I received a book about orienteering over the holidays (I had requested it). My trip back to Washington from Iowa last week was long enough, due to a four hour wait for the connecting flight, for me to get through the book.

Conveniently, there was an orienteering event in Seattle yesterday, and I went (results here). This was my first event, so I ran the beginner course. I liked it and plan to continue attending events. I think the sport will be really interesting on more challenging courses because of the decision making that will go into navigating to the controls.

Back to the book: it would benefit from updating and releasing a new edition. The basic information is still accurate, but parts of the book have become outdated, based on what I saw and learned from talking to an experienced club member.

This evening Michael looked at an apple I was eating and said something that sounded awfully like, “What’s that?” Chao-Jen and I both looked at him and then each other, both surprised. I looked back at Michael, pointed at the apple, and said, “Apple.” Almost immediately, he responded, “Apple.”

He said it a few more times, clearly referring to the apple, although it did become “bapple” a couple times.

Amazing.

He has said other words (including “owl” when looking at one of his sippy cups), but this seemed much more interactive.

Well, I spoke too soon; the 737 is not so bad when it comes to changing tables. We were on a 757 today and found that it had no baby changing tables on board.

This is not of general interest, but for anyone who wonders, A320 lavatories have better baby changing tables than 737 lavatories. If your baby is under five or six months, it probably does not matter, but the 737 table is really short. This somewhat redeems the A320 for me.

I decided to do an experiment to verify that Blackbird Pie is caching tweets locally. If it does not, then it makes more sense to stick with Lifestream for everything or to use screen captures.

Try clicking on the date to verify the tweet is actually deleted.

For more context on what this post is about, see “Site Revamp, Again — Now Embedding Tweets“.

At the beginning of the year, I added the right sidebar that contains content from my Twitter account. The motivation was to automatically capture tweets I make, most of which are retweets referring to articles I have read. I like that the content is automatically captured (although a lot ends up being redundant), but I do not like that it is in a different “stream” than my blog posts. All of the information is kept in sequence on the feed streams page, but that is not quite what I want. For instance, there is no way to comment here about any of those tweets, so for a while I have wanted a way to get tweets inlined in the blog feed.

Enter Blackbird Pie, which learned about yesterday from here. This provides a simple way to embed tweets into posts, keeping the links in the tweet active. For example:

"Geneagrapher 0.2.1-r1 Released". http://davidalber.net/?p=1031

November 3, 2010 10:35 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DavidAlber

David Alber

The downside of this is that capturing the tweets is not automated, but given how I am pulling tweets onto this site and tweeting about posts here, maybe that is a good thing. Perhaps some day I will find or write something to implement the cross-posting logic I want, but for now it is not that big of a burden to do it manually.

Here’s the initial plan: I will start embedding tweets, but also will keep using Lifestream for the right sidebar and the feed streams page (I am too busy to adjust the site style right now anyway).

Introduction

As I was about to leave for work last Wednesday I noticed that the front tire of my bike was flat. “No problem”, I thought, “just a quick fix.”

This was only the second flat I have had since getting my bike, so doing this simple task takes a little longer than it should. I was “happy” to have the opportunity to rehearse the motions at home before having to do it somewhere else.

My first flat happened within a day or two of getting the bike. The cause for both flats was that the rim tape was in the wrong position. For those who do not know what I am talking about, a quick explanation follows.

Wheels

A bike’s wheel consists of a hub (the thing about which the wheel rotates), the spokes, the rim, and nipples that connect the spokes to the rim. The nipples drop in through holes in the outside of the rim (the outside being the part where the tire and tube go). These holes are drilled through the rim and have relatively sharp edges; sharp enough, at least, to wear a hole through the tube. To keep the tube from deflating due to contact with the holes, some sort of strip is placed along the trough of the rim.

This strip — rim tape — had moved out of place for both of my flats.

My rim tape is a a sort of plastic that does not seem ideal. It is not glued down everywhere. Tension is supposed to keep the unsecured portions in place, but that is where the failures keep occurring. I am going to investigate this a little more and possibly replace the rim tape with a more cloth-like tape.

Extra Trouble

Since I was in a hurry, I swapped in my spare tube with the intention of patching the other tube at work. When I got my tire back on, though, I was having trouble with one of the brake pads always contacting the disc (I have disc brakes on my bike). Before this episode I was not too mechanically familiar with the brakes.

Prior to exhausting all ideas, I looked down through the gap between the pads and the disc and noticed a piece of metal that looked entirely out of place. This gave me cause open the brake assembly and investigate, which was something I would have been doing sooner or later with or without cause. Of course, disassembling something unfamiliar always carries the exhilarating possibility of not knowing how to reassemble it.

I found two bolts that appeared to hold the thing together and was amazed at how much they had been tightened. (Note to self: check if the bolts were tightened to some specified torque and handle as appropriate. The idea of the brake assembly coming apart during a ride is unappealing.)

When I finally got the two bolts out, half of the brake came off (as expected) and then popped into three pieces. Not too bad, but you never know what you are going to get. The pieces’ purposes were pretty straightforward: the external housing, the brake pad, and a semi-springy metal piece that serves a role of limiting the motion of the brake pads. The out-of-place piece of metal that I referred to above was the semi-springy piece. The issue was that one of the “arms” had been bent and was between the brake pad and the disc. I am not sure if it was there before the tire was removed and replaced, but it seems fairly certain that the squeeky noise coming from the brake recently was related to this.

Using pliers, I simply bent the part back into its intended shape. Hopefully that will be the end of that. If that part was between the disc and brake pad for a while, I suspect the pad may have worn unevenly. I did not think to investigate this before reassembling the thing, but I will check it out next time the brake is disassembled.

I wish I had taken pictures of all of this to make it more compelling, but I was in a hurry.

Next Time

Overall, I enjoy this sort of thing. I will, however, be making changes to make the work environment more efficient.

Having a repair stand will make doing this stuff easier and more fun in the future. More space would be nice too. Also, a separate T25 star-shaped wrench would be handy. I have this wrench on my multi-tool, but it was not convenient using it through the spokes to adjust the position of the interior brake pad.

For all of you out there who are wondering where I will be from February 24, 2010 through February 26, 2010, I have your answer: I will be at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP10). The conference is being held in Seattle, so really, I will be pretty much where I would have been anyway.

Let me know if you want to meet there.

Now that I am getting more serious about using my bike, I am ready to begin exploring phase two: events. Although I lived in Iowa for 20+ years, I never had the desire to do RAGBRAI while I was there. I am now thinking that I would like to do it sometime (add it to the list of things I want to do eventually).

For those not in the know, RAGBRAI — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa — is an annual, organized, week-long bike ride across Iowa. They announced this year’s route tonight:

RAGBRAI XXXVIII will treat riders to one of the shortest and flattest routes ever as it winds through northern Iowa from Sioux City to Dubuque.

That combination means the 10,000 riders will navigate a 442-mile route that ranks as third-easiest historically, at least as far as hills and mileage go. Weather remains a wild card. So train well.

It happens in late July.

So, who’s with me?

IRIOTI: I read it on the internet. (Therefore, it must be true.)