GLOBADOM

Vic will be discharged from the hospital, either Monday (ie, already) or Tuesday. The cracked ribs and collarbone will keep him out of action for a while, but he seemed in good spirits when I saw him (and his lovely wife) on Monday around noon. We had a good visit. He’s pretty badly beat up, but eager to get back on the bike. That’s good!

My friend Vic came out for the Saturday morning bike ride with me, fell down, and is now spending the evening at Richmond General Hospital as they treat broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a partly collapsed lung, and a seriously rung bell. I’ll be off to see him tomorrow. Remember kids: it’s not fun to make people with rib injuries laugh.

As a regular reader of Penny Arcade, I was bemused when they did a comic and newspost on something called Katamari Damacy, which they liked more than candy.

That box art! That ludicrous gameplay! The promo copy seems to have been written by Bizarro Jesse Jackson: “Featuring ball-rolling and object-collecting gameplay mechanics of mesmerizing fluidity, reduced to Pac-Man simplicity, through pure absurdity.” And did I mention the luscious, juicy price? Namco is selling this as a budget title, which means about $30 in Canada.

Speaking of cheap games, SOCOM II, Jak II, and Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando are all “Greatest Hits” now, which means they’re cheap and cheerful too. Not to mention SSX 3, which is sweet snowy goodness. But I already bought that at full price.

Sorry, no photos yet, but The Lovely One’s bicycle underwent some major surgery Friday. I did a fork transplant in order to add new brakes in hopes of improving the braking. Did it work? A painful but hilarious endo during the first test ride says yes, emphatically!

Alas, it didn’t go quite as planned. In fact, it took three tries to make the brakes work.

Attempt #1: I replaced the fork with one that had cantilever/V-brake posts, as I didn’t have a long-reach brake around with any decency. In the long term, I may try to buy some for use in this project and on the Auto-Mini. Dave donated some very nice Suntour XCM cantilever brakes for the BMX LX, and I tried to put them on. Unfortunately, there was some odd incompatibility, and they almost-but-not-quite worked. I think they’re designed for a slightly different mounting post.

Attempt #2: No trouble. I have lots of other, cheesier cantilever brakes. I grab a set of plastic-bodied Exage brakes from a bike in the shed, and pop those on. A perfect fit. Unfortunately, the new fork had a slightly shorter steer tube than the old one, and there was no way I could fit the a headset-mounted cable stop. Which sucked. But I wasn’t licked yet.

Attempt #3: Grab some cheesy linear-pull (V-brake) units I had in my parts bucket. The sad part was this obviated using the really neat Campagnolo brake lever I had (it was from their long-defunct mountain bike group, but would only work properly with conventional or canti brakes), forcing me to dig into the parts bucket for a linear-pull lever (Alivio, sigh). But it all worked, at long last.

That led to the amusing test ride. The previous brake was nasty and flexy, and required a high-effort pull to get any stopping power. I pulled the new brake as if it was the old brake, and learned that short-wheelbase bikes are very happy to lift their rear wheels. Then I lost my balance and endoed over the bike.

I did some other bike stuff at the same time. I completely stripped the donor BMX, I examined the Auto-Mini with an eye to doing some other projects on it (to do: get a frame gusset welded in, and possibly canti posts added to the fork, then lace up my new 3-speed hub into a 20″ wheel, expressly for this bike), and I made a problematic attempt to rehab two bad wheels into one good one by transplanting a freehub body from one to the other.

I’m on the back side of my vacation time. Last day at home is October 5, my birthday.

Andrew’s Serenepia is in the midst of a discussion about the difference between good exploitation and bad exploitation as regards Indian coir-mat workers. Andrew is completely wrong, of course, but the post and comments (my own being by far the best) are quite interesting. Read it if only for my great review of Greg Costikyan’s First Contract.

I just noticed one more amusing link: the protagonist of the book is an Indian businessman.

I don’t know; does the sarcasm come through in this post, or do I just sound arrogant?

My hair is about 3mm long now. The long-threatened buzz-cut finally happened. You can’t go bald if you shave your head, right?

Amusing side-effect: I could now very easily win a Jacques Villeneuve (left) look-alike contest.

Last night I went to the Burnaby Velodrome, the only, er, oldest indoor velodrome on the continent.

I had only ridden the velodrome once before, two years ago during an open-house event. But I have ridden just enough fixed-gear to have familiarity with the idea (never stop pedaling). So I paid my drop-in fee, rented a bike, and went for it.

The velodrome was way too much fun. The scariest part is getting back on the track for the first time. The banking in the corners is 47 degrees. You cannot walk up or stand on the track in the corners. If you ride too slow, some combination of your tire starting to slip down and your pedal striking the track will drop you like a stone, so minimum corner speed is 30 km/h. The first few laps involved an act of will in which I watched other riders go around the corners without falling down, and thus told myself I could do the same, no matter how wrong it felt.

The attraction of track riding is the purity. No gears, no brakes, no coasting, no real turns (the corners are so steep that it’s quite typical to have to steer against the bank in the corner at less than race pace), no distractions except other riders and the creepy sensations if you try to ride on he plywood sections at the top of the track corners.

I’m still a little scary on the boards. My line wanders, I don’t think I trust the bike enough yet, and I was deathly afraid of doing something dumb and knocking over someone else (I didn’t, though). But the sensations are amazing. You whip through the corners and get sucked down into them by the G-forces; you look down to see riders below you in corners (which isn’t an exaggeration: at mid-track in the corners, you are about 3m up, well over the heads of any humans in the infield); the bikes are quite silent except for a little track rumble, much of that from the various places where the track is taped up or the finish is chipped.

Dues are a steep $325/a this year, but if I can hit the track twice a week, it will be worthwhile.

Most annoying aptitude test ever. I scored 78/79. (þ: Colby Cosh)

Presidential debates, Al Gore thinks he knows everything, John Kerry turned orange, stop me when I find something that will matter in 10 years.

Ah yes. Rutan’s SpaceShipOne (Burt: put the spaces back in that name) did its first qualifying X Prize flight today. One notable glitch: the plane barrel-rolled more than 20 times during the ascent. That’s not right.

I was gabbing with my dad about this last night, and we discussed the difference between the serious, measured program Rutan has been running (flight tests, rollout tests; lots of tests) and the insane, possibly suicidal enterprise that is the Canadian Da Vinci project.

The one-sentence comparison: SpaceShipOne is being tested like any other experimental spacecraft, by a group of people with a lot of experience designing experimental aircraft; the Da Vinci project expects that its first flight test will be its first space launch. Not a good idea.

The irony is that the basic Da Vinci concept has merit: Erick did some calculations as part of an sfu.general discussion, and the Wildfire gets some real advantages from its balloon lift to 80,000 feet, as opposed to the lower launch altitude of SpaceShipOne from White Knight. But the advantage of Rutan’s airplanes is (aside from being a technology at which Rutan and company have world-class expertise) that you get to pick where your airplanes land. Balloons and parachutes are less amenable to guidance.

The day dawned foggy, and the drive along Barnet Highway reminded me of something odd: video game special effects have taught me to look at the real world more closely.

typical video game fog effects show background objects popping rather suddenly out of the fog, something you can often see on a game which is simulating both fog and some sort of trees. It looks quite strange. But on Barnet, what did I see but trees, popping rather dramatically out of the fog. Just like in video games. Until I started looking at video games critically, I didn’t notice the details of how we see fog.

After that start, the weather improved throughout the day, which was good, because I was still feeling a bit under the weather. Didn’t stop me from doing the ride, though. Big turnout, good weather, and no wind meant we turned in a pretty quick tour, averaging over 30 km/h. still feeling ill, I decided to miss out on what was probably a very fun extra leg to Iona. But I was glad for the break.

On the trip home (I was driving), The Lovely One was most perturbed by a bit of a cut-off delivered by a young man in a GMC van. She sweetly requested that I cut him off if I got the chance. Now, that’s not something I do, but lesson for the van driver: if you’re not paying attention, I won’t have to cut you off to get you stuck in traffic.

Here’s how it went down: we entered the Barnet as part of a bolus of traffic, I was following a safe distance behind Mr. Van watching him blithely roll up behind a slower car for no reason other than he wasn’t driving very well (or maybe he figured he could push the car into going a little faster). So I asked The Lovely One to observe, punched the throttle on the Tercel (all 85 horsepower!), and passed him ith alacrity, just in time to slide back into the slow lane ahead of the aforementioned slow car.

Too bad for Mr. Van: I took the only passing space available before we caught up to slower traffic in the fast lane, which he was now well and truly stuck behind. He probably would have had room to pass, but I took it. I probably would have let him have that spot, but he was naughty.

In other news, I’m not that sick. We’re definitely on the tail-end of my disease. Good.

And now, sports. Following up on yesterday’s Villeneuve-o-rama, he qualified 12th for the Chinese GP, which starts at 2300 PDT. That’s a midly disappointing result: well behind his teammate Alonso (6th) and sworn enemies BAR, who have Jenson Button in third spot on the grid. Not bad for a guy who has been away from virtually any F1 cars for a year, though.

In other sports news, there’s a been a rather serious, and rather odd doping positive in pro bike racing. In this case, it’s Tyler Hamilton, probably the second-best American cyclist right now (he won the Olympic TT in August), and a rider with a squeaky-clean reputation.

As of right now, he’s still asserting his innocence, despite 3 positive test results on a new blood-doping test that screens for homologous blood transfusions (injecting blood from someone else; if you remove your own blood and store it for later injection, that’s an autologous transfusion), a pre-EPO tactic for increasing hematocrit (red blood cell) levels, which basically makes your blood better at carrying oxygen (as long as you don’t mind the non-trivial risk of heart failure in your sleep).

If this stuff all holds up, Hamilton could be looking at a two-year ban from pro racing. Since Hamilton is 33, that would be something close to forever, career-wise.

This will, in the usual bike-fan knitting circles, fire up the usual debate about whether cycling should succumb to the inevitable and allow some sort of regulated consumption of various performance-enhancing drugs and doping techniques.

I have always argued the answer is no, and for some very simple reasons. Drug prohibition in sport is not like drug prohibition for crystal meth. If I start taking crystal meth recreationally [what would qualify as non-recreational consumption?], it doesn’t cause strong incentives for my co-workers to do the same, thus driving them somewhat unwillingly into taking the same risks I took on my own initiative.

To elaborate on that, everyone agrees that most of these drugs would require some sort of dosage restriction, so that you didn’t get some lunatic running monster win-or-die doses of stuff like steroids and hematocrit-modifiers, and forcing everyone to chase them.

But how is regulating these drug doses going to be easier than the current system, in which the powers that be already mandate regular testing, both in and out of competition, for a great number of pro riders? All advocates of limited-use regimens seem to be able to argue for is that doctor-supervised doses will be safer and more easily regulated. I am seriously skeptical.

And that’s how I spent the first day of my vacation.

A quick coda: this blog is for you, the reader. Let me know if you like one kind of random yammering better than another kind. My mailbox is always open.