Crime and Drama

I just watched Changeling. Wow! is all I can say. It was disturbing on so many different levels, most of all that we never got a good look at Angelina Jolie’s giant fake boobs. Its easy to forget since she has become a diva that she has done some fine acting in her career.   Its also easy to forget amidst The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Dirty Harry and Every Which Way But Loose that Clint Eastwood is a remarkable director.   Million Dollar Baby is destined to be a classic alongside The Outlaw Josey Wales; I can’t wait to see Gran Torino.

Being a parent can make you crazy with worry.   As if protecting a kid from their own damn self and from accidents isn’t hard enough, its impossible to protect them from someone bigger and stronger and smarter out to do them harm.   G hasn’t learned yet about not talking to strangers, and it will be sad when kids and friendly parents at the park start getting the cold shoulder from her, but I don’t know the alternative.   I don’t talk to stangers either, I just can do it more diplomatically.   Close your eyes and you make yourself sick thinking of all the evil in the world that can harm a tiny little girl.   Its sweeter to close your eyes and hear her tiny little girl voice.   Last night I got into bed with her just to feel her next to me, then she started kicking me in the nards.         Awww…so sweet.

Cops lie, and abuse their power. Not all of em, but enough that they ruin it for the rest – like 2 of em is enough to ruin it for the rest. Any doubts…follow up on ex-Eagles running back Ryan Moats.   Thinking back on most interactions I’ve had with cops, even the nice ones who were doing their jobs professionally and courteously and only in response to shit I had done…they must be trained to put on a professional veneer that makes them kinda an asshole, and they are acting in an adversarial role where its their task to portray your guilt and control a situation with a heavy hand.   Sorta reasonable given the job, but sorta humiliating.   They latch onto the littlest things you say and draw all the negative focus to them…just read a police report about yourself, and you will think you’re a serial killer.   Its not hard to imagine the cop that makes you feel emasculated while he tickets your off-leash dog is capable of taking it a step further, even if it wouldn’t happen, its an easy thing to imagine given the feelings such situations elicit.

The sexism that used to exist towards women is horrifying.   I just can’t imagine that society.   Last weekend I did a ride with 4 girls and one other guy, and it was awesome.   Lynette led the way on the downhill, and the ladies were ripping the gnar and talking shit such that you could only tell them apart by their tank tops.   I would love to see economic studies of sexism’s affect on a society’s productivity.   Its hard to extract that from the correspondence with most such society’s being primitive, but what a treatise that would be.   So much effort goes into maintaining a class system, so much wasted potential, you just hope like drug legalization and capitalism that efficiency will eventually drive out bad ideas.

New Bikes, II

G and I keep getting bikes at the same time. That is so cool! While she has only had her tricycle for 3 months, I’ve realized she should have gotten it long ago. The lessons she never learned riding her old crappy bike happened very quickly — steering and peddling were mastered in days, and she outgrew it in weeks. While playing around at Rage when I was picking up the Hei Hei, Beckie got her on a 12″ and she did really well. It seemed just recently she failed miserably on one at Toys’R’Us, but that was probably 6 months ago — 16.66% of her life, like my riding in 2003.

I have gotten plugged into a new riding group, with a great crowd of people who are all very experienced riders. I quickly landed an offer for a nice kid’s bike for the humble cost of a thank you and a 6-pack. Thanks Durtgurl for the invite, Scott and Robin for the hookup. I am looking forward to paying back the karma with infant props as soon as Alana grows out of them. Giving it to friends is far better than a few pennies and dealing with the freaks on Craigslists.

A new tube and some lube on the chain, and it is ready for G to celebrate during my upcoming belated birthday party.   She’ll think it will be her party, but I’ll still get cake.   After 38 other birthday parties, that will be pretty cool.   I’ve got it stowed in the shed so the surprise won’t be ruined.

the Hei Hei, bling complete with matching bell and bottle cage. Turtle approves
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the basket is going to be a big hit
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Sping Fling 09

I wasn’t going to be able to take days off this year, but since   Beckie and the girls were heading to Rocky Point,   I planned to enjoy the weekend to the fullest. I hit the pre-Fling Hawes ride on Wed eve (sorta, by myself, after working late and missing LiteandFast Dave’s group), the Somo Party on Friday, Sedona on Saturday with local guru Traildoc’s tour, and the Alta\Bajada ride at Somo on Sunday.

The Highlights:

  • Missing everything on the Blur that I did on the Hei Hei during my Hawes ride, thereby avoiding any buyer’s remorse.   Its not the bike, I just suck.
  • getting a bike for G from ScottN and his wife Robin(?), in exchange for a good 6 pack of beer and the promise to pay it forward
  • Not drinking at the Somo Party
  • Good conversations, and the great friends who supply it
  • Meeting Traildoc, AZJeff and others for a wonderful locals tour of Sedonuts.   The highlights were Hog Wash and Hog Heaven, like Hangover, but a tad tamer.   Or maybe I was just not so scared.
  • Nutting up and hitting a tough drop, turn, and drop without giving in to my fear
  • Nutting up and hitting   a different tough drop, turn and drop and holding on while the bike slide sideways down the 2nd step
  • Nutting up and rolling a 5 foot nearly-vertical rockface, then crapping my pants and succumbing to the shakes after it was over
  • Good company with the boys of JRA racing: Helimech, Lostboyz and A.P.B
  • Endo’ing on a little hay bale at 0 mph, giving a good laugh to my fellow riders
  • Chad F. Brown
  • Rolling into Chad’s ride, Durtgurl’s ride, KennyB’s ride, and Paul’s ride at Sedona.   There must have been at least 50 of us out on the trails.
  • Beer and pizza at Bike and Bean
  • 12″ tubes at Bike and Bean, saving me a trip to Wal-Mart, and allowing me to support our sponsor
  • Hitting BCT alone at dusk for an hour shake-down ride.   I had the whole system to myself. Somewhere i dropped my Swiss American water bottle, returning it to the place I found it nearly a year earlier.
  • Learning in a pinch how to adjust my hydraulic brake calipers
  • Learning in a pinch how to reassemble my freehub
  • Good company from Evil Patrick, Dgangi and others during the brutal climb up Alta
  • Cleaning Durtgurl’s Crack on Alta
  • Watching Zort, Dirtbag and Tiss’er clean the Switchback of Death. Watching your buds make gnarly shit is sometimes as much fun as getting it yourself.   The look that came over Dirtbag’s face as he prepared to drop in…it wasn’t calm, it was combat.
  • Finishing Bajada and not throwing a tantrum as it rolled long and longer and longer
  • 6 hrs of gnar, no blood

MeatPod in Jammies

I have progressively developed some distance from Alana since the initial wave of euphoric fatherhood washed over me.   The poop doesn’t bother me, and the crying is aggravating but understandable.   Its her apathy.   She’s just begun to stay awake for more than a few minutes at a stretch, and only about 2 weeks ago did I convince myself she was not blind or dimwitted as her eyes began to focus and follow me.   Most days she just has what Beckie calls the 20-yard stare.

She is boring.

Soon enough she will demand attention, music and sounds from her bouncy chairs, Baby Einsteins and all those puppets.   But for now I’d be quite appreciative if she just smiled a little. Its like trying to get all mushy over a pet hermit crab, they just don’t inspire the heart to sing.

I am kinda looking forward to Beckie going back to work, since I will have Alana all to myself a couple days a week, and maybe we can start to find some connection.

the closest I’ve come to smiling for Daddy
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the most exciting thing I’ve done, ever

Siiiiiiingiiiiiiing

It doesn’t matter to that she can’t hold the tune, or gets the words wrong.   The joy that overcomes her is worth her having no shot at American Idol.   Sometimes   her singing is soulful like Sarah   McLachlan , sometimes she rocks like Sheryl Crow,   sometimes she morphs from moment to moment like Nelly Furtado, most times its buoyant like Gwen Stefani.   She can be a temperamental diva, but it always makes for a good show.

Hei Hei My My

Todd Snider – Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues

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The Build
RockShox Reba SL 2.9 100mm Fork
Fox Float RP2 Shock
Race Face Deus XC Cranks and BB
Shimano M540 Clipless pedals
Sram 990 11×34 Cassette and 991 Chain
Shimano XT front and Shimano XT Shadow rear deraileurs
Shimano XT shifters
FSA OS 150LX stem
Ritchey WCS Carbon handlebars
Salsa Juegos grips
Hayes Stroker Carbon Hydraulic V6 brakes\levers
NoTubes Flow rims on Hope Pro II hubs
Geax Saguaro 2.2 tires
Fizik Gobi saddle
Thompson Elite seatpost
and a piece of shitty old foam to mount my Forerunner

weight is about 28.25 lbs, should be a svelte sub-28 after I make the wheels tubeless.

Picked it up from Rage on Saturday, a few hours of tweaks and new parts in the ManCave to set the front and rear sag, and it was ready for a shakedown ride on the golf course with Kila. I immediately noticed a couple things – the fit felt pretty good, nothing I couldn’t enjoy with a few minor adjustments, but I was a tad more stretched out in the torso than on the Blur.   The seatpost slipped down on a few jumps, and coupled with leaning far forward, this position really hurts my balls.   The 4mm allen fixed it with a quick twist — to the seatpost that is , not my balls.   The bike is solid and stiff like I hoped, not overly plush like some of the bikes I’d tried, but the big wheels smoothed out the ride and emulated some of the effects of suspension. I climbed the staircase at the church on my first try, and rolled down some of the runoff-washes feeling smoother than I’d expect from 4 inches. The suspension i also like better than on the Blur – there is no VPP to stiffen up at the wrong time, so I get a little more feel of the trail and a little more softness.   The Blur could handle a lot, but it could feel too firm and jittery doing it. After enjoying the single-pivot on the Heckler and how compliant it could be in the chunk, I’m really glad this suspension is “less” active. ProPedal and fork-lockout can both be enabled with the flick of a switch, so I’m not at all worried about adverse effects from the suspension on smooth terrain.   I do notice some fork bob hammering on the road, but nothing I can’t tune by upping the compression damping or just locking it out.   No pedal bob to speak of with pro-pedal engaged.

Getting comfortable on the 29er will take some practice. I was scared of toppling on some of the turns, and slid out while standing up and cranking round a turn on the golf cart path.   It was slick with water, but still, it highlighted that finding your center on a 29r is a new challenge. As is acceleration – the initial shift in momentum takes more oomph, and it can be a little frustrating. I am sure I will get stronger after a few rides and learn to start my accelerations sooner.   Over the last 2 days I did a quick Hawes ride then mostly the same loop on the Blur the next day – I got and missed just about all the same spots, but for some reason I felt less dominant on the Hei Hei.   This is probably just general discomfort with the new ride.   The flip side is that once you get going before you know it you need to upshift cause you feel like you have no chain. In the ~5 hrs I’ve have on it in the last 5 days, I find I’m hopping up to the middle and large chain rings quickly once I get moving, and staying in them through some climbs if I can use my momentum to pull me through the initial efforts against gravity.   I have yet to try anything super steep or steps that could send me OTB, but running down the staircase at the Walgreens I felt for a sec like I was dangerously weighted forward.   Bailing on the bike is definitely harder since you are higher up, so those are all things I need to approach progressively so I don’t get the flyswatter effect some people say can endo you harshly on the big wheels.   A dog ride sampling some gnar below Red Mountain Park is in order, though I was quite comfy launching a little gap jump on the pump track behind Rage without any real trepidation.

Sunday was the first real ride, 7 of us did Bulldog Canyon.   It would be a good first ride – aggressive XC, lumpy and chunky to see what the 29er thing is all about, not too gnarly but hard enough with enough climbing and burliness to stretch anyone out of a comfort zone.   I’ve never done Bulldog with more than 3 others, and it was super fun.   Durtgurl, Chongoman, U2metoo, NoelG, Juan and Gary from Ohio.   The pace was social – 4 hrs to finish, which was more than Bulldog has ever taken me by far, but it was really fun to get out and gab and check out the awesome spring wildflowers and fiddle with the bike with some help and advice from some friends.

The ride did not start auspiciously.   Gary was borrowing DG’s bike, and as we readied to launch he realized he’d left his front wheel back in Ahwatukee.   In the 30 minutes it took us to fetch the Heckler and return, I regaled him with the story of going to Rocky Point for 4 days with all of Beckie’s family and her realizing in Ajo that she’d left the wheels for 2 bikes sitting in the garage, leading me to sneak into the workout room at the Village every day and spin on the stationary bike in the dark.

As expected, the first part of the ride I was all over the place.   Some of it was the bike, some the 29er, some that my wheels were at 40psi as opposed to the 32-ish I run when tubeless.   I was spinning out in the rear, which could be my posture or the tread pattern or the non-tubeless wheels.   I let out some air and the climbing got much better, and I dodged fate by not pinch flatting.   Not so lucky with the deraileurs – I chainsucked once on the front, something a lot of people reported as a problem with the bike.   I didn’t overthink it as both rings were all the way inside and I was descending a chunky section when it happened.   But after I got it up in the stand, I was disappointed to see the deraileur was setup pretty off.   Even more disappointing was twice flopping off the cassette, causing some gashes in a couple spokes and a bend on the inner-most ring.   I bent it back pretty well using a rotor truing wrench, and after the shop looked it over there is no real damage, but a little tweak of the limit screw would have saved much angst about breakage on the maiden voyage.   No bike is perfect off the stand, and I’ve   almost always gotten outstanding advice and service from Rage.   I certainly could have given the bike a more thorough once-over myself.   So the shop gets a mulligan while suffering through their own hectic week, and they made it right by fixing up the Hei Hei and promising me the Heckler’s rotor will be in for the   Spring Fling rides this weekend.   rant over.   I will now return to happy thoughts about the bike and the shop

Once I let out some psi and the ride went on, I got a lot comfier on the bike and a lot more aggressive.   It did not handle the huge chunks as well as the Heckler, but it certainly was better than the Blur.     I felt comfortable going over drops that on the Blur would be way sketchier and on the Heckler I would have leaned way back and praised the big suspension.   The hardest descent on Bulldog I had to dab, but I didn’t feel worried, just recognized that I was sliding sideways and put out a foot.     Coming off the top, the difficult drop-in was just fine once I got up on top of the bike enough to get rolling down the precipice, the wheel-grabbing spaces in the rocks and drops not any concern with the bigger wheels.   The entire descent went fine with me never getting close to wiping out on the extended stretches of loose rocks.   Some of it is skill, some of it the bike, either way its what I had hoped – a light and fast XC machine that will throw its own punches back at the AZ terrain.

Our crew at the top
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awww…what a cute couple
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Bombing down the last miles at 20mph, I skidded out just before running this guy over
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Some excellent pics from Kathleen on her blog.

And another fun video from Sam.

Big Noises in a tinyPackage

Alana hasn’t done much in the way of cooing or chirping; its not really her idiom.   My memories of G are so packed in with so little time for reflection, it wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t do the cute baby things at this stage either and I’m just mixing them up in my head.

Alana’s howling is well-documented, but other silliness comes out of her.   The baby sucks, loudly, hungrily, like a golf ball through a garden hose, the paint off a trailer hitch…someday she will make some man very happy.   Or maybe very frightened, like the guy in the Darwin Awards who tried to use a high-powered shop vac for a Valentine’s Day date.

She breathes a lot too.   A LOT! Pick her up, and you hear very intense very focused respiration, the mere process of being vertical taxing her tinyCapabilities for all they are worth.   Usually about this time is when she ass-pees, and a little squirting gurgling noise seeps out of her little bottom and ripples up through my hand.   Sometimes the noise is so faint i’m not sure if I’m feeling it or hearing it.   Who knew moist poo could be so cute.

Her farts are the funniest by far.   They are shameless, and shake the room.   You always figure big dudes=big farts — NOT SO!   Its more a ratio of gasseous volume to valve diameter.   Still, you just don’t expect them to have such a deep bassline.   I expect to see a plump pair of jammies shooting across the room like a deflating balloon in their wake, and a dessicated little stick figure left lying in the basinette.

Geekery Marathon

I’m in the process of this very boring, very tedious, very important project at work.   I need to build about 100 test scripts that exercise an API and can be tested by automation against a known response set.   The requests and responses are both in JSON notation, which is very precise in its use of syntax and very dense with arrays nested in hashes nested in arrays nested in hashes ad nauseam, and the responses are pages long.   The cut\paste and general detail of the work in painful.

So i’ve been easily distracted by the blog as a flightly little pleasure toy.   I wanted to add some more functional plugins to the site that would show latest comments and latest posts on my blogroll.   This always involves fiddling with a few sample plugins, tweaks, and spelunking through code from developers around the world.   A few hours of effort led me to Get Recent Comments for the comments list now on the sidebar. Its got a very easy interface for formatting which allows you to use preloaded macros and combine them with freehand html.

After 2 hrs I was kinda rolling, so moved onto a recent-post streamer for my blogroll. This took a lot of fiddling to get what I wanted and in the format I wanted it, and after another 2 hours I was still evaluating and prototyping. I was liking one plugin called Feed Reading Blogroll but it required the use of widgets in your sidebar and the use of WordPress 2.7.1.   I’ve stayed away from widgets since they overwrite a lot of manual plugin code I’d built into the sidebar where I could control the formatting, and under WordPress 2.5 widgets seemed a little flaky.   You can only resist progress for so long, and I was a year behind on my version of WordPress, hanging doggedly on v2.5 since it was good enough.   Sooooooo…

I got sidetracked into upgrading.   This first required a full dl of all my code and a diff against the 2.5 default code to track all my edits.   Then a lot of fumbling about with my ftp client since it kept locking the connections to my ISP every 50 or so file uploads, was choking on recursive deletes, and I forgot to disable all my plugins when I started the upgrade process so the new version of WordPress blew up initially.   This meant falling back to the old version, more flumbling with the locking connections, until I found a management page in my website’s admin suite that let me kick ftp connections.   So I basically camped out on the page kicking connections as fast as I could while the ftp client kept establishing fresh ones, and eventually got the 1,000   v2.7.1 files uploaded.   Modify the DB to support the new version, edit the sidebar.php where it choked on deactivated plugins not wrapped in if statements, reactivate the plugins, and then begin the process of comparing all my v 2.5 tweaks to the v 2.7.1 code to see which ones I had to re-add.

It was about 5pm when I went to work on putting back my smileys, again.     WordPress once again redid its implementation of tinyMCE, and the code looked like it was written in linux so appeared as one ginormous line instead of formatted.   This was a search\replace\reverse-engineering PITA.   My emotions plugin code from v 2.5 was solid, but I had to figure out how to get it initialized by the new implementation of tinyMCE, and how to load its buttons into the WYSIWYG editor.   So I picked one plugin with a small code block (fullscreen) and manually formatted 4k of javascript code to confirm it was comparable to my emotions javascript, which it was.   Then I searched the whole WordPress install for the term “fullscreen” and figure out where I had to add my plugin name “emotions” to get it initialized.   Next I hacked through the whole code base to find its button.   After striking out on the buttons, and whittling down the list of places where “fullscreen” was called to relevant hunks of code, I realized that the buttons were picked from one large image, and that tinyMCE already had the smileys “button” in its library.   It was ready to be called by my changes above.   The files I modded were /wp-admin/ includes/post.php and/wp-admin/gears-manfiest.php.   It was now close to 8pm.

Back to the widgets to get my site widgetized and see how it looked.   I mostly got it to look right, figured out some code pieces I could pull outside the widgetizing block in sidebar.php to not be overwritten, screwed around with putting them in elements to get them correctly formatted in their new div, etc etc for a couple more hours.   And tumbled to a bug in the Recent Comments code where the title got fubarred due to any change in the widgets panel.   This took about an hour of trying to fix it on my own, until I finally figured out a workaround (resave your options for the plugin after every save to the widgets panel) and left a comment on the developer’s blog in hopes that they might fix it.   Paying back the community, as it were.

It was probably 9:30-10ish at least when I dialed in completely on the blogroll features.   It was a nice plugin, but I did not like the format.   The code was very dense and used the <abbr> html tag a lot which I did not know how to use.   The embedded php was also super-thick, and I struggled mightily to figure out where the inline styles were used vs. the optional css file.   About 3-4 more hours went by where I fiddled with it, tried and rejected a few other plugins, blew off taking out Kila, blew off working out,   and got it kinda sorta good enough when I left a comment on the developer’s site.   He was in Germany, and it was now daytime over there, and his reply helped me see the simple thing I’d missed – what I thought was a link from which I could not remove the underline was actually a bottom border.   Mixing that with some inline styles that I’d sorted out,   i quit about 2am.

My giant pile of work is still there waiting for me.