Month: October 2008

Bring Your B-Game

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riding in the morning during the work week is wicked brutal hard for me. I just f’ing hate it. Commuting is my best compromise. But now that i don’t work next to Somo anymore, i take advantage of trips to the Autoplex for work on the car. My Service Advisor and most of the staff always look at me like a loon when I’m strapping on my gear in the fancy Acura parking lot along with my much-scarred Heckler, except for one mechanic today who was admiring my bike and telling war stories of his own.

When I started gearing up, i thought about my gashed arm and my pads, my stinky stinky dirty sweaty gatoradey sunscreen-soaked pads. I actually wash my pads somewhat regularly, but i’m still sure there are cures for cancer hidden within their depths. I thought wistfully about the script for antibiotics i turned down when i got my arm sewn up, and wondered why i didn’t bring the Blur and ride Desert Classic instead. Um…cause Classic sucks, and if i’m getting in the car to goto Somo, i’m riding National.

I was feeling jittery and unsure what to ride. Go hard to get over my crash, or go easy and just work myself into things and protect my tender paw? I’ve ridden National hundreds of times and i still get butterflies when i launch a ride. I had 20 minutes of warm up to chug a V8 (thanks Acura Service Advisor) and think it over. It was time to go up National after the last 3 rides going up Mormon, its always like this when I get back on Somo and need to elevate my tech game. But with the crash and my dainty arm and the heat and my shitty new 2.2 ungrippy rear tire and all other excuses dangling over me, i vowed to not try very hard. It would be the best way to restore my riding mojo. When all else fails, lower your expectations.

So i stunk my way up the hill. There are always things to be proud of riding National, when you try them all 5 times. I was going so slow it was only the laws of physics that prevented me from going back in time, and i eventually arrived at the saddle above BV. I just wasn’t feeling it to go down 24th or National, i needed the sucking to have a positive spin, and riding things timidly that i knew i had ridden better sounded depressing; riding something new poorly would be exciting and come with its own pre-formulated excuse for failure (see above paragraph). I opted to try Corona Loma for the first time down the south face, which would dump me onto Desert Classic and out Elliot Road back to the dealership. I knew almost where it started and where it ended, but not the trail head. A very friendly hiker in a yellow shirt got me on course, somewhat disbelieving that anyone would ride Corona Loma.

It started with a short fun descent, then a deep shitty wash, then a loose shitty hike, then a rugged exposed shitty cliff.   I kinda wondered if I was still on the right trail after walking most of the aforementioned shittiness, til I came up on a drop I’ve seen Durtgurl post in photos.   Great – the hardest drop on the descent, cold.   No problem – it looked harder than it was if you could sneak your derailleur through the slot.   From there, it was 10-15 minutes of steady uninterupted rock-surfing.   It was neat – the pitch was steep but steady, the rocks loose but mostly uniform, it was hard but nothing got much harder, and there were really no breaks.   Just flow down for 1 mile and 900 feet.

I rode smooth and conservative and got it all woohoo!   It dumped me out on the Double Secret option off Desert Classic, where I promptly ran into the same hiker who gave me directions.   He was impressed I made it down, I was impressed he beat me down.     A quick sprint back on Classic to the watertank, and I dumped out onto Elliot and back to the dealership.   My car was cleaned inside and out, and I grabbed all the free cookies i could handle before heading into work just after 10.     Next week the parts will be in, and I will do it all again, including the free cookies.

Confidence restored.

Grunting…

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  • when talking is too taxing for the weary t.human
  • when pie-hole is stuffed with popcorn
  • when “i’m sorry, could you repeat that” seems a very confusing sentence
  • when in the middle of a good constitution
  • when flipping me the bird is beyond the content of Nickelodean’s programming
  • when she prefers you do not interrupt
  • when she wakes
  • when she almost wakes
  • when she wakes after almost sleeping
  • when “No” just doesn’t express how pissed off she is
  • when “hey that sound very interesting, please tell me more” takes too long
  • when refusing to get out of the bubble bath
  • when demanding more eggs for breakfast
  • when lolling on the floor bored and disinterested in going to school

The Harem

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Heart – Magic Man

I rode all four bikes this week, 5 if you count the trainer last weekend.

The name just came to me. I’ve heard people call their bikes a fleet, a stable, even a quiver. It always seemed kinda weird to me. I just called them my bikes. and I never anthropomorphized them. but the Harem had a nice ring to it, kinda nasty, kinda dirty, and i haven’t heard anyone call them a harem before. At least I’m first in my own mind. Perhaps it is a subconscious reaction to having a pregnant wife, and a toddler who sleeps in my bed. but i still like snuggling with G, and it makes me calm knowing where she is when i fall asleep and when i wake up.

The Harem

whatever. the name seemed to fit. and its porn-tastic riding them all in one week. Just writing this is giving me a chubber.

The commute was a chore. and a relief, as we announced 10% layoffs and lost one from our group. My sprint workouts have utterly and completely failed. Perhaps next week.

Wedneday I rode Pass Mountain wtih Alex and Ray. My rear tire was shredded.

On the approach from the Levee Trail i quickly realized i had no traction, banged my knees into my top tube twice spinning out before we even hit the Wind Cave junction. In my yearning to be free from the burden of pads, and their knee protection…I gave up the idea of going big on any lifts. It was a slippery ride, yet i rallied on the north face and got the hard tech stretch better than i have in years, and nailed a corner 5 minutes down from the saddle that also had my number. I lost my rhythm in the descent when my front derailleur quit shifting. I had the vaguest memory of this happening to Beckie once from a tiny rock lodged inside the cage and the frame…indeed it was. Ray and I rolled on, Alex had long-since dropped us, only to endo into a cholla at the bottom of the descent. For all of us, it had become that kind of shitty ride.

Friday I had a nice quiet roadie to Sagauro Lake.

Some deraileur issues

I solved them

Saturday we took Kila and our bikes around the Red Mountain Ranch community yard sale. The bikes made mockery of all the cars, and we found this.

it was only $.25. It was comical, us desperately looking for more things to buy, so i could give the owner of the $250,000 house an even dollar. Yard sales are what they are, and kinda creepy, and kinda fun if you put iced coffee in your water bottle and approach it all as a doggie-park-ride.

yesterday i built this

in expectation of

it cost $32 from Ace, which was pricier than Orange Hell, which was disappointing. But i like my neighborhood Ace. They are nice, and helpful, and nice and helpful. They let G run around. They give useful advice, and know how to operate a register.

Sunday. Hawes

Oops

Ironic that earlier in the ride thought to myself “I haven’t fallen on Hawes in like 5 years“.

Three stitches, a rejected x-ray and script later…

it was weird, signing in to Urgent Care on the computer, getting processed, getting sewn up, getting offered extraneous services for the purpose of covering the liability, getting processed again, getting to the bar in 1:15 later — it was just perfect for someone like me since i knew good and gawdamn well when I did not fracture my elbow. The efficiency was wonderful, and scary…if the nurse just gave me a hug on the way out it would have all been perfect.

The Eagles won. Me, G and K rode to the fire station, then crashed the church’s fall festival. bouncy castles abounded, G went nuts and I went nuts playing with her, it was an awesome way to end the week.

Pre-Crying

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G had taken to crying about things that will hurt her that she knows not to do when she decides not to do them.

Allow me to elaborate, by way of example.

We’re at the park, on the monkey bars, and she asks me to hang Kila’s leash so she can swing from it.   Then she climbs up to the top of the play-gym and asks me to hand her the leash.   Upon which i look straight at her and say “No.   You’re going to fall.   You’re going to fall.   You’re going to get an owie.   Owie owie owie. ” I see the wheels slowly turning behind her pretty blue eyes, and then she starts to cry.

WTF?   The whole idea of me giving her warnings and her getting smart enough to think before she acts and then ask me for advice and then heed my warnings is so she won’t cry.   Why do i feel like a bad parent by protecting her from harm?

G: “I wanna get in the pool”
Me: “Ok, but its really cold”
G:

G:“i wanna climb\ride\run\swing\hang\dangle\snip\snap\trod\trek\whittle daddy”
Me:“Be very careful, be very careful, owie owie.”
G:

Me: don’t eat that fistful of butter. it’ll give your tummy an owie
G: i want butter daddy
Me: you’ll feel seek, and shit your pants
G: (after eating fistful of butter)

When in public, I try to let other people hear what I’m saying before they start hearing her cry.   I feel dirty, and i dont’t know why.

Self-Service

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The baby has learned to open the fridge door.   This perhaps is the watershed moment when I should stop calling her The Baby.   I’ll get over it, i can still call her tinyHuman, and soon there will be another baby.

Opening a large door with weatherstripping is a herculean accomplishment when you are 31lbs. Its like walking out of Somalia and finding yourself at the front door to Golden Corral. I’ve let her fetch her chocolate milk, and her apples, and her yogurt.   Its healthy and filling and saves me time in the mornings.   But now she’s started getting out fake-syrup and pasta, and making herself a dish of fake-syrup dipped in pasta.   Health implications aside, the sticky mess is a pain in my ass.   On the drive into daycare she complained about how sticky her hands felt, and i reminded her of how her hands got sticky, then she complained when i washed her hands at school.

I should have known this was coming by her habit of filling Kila’s dish past overflowing with kibble, leading to her emptying Kila’s bag of snack treats before the supine dog on guest room floor, and placing a tidy pile of rawhide bones in front of the dog on the bed. Its cute when its feeding the pets; its gluttonous and filthy when its feeding herself. She is close to thinking she can crack her own eggs, and only my rapier-quick wit in asking her to mix in a helping of peas saved me from a having a frittata crisis on my hands. I know soon the milk jug will make the briefest of layovers in her tinyHands, en route to a bullseye on the kitchen floor. Hopefully Kila will help clean it.

1 Character

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An interesting bug.

One of our programs has a 90-day limit on passwords, and for passwords set on October 2, that limit would be reached on December 31. For some reason, passwords switched on this day were getting marked as expiring in 12-31-09, which violated the 90-day limit, and blew up the user’s account. This caused something of a panic amongst the sysAdmins.

I had a hunch, as I am paid to do after working 2 years on a program, and correctly determined the cause related to our 90-day rule and the new year, and the fact that the bug was effectively only a bug on this one day. Some further digging by one of our developers revealed the bug to be due to the usage of Gregorian time rather than “regular time”. The perl documentation describes the differences like:

%G – The ISO 8601 year with century as a decimal number. The 4-digit year corresponding to the ISO week number (see %V). This has the same format and value as %y, except that if the ISO week number belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (TZ).
%Y – The year as a decimal number including the century.

I never understood why a program would support different algorithms for calculating time. then again, I majored in philosophy and not computer science. You would think if anyone could find uses for different versions of time, it would be a philosophy major and not someone trained to think in 0s and 1s, but i digress… Much discussion, relaying and allaying of concerns and messages ad nausea up and down the food chain ensued, ending in a decision to change the constant we use for time management in this program. Its no small thing when you alter time.

The pressure was on QA to make sure this change was safe. After 10 years and an inflated title, i took this in stride, and showed why its worth having me instead of two junior engineers. Rather than use a shotgun and splatter an entire work-week across my monitor like a Robert Rodriguez film, testing the entire program and numerous date combinations, I searched the codebase and found this change affected 14 different features. At a unit level, the time calculation would be the same for every one of them, meaning I only had to test the specific piece of code once. It worked as planned on new years, which I was able to test by hacking the code base to check for a 68-day-old password. Next was to determine the risk in the event my testing was wrong. I found two uses of the time constant to be for a different program using the same library code and now the happy recipient of a free enhancement request, three occurrences that were informational only and would have no impact if wrong, eight that were straight expiration dates which at worst would be simple edits, and the one bug due to the application of the 90-day business rule which i provided steps to work around.

The analysis of the fix and risk took about an hour and a half for me, it took about 10 hours at least of various other people’s time, more if you included all the email. The code change was 1 character.

Before: STRFTIME_NLS_DATE_TO_CHAR_FMT => ‘%G:%m:%d:%H:%M:%S’;

After: STRFTIME_NLS_DATE_TO_CHAR_FMT => ‘%Y:%m:%d:%H:%M:%S’;

Xtreme Dog Park

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This is something that would have been amazingly cool with a video camera. Sorta. Except it was dark. And backlit from the lights on the 202. And every time something exciting happened, a cloud of dust went up. Really all I could see were blurs of dark and slightly-less dark, and hear the occasional whimper or jangle of Kila’s tags, and some more puffs of dust.

Kila spotted a coyote behind the Boulder Mtn park at the bottom of Las Sendas. Clued in to Kila’s body language, i found the grey blur moving in the open tract next to the highway, then just hung out and watched for about 15 minutes as Kila and the coyote ran and parried and did whatever it was that they were doing for quite such a long time. It never got hectic, which was weird. Kila never got bored, which was weird. The coyote never growled at Kila, nor showed its much meaner side, nor tried to lead her off, which was weird.

A couple times I whistled for Kila to come near me, just so she didn’t get too carried away or do anything stupid. I kept thinking the coyote was gone, but a short while later Kila would run out to discuss things with it further. She never got much more than 50 yards away from me, also weird that the coyote minded me so little. The entire saga was like and extended meet and greet, where no one knew who the alpha dog was. It was quite civilized really.

The only time I’d seen a coyote be that interested and that patient with Kila was the spring of ’02 after we first got her, and a large coyote persisted in following us across Longbow golf course, even when i stopped several   times and approached it menacingly. Soon after that I realized Kila was not fixed, after a dog spent several games at Uomo Donna trying to hump her, and she spotted a little on our white tile floor. Tsaina and I once tailed a coyote for a while in the riverbed behind Fort Lowell Park in Tucson, and it eventually led us right into 3 of its mates who were waiting for us.

No such thing was happening here. It was just two dogs trying to get on the same page for a very long time. Maybe the coyote was young, or was used to seeing Kila as we spot them regularly in that park, and hear the same pack howling just over our fenceline at night frequently.

This was Kila’s version of riding gnar.

Gone Baby Gone

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I sold Jo’s cage and t-stand today.   The whole thing happened very quickly – I posted on CraigsList yesterday and within 1 day and only three replies I had two very reasonable people show up on time and give me my offered price for the items.   That in itself has got to be some sort of sign from god.   It helped that I cleaned them both thoroughly, they were in good condition, and I asked a tad less than half the purchase price for each.

I tried to get in touch with Andrea (Jo’s new owner) beforehand to confirm that after 4 months all was continuing to go well and she expected to keep Jo.   It got a little hectic, I finally got her on the phone while the cage buyers were in the garage inspecting, but in the 30 seconds we spoke she said things were great.   Perhaps they are, perhaps they are not; I can not know.   I spoke briefly with her daughter when I left a message earlier in the day, and she said that all was well.   Hopefully Andrea will call or mail me back and let me know.

Does it really matter?

Jo is gone for good now, and there is no going back again.

I think I should be happy, or relieved, or angry.   Instead I’m still just a little sad and just a little ashamed and feel just a little hollow inside by my somewhat-willful efforts to make myself ignore the feelings in hope that time will make them go away.   I am torturing myself over this for no good reason, other than placing blame helps add some concept of explanation to mitigate the simple pain of the loss.

I did the same thing to myself when Tsaina was dying of cancer and we put her down.   Just like then, there was no more blame to be wrung out of the situation.     The right thing to do would be   man-up and get over it.   Just get fucking over it already, cause its over.

it will take time.   and rushing it is one more act of will at the expense of humanity i don’t want to see myself make on the long downward trek from the joy of childhood.   But I probably will anyway, cause i don’t have the bandwidth to be bothered by this anymore.

tinyMechanic

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G has long held a preference for the truck. I think its cause she gets to ride up front, and up high. Every day when we go out she asks to take the truck.

Last week, the truck had a pile bearing in the transmission that was getting close to failing. So I did not drive it, except to take it in to the shop. I told G “the truck is broken. the truck has an owie.” She seemed to accept this, then busied herself playing with a ratchet and trying to undo the hitch rack on the Acura like she had been watching me do. G naturally tried to unbolt the bolt I just bolted down. This was mostly harmless, and resulted in t.Human only getting herself a little dirty as she crawled behind the bike trays and under the rear bumper. Not much could go wrong, as that bolt is pretty tight, has a cotter pin and a lock, and the ratchet i keep in my portable bike tool kit is kind of a piece of shit. But she enjoyed the ratchety ratchety noise and the solid feel of the tool in her hand. Who wouldn’t? Ratchets are almost impossible not to play with.

So today, $1024 and one new clutch later, Genevieve asked me if the truck was all better and if we could take it. I’m still surprised when she remembers obscure details like this. Then she proceeded to ratchet on the hitch rack for awhile longer. I told her she had fixed it, she said “all fixed” and then said “you’re welcome” when I thanked her for her help. She even put her tools away, umm, sorta — meaning the ratchet got handed to me and she knocked the tool bag around on the floor a little with her foot.

if only real mechanics were this affordable.

Tag-a-long

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I found these in my pack.

It was sweet, G knows what my Camelback is all about.   So i took the little one with me.

Alex decided it was his day to ride 24th St., I was happy to show him the way. I had a smooth climb up Mormon, much improved upon last week. Alex nearly died behind me. It was weird, it was unsettling, for both of us. We seriously thought about turning back, but a Goo shot and Alex’s distaste for bailing after he’d got himself all pumped to ride 24th convinced me to lead him on. I did ok, he got all of it. He’s sneaky like that. I think I am stronger than Alex on hardcore long descents, I was pulling away from him on most of the ride down. But on super 3rd degree gnar-gnar challenges he is better than me. He got the hardest slotty s-curve on the trail on his first try, and I still have trouble with it and tried it four times yesterday alone. Its kinda the same climbing: i have more power, he has more technique. Its fun to keep each other on edge. It was fun to watch him do so well. Then he almost heaved behind me getting back over Beverly Canyon and cried like a girl about hitting a few drops in the dark.

Alex bought me dinner. Best Goo shot I ever spent. I too was flush with joy after my first time down 24th and called all manner of friends to kvell. JB joined us too, ready to take his share of abuse for flaking on Rocky Point.

The bird survived about as well as Alex

G pulled it out of my pack the next morning, along with most of my tools, which she then spread out across the kitchen floor.