Month: July 2008

How To Bike Ride Home In 42 Easy Steps

Even though it was Thursday, it was the last day of our work week, so we rode the tandem in. Because it was our nine hour day we needed to be into work an hour earlier, so the alarm went off at 4:45AM. FYI, even though the days are still quite long because of the season it is very dark at half past five in the morning, but we have a red strobing tail light and a nice bright battery powered headlight so we can see and be seen.

After work I mounted the camera in the Photojojo BikeCam Mount and documented our 6-1/2 mile ride home. I took 42 pictures and uploaded them to Flickr. You can watch a slideshow by clicking HERE. Once it opens up, click on the i in the circle so you can read along. If you are not from around here most of the comments won’t mean anything, but hey, reading them might distract you from the fact that they might be tilted or blurry. (Did I mention that they are totally unedited in any way?) Tomorrow I’ll work on placing them on a google map so you can see the route. (Can’t hardly wait, can you?)

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 261

Long Range Baseball on the Radio

The FRS had an afternoon game in Seattle which started here on the east coast at 4:40 PM. Perfect timing for me as I could listen to the game while I put another coat of gloss white on the trim in the middle bedroom.

I fired up Gameday Audio, selected the Boston radio station that broadcasts the games and I was greeted by some inane sports talk show. At first I thought they might be in a rain delay, knowing the pacific northwest, but then remembered that the Mariners field had a retractable roof, so a little liquid sunshine wouldn’t halt play. I clicked on the link for the Seattle radio station’s broadcast and sure enough they were nearly through the top half of the first inning.

It was kind of neat to hear a different set of voices with a different perspective of the game. The roof was open and because the stadium is near the city’s rail yard there were quite a few times when you would hear train horns blasting in the background that, for me, added to the ambiance. Half way through the game the TV and radio broadcasts swapped play-by-play guys and I got to listen to their long time announcer, Dave Niehaus. He has been doing Mariner’s games for 32 years and you can hear why he has been doing it so long and is getting inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this Sunday. A very nice listen even if his team loyalty is misguided.

During the breaks between innings there was sometimes silence and sometimes commercials. I remember when I first started to listen to the Red Sox games on the internet all I ever got was silence, but sometime in the last couple years I started hearing all of them. I wonder if it was because MLB.com blocked certain ads. That seems unlikely, because as much as baseball frowns on gambling (right Pete?) one of the sponsors I did hear from several times was the Swinomish Casino. A big sponsor of the Red Sox baseball games is Foxwoods Resort & Casino as well. The only thing I can come up with is the radio station has a two tiered sponsorship plan for advertisers, one cheaper one for local coverage and a more expensive one for the national coverage.

I stopped listening to eat dinner with the game tied at three runs apiece. When I came back I tried the Boston broadcast again and they were doing the game, so I stayed with the old familiar voices. The game was still tied, but the FRS finally won the game in the 12th inning earning a three game sweep of the Mariners (which took a little of the sting out of being swept by the Angels in the three games before.) Tomorrow is an off day before the dreaded MFY come to Fenway Friday for a weekend series which means I’ll probably get to see some of the games on TV.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 261

Bike Cam II

Tried out Version 1.1 my Photojojo BikeCam tonight. The lock washer helped because the clamp around the handlebar didn’t come loose at all during our nearly 12 mile neighborhood jaunt. But, you just knew a but was coming didn’t ya, the camera still had a tendency to rotate from facing straight forward. My guess is because this doesn’t work like a real tripod, i.e. the screw doesn’t bottom out in the camera’s tripod socket, no matter how much you tighten it, it is still going to rotate.

Because the camera is off center on the handlebars, the tripod mount is off center, the camera is sticking up at the end of a 2″ long screw, the tires have 90p.s.i. in them and the roads are not real smooth, 90% of the images I’ve taken so far have been blurry. Even the un-blurry ones aren’t what you’d call photographs (snapshots maybe), so what is going to let the world know you are taking these pictures on a moving bicycle and are not just snapped by someone from another planet who has never even heard of photography?

You include the bicycle. If you look at the very bottom of the first picture you can see a shadow of my helmeted head. Not real obvious. When life hands you lemons, you should make some Mike’s Hard Lemonade. When the camera kept rotating bit by bit, an idea popped into my head, why not rotate it nearly 90° and include some of my hand/arm. I think ideally I should figure out how mount the camera in a vertical manner and using the widest angle available include just a bit of the front tire. Maybe I can work that out with my Gorilla Pod.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 259

Is It Just Me

Or has mr-miata.net been really slow lately? I can’t even load cpanel to back up my database in case of some sort of imminent failure.

Current plan for Friday is to go see the X-Files movie. I hope that Scully and Mulder don’t kiss, contrary some of the images I have seen on the net, because it will ruin something for me. Someone I talked to today wishes that they would just go ahead and do it, as the sexual tension is killing him (Hi Mark.) I know in real life that eventually they we would end up together because as the great philosopher Harry Burns once said:

…no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 257

Used Books

I get nearly all my reading material from a local used book store. An eight dollar paperback costs four bucks and then because I have store credit from returning books there, they take another half off, so for a couple dollars I get several hours of escapism. I mostly read mysteries, from the hard boiled private eye kind to the comic female bounty hunter kind.

Because I read a lot of the same type books and my memory is addled due to age and the hundreds of acid trips in my younger days, all the back cover blurbs about the book are starting to sound the same, so that has become an unreliable way to choose a book. I have more than once brought home a book and about half way through it realized I have read it before. To increase my odds of bringing home a book I haven’t read is to open to a random page and read a bit, but for the reasons mentioned above this is not much more effective. My latest solution to this dilemma is to take a black Sharpie and fill in the zero on page 101 in every book I bring home. This works for me. But.

The mark is not that noticeable, I don’t think, but does it bother the next person who picks up the book? It is surely not as bad as some markings I’ve come across. In the latest book I’m reading some kindly Christian has tried to prevent readers from inadvertent blasphemy by crossing out the word goddamn. It happened once early on in the book and then twice later. I’m curious as to why a person of those moral standards was reading a book featuring murder, adultery, gambling, drugs and prostitution in the first place. And I wonder why they just didn’t stop reading after the first mention of goddamn, but plowed ahead to find more.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 256

That’s Enough Human Contact

This morning after a not so special breakfast at IHOP, Donna got lukewarm water with not so mixed in powder instead of the hot chocolate she requested, we had a very interesting visit to the North Augusta Post Office. And I think I figured out why Postal employees “Go Postal”, it is not so much their working conditions, but more like having to deal with surly customers all day.

They aimed for camp, but fell short. There were some clever lines that will probably be seen as signature quotes on internet message boards and I actually sort of liked the musical numbers. See it for free before its gone (Sunday, July 20th @ midnight.)

Dr Horrible?s Sing-Along Blog

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 256

Bike Cam

My first attempt with Version 1.0 my new Photojojo BikeCam. They advertise it as all it takes is $10 + 10 minutes to make a camera mount for your bike. The cost was free because I actually had all the bits and pieces laying around, but it took about 15 minutes to find all the bits in my *20-year draw.

Half way through the ride I found a bug that I will have to fix for Version 1.1, the camera started to rotate because the vibration of the ride had loosened the nut on the clamp. The fix should be a simple matter of swapping out of the plain washer for a locking kind.

I want to take a sort of strobe movie of our commute to work, you know take a picture every couple of minutes and make a little animation out of it. May have to do it on the way home though because the ride in is on the ragged edge of dawn.

Changed the oil and rotated the tires on the Emperor tonight about 800 miles past my usual maintenance point (oh well, better late than never) in preparation for a possible trip to Charleston. We were going to leave in the morning right after the MMC July breakfast, but we are now going to wait to make a decision until after the Tour de France coverage around lunchtime. It is going to depend on what happens with a storm that is just off the coast.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 256