GLOBADOM

I couldn’t do the club ride today due to a scheduling conflict, but I did manage to run a few other errands, and kept pretty busy. I spent a few hours doing a major reconstruction of the fixed gear, one of my less-ridden bikes.

The reason I wasn’t riding it so much is that in the first iteration, I had created a monstrously overgeared bike. A typical road-going fixed-gear will use a gear like 42-15 or so, but I was riding around on something like a 52-16. That’s a crazy gear, super-high, so the bike was all but impossible to ride up a serious hill, and coming down was almost as bad, as the high gear ensured you couldn’t slow the bike down much by backpedaling.

So, since I had the bike apart, I decided to correct most of the bike’s other fixed-gear sins: quick releases are a fixie no-no, mostly out of a respect for track traditions and a serious desire for the rear wheel to not come loose while riding in the velodrome (if possible, a loose rear wheel is an even worse experience on a fixed gear than a geared freewheel bike, but then most drivetrain failures are). So I decided to respace to 110 mm at the rear, the traditional fixed-gear standard, so that I could use other hubs in the future, and so I could remove some spacers from my current axle, convert it to nuts from a quick-release, and possibly use the second set of threads on the other side (this is a good thing, because it means I can now put a second choice of gearing, or even a freewheel, on the spare side).

When a shop re-spaces your steel frame (usually to make it wider so you can use modern drivetrains with 8-10 speeds) they probably use the fancy term cold-set, which sounds nicer than “bend frame without using heat”. Which is what they do, and what I did on the porch. The approved technique involves a 2×4 and judicious force, but since I was going narrower and felt lazy, I just stood on the frame a little, then un-bent it a bit to fix my overenthusiasm, then used my nifty dropout-alignment tools to make the final tweaks. Some string and cleverness nicely substitutes for a frame-alignment tool, and you can get away without using dropout-alignment tools, but the latter is fun to play with, and I got my set for free, more or less.

Changing the gearing was surprisingly involved. The old chainring I was using was permanently attached to the cheap original crank from the bike. This bit of unpleasantness was removed from the bike and put back on the parts pile, and out came a 5-bolt crank and appropriate ring. Two appropriate rings in the end, since the easiest way I had to solve some spacer issues with the chainring bolts was to add another, smaller chainring just outside the actual drive ring. It looks silly, but it works just fine, and gives me a theoretical option to drop the gearing slightly, from the 44 to a 40.

I got the project mostly reassembled before dark (there are some outstanding issues with re-centering the rim, adjusting the rear brake, and fixing a flat tire), and retired to the computer feeling quietly satisfied with a fairly well-executed bike project.

I also found the SCSI drives I needed this week (yay eBay), and have convinced my father to focus on the Canon A70 or A75 as his first digital camera. They’re really good.

Uh-oh. There’s some ready-made frosting in the fridge. I don’t know what evil the frosting cartels work to make it so smooth and tasty, so close to being pre-mixed butter and sugar, but um, it’s okay to just eat that stuff, right?

Today is one of those days I use to mark the seasons: the first day I absolutely, positively had to have lights on for my commute.

I depart from the house, ideally, at 0715, with and expected arrival at 0745. Official sunrise was at 0734 today. Sunset is not until 1823 local time, and I finish work at 1700, so I should make it home without needing the lights, though I often run a red blinkie at the rear just for extra conspicuity.

Lighting options have greatly increased lately, mainly due to the rise of white LEDs. These are great lights for being seen, but don’t yet throw enough light for really good seeing at night. My commute is well-lit, but I want to try some night-riding of trails this year.

I’m using a simple 3-LED blinking white light at the front, and I have a set of good used incandescent lights which should be usable for trail riding. I’m experimenting with them now: the battery is depleted, so I need to hook up a new one. Fortunately, I have a serious 12V sealed lead-acid unit that I managed to get for free. Unfortunately, it’s about 15 pounds, and big. If I can find a way to securely mount it, it should work for my needs. And provide some weight training in the bargain.

Played indoor soccer yesterday, as the lunchtime intramural season started up. My neck is still hurting 24 hours later. We lost 7-2.

Hey, what can I say? You’ll never think about Middle Earth the same way again. (Þ: Darren Barefoot.)

Obviously, I’m not reading Joe Kissel’s Interesting Thing of the Day often enough. He recently did an article on

The Evolution of Scrolling which I appreciate for a few reasons.

I briefly worked as a hardware and software tester for Kensington (their Gravis facility in Burnaby, actually) in 2000, and Joe was the guy in the office two doors away, and met with us testing grunts fairly often. I did some testing of the TurboRing trackball he describes, and several other devices, including some joysticks and the latest and greatest versions of the software for both the Kensington mice/trackballs and the Gravis joysticks and joypads.

The oddly named Expert Mouse (it’s a large-ball trackball) which Joe talks about is still my very favourite input device. I like the efficient, precise movement combined with a device that doesn’t wander all over the desktop, which is what mice do. It is a quirk of cheapness that I don’t own one of these most excellent devices already.

My retirement present from Gravis was a prototype gamepad, which is kind of a neat thing to have.

So lots of projects right now. I need, for obscure reasons, some high-performance 50-pin SCSI drives. I’m trying to find a nice new camera for my parents (DMC-LC70 on eBay, I’m looking at you), I’m trying to buy Eric’s camera, and there’s the usual fuzz of bicycle projects ranging from the sane (replace brake pads) to the insane (just about everything to do with the Auto-mini, a BMX for my mom…).

Regarding these, if you have any suggestions for a source of old SCSI drives, or a good camera in the $200-300 price range, I’m all ears.

My very, very stupidest project of recent days was the Katamari Damacy music project. Essentially, I loved and desired the music from this great little game. I searched high and low for some secret PS2 hacking tool that would give me access to the music tracks. The short answer is that it would probably have required hacking assembly code in the hopes of finding the entry and exit points to the music data.

Then, as I was ready to go insane (or possibly order the soundtrack from Japan), I discovered when you finish the game, you unlock clean copies of all the in-game songs. Oh. New plan: play songs through the receiver, run cable from the receiver’s headphone jack to the laptop audio-in.

Not to be ungrateful, but the sound room plays most of these tracks as a loop (interestingly skipping some sort of short start loop with most of these songs; presumably this is how the songs are looped during each level in the game) with no indication of where the songs end. So I can’t tell how long to record.

So other than that, the usual: bike ride in the morning, Katamari Damacy in the afternoon, dropped by Daniel’s house in the evening, coming up with a terrible parlour game: given a movie title, add another movie that shares at least one word with the first film, and then describe the mash-up plot before giving the film name.

Example: “I want to see that film about the kids who build a Russian nuclear sub in their back yards and then defect to the us side! You know, The Hunt for Red October Sky.”

Paul “won” the game with his description of the daring adventures of a group of WWII sailors who plotted to take over a German submarine by pretending to be crazy, U-571 Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Robert X. Cringely (the PBS one, not the Info World one, long story…) has a natural gift for overstatement. Erick tends to think he’s a complete idiot most of the time. Nonetheless, he’s got the scoop on some interesting, if long court documents.

The scary court submission suggesting MS told naughty lies to the Department of Justice and others. The explanatory column.

Curse you Penny Arcade for addicting me to this wonderful game! I have picked up a cow, two types of car, a couple of motorcycles, and some jungle gyms. Current project: find some way of extracting the soundtrack so I can make my own CD of the rich, tasty music. Oh yes.

So the City of Vancouver is about to ask its citizens to vote on whether they want a ward system to replace the at-large council system which the city currently uses. Mercifully, I live two municipalities away, so I don’t have to make an excuse for missing the civic plebiscite on the 16th.

The entierety of left-leaning politics in town, from the Mayor to the Georgia Straight to Mike Harcourt have come out firmly in favour of wards, apparently on the basis that what they have done for Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington D.C., they can do for us. Forgive my suspicions that they figure this would cement the current COPE majority on council, since the west side of town would no longer the gain the unfair advantage of having an overabundance of citzens who bother to vote, thus ensuring their interests are well-represented in city hall. The nerve! Exercising franchise! It must be racist! Or something. The accusations (it hurts minorities, it’s unconstitutional, &c.) are weird. I’m not sure if the proponents believe this, or just believe there will be political gain to be had.

The thing that surprises me is that this is the same gang calling quite vociferously for some form of proportional representation at the provincial level. of course, in some key ways, the current at-large system has much more similarity (though some notable differences) to current pro-rep systems. Meanwhile, the proposed wards are are a perfect equivalent to the current federal and provincial systems of electing MPs and MLAs.

I think the move to a ward system represents a move to a slightly less perfect form of democracy. This isn’t an entire province, or even counry, where ridings are a consequence of having vast swathes of territory to represent. Vancouver can be traversed by bicycle in less than an hour in virtually any direction. It’s not a challenge to check out something happening two neighbourhoods away.

But I’m going to leave off. Port Moody is in the throes of dealing with some major developments, notably recreating Rocky Point, facing some sort of upcoming rapid transit system, the reconstruction of Murray St. for the purpose of making traffic go faster, and a lot of development.

More some other time.

Katamari Damacy. Well, Mike gave me a gift certificate, which was quickly turned into Katamari Damacy. Funny story about that: I got all excited after he came over around 7 last night, told him what I was going to buy with the gift certificate, so we jumped in his car, drove to the mall, and as we got there, I remembered that it was Tuesday, and the mall closed at 6:30. So I went back and got it this evening.

The short version, after an hour of play: the game’s graphics, how can I put this charitably? They are bad. Some of this may be the look the designers wanted for the game. But we’re talking almost untextured objects in many cases, and no visual depth. But the graphic design of the game, as opposed to how many neat visual effects are on screen, is High Japanese Weirdness. I love you, Japan! You’re weird! Don’t ever change! The music is silly, in a very good way. The controls are pretty tight, but the experience of rolling around your Katamari-ball once you’ve gotten it good and lopsided (and if you’re clumsy like me, that will happen a lot), is annoying, but it’s supposed to be.

Who cares? You can pick up cats! Yes, roll over birds, mice, almost any household object you can imagine, animals of all description, and make a big ball. It’s funny, it’s fun, I’m quite happy to have spent $30 on this thing, because I’ve been playing for an hour and I can’t stop grinning. The cut-scenes are actually funny, featuring as they do the King of the Cosmos, who is almost certainly on drugs, and dresses a lot like Chairman Kaga.

Yeah, so go play Katamari Damacy. I can’t wait until I make a ball big enough to pick up cows.

31. And darned nearly hairless thanks to my recent close shave. Instead of ruminating about being old, I think I’ll ruminate about being bald.

I’m not really bald. I just shaved my head down to about 2 mm. Since I am a perpetually warm person (not just my personality, either!) I enjoyed the cooler feel. But really, it’s a little much. I, who didn’t generally wear a hat even in the rain (I have no use for umbrellas, but that’s another story), now wear hats all the time, and not just to hide my unsightly skull. It’s also to keep my unsightly skull warm, a job previously done by, you know, hair.

Have a happy birthday today, even if it is my birthday you’re having.