an eye on the situation with gas prices, and I read something interesting this morning in the New York Times about the price of fuel in China. The Chinese government provides a direct subsidy for consumers there by fixing the price paid at the pump. This has insulated Chinese consumers from recent price increases and removed any motivation to scale back consumption in that country, which is one factor in the global increase in the price of oil and fuel. Yesterday, the government increased the price of gasoline for Chinese consumers by 16% to $3.83/gal, and the price of diesel by 18% to $3.58/gal. As a very tangible result of the complex psychology of oil trading, the commodity price of crude oil fell $4/barrel immediately on that news.
Although the Chinese have seen noticeable and rapid improvements in the quality of living, they are also rapidly transitioning from a biking to a automobile culture. Sigh...
The way things are going today with oil prices and global warming, Divine Intervention will hardly be necessary to have a really nasty Great Tribulation.

Nerd Test

2008-06-18T13:22:00.002-05:00

Hannah suckered me into this. If you click the link from my page, come back and post your score in the comments...

Back in the Saddle

2008-06-18T12:59:00.003-05:00

Time to get back in the saddle. Of life, of school, on the bike, etc. We just returned from a very good weekend of the wedding of my brother in law Peter. It was a great time of family, friends, hanging out, sightseeing, monopoly, midnight pow-wows, etc. My wife, as usual, has posted her well-written and entertaining summary of the weekend, and I dare not compete or compare with my own version. I could go on and on about my nightmare travel experience with Continental and an unplanned and low-sleep overnight in Houston, but I'll spare you the details.
A much needed breather. The weather was actually cool, and I tried to spend a lot of time out it in to radiate the Texas heat out and see if I could lower my core temperature in preparation for the rest of the Texas summer. Unfortunately, thermodynamics does not work that way, and we're back in sweatland. For my ride in this morning, I actually was pretty much recharged, and the weather was not bad. I'm not sure how the ride home through the 40C heat will be, though.
Just one quick little funny about the airplane trips. For personal amusement, I have recently started counting the number of times that I hear certain phrases from the flight crew. The two most frequent ones, in my experience, are sentences that start with "Once again..." and "at this time". For the flight up, the score was tied at 4 and 4 because the captain spoke with unusually civilian jargon. The trip home, though was classic, with 7 instances of "Once again..." and 9 of "at this time".

PS, after a comment from my brother in law Paul, I'm switching RSS to full syndication so that those of you who use a blog reader get the whole thing and not just the first paragraph. Most of my ad traffic comes from searches on a few of my posts anyway, so it's not that big a deal. Enjoy!

A Funny Thing Happenend on the Ride Home

2008-06-09T23:20:00.004-05:00

All I can say is I thank God for firefighters. Here's what happened:
I spent a busy day in the lab directing the eager efforts of two students visiting our lab for the summer from Dubai. They are both hard workers and smart, which means that they can pretty much finish a task soon after I assign it, and with my adviser away in Germany presenting a paper he and I wrote that leaves me pretty busy keeping these guys busy. Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing.
So I'm racing home on my bike through near 100°F heat, trying not to be too late for Eliza's 5th birthday. So that I can stay hands free and still talk on the phone while I bike, I've figured out what I thought was a pretty good way to tuck my cell phone under the straps of my biking helmet. With the phone on loudspeaker, I'm able to hear and be heard without sacrificing safety by tying up a hand while I ride.
I had just ended a call to let Hannah know I was on my way when, I'm not sure what caused this, the cell phone slipped from the straps and flew into the street, taking my glasses with it. I screeched to a halt and turned around as quickly as possible to rescue my glasses. Amazingly, they survived the fall with no scratches on the lenses, a big relief, but the only parts of my phone I could find were the face plate and key pad. Finally I realized that there was the storm drain, and when I stuck my head in, I could just barely see the rest of my phone, down in the leaves in the bottom of the drain.

View Larger Map
It just so happens that my mishap occurred directly in front of Austin Fire Department Station #3. (Behind and to the left in the picture above, it's the red brick building. The Offending Storm Drain is visible just ahead of my position on the right.) I grew up in the neighborhood, and I used to frequent this particular firehouse as a youngster , selling the Worlds Greatest Chocolate, popcorn, and whatever overpriced medium my school was using for fund-raising that year. Through these visits, I developed a fondness and respect for firemen that endures to this day, so I walked my bike over, explained my case, and asked whether anyone could help. Doing so, I interrupted and eagerly abandoned game of ping-pong, and created an opportunity for three of these fine men to grab a bunch of wicked-looking gear and hike across the street to rescue my phone. It was, of course, no problem to lift the cover and send the youngest guy, the new recruit, down into the hole to fetch the phone. Knowing full well that they loved the opportunity to get out and do something, I thanked them once, with genuine heartfelt gratitude, and rode the rest of the way home.
Now the moral of the story is, if you're going to lose something down a storm drain, do it in front of a fire station!

Chatter, a Review

2008-06-08T23:00:00.007-05:00

If I haven't posted for a while, it's a consequence of being in that "all but dissertation" phase and being between semesters. Expectations are high that I would get a lot of research done. Alas, blogging takes the back seat...

In any case, tonight I finished reading a book Hannah got me for the first of m 34th birthdays. (I'm planning to hang out at 34, an entirely respectable age, for as many years as I may before conceding to 35 for several more.) The book is by a high school classmate of hers named Patrick Radden Keefe and it's called Chatter:Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. The title pretty much tells you what it's all about.
I suspect that the word Echelon in the title is a bit of an attention grabbing device, since the book is not really about Echelon so much as the NSA, its eavesdropping network, and a history of its sucesses and failures.
Most Americans, including me before reading this book, don't have much of a clue about the extent of listening in that our government does. Apart from some awareness about the recent warrantless wire-tapping done by the NSA, we really only have at vague sense of unease that our privacy may be just an illusion. Keefe goes to some lengths to describe in as much detail as possible through public domain sources all of the eavesdropping activity that we unwittingly finance through our tax dollars. In various chapters he describes the infrastructure of eavesdropping; our international security partnership with the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; the lives of several insiders who went public; the crusades of several outsiders who research the eavesdroppers and report on their activities; the responses of foreign governments to our eavesdropping; and some very insightful discussion about the benefits of signals intelligence as well as its shortcomings, failures, and the abuses it allows.
Keefe likes to point out that there has been remarkably little public will to discuss the trade-offs between security and liberty. There have been several remarkable failures of intelligence, including most notably September 11th, the attacks on our embassies, and the attack on the USS Cole. Amazingly, our usual response to these failures has been to not hold anyone accountable, and increase funding for the agencies responsible for the failures.
This was quite an eye-opening read, and thankfully, Keefe steers well clear of any paranoid raving. Much of what is written in the public domain about Echelon is unashamed paranoid raving. Just Google "Echelon" and count the references to Orwell to see what I mean. In my opinion Keefe does a good job of informing without opining too much. His main grief seems to be that we in the public seem too apathetic to have much meaningful discussion about where the line between liberty and security should be drawn.
I recognize that my skill as a book reviewer is falling somewhat short in this post, and this is a difficult book to do justice to. That said, it is quite readable and will not fail to keep you turning the pages. I would recommend giving it a read, especially in the run up to the elections since we are sure to hear a lot of rhetoric about security and freedom in the debates this fall. Click the cover shot below for a link to the Amazon page for this book.

Spotted: Tandem Trike Trailer

2008-05-23T22:05:00.006-05:00

My Dad is spending six weeks teaching in Cambridge, England this summer, and he spotted this gem parked outside a grammar school there. It looks like Mum brought two kids to school on her bike and is taking them inside at this moment. Note the safety vests, helmets, and handlebar pannier. Kudos to British Mum, whoever and wherever you are!

By the way, this is a Pashley U-Plus 2, available in Pashley Cycle's Brilliant Bicycles product lineup. You can't see it in this photo, but the kids have their own 7-speed derailleur. I think this is cool beyond words...

Bike to Work Day

2008-05-18T21:31:00.006-05:00

Friday was Bike to Work Day. Maybe you knew that and maybe you didn't, but there were events all over town. Probably the best thing of all was that the Austin Cycling Association sponsored breakfast at various stations around town. I managed to show up at two of them and grab the likes of bagels and cream cheese, orange juice, coffee, fruit, etc.
At the first stop on Shoal Creek where the Far West bike trail intersects, I snapped a few photos and spent a little time to chat with some other bikers. The other breakfast station was at Wheatsville Coop, near the end of my ride, where I was just in time to grab a last cup of coffee before they cleared it all away.
The Austin American Statesman did a little piece on Bike to Work day, which you can watch online here.
For me it was not that terribly different from normal, except that I got to talk to a bunch of other bike commuters. It seemed to me like most of the people hanging out at the breakfast stations were regulars already, and I didn't meet any newbies. But it was fun nonetheless.

A Visit to Mellow Johhny's Bike Shop

2008-05-14T12:09:00.009-05:00

Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop is Lance Armstrong's new bike shop in downtown Austin. Ive heard a lot about it recently, and someone forwarded a link to this article in Momentum Magazine talking all about the shop and what Armstrong's motivations were and so forth. I decided that since I work so close to the shop I might as well bike over and check it out.
Mellow Johnny's is tucked into the corner of 4th of Nueces on the western side of downtown Austin. This is the heart of the area experiencing reinvention in the new urbanism mold. (That's the shop in the lower right corner.) The photo is deceiving because this is actually a neat part of town, close to both Lady Bird Lake and the Shoal Creek hike and bike trails. The fenced off area is a soon-to-be-built-on construction site for more new urbanism...
So where does the name Mellow Johnny's come from? It's a pun on the yellow jersey won by the race leader in the Tour de France, which Lance has won seven times. In French, the word is maillot jaune, and do I really need to explain how an English mispronunciation could yield Mellow Johnny's? I didn't think so.
They're not exactly in your face when you walk in, but sure enough, there on the wall toward the back are the winning jerseys.
So what's it like inside? This shop is all about promoting biking for everyone and making biking accessible to everyone, from the weekend recreational rider right on up to world-class racers. This is actually a tricky thing to do in a single bike shop. Most racing bike shops I have been in suffer terribly from bike snobbery, and finding staff who can adapt to a wide variety of customers had to be quite tricky. I talked to several of the staff at M-J and found them all to be friendly (even the guys behind the counter working on $3000 bikes). Maybe it's just the newly-opened store smell but they did a good job of making me feel welcome.
Inside, I found offerings from Trek (of course), Schwinn, Swobo, and Masi. (There may have been others that I missed.) There were plenty of high end racing bikes, but a lot of floor space was given (photo on the right) to urban/commuter bikes, and there was even a semi-decent selection of kid bikes. (I think I'll bring my kids here when it's time to upgrade.)
Then there was the window display, which had a mannequin not in lycra and holding on to a bike with panniers stuffed with groceries! I think I like the message.
So I realize that I've done a bunch of gushing here. Was there anything disappointing? Just two little things. First, I was shocked to discover a rather glaring lack of bike racks around the building. I asked Todd about this inside, and he sheepishly explained that the racks were on their way, and yes it was a little weird, but please to bring my bike in and park it inside. That brings me to my second thing: the big sliding glass doors of the main entrance have a step outside, not a ramp. This means you have to carry your bike in instead of rolling or riding. Seems just slightly odd to me...
Anyway, it's worth a visit, whether for supplies, repairs, curiosity, or coffee (did I mention there's a coffee and sandwich shop there, too?). Stop on by if you get a chance.

My Crosstown 7 Reaches 3000 km

2008-05-13T11:07:00.003-05:00

Just in case anybody cares, I flipped 3000km (1860 miles) on my odometer yesterday on my ride in. Lifetime average speed for the bike is 18.1 km/hr, or about 11.2 mph, including all of the stops and walks, etc. I've had the bike since the end of last Juy, so it's been almost a year.
No major problems have come up, and it continues to perform well.

Birthdays and Mother's Day

2008-05-11T23:11:00.004-05:00

May is a busy month in the Diller family, with semester wrap-up, two birthdays, Mother's Day, our wedding anniversary. Sometimes it gets a little challenging to give each event the attention it deserves, but I appear to be just barely holding things together, as my dear wife mentions in her most excellent post which describes today's activities. Click on over to read and see. I won't duplicate the effort.
I do want to describe Friday and yesterday a little bit. Friday from 2-5:30 found me in RLM writing furiously on an 8X8" square desk in an attempt to convince my Gas Dynamics professor (incidentally also a member of my dissertation committee member whom I will need to look in the eye regularly for the next couple of years) that I deserve an A in his class. This had to be one of the more grueling exams of my career, and I left the room with shoulders transmuted to glowing hot iron and unable to see through my red-rimmed eyes. I think that's enough said about that, I'm trying to forget it now...
Friday, as I've mentioned before, is my birthday. Not that this is a huge deal to me (I've decided to hold steady at 33 or 34 for the next few years), but one does wish to enjoy some quality time with one's family, and exams have a way of taking one's energy away. But I've said enough about that. My dear wife cooked up a wonderful dinner, after which certain gifts were given. Hannah definitely knows how to give according to the desires of the receiver, and accordingly found for me two books, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, written by a former classmate of hers, and Battle of Wits, a history of code making and breaking in WWII, both of which I have begun to enjoy already.
Saturday (after I awoke and took Caroline with me to vote in the Austin City Council elections) found us in McKinney Roughs, a park run by the LCRA, where we retreated for some much needed R&R. They run a program called Acorn Eaters for kids, and we dropped Ian off there to participate in that and then proceeded to run into nearby Bastrop to find drugs for Hannah's migraine. 4 Advils and 1 Benedryl later, I was walking the trails with Eliza and Caroline. There is a tremendous amount of interesting flora and fauna in the Texas countryside, and I've attempted to show some below in the slide show.

Moving at the pace of a 4-1/2 and a 2 year old, we made our way along one of the trails. Eliza had an unfortunate encounter with a paper wasp, which the lady in the visitor's center was able to treat with a sting wipe and ice. Lizey showed the remarkable resilience of a child and was back on her feet before too much longer. Thus, we made our way through a small piece of the preserve, using our new camera liberally, and just enjoying the cool breeze and low-stress environment.
We ended the very pleasant day at my parents' property in Elgin with dinner and ice-cream in honor of Hannah and my birthdays. Let's all sigh together in satisfaction and contentment. :-)

What about the gas-tax holiday?

2008-05-09T22:10:00.002-05:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about the idea of lifting the 28cent/gal federal tax on motor fuel from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the traditional summer driving season. I have heard all about it from coworkers, presidential candidates, and unasked-for email forwards. I finally read some well spoken opinions (linked below) in the New York Times yesterday that spell it out.
Here's why a gas tax holiday would be a profoundly bad idea. Most people are grousing about the stellar oil company profits while we pay $3.50 and more per gallon. Why don't they lower the price and give us some relief? It's not fair they're making so much money! The fact of the matter is that the price of gasoline has little to do with price gouging by the oil companies and a lot to do with increasing global demand for oil, a weak-valued dollar, and uncertainty in the future of the oil supply. Removing the federal gas tax, in addition to removing the funding source for our roads and bridges, would spur increased demand in the USA, thus increasing the competition for the already tight supplies. It would be a matter of weeks before the price was right back up where it started, and now the oil companies would be pocketing the extra 28cents/gallon, instead of the federal transportation fund. In the opinion of most economic experts, it would backfire pretty badly just based on the economics. That's not to mention all of the expense associated with the accounting nightmare it would create for the federal government. It's just not even reasonable to think we could pull it all together in time for Memorial Day. Call by politicians for a gas-tax holiday sound a lot like political pandering.
So here's why it's not the end of the world if someone does manage to pull it off: first of all, it's a relatively harmless (only $5 billion or so shift from the transportation fund to oil company profits) way for politicians to convince people that they're trying to do something about a problem they really have little control over. Second, it could head off some much worse ides, like price controls or rationing. Last of all, it's just possible that he oil companies would use the windfall to try to increase production, which will only get more and more expensive from here on out.
I'm not convinced by the second argument so much, and generally, while I hate filling up for $60, I think that pain at the pump is pretty much what it takes to actually get people to change their habits. The indications are (I posted about this earlier) that people are starting to do this already, and for the first time in a long time, our gasoline consumption is going down. It's probably about time to put a damper on the American hyper-consumption lifestyle. Could we hope that people will begin to prioritize on deeper things in life than the next bigger plasma screen TV? Dare we hope for some spiritual opening?

Doctoral Candidacy

2008-05-06T22:06:00.003-05:00

I'm surfacing for a quick gasp of fresh air before I dive back into the last week of the semester. If you have happened to notice how long it's been since I posted, it's not because I don't care. Between a final project, final exam, and oh, by the way, filing for doctoral candidacy, I've had a busy couple of weeks.
Last Friday, I met with my thesis committee for the first time and presented my research plan to them. It was an hour and a half and very tiring for me, but all in all, it went well. I had been looking forward to the prospect of this being my last semester with a class, but they gave me one more to take. What they didn't do, thankfully, was to pile on a whole lot more work for me to do, and afterward, debriefing with Dr. Hall, it sounded like things went well relative to the gamut of dissertation proposal meeting outcomes. Today I filed the formal paperwork, partly on line and partly with actual (gasp) paper sent through the mail. I thought we were past that by now, oh well.
Now, if I could just knock out this final exam and final project. It's unfortunate thing that my birthday falls in the 2nd week of May since I have had final exams on many of my college-aged birthdays. This year is no exception, and for my birthday present, I get a final exam and a final project due date. What could be finer?!
Saturday, we're planning some low-brain-power activity, probably recharging in nature: maybe a hike at McKinney Roughs, and then an afternoon with my parents in Elgin. Last Saturday was Hannah's birthday, so we're going to do as we almost always do and wrap two celebrations into one. Then on Sunday there's Mother's Day, then the following week is our anniversary (11 years!). May is a busy month...

Recognizing the Importance of Bicycling in Transportation and Recreation

2008-04-30T12:17:00.004-05:00

If you've never written your congress people before, here's your chance! (Here are convenient links for Representatives and Senators.) It's time to request support of House Resolution 305 "Recognizing the Importance of Bicycling in Transportation and Recreation". It raises the priority of investments in cycling infrastructure. Technically this is a House thing at this point, but it would not hurt to let your Senator know to support the Senate version when it comes through.
Here's a nice excerpt from the motivations section, nice because it says a lot of the great things about cycling:

Whereas a national transportation system conducive to bicycling produces enriched health, reduced traffic congestion and air pollution, economic vitality, and an overall improved quality of living is valuable for the Nation;
Whereas by dramatically increasing levels of bicycling in United States cities tangible and intangible benefits to the quality of life for cities and towns across the country will be realized;
Whereas we now live in a Nation with 300 million people, and that number is expected to grow to 365 million by 2030 and to 420 million by 2050 with the vast majority of that growth occurring in urban areas with limited ability to accommodate increased motor vehicle travel;
Whereas since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has grown 3 times faster than the United States population, and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations;
Whereas one-third of the current population does not drive due to age, disability, ineligibility, economic circumstances, or personal choice;
Whereas the United States is challenged by an obesity epidemic, 65 percent of United States adults are either overweight or obese, and 13 percent of children and adolescents are overweight, due in large part to a lack of regular activity;
Whereas the Center for Disease Control estimates that if all physically inactive Americans became active, we would save $77 billion in annual medical costs;
Whereas over 753 of our Nation's Mayors have signed onto the climate protection agreement of the United States Conference of Mayors urging the Federal Government to enact policies and programs to meet or exceed a greenhouse gas emission reduction target of a 7 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012;
Whereas the transportation sector contributes one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and passenger automobiles and light trucks alone contribute 21 percent;
Whereas bicycle commuters annually save on average $1,825 in auto-related costs, reduce their carbon emissions by 128 pounds, conserve 145 gallons of gasoline, and avoid 50 hours of gridlock traffic;
Whereas the greatest potential for increased bicycle usage is in our major urban areas where 40 percent of trips are 2 miles or less and 28 percent are less than one mile;
Whereas in 1969 approximately 50 percent of children in the United States got to school by walking or bicycling, but in 2001 only 15 percent of students were walking or bicycling to school;
Whereas as much as 20 to 30 percent of morning traffic is often generated by parents driving their children to schools, and in the United States, motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for children ages 3 to 14;
Whereas many public agencies in cities are using bicycles to deliver critical municipal services, for example, more than 80 percent of police departments serving populations of 50,000 to 249,999 and 96 percent of those serving more than 250,000 residents now have routine patrols by bicycle;
Whereas surveys show that a majority of people want to ride and walk more but are dissuaded by concern over traffic danger and other barriers, and case studies have shown that when those barriers to bicycling are removed, people start riding;
Whereas investment used for improvements for bicyclists and promoting bicycle use resulted in the quadrupling of bicycle use in Portland, Oregon, since 1994 and a recent report to Congress on the nonmotorized transportation pilot program reveals that 19.6 percent of trips in Minneapolis, Minnesota, are made by biking and walking, reflecting the benefit of initial investments in nonmotorized infrastructure;
Whereas the American bicyclist generates enormous economic returns, in 2006, the national bicycling economy contributed $133 billion to the United States economy, supported nearly 1.1 million jobs across the United States, generated $17.7 billion in annual Federal and State tax revenue, produced $53.1 billion annually in retail sales and services, and provided sustainable growth in rural communities;
Whereas a national network of interconnected urban and rural bikeways can provide valuable community benefits, including low or no-cost recreation and alternative transportation options for people of all ages and abilities;

... There's more if you have the time and haven't run out of patience. Click the link above.

Bike Sharing in D.C.

2008-04-28T10:25:00.002-05:00

I'm taking a quick break from writing my dissertation proposal to point out this great idea: Washington D.C. is following the example of Velib (oops, their website's english pages turn out to be in french!) in Paris, France to set up a bicycle exchange program. SmartBike DC is the name of the public/private program wherein, ClearChannel gets an advertising monopoly on bus shelters in exchange for running the low-cost program. $40/yr gets you a membership entitling you to a 3-hr no-additional-cost rental of a 3-speed bike to get around the city. The stated purpose of the program is to relieve pressure on the congested transit system, so it's aimed more at residents and people who work in the area and need to get around the central business district than at tourists who want to see the sights. The rental locations and fee structure are clearly geared toward this market segment.
Presumably someone has studied this and decided that is the most important market at present, but with the number of tourists in D.C., it seems crazy not to set up a bunch of stations around the main mall and make a short-term membership available to out-of-town visitors, too.
All in all, I'm happy to see the program. More people are becoming interested in human-powered transportation as gas prices go up. Maybe we'll see this model in more and more cities.

Gas Consumption Drops!

2008-04-26T00:03:00.003-05:00

According to the Energy Information Administration, gas consumption in the U.S. is projected to drop this year for the first time in 17 years ago. (Did it really drop 17 years ago?!) Read the same article I did in the New York Times. This is apparently the consequence (finally) of high gas prices and a slowing economy. I wonder how the bicycle makers are doing. Interesting question: in a slowing economy with rising fuel prices, do people buy new bikes or dust off old ones and ride every once in a while instead of driving?
One piece of anecdotal evidence, which doth not a trend make: today when Ian and I biked our 1.5 km to Sun Harvest for groceries, the bike rack was full and there were at least two other bikes self-locked against the wall. I have never yet seen that at this store, which I ride to with some frequency, but the weather has been nice and it could just be coincidence.

Doin' the Hula!

2008-04-25T22:52:00.002-05:00

Caroline, aka Gem, Little, and Chubby Grum-Grum, put her tremendous skills to good use today at the Austin Friday Home School Co-Op Demonstration Day showing us the traditional Hawaiian dance. Here's the practice session:

And here's the performance:

So much cuteness, so little video...

Tim's Tips for Hot Weather Bike Commuting

2008-04-22T19:43:00.007-05:00

Sweaty days have arrived in Austin (today was in the upper 80's with humidity flirting with 90%). Do you live in such a place? Should this be an excuse to stay off the bike? Never! To convince you, I have conveniently compiled Tim's Tips for Hot Weather Biking!

Water: Water is your friend. If you're like me and you start off your day with coffee and need a coffee boost sometimes in the afternoon just to make it, then it's very easy to find yourself in a bad situation hydration-wise. The morning ride is usually fine since it's cooler then and hopefully you've just had breakfast. The fun starts when it's time to mount up for the ride home in the heat. I've had some bad rides where I didn't have water along, and I was dried out, and the weather was hot. Don't do that. The best thing is to start tanking up an hour or so before you have to leave and then drink early, often, and in small doses. Embrace the sweat! It's good for you, and you can shower when you get home.
Shade: Shade is also your friend. The ride in in the morning is usually pleasant because it's cooler and the sun is lower in the sky, meaning (at least in Austin where there are trees) that your ride is shadier. In the afternoon or evening, when the heat is up and the sun is high, seek routes that have shade, even if you have to go out of your way. This can mean the difference between a pleasant ride and discomfort. Direct sunshine makes a big difference (see next point).
Shirts: Bring an extra shirt for riding. If I wear a lycra jersey (I have a couple from some charity rides, but I don't usually like to show them off) then it's easy enough to change out for the day and put it back on for the ride home. T-shirts usually don't recover during the day and need to be stashed out of sight in a bag so bring a second one for the ride home. Short-sleeve button-downs actually have an advantage: if you practice a little bit and don't use a backpack, you can find a posture that will inflate your shirt through your sleeves or collar, and this is awesome air-conditioning. It's possible to do this with T-shirts, but I've had little success with polos, and I think we don't need to mention long sleeves for hot weather riding...
Shorts/pants: Shorts are best, and with pants, the lighter the fabric the better, but that said, I usually have to wear jeans because I work in an engines lab, and if I can wear them year round, so can you. I recommend against spandex shorts, for several reasons. Black ones are sun-magnets and unbearable in the sun. White ones show way too much, and any other color is bound to be plastered with that ultimate poseur-sin: the team logo. Actually, in my humble opinion, spandex shorts are almost always poseur-fashion and don't really offer enough advantage to justify wearing them on a commute. They belong in bike races, not on the commuters.
Load: Lose the backpack/shoulder bag. They leave sweat stripes. I used to be a backpack only rider, but I have made converted to a bike rack, and will not go back, especially for summer riding. I use a bike rack, two S-hooks, and two bungee cords. My backpack (L.L. Bean) has a sturdy handle which I attach to the top of the rack with the S-hooks. The pack then hangs over the side of the rack, and I hold it in place with the bungee cords. I used to worry about my laptop getting shaken, but I keep it in a padded case in my backpack and have had no trouble. The result of all this is that I can get to work without a sweaty back and sweat-stripes on my shoulders. By all means lose the back pack and let air flow in and through your shirt.
Effort: Don't sweat it! Last of all, and probably most importantly, remember to enjoy the ride and not try to beat your personal speed record when the heat is up. Relax, take it easy, leave plenty of time, and enjoy the ride. There's no shame in going slow, and it can make the heat a lot less oppressive. Consider the payback as you pass long lines of cars waiting at traffic lights.

I hope I've convinced all of my biker readers, and especially my non-biker readers, that you should not use hot weather as an excuse not to ride. Live! Breathe! Quit your gym, and save some gas! Ride a bike!

SAE World Congress

2008-04-21T22:00:00.006-05:00

Last week, I got to travel to Detroit, Michigan to attend the 2008 SAE World Congress, where I presented my first publication on Further Development of an Electronic Particulate Matter Sensor and Application to Diesel Engine Transients with my advisor, Dr. Matt Hall. He invented, and together we are developing, a sensor for diesel engine exhaust to measure the soot content. The goal of the work is to enable better control of engines for more efficient and cleaner operation.
The Congress was in two parts. There was a large exhibition, with many dozens of vendors representing a broad swath of the automotive industry, from south asian parts suppliers to BMW touting its newest hydrogen and diesel engines and Honda showing its latest engine magic, handily wrapped into even the very modest, very long-lived, and very cool Super Cub. (Honda engineers are always fun to talk to, in my experience, both in the conference rooms and on the exhibition floor.)
Then upstairs were the technical sessions, where the papers were being presented. This is where I spent the majority of my time. There were a 30-40 sessions, at least, each with about 15 papers to present on a specific theme. My session, organized in part by Dr. Hall, was the Combustion Analysis and Flow Diagnostics session (PFL203 for those who care). The session was split between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, and wouldn't you know, but I was the first presenter, just after lunch on Tuesday. That was probably a good thing, because it meant that I didn't have too much time to get nervous. I can't really relax and enjoy things when I'm uptight about having to present.
A funny little thing happened on the way to the Congress, which I will share at my own expense and for your enjoyment if you promise not to laugh too hard. (Note the "nerd" and "self-awareness" tags on this article.) I packed for myself in usual fashion, at the last minute and with minimal, but in my estimation sufficient, consideration about what to wear, happy to have remembered sufficient socks and to match belt color to shoes. I even packed two ties of tasteful and moderate but fashionable design. I resisted the urge to wear a bow-tie in honor of my father. I put as much or more thought into packing my back pack with sufficient reading material for the flights and down-time. You understand my priorities, right? So I march out Tuesday morning, headed for the Cobo Center, and I'm about 10 minutes into my walk when it occurs to me that my sport coat is navy blue and not black as I had supposed in the dimmer light of the closet. Not a problem except for the black pants I'm wearing. I've learned to trust that little nagging I get in my subconscious, so I dialed Hannah, and after chatting about my impression of the city, blah blah blah, I tried to subtly share the humor of discovering my mismatch with her. She however, instead of chuckling with me and encouraging me to plod ahead since I'd be with a bunch of other mismatched nerds anyway and who cares (right?), got deathly silent and said, "You're wearing what?!" "Uh, my black pants..." "Your faded black pants that are not at all dressy??!! With a navy sport coat???!!!" "Um, I gotta go."

(View Larger Map)
Well, here's the truth. I marched on to the Cobo Center because I was afraid of missing breakfast (I missed it), and registered and scouted out where my presentation room was. Then, full of inner conflict and needing to resolve some self-confidence issues, hopped on the People Mover back to the hotel room and, feeling like and idiot for the initial gaffe and as much an idiot for going back, changed into some appropriate slacks and made my way back. Penance was duly performed, and now I was free to be my best.
(OK, pick yourselves up off the floor from laughing and read the rest of the story...)
It's a good thing that I practiced my presentation twice before giving it, because in front of 70-80 people who all knew a lot more about this than I do, I was pretty intimidated, and it was hard to think straight. I pretty much just stuck to the script I had practiced and managed to come in exactly on time. There were several good questions and a couple that I had to punt to Dr. Hall. I sat down feeling immense relief.
Seven presentations later (Phew!) as we were walking to the coat room, I asked Dr. Hall how he thought I did. "That was good. You did really well. Exceeded my expectations; not that they were low. Good job." I picked my jaw up off the floor and thanked him. (Once. It was a considerable effort not to dissolve into a blithering idiot.) He is not one to idly dole out praise, and he has been free to tell it like it is before, so I took it as a genuine compliment. 'Nuff said.
That night there was a big dinner party hosted by the Southwest Research Institute, where I met several Texas Exes, including Alok Warey, my predecessor in Dr. Hall's lab who worked on the sensor before me. The next morning, I roamed the exhibition hall, and loaded up on pamphlets and trinkets for the kids. That afternoon, there were 8 more presentations, and then we left for the airport.
One last funny story about the trip to the airport, and then I promise I'll sign off. (I know this is getting long.) So we hop in this taxi cab and immediately I realize we're in for quite a ride. For one the taxi is barely holding itself together and needs new shocks, new A/C, and a good bit of interior decoration... But the driver was the real piece of work. He asked what we were at the conference for and immediately connected with us on "the sensors" and proceeded to tell us all about his experiences at mechanics school. And then art school, which he attends while he can. And all about the inside view of the art industry and how to and how not to make it. And then he wanted to show us his work and whipped out his cell phone and flipped through the photos he'd taken of his wood turning work, all while weaving in and out of traffic, dodging the famous 13-axle Michigan semi-trailers. At one point, he handed the phone back to me to scroll through his pictures. It turns out I'm the talkative one between my advisor and me (ever hear the joke about the extroverted engineer?), and I know a little bit about woodworking, so I hung onto the phone and tried to make conversation about this and that exotic wood, etc. in an attempt to allow him to keep his eyes on the road. Alas, out came a second cell phone with pictures of some well-carved gradfather clocks. I gave up and started praying...
We actually reached the airport in record time (phew!) and tipped him generously for the ride, thankful to have arrived alive. I won't even talk about the guy I sat next to on the airplane... Ah the adventure!
Thanks for reading.

Sinking Under a Mid-Term

2008-04-19T19:40:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately. I have been out of town (about which I plan to post), and this is the end of my mid-term crunch, and I have a Monday 8:00AM exam.
Molecular Gas Dynamics!!!! Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner...

I give you Light and Shadows...

2008-04-13T22:43:00.002-05:00

If you haven't done so already, visit my wife's blog today. Her latest post is high literature.

MS 150

2008-04-12T22:05:00.002-05:00

The MS-150 fund-raising bike ride from Austin to Houston is in progress at present. The MS-150 is a bike tour that raises some millions of dollars annually for research into treatment and cures for multiple sclerosis. I have participated in a similar fund raiser (the Pan-Mass Challenge, for the Jimmy Fund), and am somewhat familiar with this kind of thing.

I wanted to hilight a neat thing going on this year. My friend Steve works at National Instruments, and he told me about the team they are fielding this year, which, appropriately enough, features fully instrumented riders, whose vital signs and position data is updated live to the web. Check it out here. Very cool.

Micro-Retraction

2008-04-12T20:29:00.002-05:00

OK, I have a little, minor, micro-retraction to make regarding my previous bash of the latest version of Microsoft Office. My previous post is all true, and I stand by everything I said there, but there is actually a little bit of redemption for Microsoft.

First, here's the back-story: I'm leaving Monday to go to the 2008 SAE World Congress in Detroit, where I will be presenting my first publication! In preparation for going, I have been making sure that I have all the appropriate cables, software, etc. for delivering my presentation. After a failed attempt to get a mini-DVI to VGA adapter on eBay (they sent a similar-looking but incompatible adapter, the mini-VGA to VGA) , I hoofed it over to the campus computer store to get the right thing. While I was there, I saw a Mac up and running a demo of the new Office 2008 for Mac. I thought, why don't I see whether the badness was perpetuated in the Mac version... Imagine my surprise to find all of the best features were preserved, and they actually managed to make it better: customizable toolbars, actually helpful help, etc. One big improvement was that it now correctly reads figures from Windows machines where it used to improperly rotate the text in figure axes; this was a point of constant consternation for me when I had to transfer files back and forth with my adviser. That was enough to convince me to buy it (at the academic price of $29, how could I go wrong?).

So I still have a gripe, which is not really relevant anymore, but could have an implication for my friend Sam, who is on the Mac-Windows fence: How could MS manage to get it so wrong for its Windows products and right for its Mac products? And also, what's up with the 350MB of updates I have to install?! They only published the software in February. That's a lot of things to fix already in April, IMHO.

(You may legitimately accuse me of making a mountain from a mole-hill, but it's the little things that matter sometimes. I realize I've staked my entire opinion of MS Office on the ability to customize the toolbars. That's just who I am... ;-) )

A Life Goal I'd Like to Share

2008-04-10T17:10:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting here in my engines lab (one of my last efforts to be graded), with head pounding from carbon monoxide, high CO2, and various hydrocarbons. I've been fixing the emissions measurement bench in a for-show-only attempt to make this lab work. As soon as we get one instrument fixed, another fails. There is no budget for this lab, and there is not one single person who takes care of it, so it ends up getting hodge-podge maintenance from those of us who are not scared to lift maintenance hatches. I'm taking a break while someone else attempts to fix some software that, thankfully, I know nothing about.
It's 5:18. The lab started at 2:00. It's supposed to end at 6:00. We have no data yet. Same thing happened in the last session.
My thoughts wander. Here, is what I'd rather be doing.

A life goal of mine is to get certified to fly sailplanes. One day, when there's time and a few extra dollars, I'll indulge maybe. Enjoy the 4-minute preview.

Milestone Passed

2008-04-10T10:15:00.003-05:00

Wow I'm on a blogging kick! I'll keep this one short.
Yesterday I managed to line up the last of my dissertation thesis committee members, and now I'm scheduling the first meeting to defend my research proposal. Once I'm through this they'll wave their hands, and I change from Ph.D. student to doctoral candidate. That means I'll have attained to ABD status (All But Dissertation, a chronic condition for some).
It also means that I'm spending a lot of time now getting my dissertation research proposal ready. Woohoo! Lots of quality time with the computer.

Folder Size for Windows XP

2008-04-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

Rather than just complain about how Windows XP does not calculate folder sizes like Mac OS X does, I decided that someone, somewhere must have done something about this already. It turns out they did. Click here for a nifty little tool to show folder sizes along with file sizes in details view.
In case you're wondering (as I'm sure my DW will) why I would even bother with this, it helps to know how big folders are when I'm cleaning out the hard drive, looking for junk to throw away to make more space. This is an issue because I run XP on a 10GB partition of my MacBook and Windows is such a bloated disk hog. Oops. I was going to try to not bash Microsoft, but I guess I just couldn't make it...

And Another Thing... :-(

2008-04-09T16:25:00.005-05:00

Now there's no way to see file properties from inside Office since the file menu is gone and has been replaced by the "Popular Commands" section of the ribbon. Who determines what is popular? I was trying to find out where MS decided to save my file. No such luck. Save a new copy.
Just not on C:\ because (gasp!) this folder contains file that keep your system working properly, and you should not modify its contents! The horror!
Power away from the people. We know best.

Unbelieveable!!!! (Actually quite believable but totally outrageous)

2008-04-09T15:13:00.004-05:00

So the ME computer lab has just recently switched over to the new version of Microsoft Office, Office 2007. The new version features a broad swath of occupied space at the top of the screen called the ribbon. This replaces the toolbars of the previous version that could be torn off, placed wherever you wanted, and customized to contain what you wanted in whatever order you wanted. The toolbars were good. Put power in the hands of the people.
I had naively assumed that the ribbon would be an improvement on this. Wrong! Since I mostly use a MacBook, my screen is wider than it is tall, and I typically tear off the toolbars and put them on the side of my screen so that I can see as much vertical distance on my document as possible. The ribbon, however, uses up something like a quarter to a fifth of my screen across the top so that I get a relatively thin sliver to view and work with. I've avoided using Office 2007 up to now, when the option to use good ole Office 2004 disappear on the lab computers.
So I set about trying to find out how to add superscript and subscript to the ribbon. These are vital engineering edits in combustion science, which is full of chemical names and variables with exponents. I've always added these easily to the toolbars and been quite happy. Here's what the Microsoft Help says: "Because each tab relates to a type of activity, such as writing or laying out a page, it is not possible to customize the Ribbon without using XML and programming code."
I'm floored.
Not surprised. Floored. They've taken away one of the best features and required us to learn XML to get it back.
I determined long ago that Microsoft's motto goes something like this: "The dumb get dumber, and we'll get richer because we know better than you."
How long until Google Docs presents a usable alternative? I'll jump ship as soon as I possibly can.
Now I need to get over my rant and get back to work.

Human Powered Car Gets Pulled Over!

2008-04-09T14:10:00.004-05:00

Now here's a concept I can get into:

Four people pedaling a stripped out Buick Regal. It's a little funny that they got pulled over since the charges apparently were thrown out in court. Major bummer about the towing charges to get it back to the studio where it was built... Check out the full story here. Thanks to CommuteByBike.com for the tip.

Clearly this is not a motor vehicle, so does it fall under motor vehicle laws? Why would it not be OK to drive this when bikes are OK? I think we need more cars like this!

What is it about dogs and bikes?!

2008-04-07T11:36:00.002-05:00

Last week I had a rather fun ride in to school in the morning. After running by Office Depot for printer ink, I turned south into a stiff headwind and started pedaling toward school. It was along this stretch of Guadalupe St. just behind the Texas Department of Public Safety (setting up the irony here) that I heard the noise that most bikers hate with a passion: the clickety-clackety growl and snarl of a dog giving chase. Sure enough, I glanced back (I have perfected doing this without swerving, an incredibly important skill for this situation) and saw a young pit-bull tearing across the street in my direction. I stood up to accelerate, but the dog quickly caught up to me and began circling. Another glance spotted the owner watching interestedly but doing nothing on the other side of the street. The pit bull started to snap at my heels (I was wearing shorts and sandals, so no protection there), so I had to take action. Another glance told me that the owner was still not going to be any help, so I reached down and took a hold of my U-Lock. When I raised my hand to start a swing aimed at the dog's nose, some conditioned response went off in the canine head and it backed off, swerving out into traffic in front of a car, which almost but unfortunately did not turn it into a read streak on the pavement. I very nearly turned around and swung the U-lock at the owner instead. Need I mention that there was no dog collar and no leash? Grrr!

Commuter Racing

2008-04-03T12:14:00.005-05:00

See!!?? I'm not alone. Here's an excerpt from a guest post at Bike Commuters.com:

It’s often referred to as “commuter racing” or the “great race”, but it’s seldom talked about openly (the first rule of commuter racing is, of course, that you don’t talk about commuter racing). And one of the first things you’ll find out when you start bike commuting is, everyone does it but few people admit it.

...

I know a number of singlespeed mountain bikers who dedicate their commuting lives to overtaking riders on geared bikes. You, the guy with the beard riding a vintage 70s touring bike you’ve owned from new - you’re telling me that you don’t get a buzz from passing a 20-something on $4k of carbon fibre?
No-one’s immune.

Read here for the full account.

Apparently, I've violated the first rule of bike commuter racing, but so did he, so I'm not too worried.

(smile)

Emergence of the Spandex Warriors

2008-04-01T19:34:00.005-05:00

You've heard of the 11-year locust, right? It stays hidden out of sight for years at a time, and then once the conditions are right, a whole bunch of them emerge in a frenzy of activity for a few days, lay eggs, and then die off and disappear.
Sometimes I feel like we have a similar phenomenon on the bikeways of Austin. Through the winter months there are a few hardy souls pedaling with sweaty backs and frozen fingertips to and from work, and through the summer months we same few bring two extra shirts along with us to stay dry and partake of the three-shower day.
Then for a few short weeks, the weather is nice in April and in October, the spandex warriors emerge, and Shoal Creek Boulevard is crowded with folks in spandex and bright jerseys riding $$$$ bikes. Sometimes they're in big packs even. Some are very fast and some are slow. Although you may think you detect scorn in my tone, I am truly thankful for these folks, and here's why:

Nothing motivates me to ride fast like a spandex warrior, and this is definitely a good thing. My usual pace is something around 20-22 kph, if I'm just pushing easy and not in any particular hurry. I'm not normally motivated to do sprints on my own just for the workout. However, when I pull up next to a carbon fiber bike at a traffic light, it's impossible for me to avoid a sprint to stay up with the guy. It's hardwired somewhere in the Y-chromosome, and the more duded up he is and the less flashy I am, the better. Usually, when sucked into a friendly unofficial race with said spandex warrior, I find my speed is up near 30-35kph. Granted I'm a melted puddle by the time I get home, and he's still got 30 km left on his joy ride, but I sure showed him that the clothes and bike don't make the rider...

Right. Will you just listen to me? Is this pathetic or what!? I'll stop the introspection here and continue to enjoy the all-too-brief season of friendly races (all in my head, I'm sure) until the weather moves into three-shower-day season, and the roads clear up again, and I'm left alone with my thoughts on the road.

Thanks for reading, and please comment if you either identify with this or this I'm crazy.

From the Senate District Republican Convention

2008-03-29T10:24:00.003-05:00

Here I sit in the upper balcony of the Delco Center, where the Senatorial District 14 Republican Convention is underway. I signed up to come as an alternate, mostly because I'm curious about the process, and it's the first time I've felt like my vote could make a difference. It turns out that all 9 precinct delegates showed up, so I won't be necessary, and I can leave at 11:00 without any guilt.

The first thing that struck me about this event was how many people are here. The line was actually out the door and around the corner. If people think that the Republican Party business is all wrapped up, they are wrong. There are a lot of people here with a lot of things to say, and there is not quite the unity of opinion that I had imagined.

A big part of the energy here is associated with vigor with which Ron Paul has mobilized people to affect the Republican party platform. He has rightly realized that he will not win the national nomination, but he has managed to put together a political platform and get a lot of people push his agenda through the proposal of resolutions. There may be a substantial attack on some of the traditional tenets of the Republican party.

Two things will happen today at this convention. Delegates will be chosen to represent our district at the state convention in Houston. Resolutions will be voted on. It's a much larger scale version of the cozy precinct level convention I blogged about earlier except at this event, 863 delegates showed up to this convention from 164 precincts. This is more than double the number present at the previous convention two years ago with most people raising hands when asked about first time attendance.

A big deal is the assignment of delegates, so the roll call and the sorting out of who is here determines the voting strength of each precinct. As there are anticipated to be some differences of opinion, they are actually very careful to get it all right. It seems a little ridiculous, but they deal with each little deviation and irregularity in front of everyone. A lot of other trivia (rules, etc.) gets voted on, and believe it or not, there is debate on this stuff.

I actually managed to miss the all of the voting on the resolutions due to another commitment, but I want to comment on a few things:

-I stood in the registration line for 45 minutes next to Jim Hasik, who is running for State Representative for my district. I actually got to talk with him at length about several issues and found out that I agree with him on a lot of things. I think I'll vote for him.

-Also, Gov. Rick Perry spoke at the opening address to promote a resolution supporting the Boy Scouts of America. There was one heckler who was shushed by the crowd.

-There are a bunch of political groups associated with various issues here passing out fliers, stickers, donuts, etc. For example, from my vantage, I can see Texas Alliance for Life, FairTax.org, Ron Paul Revolution, "Stop Domain Subsidies", "Vote Zimmerman", and so forth. Lots to chew on, and a fairly wide variety of opinions. Unfortunately, it's time for me to go, so I'm going to miss the end of the debate on how to fairly assign 162 delegates among 164 precincts of unequal sizes, a debate I don't fully understand. With this level of debate and nitpicking, I think I'm pretty comfortable with the process. At the rate they're going now, it will be late afternoon by the time all this is done. Too bad I'll miss the fun.

Thanks for reading!

Book Review: Blind Man's Bluff

2008-03-26T13:26:00.002-05:00

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, by Sherry Sonntag and Christopher Drew.

I was at the library the other day, and having just finished reading Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian, I was in a little bit of a naval mindset and was looking for info on sailing ships, and there sat this book. The title and subject grabbed my attention, as they were clearly designed to do, and since there is no cost involved in a library check-out, I brought it home with me.

Halfway through the first chapter, it started to seem very familiar to me, and then it donned on me that exactly the same thing happened about five years ago on a trip to the library when we lived in South Carolina. It turns out I've read the book before! Weird, huh? Anyway, I've read enough of it now to offer an intelligent opinion, and anyway, I want to try out the Amazon associates link.

This is one of those books which uncovers a previously hidden part of American history, which is the submarine aspect of the cold war. The chapters in fact focus mostly on the disasters and near disasters in the U.S. submarine service, starting from the early dare-devil days of the diesel subs up through the modern nuclear boats. I don't think most people realize that there were a lot of lives lost in the cat-and-mouse game that we played with the Soviets during the Cold War. At various times, destroyers rammed subs and damaged or sank them, subs accidentally bumped into each other, and both American and Soviet subs popped their periscopes up in the middle of busy enemy naval bases. In one high-profile case, the Soviets discovered a "property of US Govt."-labeled wire-tap on one of their undersea communications cables. Oops!

There were also technological feats as impressive (and nearly as expensive) as the Apollo space program that had to remain shrouded in secrecy. In fact, mere days before the Apollo 11 moon landing, the U.S. Navy was operating a deep-sea recovery vehicle in and around a submarine wreck which was under two miles of water. And they weren't allowed to tell anyone about it. How's that for a fine use of tax dollars?

While the stories are interesting and the tales are compelling, I've found a few too many style errors to be able to give this a whole-hearted endorsement. Several times, the authors switch from present voice to past mid-paragraph. At times the authors' opinions about mistakes by the Navy and various departments come through a little too clearly, and the tone starts to sound whiney. If you happen to be in the Tom Clancy fan-camp, these issues will not bother you in the least, and I can heartily recommend this book to you, since this has the added benefit of all being true. For the rest of you (my wife for instance), if you care overmuch about style and good writing, be forewarned: this is by no means the worst I've ever read, but this will not contend for space on the shelves of great literature.

Thanks for reading!

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

2008-03-26T07:00:00.005-05:00

Our friend Melissa invited us to join her down at Zilker Park last Friday to join her in a kite party in honor of her birthday. (She is one of those rare individuals who seems to be able to seamlessly integrate friends from work, school, home and church. I, on the other hand, feel as though I live in separate, disjointed worlds...) So I took that as an excuse to do what I haven't done since Jr. High but have thought of doing several times: I made kites for/with my kids.

It started with a trip to Hobby Lobby (my wife finds these 40% off coupons that make this possible) on the bikes with Uncle Allen to go pick out fabric. We returned home with dowels, nylon thread, and 3 yards of nylon rip-stop fabric.

Next I had the kids draw shapes on paper for patterns that they wanted to put onto their kites. Eliza, 4 yrs old and an aspiring princess, chose a heart and a star, which star was cut to shreds by the participation of of 2 yr old Caroline. Ian, 7 and a huge fan of Lego Exo-Force, drew impossibly detailed Squid-Ammo and Cordak Missiles. The end result was pretty much a rectangle with details drawn in by hand. =)

In any case, I had imagined that it would be pretty quick to throw together a couple of delta kites, and all things considered, it wasn't that bad, but I ended up putting in a couple of late nights with the sewing machine. (Who says sewing is for girls?! What an awesome mechanical gadget a sewing machine is. This is Man Stuff!) I tried out two different approaches for the kites, one using sleeves to hold the dowels in place and the other using pockets. The sleeve kite looks better, flies better, and was only slightly harder to make. I recommend that method to any other aspiring kite makers. (Here is an interesting link to a NASA program that aids in the design and trimming of kites of several different designs. Not necessary to get one to fly, but interesting nerd-fodder nonetheless.)

Our camera is currently on the blink, and I think I have about a 50% chance of a successful repair when I can make an hour or so for it at school. There is an ancient backup camera, but I'm not sure where the card reader for it is, so you're going to have to wait a few days for photos of the kites. I promise I'll post as soon as I can come by some photos, though. Then I'll be able to show how they were built, etc.

So now on to the touchy-feely part. I have to say it was one of my life's greater satisfactions to go fly kites that I built together with my kids. Once we had a little bit of a breeze under hers, Eliza went tearing off across the field with string in hand. Her concept of flying a kite requires running with it, and I suppose that's much more exciting than just standing still with your neck craned to the sky. Ian's kite took a little more work and a long tail to get and remain aloft, but once in the air it stayed there quite stably. His concept of flying a kite involves chasing after his sister so that he can cross the strings and bring both kites crashing to the ground. If I had been able to relax and laugh about this it would have actually been pretty funny, but after all the hard work of getting them in the air... Ah well, nothing like kite flying to shine light on my lack of perspective.

All in all, this was a great way to connect with the kids. The deal was totally sealed when Eliza asked me yesterday, "Daddy, when can we go fly my kite again, just you and me?" Who can turn down that request? I think we're going this afternoon, in fact.

The Smog Dilemma (EPA acts, sort of)

2008-03-13T11:19:00.004-05:00

I read an article in the New York Times today that prompted a good bit of thought. The essence of the article is that the U.S. EPA is lowering (tightening, that is) the Federal ground level ozone standards for air quality. This is, in fact, a good thing in general. I happen to work in a field that deals with air quality, and diesel engines (a central part of my research topic) are a prime source of NOX, which combines with unburned hydrocarbons (gas vapor, paint fumes, swamp gas, etc.) on hot sunny days to form ground level ozone. Wait a minute, you say, I thought we were tryingto protect the ozone layer, I thought ozone was good!? Well, it turns out that way up high, miles in the sky, ozone serves a very important function of blocking UV light, so we want to not emit chemicals that destroy the ozone up high. But ozone is actually a powerful oxidizer which irritates and inflames lung tissue. It sends tens thousands of people to the ER, causes missed work and school, corrodes plastic, darkens wood, etc.
So first comes the rant. According to the article, EPA administrator Stephen Johnson, a Bush appointee, did a classic Bush move and ignored the advice of his top scientific advisers and lowered the allowable 8-hour average concentration half way to their recommended level (from the current 84 parts per billion to 75ppb instead of 60-70ppb). This may seem like fine parsing, but the impacts could be big. The bottom line is this: when a municipality consistently experiences air quality below the federal standard, they are required by law to form a plan to clean things up or they lose money for highway building projects. If there's no air quality trigger, then nothing happens. Lowering the standard will effectively cause more cities to start cleaning up their air, much to the benefit of city dwellers everywhere. What irks me about the decision is that it is yet another in a long train of snubs by the Bush Administration of scientific advice regarding the environment. Shall we add to the list decisions regarding forestry, greenhouse gases, Arctic drilling, CO2 emissions caps, etc.
So here's the dilemma: as a devoted biker, what's to do on an "ozone action day"? On such days, the conditions are right for forming lots of ground level ozone. Not driving can make a difference in air quality. Seems like a good time to hop on a bike, no? The trouble is, that commuting on a bike puts one right at the source of pollution: near automobile tailpipes. It also turns out that one tends to breathe deeply when riding a bike. Normally this is a benefit, but not when the air is full of ozone. If everyone got out of their cars and onto bikes, then we might make a difference, but if only I and a few other crazies did so, then we'd be punishing ourselves for a good deed, and I'm not so into environmental martyrdom. Maybe the trick is to ride early in the day before the smog forms. Or maybe we should all write letters to our congressmen...
Thanks for reading.

Feeling that Civic Pride..

2008-03-08T11:37:00.005-06:00

It's time for my biannual rant against Daylight Saving Time. Whoever proposed that we switch our clocks twice a year certainly did not have to deal with the schedules of young children. Rather than feel completely powerless about this matter, I have, in the past several years, taken advantage of the convenience of writing my congresspeople online (here, here, and here). Feel free to join me in my crusade. Here's this year's rant, prompted by a well-thought-out opinion in the New York Times:

Dear ...
I and my family are strongly opposed to the practice of switching between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. Please, if this issue should come up for consideration, do not vote in favor of continuing the practice.
Recent studies have shown that switching to Daylight Saving Time in the summer does not result in a savings of electricity. It does, however, result in a measurable increase in the number of morning automobile accidents; it wreaks havoc on the schedules of parents of young children, whose bodies do not operate according to a clock but rather to daylight; and it causes considerable confusion to those who work with dates and time in computer programming. I am personally affected by all three of these consequences and would appreciate a repeal of the practice of switching to and from Daylight Saving Time as soon as possible. If there happen to be legitimate energy savings associated with use of Daylight Saving Time, perhaps we should consider a permanent institution of the summer schedule.
yours truly for the Diller Family (two adults and three young children),
Timothy Diller

In other news, I was inspired by the story of Master Sergeant Woodrow Wilson Keeble, who was posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor in a correction of injustice that makes the heart glow with simultaneous pride and anger. President Bush made the presentation and told his story as only he can. If I were President, that would definitely be one of my favorite parts of the job.

The Republican Convention

2008-03-05T22:53:00.003-06:00

As Hannah mentioned, I found myself in the precinct-level Republican Party convention last night. I thought I was going to experience something similar to the caucuses Hannah attended and went with the intention of casting a vote and leaving. Civic duty discharged, time to go home.
What I found instead was in stark contrast to the line-out-the-door Democratic caucuses: a small room with 18 other souls, 6 of them children, and all eyes on me when I entered. To make matters more interesting, I know the family who constituted 2 of the adults (one of them the session chairman) and 4 of the children in the room, and I know that while we are close in our Christian faith and general life morals, we have a few differences when it comes to politics.
In any case, I decided not to turn around and walk out, and thus began one of the most interesting evenings I've had in a long time. After all of the business about election of officers, etc., the heart of the meeting was voting on several resolutions which the leader of the meeting, my acquaintance, brought forth. The first issue was my favorite why-is-this-a-hot-button, illegal immigration. The resolution was a motion to make part of the Republican Party platform the requirement that state and local law enforcement officials vigorous prosecute illegal immigration and condemn any sort of amnesty, etc. I'm sure you've heard the arguments. When he opened the floor for discussion, a lot of people were just looking around the room at each other, so I swallowed hard and raised my hand. When I do things like that, I become intensely aware of the sound of my own voice in my ears, and it makes me very self conscious and is not a comfortable feeling, but I had to know, "Can somebody explain to me why this is such a big deal? I've heard a lot of arguments about why we should focus on this, but so far, I'm unconvinced. I'm willing to change my mind, but convince me..." So I listened to the standard spiel about costs to hospitals and schools, the drain on the government budgets, the risks of terrorism, and so forth. Another man spoke up to point out that whatever the merits of prosecuting illegal immigration, strongly worded resolutions as had been proposed were not doing the Republican party any service among the unconvinced and that we should tone down the rhetoric. Amen. In the end, I remained unconvinced (I find myself feeling better about a more compassionate attitude, click here for a thought provoking example), and the measure passed with a 7-4 with one abstention. While I was not satisfied with the result, I felt a lot better about the process, and in the end I was glad that I went. I feel the GOP is getting a little extreme because the conventions are attended only by activists like my friend and there are relatively few moderate voices, like I discovered my own to be.
I'll spare you the complete details, but in the course of the evening, we voted on measures dealing with illegal immigration, English as a national language (why, again, is this important?), a photo ID requirement for voting, a voter verifiable paper trail for elections is Texas (I got to amend this one not to take us back 100 years to hand counted paper ballots), a limitation of government growth to inflation and population increase except by ballot measure, and protection and affirmation of parental rights and responsibilities. There were plenty of times when I felt very out of place in that crowd, voting on those issues. But rather than feel like the party is out of touch with me and my family, it was good to speak up and make my views known.
I have no delusions about the magnitude of what we accomplished; we were a small voice and one of many many precincts in the state that voted on similar measures. However, I found out a lot of things, I got to meet and have substantive discussion with a few of my neighbors, and by speaking out, I was able to influence others and have my own views refined and sharpened.
If you've never been to any kind of neighborhood or local government function, it's a neat experience, and I recommend it, whether it's the party convention or caucus, or a neighborhood association meeting. You may not change the world, but you'll be involved, engaged, a little more connected, and you might just make a difference.

Excuses, Excuses... and a new blog

2008-03-05T11:44:00.003-06:00

I know excuses are lame, and I don't enjoy giving them, but there is an explanation to my lack of new posts, which was my first midterm in the Gas Dynamics class I'm taking. It took a bunch of studying and pretty much ruined one weekend for me, but I managed to pull things together enough to feel pretty good about how I did afterward.
Two things strike me as ironic about this class. It's the last class I'm taking in my academic career, and it's called "Introduction to Gas Dynamics," because we're really only getting the basics (hah!). I would have hoped to move on to some Advanced Blah Blah Blah classes by now, but apparently you can get a Ph.D. (presumption of finishing duly acknowledged) with Introductory classes. The second irony is that I finally get the hang of test taking (after 9-1/2 years of college courses) in my last two semesters. There's just no justice in the system. Or maybe that's the point of the system.

And now for an abrupt subject change, my friends at Dynamic Bicycles have started a new blog. Check it out here.

A Great Day with my Boy

2008-02-24T22:48:00.007-06:00

Yesterday, I rode with Ian down to the Austin Energy Regional Science Fair, where he had was judged on a poster he put together at his home school coop on water molecules. It was fun to be there with him, but we actually only spent about 20min at the fair. We arrived there at 11:00 ad he was finished being judged by 11:20, and awards were not announced until 3:00. We decided to take a nano-risk of missing anything significant at the awards ceremony and go get cheeseburgers instead.
The real fun, for both of us, probably, was that we traveled to and from the site on bikes, about 30 km round trip. You can see the route profile plotted below courtesy of my new friends at Veloroutes.org. Click here for the route map.
Ian was on the tag-along trailer pulled by me on the Crosstown 7, and at one point on the way home nearly fell asleep. Needless to say, we were both wiped out pretty thoroughly by the ride. I call that just about as perfect a day as you could get.

Veloroutes

2008-02-22T08:50:00.004-06:00

So, it turns out there's already a nice online tool (Veloroutes) for doing what I did yesterday. Here is a link to a route similar to the one I posted, except that this one does not deliver you directly to my doorstep. I considered that to be slightly imprudent. Here is the profile produced by Veloroutes.org:

With Veloroute, you can export .kml files that are importable to Google Earth, and they already have the elevation data, so you don't have to go through the ordeal of filling in the .kml file. I still want to be able to play with the profile, so my next step is to write an Excel macro to import .kml files. More to come...

My Route

2008-02-21T14:24:00.004-06:00

What started as an innocent curiosity expedition with Google Earth turned into a rather longer journey through data manipulation, which I will explain presently. What I was trying to do was plot an elevation map of my ride to and from campus. Since I commute by bike, elevation changes are important: to be sought out if I want a workout; to be minimized if I'm low on energy. If it was easy enough to do (it was not, with present tools) I was going to plot out several routes and compare them based on elevation profile.
In any case, here is the elevation profile for my route when I ride along Shoal Creek Boulevard:

To get this, I first drew the path in Google Earth and exported the path as a .kml file. kml is the "keyhole markup language", a sort of xml for maps. Unfortunately, and this is a BIG unfortunately, Google Earth does not include elevations in its exports.
It turns out there is a web service for filling in the elevations, though, found here, which is cumbersome, but ultimately useful. I copied out the trip coordinates from the filled-in kml file and reformatted it so that Microsoft Excel could read it. Then, I put in formulas to convert latitude and longitude to distance traveled, and plotted the results.
I know this can all be streamlined, and maybe I'll make a minor goal of posting a one-punch processor for turning Google paths into elevation profiles. In any case, it's kind of cool to see the result. My trip is semi-hilly with about 50 meters net elevation change from school to home. Overall, the ride home has 213 meters of climbing, and the ride to school has 94 meters of climbing.

Mellow Johnny's

2008-02-15T12:06:00.005-06:00

I'm very happy to see that Lance Armstrong is opening a commuter focused bike shop, right here in Austin. When I first heard about it I was worried it would be a racing-bike focused shop, of which we have a plethora already. This one is going right into the downtown in a conversion of an old building from the 50's. The idea is to make a bike shop, cafe, bike-storage, shower, and changing-room facility right on the soon-to-be opened Lance Armstrong Bikeway which will provide an East-West corridor into downtown Austin for bikers. This is a great idea that I hope we see more of in the future.
BTW, the name "Mellow Johnny's" is a pun on the French word maillot jaune, for the yellow jersey worn by the Tour de France leader.
Note that I have a newer post on Mellow Johnny's.

The View From Up Here

2008-02-15T10:08:00.006-06:00

I think I may have reached the dizzy height of nerd-splendor today in the gas dynamics class when I actually understood Dr. Varghese when he said "This is a five-dimensional hyper-spatial surface subset of our eight-dimensional space." Here are the accompanying equations:

In case you care, this is the development of the distribution of molecular velocities based on intermolecular collision mechanics. Sounds esoteric, but your life depends upon it.
So why am I posting this on my blog? Why would anyone care? In the spirit of Chubby Grum Grum, I'm attempting to at least publicly acknowledge my innate nerdiness and make peace with it, to not take myself too seriously, and to join with you all in a good hearty laugh at the joy I experienced today in wrapping my mind around five-dimensional hyper-spatial surfaces. All together now, ROTFLOL!

How Cool is That?!

2008-02-11T21:22:00.000-06:00

Today was one of those days that I live for at school. Full of excitement and adventure and really cool things. The coolest thing of all (if you grok the engineering mind) was that I got to use a Scanning Electron Microscope to examine some of the diesel soot particles exhaled by my dear Thumper. You can see the zoom-in in the series of photos below. The magnifications go from 200x to 10,000x. For reference there is a little bar that shows a distance scale. 1µm is a thousandth of a millimeter. For reference, one of your hairs is about 50µm across. The fibers you see in the pictures are glass fibers that make up the filter paper I trapped the soot in. We're zooming progressively in on the particle slightly left of center in the first image.

Incidentally, the smaller soot particles less than 2µm across (the individual clumps in the last image) are perfect for delivering carcinogenic compounds deep into your lungs. When they clump together like the one shown above, then your nose filters it out, but if they remain small (and hard to see, which is good for visibility but bad for lungs) they pass right on down and deposit all sorts of wonderful benzene and other toxics straight into you most sensitive tissues. This is actually a special concern for bike commuters, who tend to breathe deeply right next to the exhaust pipes of trucks and buses. For that reason I try to ride on road where the diesels don't go...
I guess that sort of explains part of why I'm doing what I am in graduate school. Hope you thought this was a neat as I did.

Answers to the Ultimate Question

2008-02-08T13:04:00.000-06:00

...because the weather was beautiful: clear, sunny, cool; I had spent way too long in the cave, I mean lab, breathing diesel fumes with Thumper; and finally, in a stroke of wonderful coincidence, I passed a line of 42 cars waiting for the stop sign at Shoal Creek and 45th.

Now, what was the question???

While we're talking about why we like to be outside so much, check out this pic of our happy family enjoying the great outdoors last weekend. Hannah commented on this on her blog...

Dynamic Crosstown 7: A Review at 1200 miles

2008-02-05T12:40:00.000-06:00

Last summer, I had to retire my old faithful commuter with something like 12k miles because it need about $400 worth of new drive train, wheel, hub, etc. Having paid about $400 for it 12 years ago, it was time to check out the market and replace it with a new bike.
I looked around at several options, and I ended up choosing the Dynamic Crosstown 7 over the Bianchi Milano, Bianchi Bergamo and the Breezer Uptown. This time around, I wanted reliability, low maintenance, and a good balance of cruising speed and comfort. Having had enough of cleaning dirty derailers, I was sure I wanted to get an internally geared hub. I ended choosing the Crosstown 7, a shaft-drive bike with the Shimano Nexus 7 internal hub.
I made my choice based on rides of the Bianchis at Ozone Bikes and reading the reviews of the Dynamic online. BikeCommuters.com gave a good review on their site. Many of the people who write in to the Dynamic website are hard core year-rounders in the sticks of Maine who ride through snow and summer rain alike. I took that to be a pretty good endorsement. The shaft drive had strong appeal to me since I have long ago tired of sprocket tattoos, greasy fingers, chewed up pants legs, and expensive drive train replacements. The shaft drive has no exposed moving parts, does not need to be cleaned, and is an $89 part when and if I have to replace it. (Dynamic estimates its lifetime at about 10k miles.) How many chains, gearsets, and derailleurs have I been through on my previous bike in 12k miles? At least $300 worth... :-\ Daring to be a little different, I took the plunge.

The buying experience was good overall with minor hiccups. Since they are fairly small volume, there are not local dealers, and my order was over the phone but the sales rep was helpful, knowledgeable, and willing to customize the order. They swapped the cheapo pedals and seat for a good cycle computer, and I added fenders, too. With the added delivery charge, the total came to about $750, delivered to the door. Their website estimates 3-5 days delivery to Austin. I ordered late on Friday, and it took them until the following Wednesday to put it in the mail, and five business days later (Monday) it arrived. From order to arrival was actually 10 days.
Assembly was straightforward: the shaft drive poses no special difficulty, and I was eager to take it for a spin. I noticed right away that the shaft drive was not silent but growled a little bit, especially right before shifts. Otherwise everything felt good.
I did quickly develop two beefs, though, that are pretty much inexcusable for a bike of this cost. First, out of the box, the front wheel had a wobble large enough to brush the front brakes. >:( I cured this with a spoke wrench and wheel alignment rig, discovering in the process that three spokes were way loose. How this got past quality control, I have no idea, but this was a disappointment. ??? The other beef is that the crank was a little loose and creaks embarrassingly when I stand on the pedals. :-[ This has been largely resolved by using clipped pedals and shoes (no switching torque direction) and a quick tightening of the crank arms, but I would expect the cranks to be appropriately seated and tightened to avoid the noises. Again, this is minor and relatively easily fixed, but with no local dealer offering a free first tuneup, and for the price I paid, I would expect it to be ready to go straight out of the box. :(
In any case, that was 1200miles ago, and quickly forgotten. I have five months riding it, in cold weather and hot. I've changed flats, and spent a lot of time in the saddle (The trip computer estimates about 100hrs.) So here are my well-worn impressions now:
In Re: the growling, a shot of grease to the front crank case completely solved the problem. I would have expected it to be done more thoroughly out of the box, but this was not a big deal. Properly done, it is totally silent. The bevel gears and drive shaft add a very small amount of friction relative to a brand new chain, but I think this would reverse for an older chain, and as I expected, the drive has gotten smoother with after a short break-in. On average, I've been adding grease to the front crank on a more or two less monthly basis. I ride a lot and more vigorously than some, so my greasing interval is slightly shorter than the recommended by Dynamic. I can tell it's time to add grease when the drivetrain gets a little growly. It's really very easy to do and takes me all of 15 seconds to do, so this is a HUGE improvement over the messy chain cleaning process I used to dread.
I definitely enjoy the lack of worry about pant cuffs, grease marks, and having been through the rain a few times this week and have not at all missed needing to clean the chain and derailleurs, etc.
I love the Nexus 7 hub, and highly recommend it: the shifts are precise and instantaneous. The gearing is well suited to my commute, which is moderately hilly (mostly along Shoal Creek from Anderson to campus). Anything hillier, and I'd recommend the 8-speed, whose extra gear is at the bottom of the range, for climbing. It took a little bit of time to reprogram my muscle memory since its grip shift is setup in the opposite sense from a derailleur's. I.E. twist forward to shift down and backward to shift up. At first I had to think about; now it comes naturally. Regardless, I love the ability to shift without pedaling, a huge help for hill starts.
The geometry is, for me, the right compromise between being far enough forward for speed and power but upright enough not to stress my wrists and lower back (especially with a backpack: I prefer not to use a bike rack). I saw a complaint online about the aluminum frame being too stiff, but I find it very comfortable and not too jarring, and I appreciate the lighter weight. In addition, the aluminum frame displays some beautifully well done TIG-welds, for those who appreciate that sort of thing.
Regarding flats, it's not a big deal to remove the rear wheel, although it is certainly more of a process than on a bike with a chain and quick release skewers. I keep two extra tools that I would not otherwise: a stubby flat-head screwdriver, and a thin wrench to fit the bolts on the rear axle. The main problem with getting the rear wheel off is actually the fenders. With the rear-open axle drops, you really have to remove the fender to get the wheel off. That makes it more involved than a conventional setup, so in order to minimize that problem, I replaced the Kendra tires it came with with some Maxxis urban tires with a Kevlar lining (and a reflective sidewall). Since putting on those tires, I've not had a single flat, and removing the rear wheel hasn't been an issue. Better tires are an option that Dynamic offers, and I would recommend paying the extra money for them.
Overall, I'm pleased with the purchase and would characterize it with one word: smooth. I look forward to putting lots more miles on the bike. In general, the build quality and components are good (with the above noted exceptions), and the Nexus 7 really shines. The shaft drive is pretty transparent and noticeable only because of the annoyances it doesn't give. I think I'll appreciate it more and more as I don't have to tune it, oil it, clean it, replace it, or hide my greasy pants legs. I hope that shaft drives become more accepted in the mainstream in the future. I think that would be well justified, especially among the bike-as-transportation community.

Ride on Mr Francis!

2008-02-03T21:26:00.000-06:00

I saw this guy biking up Shoal Creek Boulevard today and found him to be inspirational. I present to you Mr W.B. Francis, on his way to the grocery store, on a tricycle. We should all be this active in our 80's.

Bike Pants (Redux)

2008-01-30T21:42:00.001-06:00

A quick link to those who still aren't convinced about bike helmets (probably no one I know). Be forewarned, there's a pic that's not for the faint of stomach.

And now... the bike pants. It seems that the advice I've gotten has fallen into two pretty distinct categories. The first, in which are all of the women in my life, warns me to stay far far away from biking knickers. My dear sister reports that she was rolling on the floor laughing out lout (ROFLOL in web lingo) when she thought about me wearing them. On the other hand, several of my engineering-type biker buddies think they're cool, especially with the hand made, organic sheep pedigree that the particular pair I showed held.

So I'll admit that the pair I showcased was a little clingy and hales from last century, but how about these, recently purchased by a buddy of mine who was gracious enough to model them for me and send pictures (with his head conveniently out of the picture). Could those of you in the "far far away" camp possibly endorse something more like this? At least while I'm still in school? At night?

When the bike is not optional

2008-01-29T22:09:00.000-06:00

I discovered something today related to commuting by bike. I stayed home with the girls this morning so that Hannah could take Ian to an appointment, and our plan was for me to bike over with the girls in tow and pick up Ian to bring him home while Hannah went to a different appointment. The first part of the journey was no trouble, a pleasure in fact.
We were set up in our bike train configuration as shown in the beautiful pic, with Eliza on the tag-along trailer and Caroline in the enclosed trailer. A cool, partly sunny day with a pleasant breeze. What could be better?
We picked up Ian and headed to a nearby park for some outdoor fun. When it was time to leave, though, it became apparent that Caroline was not such a great trailer-mate, especially with her sister. I had been counting on Ian to be able to help some with the uphill portions of the ride home, but he was much better able to handle the antics of his tired, hungry, cranky two-year-old sister, so it became necessary to install him in the trailer and let Eliza ride the tag-along.
Thus began a 40 minute ride home with wailing toddler and 45 lbs of extra dead-weight to pull home up hill. All of a sudden it was not so pleasant anymore, and the prospect of the 5km jaunt home was not so enticing. The problem was that there was not really a choice anymore. Ian and Eliza did their very best (a noble effort) to distract, entertain, and encourage Caroline, but she was not to be consoled. Needless to say, I did make it home eventually, but I was pretty wiped out, physically and emotionally from the ride.
I probably could have made it a lot easier on everyone by bringing snacks along, which is much more of a parenting issue than a biking one, but conditions were less forgiving of my shortcoming. This brings up another point: It's a lot easier to feel good and conscientious about bike commuting when you are actually leaving a car behind that you could have taken but chose not to. But when there's three kids to tow with one not happy about it, it ain't necessarily so. After some lunch and with Momma home, we all felt better, and I was able to hop back on the bike and ride in to school (felt totally different) and even enjoy the ride despite worn out legs. I guess the moral of the story is that relying absolutely on pedal power takes more planning than I did today.

Such a Week

2008-01-25T22:46:00.001-06:00

Ever since finals finished last December, I've been working like crazy to try to get ready for a paper manuscript that was due January 15th. I took two or three days off around Christmas and New Year's Day to spend some time with the family, but all in all, my "break" consisted of a lot of lonely days in the lab, the building abandoned by all but the most desperate graduate students, with a spicy mix of urgency and guilt churning around inside. Urgency because I needed to get good data for the paper so I can publish so I can graduate so I can get a job in academia so I can work really hard ... never mind, I'm going to terminate that line of thought for the present moment. Guilt because my poor dear wife was home alone going crazy taking care of three wonderful, bright, energetic children and wishing I was there to be with her to help out and spend time together. Spicy when I start feeling angry about graduate student abuse... You get the idea.
When January 15th rolled around and I still didn't have good data ready, My Advisor got us an extension until the end of the month (next Tuesday, if my reckoning is right). This high lights one of the downsides of graduate school and doctoral research: previously, with classes especially, if a deadline got too tight, there was always the option of what I called "academic euthanasia." I could always just quit with a good effort and accept a few points off in exchange for release from the torturous finishing effort that has always been such a challenge for me. Now, that is not an option. I don't really have a choice about finishing up this project. The stakes are higher and the scope is much bigger.
Thus, this week found me spending long days in the lab trying to tweak this and modify that in an attempt to get things right so that the plots will come out just right. When my advisor left yesterday after 5PM with the announcement "well, I have to go," i was (mutually, I think) at a peak of frustration and without a clear idea of how to go on.
Last night, we had the home meeting at our house, and I was somewhat recharged afterward, but this morning was a long frustration, too. Eventually, I was on my own for a several hours, and I decided to make a few command decisions. When Prof cam back in around 3:30, I was well on my way to a solution, and when I left at 5:45, I had usable data in hand. Phew!
There's still the slightest chance that there will still be a problem that I'll have to fix tomorrow, and the paper still has to be written, but I have the exhausted satisfaction of knowing that I have done all that I could. And Frankly, I'm Wiped Out. I'm going to bed.
PS. That's Thumper up there.

Convergent Rose

2008-01-23T11:59:00.000-06:00

(c)2005 Tim Diller
Here's that little piece of artwork I was trying to scan the other day. I did it in pen and ink in February 2005, shortly after deciding to leave Michelin and return to school. Infer what you like about eclipses, distant horizons, shattered thoughts, clarity of line, blah blah blah. You're probably right. I've got another one that's mostly finished that's been in progress since shortly after I finished this one. Look for that one shortly before I make another major life change.

Nothing's Quite so Frustrating

2008-01-22T12:03:00.000-06:00

Is there anything more frustrating than a computer printer?
I will grant you, dear Printer-Lover, that it is indeed amazing what the modern printer can do in terms of photos, printouts, color copies, etc. But there are times when I feel deeply scammed by the printer makers' strategy for selling ink. I've had two ink jet printers that lock down the entire device when one of the ink cartridges is low. Right now, in fact, there is an HP PSC 750 sitting on my desk which is capable of printing, copying, and scanning. But because the color ink got too low, I am unable to do anything with it. At all. Not scan, not print in black and white, which is the cartridge I just replaced. Now my hands are tied until I come up with the $35 for the color cartridge. Grrr!
I can only mutter threats and post a rant to my blog. I had planned to scan some nice artwork to post to please your eyes and provoke deep peace-inducing thoughts. Instead, I'm stirring up the anger I'm sure that you, too, have felt toward the makers of ink-jet scammers, I mean printers. Grrr again!
We have the same situation at home with the Epson Stylus Photo 820, whose black cartridges cost $26 and color cartridges cost $22. What's up with that? Don't tell me that it costs more to make a single color black ink cartridge than it does to make a five color cartridge. This printer, too will lock down and refuse to operate if either of the cartridges is out. We only paid $50 for the printer in the first place. It makes a heck of a lot more sense to go buy a new printer! Believe me it won't be an Epson. Grrr yet again!
Apparently, Kodak offers a printer with cheaper ink, but I don't know about its lock-down policy. I'm tempted to try it with $10 black ink refills and $15 color refills. Has anybody ever had a printer that did not do this?

Poseurs All?

2008-01-21T11:24:00.001-06:00

This commentary on an electric bike fad in Europe kind of speaks to me. Check it out at Pinch-Flat news. Does my previous post qualify me or disqualify me for dismissal by the Euro coolies as a poseur? I'm clipless but haven't donned Lycra in ages. Hmmm...

Biking in the Rain

2008-01-21T10:42:00.000-06:00

It's a cold, drizzly day here in Austin. It's also M.L.K. Jr. Day at UT. There are a few consequences of these facts: there are no classes, and the University is almost empty, but I'm a grad student with a publication deadline, so what does that matter? It also means I get to ride my bike through the rain!
At first you may think I'm being sarcastic, and you might be partially correct. But there is in fact a small part of me that like to bike in the rain. Two of the big problems with biking in the rain don't matter today: It's hard on a bike, but I've got my driveshaft bike (I promise to blog about it soon; I'm writing a review), which, with full wheel fenders and no chain, is relatively immune to the rain; also, it's a big bummer to have damp jeans while sitting in class; it makes me self conscious and uncomfortable. So, I haven't gotten rid of the wet jeans discomfort yet, but with nobody else around to care, I can sit at my desk for a minute with a mug of hot coffee, dry off, and procrastinate briefly while writing to the blog.
So those are the reasons not to hate biking through the rain on this particular day, but why on earth would I like it? Well, for one, there is the man against the elements aspect. I spend so much time inside under fluorescent lighting, staring at pixels, or sniffining diesel fumes or solder smoke, that Nature is Balm to me. This is closely related to, but pathetically short of, the same sort of joy that mountain climbers find in surviving a blizzard while perched precariously to the side of a mountain, 14,000 ft up. If this makes sense to you, then you understand me perfectly, but if you don't, then let it remain a mystery. Better yet, go climb Long's Peak in Colorado. Then you'll know what I mean.
The other motivation for riding in the rain appeals to the engineer in me. I've some time and effort perfecting my ride against just such a situation, although I usually frame it to myself and others as a hedge against getting caught in rain. That is, it starts raining once I've already committed to my ride. In any case, I've got this new bike that I may have mentioned before. It's got fenders and no chain to get messed up by rain and road grime. I've got a whole system of clothing layers including fleece vest and waterproof shell. I've lined my backpack with Tyvek to protect the water-critical elements like my laptop and notes. (Note to any other bike commuters out there: Fedex Sleeves are made of Tyvek and work really well for this kind of thing. Big bonus is that they're free!) So I have all these elements assembled into a system, and I like to see the whole thing work. Engineers know a certain joy of ownership, a sort of shallow reflection of parenthood, of our creations, and we like to put them to the test and see what the failure points are so we can refine them. I like watching how the fenders catch the water and keep it off me and the bike. I like watching how the tire treads disperse water (I used to work at Michelin, BTW). I like staying warm and dry underneath the rain shell, etc.
So this brings me to the wet jeans issue. There's just no way around it. They're a big bummer. So I've got to do something about that. I read about these wool pants that are designed for bikers. The biker- nerd- engineer in me thinks they're great, but I've long ago learned not to trust my own sense of style in this sort of thing. So I'm going to post the question to any readers I might have. Especially, if you are not into biking answer me this: Should I save up and buy them for a rainy day? Or should I stay far, far, away and just learn to take the bus? Click the link, check them out, take the poll, let me know.
P.S. My wife gets the final say.

Good News Indeed!

2008-01-15T12:21:00.000-06:00

Folks, it's a red-letter day for the Diller Family: Netflix just announced a change to their plan, and now instant viewing is unlimited on our $10/month account. Now we'll never sleep because we can watch as many reruns of The Office as we want! Woo Hoo!