bug goes crunch: October 2005

bug goes crunch

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

something squishy

okay well just far too much going on these days, serious things at home with the family and interesting things at work, to keep up with a web log, of all things. but the wrold does need to be reminded of the weather. so here i am. and it is about 42 °F , dew point about 38 °F, nice and cool after a light rain, and a brisk 12 mph wind from the north. that blew me along nicely this morning, but it is going to be less fun this afternoon when i make my way home, northward. *sighs*

and there are starting to be a lot of osage oranges squished in the street...



so it goes.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

the boussinesq assumption


last night it rained.



now it is getting pretty outside; fall has settled in. osage oranges are appearing on my morning commute; there's a stand of them on state across from the produce station.

lately i've been totally wrapped up in an EFDC model of the ottawa river, a segment of it actually, the “stickney avenue depositional zone” as it is known. so wrapped up in EFDC and matlab, for postprocessing and visualizations, and wrapped a little in fortran for tweaks to my particle tracking model, and then wrapped again in matlab for animations of the output from that model. lots of computational efforts here - just wait until i get started on that model of the saginaw...

yuh saw it here peoples...

Friday, October 14, 2005

i'm giving you the keys to the kingdom


this morning it was dry...

oh yeah. so i fixed my rear wheel last night, put three new spokes on there, got it pretty well trued up and all. was riding in and, along state street, this guy pulled his piece a shit van over, backed up a little, and tossed what i think was a huge ring of keys across the street to his buddy, missing my face by...well, enough, but it still scared the shit out of me. so i yelled at him, and then he got mad at me (emphasis added). i didn't stop, didn't even consider stopping, just kept going, and about a minute later he is honking is horn and cussing me as he turns onto mckinley and drives away to who cares where. i think what may have actually happened is that i hurt is feelings when i called him a bad name, and like a typical male he got angry instead of talking to me about how he felt. but i wasn't mad at him! i was just glad he didn't hit me full in the face with whatever that dad-blamed jingling hunk of whatever it was he threw out his window.

for this, i am fixing my wheel into the hours of the night? it's funny because it's true.

now i am getting all undecided about building another wheel now. after a chat down to the local bike shop i got the feeling that my efforts would be kinda wasted if i tried to build up a decent wheel around that craptastic suzue steel "track" hub, so i figured i could get like a suzue basic hub or something, which upped the price a little. then i threw in spokes and nipples and a lockring and tracknuts and i was at $110, with a bunch of parts and no wheel yet. then, while shopping around harris cycles (on the web), i discovered that for just $125 they could build me a wheel around the suzue basic and a mavic ma3 (lockring and tracknuts still extra). so really, it worked out to around $25 for these guys to build the wheel. that seems like a great deal, but i still want the experience of building one on my own. i guess the wise choice would be to spend the dough on a good wheel, and then experiment on my own with other stuff. that way i could be (reasonably) assured of having a decent bike even if my wheel turned out kinda bogus.

well, just typing this here has almost convinced me. but i haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

well for one, there's no london eye


another craptastic dreary dark damp day. the detroit paper said "we can pretend we're in london" but right away i can think of a few reasons why that won't work. straight away, i thought of them. or maybe they meant london, ontario.

i might be grumpy because i had to cancel my camping trip (speaking of ontario) but it was for a good reason: the older son is marching at this friday's football game, which i absolutely have to see. i get some profound feeling i can't really explain when i see him doing all these things i didn't do in high school, things that i don't exactly regret not doing but that i wonder about anyway, wonder what it might have been like, but he is doing these things without me prompting him in any way. there is this cliché of parents trying to repair their fucked-up childhood (which they can't really do, righrt?) by making their children do all this stuff they didn't do, or screwed up. a parallel cliché involves forcing children to do the same things the parents did and succeeded at, pressuring the children to succeed at the same level, or even higher. but neither of those clichés seem to fit the current pattern, which is this older child just taking on all these things out of his own inspiration, and me just trying to help him along in any way i can, but mostly sitting back, watching, in awe, slack-jawed and cotton-mouthed.

so i'm going camping in november. that will be a trip. stay tuned.

i might also be grumpy because i haven't been able to ride the bike much, because of multiple errands and other complications. i did yesterday, however (which was when that photo was taken), and on the way home i heard that familiar "pong" of a breaking spoke, although quieter than usual, and when i got home i found not one but three broken spokes, all on the drive side. that may have explained the quieter pong - the wheel was already somewhat de-tensioned. so when did the others break? my mind is a blank. but i didn't have enough spares to repair the wheel last night, so here i am, driving (although i had to do that anyway). i'll get some spokes after work and fix the wheel, but my big (new) plan is to build a rear wheel, using that el cheapo steel track hub and a rim and spokes to be purchased later. so that will be an interesting project as well. i will post pictures.

--->crrrchcrnchc