bug goes crunch: April 2006

bug goes crunch

Thursday, April 27, 2006

yesterday i got so old


well today was mostly a programming day at work. tweaking a linkage between SWMM and EFDC, trying to do a better job of distinguishing between wet and dry weather flows from tributaries, so that the proper bacteria concentrations can be applied. it is trickier than it sounds, in part because of the range of absolute flows, and being able to say just how much of a relative change to you have to see before you can say, for certain, that a wet weather event has begun (or, more importantly, ended). so i will get that licked eventually.

we have been having an unspeakably gorgeous spring and there is nothing i want to do more than go ride. i will get to do just that, soon, although it will be along traffic-choked state street, for a while at least. but back in the robin hills of vesper heights, all is beautiful.

coming back from delivering motor meals today a coworker and i spotted a great blue heron in the pond out front. pretty hard to miss, actually; he was a big'n. we tried to get a photo but he was too shy, or possibly perturbed at the canada geese over on the other side ofthe pond, to whom i would do considerable violence if it were permitted, as i do not care much for canada geese (don't even get me started on swans). anyway i am very much on the lookout for the big waders; stay tuned.

--->dad

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

the white bike cannot be stopped


here are a few snapshots of my beloved track bike, sporting its new wheels. the setting is perhaps not perfect, but certainly conveys the general feel of the area of late. details: wolber super champion rims, campagnolo record pista hubs, dt swiss 14/15 spokes with brass washers, 36-hole 3-cross lacing. the tires are tufo, i forget the model, i think 21 mm (or so - will post correction if necessary). i had a bit of a time gluing them on, deciding that i didn't get enough glue everywhere the first time (what is referred to on the park tools website as a "starved joint"), so that i actually pulled them off and started over again.

but now - excellent! i rode the bike around town and it was deliciously smooth. the real test will be on the marine plywood out at the dick walden vélodrome, however. i get these vaguely creepy fears of tires coming unglued on the banks and sliding down and fucking people up, but it is probably just me coming unglued instead. i will bring both sets of wheels just in case.



the other thing i'm thinking of experimenting with out there is a bigger chainring. really i need a few more cogs but they cost money, which i don't normally whine about but i kind of blew the budget on the wheels, whereas i have two more superbe pro chainrings, 50 and 51 teeth, part of the garage sale cop-of-a-lifetime that got me the white bike in the first place. so anyway it might be interesting to find out what kind of pace i can keep pushing another few gear inches out there.



in the closeup of the rear hub you can see: the brass washers; my dirty izumi chain (i promise to clean it soon, although i realize that to many persons it probably looks quite clean already; i have high standards for moving metal); the type of scuffing that white powdercoat picks up all too readily (a little rubbing compound will get that right out, however); a reflection of me in a characteristic, albeit unflattering, squat.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

take a little while to grow your brother's hair


well there has been a change in the weather. after several days (really a full week) of warmth and sunshine and growing and blooming, we have thick clouds, darkness, drizzle and cool temperatures: 41 °F, and 16 mph winds from the north. of course, given that the last five miles of my commute are pretty much due south, the wind was a bit of a boost. here's hoping it calms a bit before i have to ride home again.

somewhere in the vicinity of the new storage depot i smelled that faintly biting burnt-toast smell, but i couldn't imagine where it was coming from; no greasy spoons anywhere near here, somewhat a bone of contention among the office workers who don't actually care what they put into their stomachs (ahmo's deli is a short drive, actually, with all the wholesomeness we come to expect from middle eastern food). so i am thinking maybe that is not actually burnt toast i am smelling, but something else.

the real news is that last saturday the older son, who just turned sixteen, has begun working at his first job, at the local bike shop! how cool is that? understand, there are several bike shops in our fair city, at least one of which is unbearably hip and thereby snooty, whereas at least two of them are perfectly reasonable and pleasant to deal with, but only one of those is relatively nearby and has consistently treated me well and provided excellent service over the years and is therefore my favorite shop. and that is where the lad is working. so that is really cool. this should kick-start his fixed gear mountain bike project, plus help him save money to buy another bike, so he will finally stop riding all of mine.

on the subject of "mine", i took the track bike out yesterday evening with the brand new tubular rims and tires and oh my goodness was that mellow. i have to promise myself to keep them off the street until at least one, if not five, trips to the vélodrome have been taken (with hope, the first being this weekend). anyway words cannot do these fine wheels justice so i will shut the fuck up and come back when i have some pictures (which will have to wait until the sun comes back out, polished aluminum, all that).

Friday, April 21, 2006

sometimes i get so tickled i can't talk


so it was a quiet ride to work today; no volvos, no epithets, no piquantly intense frustrations. how i like it, that is.

last october i began taking photographs of the pool in the memorial bench outside the office, because i had noticed the winter before the way it reflected the daily weather. this week, it seems, with the relatively peaceful arrival of spring and the growing season, that the weather has been, in a word, uninteresting; certainly little change from day to day. the pictures could attest to that, if i were posting them all. but i may have left a few out. anyway, it will rain some days and not some other days, and leaves will blow in and out, and bird shit will appear and be washed away by rain and so on. so i will continue to take the photos, and probably post some of them. but a different format may be appropriate. if i can find someplace to host, say, a pdf-based slideshow (i've been putting them all in a powerpoint presentation to start that process) then i could link to that from here. maybe. it's all speculation. but it is interesting to look at them all, one after the other, like that.

yesterday evening i worked on cleaning the excess glue from the rim of my rear wheel, and was checking the bond of the tire in some detail, and despite my inner desires i had to admit that i really did not get a very good bond along one of the edges of the tire, and i reluctantly accept that i ought to re-glue the darn thing. i didn't have the spirit, after that, to perform the same study of the front wheel. *sighs* but i will. i'll get those tubulars glued right and then i'll show everybody. i promise.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

today is the greatest


so this morning as i turned right onto southbound state, from packard, i "took the lane" (as they say) in my usual fashion, intending to hold it the next 200 feet or so to the light at hoover, which is always red due to the synchronization of the traffic lights; at hoover, i pause for no more than 10 seconds while waiting for the light to turn green, in a line of cars, and then proceed, in turn, then moving to the right as the bike lane appears. 99 times out of 100 this works fine, but this morning a man in a volvo suv pulled way out and around to pass me, while we were turning, forcing me to make some sort of evasive maneuver that caused me to bounce around a bit in the rough patch of pavement i usually (99 times out of 100) avoid.

so of course the light was red and i rode up on his left, not sure of what i would say, and he rolled down his window, and i pulled up and rested my hand on his door, and he looked at me and said, grimly, "don't touch my car, asshole". he was older, silvery-grey hair in a poufy blow-dry style, a sort of checkered shirt and maybe a tie, very professional-looking, no doubt in a position of responsibility somewhere and quite likely looked up to by junior staff, a mentor or role model even, and all he could think of to say to the bicyclist he almost ran over was "don't touch my car, asshole". all i could think of to say, taken aback as i was, was "you beat me to the red light, you're a good man". i did not, however, remove my hand from his door until the light turened green and he began to drive away, which happened very soon (because of the synchronization of the lights, you see). of course later i thought of much better things to say, and of course there was that piquantly intense frustration of not having gotten the best of that nameless chump, in the moment of his monumental display of chumpitude, but at least i could say to myself with confidence that i did not give up the moral high ground as it were. i didn't even cuss, or smack his car, or anything. he, on the other hand, began a conversation with a total stranger by calling him an asshole. being himself, i will cheerfully assume, is punishment enough.



anyway it has been terrifically spring-like these days. yesterday evening i rode around, trying to get a few pictures of some of my favorite spring trees, at which i was moderately successful. they are interspersed here, along with a picture of the everyday commuter, in all its utilitarian glory.



sharp-eyed bicycle gazers may note that there is no toe clip on the right pedal. correct! what happened, no more than half an hour before that photograph was taken, was that the chintzy mks clip finally snapped off; one of the two prongs had broken, when i don't know, only it had been like that for at least a week, and then as i was setting off the other prong snapped and i was left with my binda strap and nothing else holding my foot on the pedal where it belongs. i checked my boxes of stuff in case i had kept the craptastic plastic clips i had before, but no luck: in a moment of uncharacteristic wastefulness, i had tossed the old clips. then i checked the left clip, and one of its prongs had snapped as well. so much for njs-approved equipment, eh? today i will stop by the lbs and get some good-old-fashioned-american-fucking-plastic clips. because a fixed gear with no toe clips is some weird shit, my friend; downhills are especially scary because the pedal wants to get shed of the foot and it is not going to wait for the rider to get back on track, so to speak.

anyway there is my bike. love it or leave it. tonight i expect to finish getting those tubulars glued and cleaned up and on the white bike, and that is going to be a thing of beauty, not only to ride but also to just look at.

Monday, April 17, 2006

beware the rat


well my nose does not lie to me. friday morning, when i topped that little rise on south state, by the varsity tennis center with those thoughtfully-designed stormwater detention basins out front, with the reeds and cattails and tall grasses that make such a nice home for the red-winged blackbirds, who now sing "ok-a-lee-ee" to me every morning as i pass by, and i thought i smelled that slightly rancid smoke smell, the smell of a burning building that has been largely extinguished and is mostly soaking wet with maybe a little smoldering going on in a corner, beneath some rubble, and i wondered why i was smelling that and what building could have burned because i didn't see anything, and anyway i was tooling along cheerfully and just sort of taking in the smells as i rode by, thinking about how when you look out across a forest after you have climbed a hill and you see hundreds if not thousands of shades of green and brown, or maybe it is autumn and the greens and brown have been supplemented with reds and oranges and yellows, and all those different colors are almost too much to imagine but really you like it, because it's beautiful, and how that must be like what happens when a dog steps outside and takes a breath of the outside air, that the dog takes in and recognizes as many smells as we do colors, smelling all the different animals and plants, the urine and musk of hundreds of rodents and the mold spores and the exudate of the snails on the garden walls and the motor oil that some bonehead poured onto the street and a mcdonalds hamburger tossed from a car and a bunch of things that we don't think of as having any smell at all but of course they do. anyway i read in the paper that the pto thrift shop, which was down the other side of that rise off state street, out of view of the street (next to where ann arbor plastics used to be, i used to go there a lot), burned the night before, pretty much a total loss although fortunately no one was hurt, especially the firefighters who would have just as soon kept playing their euchure game all night. and that explained the residue of flares i saw at state and stimson, where the police must have been directing traffic from southbound state onto stimson so the firefighters could do their work without interruption.

so my nose doesn't lie to me. years ago, when i was working on the paint booth scrubber water project, we were having a meeting talking about how the project was going, and how we were coping with keeping the bioreactors alive and happy during the july shutdown, and i commented on how i could tell the paint solvents were beginning to degrade in the storage tanks because of the change in smell, and the lead researcher from ford (who was a native of korea) said "you have a very sensitive nose...were you born in the year of the dog?" and i replied "no, i was born in the year of the rat" and he said "that's very strange" and the room was quiet for a moment, before we moved on. i've always wanted to ask him what he meant by that.

the weekend was spectacularly beautiful, saturday anyway, and i took a soul-nourishing ride along huron river drive, not an extreme workout or anything, just an hour or so of spring beauty (well, not spring beauty per se; the hepatica and bloodroot and even possibly rue anenome were in bloom, and probably spring beauty as well although i did not pick any out as i rode past), watching the sunlight wash the forest floor in the absence so far of leaves, and reflect off the wavelets on the spring-swollen river, just a light breeze from somewhere north and west, breezy enough to make it easier to get home than to leave home, which is how i like it. just me and the white bike and the sun and the breeze.



later i changed the tires on the commuting bike, off with the knobbies and on with the smooth ones, not slicks exactly, something with some tread that will shed water because i do ride in the rain and i'm not interested in going down on my ass (or shoulder or thigh, more likely). and that change of course makes the commuting bike almost totally silent, so there is once again that wonderful moment of peace when i first get on the bike in the morning, and am rolling my way off the robin hills of vesper heights, before i begin battling for my piece of road with those clowns who are furiously racing their way to work before there are only jelly doughnuts left, because my god who wants to eat a jelly doughnut? total loser, that says.

but today i'm good.

Friday, April 14, 2006

earth and earthworms


that's what the neighborhood smelled like this morning. later somewhere further south, i detected some smoky notes, perhaps from somebody burning some lawn litter illegally as they do from time to time. this would have occurred the night before; what i smelled was the moist, burned wood smell (i don't know what those compunds are, something polycyclic and aromatic, creosotes and turpenes and so on).

spring has truly taken hold, even though i know there will be some icy mornings yet. today the younger son leaves for a caribbean cruise with his grandmother and cousins. this is a trend the cousins have started (the older son went to alaska a couple of summers ago), and i suppose i approve as long as i don't have to ever go on one. i mean really. in a couple of weeks i will be going backpacking in lake superior provincial park (first trip there for me), which is way more my speed. anyway i mention it because he is for some reason being allowed to take the new digital camera with him, so my photo documentation of the emergence of spring is going to be limited somewhat - there are magnolias just ready to burst, probably today as it will be sunny and warm once again. i like spring and autumn the most because the transitions are by definition ephemeral; they cannot be sustained, you have to be in them while they are happening to know them at all. summer and winter could go on indefinitely (sort of like the tropics and the poles, respectively), but death and rebirth are what makes a circle round, if you know what i mean.

and round goes the wheel.

-:>#<:-0-:>#<:-0-:>#<:-0-:>#<:-0-:>#<:-0-:>#<:-

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

the south wind thing


blowing in my face again. that was okay yesterday evening, made the ride home easy. what will eventually happen is this circulating business will pass to the east, and the wind will turn (that is, we will be experiencing the other side of its anticlockwise rotation) and that will be that. at least until the next circulating business arrives.

and i knew it was going to rain today but i overhauled the drive train last anyway. overhauled it good, too: repacking and adjusting the bottom bracket, cleaning and lubricating the chain not with that cat-vomit-smelling phil wood tenacious oil but with the good triflow (which i guess as long as i am mentioning product odor i should say has that sweet, butyl acetate aroma not unlike nail polish - mmmm!), so it is all clean and shiny and glints back up at me when i glance down as i am riding in today. the rain had stopped falling for the time being, only the occasional puddle and a general profusion of earthworms to remind me that it had rained, and the general smell was of earth and worms and the random whiff of automobile exhaust but all told the strong impression of spring was made, easter being around the corner as it were and the forsythia seeming to have bloomed in the night, if such a thing is possible, and the lawns greening furiously, having sent up a few tentative blades in the previous weeks but now taking notice of the sudden warmth and saying "okay boys here's our chance let's get to it" and the lawns greening and thickening at a furious pace now, so that the lawn mower itself is beginning to feel rumblings of significance again.

i may actually have to mow the lawn before i can get back to the vélodrome again. so it goes...

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

if you could blow up the world


oh fhcalc, the bane of my existence...i am referring, of course, the the utility subroutine in ECOMSED (which is hydroqual's 3-d hydrodynamic/sediment transport modeling code) that calculates fetch lengths for use in its various wind-wave submodels. when we first started working with their old code, we couldn't even get it to compile because of errors in fhcalc, mostly having to do with boundary cells. after porting the model to their newer, public-domain cose there were fewer difficulties although we still had to put a couple of hard-wires in there.

but we were still bedeviled by spiky results in the cohesive sediment concentrations, which would only occur when the wind-wave model was used (and only smb, not the donegal model, which would always blow up anyway). the wave model itself looked okay, so we were somewhat at a loss, until i finally checked the fetch length calculations and discovered that, for certain cells in certain directions, fhcalc had calculated fetches of multiple hundreds of kilometers. we are not modeling lake superior, however. this was clearly the culprit, and while i figured out how to correct it by hand using data dumped into excel (the problem has to do with calculating final locations using phantom cell corners), my first attempt at changing the code was unsuccessful. unfortunately (and this is our little secret) i couldn't stay late to fix it. but today! i will master fhcalc or die trying.

[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]-[~/*\~]
[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]-[~\*/~]

on other mornings i might have complained about the moderate, slanting headwind on the ride in, but i know that today it will bring warm air with it. and i am happy about that. the variation of weather this time of year is a constant wonder. i can of course remember very clearly what it was like 16 years today (because the older son was born that very day) and it was very cold, colder than the day before, and i remember also the bits of ice on the windshield and even the stray snowflakes, there on the volkswagen, very much later that night when i went out to the car and drove home for a few hours while they slept, what i thought were my very last hours of not being a dad, only really those hours were already gone, because i already was. a dad.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

all the things you are are


well it seems as though that wind has dies down at last. the ride home yesterday, and even more so the day before, was tiring with the 20 mph (gusting to 30) northwest wind a-blowin'. and it was not so much the extra work against viscous shear, which i ought to be able to take in stride (as it were), but the gusting and variability of direction making it difficult to hold my line. the wind is at its strongest on state by the airport, where it has what amounts to a considerable fetch, and this is also the narrowest stretch of road, with a full share of grumpy and short-sighted motorists. yesterday i actually took to the shoulder, the hardpan clay with its scattering of gravel, at least part of the way. i love to ride my bike, but i have no desire to be taken out by a durango rushing on its way to the next red light. feh!

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

standing alone at the top of the stairs


yeah so after the typical teasing breeze of warmth we are back to a little colder, and a little more damp, than one might wish. i did get the front gardens raked out sunday, so they are looking nice, and just in time for frosting and freezing!

but the good news is, i went to the vélodrome on saturday, and it was a blast. mostly we got things ready: attached various things the winds had blown off, set up the tarps, got out the chairs, that sort of thing. by 1:00 it was time to take some laps. i may have actually been the first rider to hit the track this calendar year! there was no racing, just a some solo grunting and then a series of exhilarating pacelines. oh man. it never really got nice (only threatened with occasional flashes of direct sunlight), and there was a stiff wind that made coming out of turn 1 interesting, but all in all it was good clean fun of the sort i haven't had in a while.



i mention racing with a bit of trepidation. the whole thing arouses certain long-dormant conflicts over the value of athleticism, the spirit of competition, the meaning of artistry, and so on. i don't consider myself to be an athelete, nor a competitor; long ago i surrendered myself (or so i thought) to the cerebral in favor of any real or imagined physical prowess. this was in part a response to thew adolescent "jocks versus freaks" bullshit that went on in school. but it is also (in part) a sincere recognition on my part of just how much energy a person can devote to things: to truly excel in athletics requires discipline and above all time for training. instead i learned the bebop idiom, and to play piano and saxophone in that idiom, along with other instruments and other idioms. i needed to do that, and i'm glad i did; let someone else set records in the 200 meters.



but still inside somewhere there is a desire to beat a guy, to be stronger somehow. i have to struggle with that, in reality, to overcome the crummy feeling of being dropped by carbon-fibered roadies. i tell myself "they can't play saxophone like hank mobley" and i'm sure of that, so that's good. but at the vélodrome, someday, the idea of actually racing is going to come up. and i'm going to have to be able to deal with having my ass handed to me. i'm not espeially worried, mostly because the other riders i've met have all been very friendly, and the atmosphere is convivial, so i can imagine easily enough that there is no gloating or baiting over the order of finish. still, it is just a lingering feeling...we shall see.