Archive for the ‘personal’ Category
Bike tire life
June 12th, 2008
Yesterday I got a flat tire while on my ride to work. I was only a bit more than a mile from the office, so I walked the rest of the way and later that morning replaced the inner tube with the spare I keep in my saddlebag. Because the flat occurred as I was coming down off a small curb, I first thought it was a pinch flat. A quick inspection proved that wrong.
As you can see, I’ve let my tires get past their expiration date; I’m sure that whatever I ran over wouldn’t have caused a puncture if the tread hadn’t been worn away. I ordered new tires from Nashbar and should be getting them next week.
The thing that bugged me most is that these tires are not much more than a year old, and I can’t remember wearing out tires so quickly before. Because I rode about 1500 miles last year and have ridden about 550 miles so far this year, I figure those tires have only about 1800 miles on them. I’ve never kept track of my tire life before, but that seemed kind of short.
(It was the rear tire that punctured, and it does wear more quickly than the front. But I rotated them late last year so the two almost equally bald.)
So I went to Google to look for average bicycle tire life. This page, from a tire manufacturer, talks about 2000-5000 km (1250-3000 miles) for their standard tires; this page, from a cycle shop in San Francisco, talks about 1500-4000 miles. So my tires aren’t freakishly short-lived, although they are definitely on the low end of the typical range. I guess I’m just riding more, so the miles are piling up more quickly.
I’ve promised myself to pay closer attention to the tread on my new tires and not let them go so far. While I don’t hate changing tubes—unlike Jamie Zawinski—it’s never fun to have to do it the middle of a ride.
Weather icons
June 11th, 2008
Yes, I’ve written a lot about weather forecasts lately. I like to think that my interest in weather forecasts comes from a combination of this year’s rainy and cold spring and my desire to ride my bike to work most days of the week. Getting an accurate forecast helps me dress for the weather and, in some cases, time my rides to avoid the heaviest rain.
Or maybe I’m just developing that peculiar interest in weather that comes with advancing years.
Either way, I’ve noticed that the online weather services play up the possibility of storms just as much as TV weatherfolks do. For example, over the last few days the National Weather Service, AccuWeather, and the Weather Underground have been predicting a 30-40% chance of thunderstorms in Naperville tomorrow and Friday—a reasonably high percentage, but not even to the level of a coin flip. Despite the less-than-even odds, all three sites have decorated their forecasts with formidable icons of thunderclouds, lightning bolts, and slanting rain. (To be fair, the Weather Underground’s icon incorporates a question mark in the cloud. But the question mark is pretty subtle—I didn’t notice it when looking at the reduced-size icon on my iPhone.)
The icons make you think the chance of bad weather is much higher than what’s actually predicted. Several times I’ve found myself planning to drive to work to avoid getting caught in a thunderstorm only to read the fine print and decide to ride my bike. I know I’ll get caught eventually, but so far my rides have been pretty dry.
Consider this my top tip for bicycle commuting: pack rain gear as if the thunderstorm icon is right, but make your decision to ride as if it’s wrong. You’ll do a lot more riding and won’t get nearly as wet as you think.
What’s in my Pelican?
May 6th, 2008
Last week I got a red Pelican 1060 Micro Case to carry my breakable and water-sensitive stuff in a saddlebag while I bike back and forth to work. For years I’ve just been wrapping my phone, wallet, USB thumb drive, etc in a plastic bag. This has worked, but when this spring’s stiff breezes blew my bike over a few times—fortunately with the saddlebags empty—I began to think my stuff needed better protection. That my old phone had been replaced by an iPhone gave me further incentive.
Pelican cases are pretty common among people in my business; they protect cameras, microscopes, and other delicate equipment from the abuses of the road. So they were my natural choice when I went looking for a case. The 1060 is the largest of the “micro” cases, which have clear tops and no handle. You fill them with Pelican’s “pick ’n’ pluck” foam, which you can customize to fit the outlines of the equipment you’re carrying.
So here’s how I fill my case. First, I put in my Fisher Space Pen, digital voice recorder, USB thumb drive, and keys. My Camry uses an electronic “Smart Key,” so that thing on the right that looks like a fob actually is the key for my car.
Then I add my iPhone above the Space Pen.
And my watch and earbuds on top of the phone. My earbuds are wrapped up in a short length of inner tube, which keeps them from tangling in my pocket.
Finally, I add my wallet and Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase. The SPB is an upscale replacement for the Hipster PDA; I prefer the SPB because it keeps the index cards a bit cleaner and doesn’t have a binder clip that pops off at inopportune times. Despite its name, I carry my SPB in my back pocket.
The wallet and SPB act as top padding and keep everything tight when I close the lid.
I haven’t included links to higher resolution versions of these photos because I took them without a flash to reduce reflections. The exposure times were about 1/5 of a second, so the originals are pretty fuzzy. Fortunately, the reduced sizes here look OK.
Time practice sheet for kids
April 14th, 2008
My second-grader has been learning to tell time, and I wanted to make a set of practice sheets for him. I am, of course, far too lazy to draw the clock faces by hand, or even to use a computer-generated sheet of blank faces and then draw the hands on them. So, following the same principles as my earlier math practice sheet, I made up an HTML document that uses JavaScript’s random number generator to generate a set of clock faces.
My son writes the times below each clock and I (or my wife or my fifth-grader) check his work.
Now, when I say that I “made up” this document, what I really mean to say is that I stole some JavaScript from Mathieu ‘P01’ HENRI. He wrote a realtime JavaScript clock program that draws the hands by altering the height and width of some transparent GIFs that contain diagonal lines. I took a good chunk of the JavaScript and some of the CSS and made an HTML file I named “clock-practice.html.” It’s a bit longer than most of the code I post here, and it’s useless without the set of GIFs for the clock face and the hands, so I’ve wrapped them all together in a zip file you can download from here.
One improvement I’ve made over M. HENRI’s work is to draw the hour hand at the correct angle. If you look carefully at his work, you’ll see that he doesn’t include the minute in his calculation of the angle of the hour hand. This has the unfortunate effect of keeping the hour hand at a constant position from xx:00 through xx:59, which would be very confusing to a second-grader. (In M. HENRI’s defense, he’s using a clock to demonstrate a cute way to draw straight lines at any angle in JavaScript. His focus is not on drawing a clock, per se.)
Every time “clock-practice.html” is loaded or reloaded, it redraws the twelve clock faces with new sets of hands. Whenever I need to make a new set of practice sheets, I repeatedly reload and print the page. To assuage my environmental guilt, I print each page on the back of paper that has already been printed on one side and is headed for the recycling bin.
The day that never ends
November 4th, 2007
Lots of people consider today’s extra hour to be a gift—time to get up? no, I can sleep for another hour. But in our house, which has had little kids living in it for almost two decades now (only have three kids, but they’re spread out), this is the day that never ends. Kids don’t sleep in. They rise with their internal clock and bang around the house as they would on any other day, erasing your extra hour of sleep. But they follow the clock religiously when it comes to bedtime.
“Aren’t you tired?” asks the exhausted parent, looking for some peace.
“No, it’s only 8:00!”
“But you’ve been up since 6:00 this morning.”
“It’s only 8:00!”
“Look at how dark it is.”
“It’s only 8:00!”
Taking stock
April 14th, 2006
We’ve had a few straight days of warm weather, so I decided to ride my bike into work today for the first time this year. Because it’s Good Friday and I didn’t plan on working a full day, the hour and a half of riding takes up a pretty high percentage of the time away from home. That, combined with my tendency to want to start a new “program” at the beginning of a week, nearly led me to drive in instead. But…
It’s mid-April, which seems like a couple weeks after I should have started riding to work.
The clocks have changed to give me daylight to ride home in after work.
I’ve edged back up over 180 lbs, something I told myself I wasn’t going to do.
So, back on my bike and back to looking more carefully at how much is on my plate before I eat it. I’m also going back to weighing myself in the evening as well as in the morning. Although the second weighing seems a bit obsessive, it does help keep my away from snacks at night. Frequent monitoring of progress (or regress) helps me stay on or near the right path.
Looking at that post from the beginning of the year reminded me that I hadn’t checked recently to see if I was keeping up with my goal of 3 posts per week. Yesterday I checked with this blog’s Movable Type administration pages and found that I’m 5-6 posts behind my goal.* While it’s true that the mechanics blog more than makes up for this deficit, that’s something of a cheat: I wanted this year to end with about 150 posts in this blog. Another reason to peddle faster.
* How many weeks into the year are we? Go to the Calendrica applet (with Java enabled) and check the ISO date to find that we’re in Week 15. It’s also Day 104 of this year. Check the Julian calendar to see that it would be April Fool’s day if it weren’t for the Gregorian calendar reformation. Calendrica is the work of Edward Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz who wrote the wonderful book, Calendrical Calculations and the calendar mode for Emacs.