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Tour 2011, part 2, Preamble

2011 seems to be the year to travel. We started in January with a new car and a trip to California, Arizona, and New Mexico; a short trip to Vancouver, BC (via Birch Bay, WA), a Linux conference in Bellingham, and the Conference Marathon in June, hitting the ANWG conference in Salem, Big Sky Fiber Fest in Hamilton, MT, and back to Oregon for the USENIX Federated Conferences Week in Portland.

"Leviathan," our trusty Santana tandem we've had since 1986

Along the way, we ordered our long-awaited replacement for the HPV Leviathan, the trusty Santana Arriva XC tandem bicycle we’ve been riding for 25 years, and signed up for an Adventure Cycling supported camping tour in Upper Michigan in September. Over the 25 years, we’ve strapped the big fat-tired tandem in the back of a pickup truck and, later, on a roof-top rack, variously on the pickup with canopy, on a Nissan Sentra, and, for 17 years, on a 1994 Jeep Cherokee. When we traded in the Cherokee on a new Jeep Patriot, a wee smaller vehicle, the tandem rack no longer fit. Also, as we found out back in 1988, it is very difficult to box a full-sized tandem so that the airlines and rail lines will accept it, and, lately, if you do meet the size requirements, the oversized baggage fees (special for bicycles) are prohibitive.

The "Green Machine" with full trailer, ready to roll

Our new ride, a Bike Friday Project Q, which has been featured before, is a bit lighter, uses a bit more modern technology, and, most importantly, breaks down into luggage-sized pieces, so it can be checked as ordinary baggage on public transit.   We initially ordered only one case, a modified hard-shell Samsonite pullman case that converts to a trailer, but found getting even the single-bike conversion mode into one case was problematic.   So, a second case was ordered, which comes with a stacking attachment that allows it to swing out of the way for access to both bags when configured as a trailer.

And, here it is, packed and ready to be transported.  With both cases, there is room for additional bike gear: shoes, helmets, tools, and bike clothes.  The various bike components–tubes, seats, pedals, etc–slip into felt bags.  The brown blankets are spread out on the ground or floor for assembly/disassembly and the bike held together with slip joints and clamp screws.  The front half of the tandem is on the right, and the back half is on the left, along with the trailer components.

So, we’re off again for Tour 2011, part 2, which will take us to Montana, where we plan to reassemble the bike and ride some of our old familiar routes around the Bitterroot Valley in the evenings: it’s a business trip, with a few days at the customer’s site.  We’ll spend a day or so at our cabin in the Mission Mountains, but probably no time for biking, before heading farther east to Minnesota, where the Unix Curmudgeon plans to attend a high school reunion for the first time, having avoided previous ones for the past 50 years.  Depending on weather, we might or might not break out the bike in Minnesota, as we’re only there for a few days before racing back west to Chaos Central to train hard for Tour 2011, part 3, which will be in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in September.  So far, we’ve put less than 50 miles on the new machine, in a series of 6-12 mile rides, part of the break-in period with frequent adjustments plus learning to break it down and assemble it quickly.  Stay tuned.

 

Summer Conference Marathon

The solstice is a few days away yet, but the unofficial start of summer is traditionally Memorial Day, when days become longer and travel is easier. And, travel we have, despite the average price of gasoline hovering around $4. If time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening all at once, it isn’t working this year.

Olympia Weavers Guild display at ANWG 2011

The month of June opened with a quick dash south from the southern reaches of Puget Sound, down the Cowlitz River, up the Columbia and Willamette rivers, between the capitol cities of Washington and Oregon, accompanied by frequent showers. Our destination was the biennial ANWG conference. The Association of Northwest Weaver’s Guilds (the initials of which are pronounced “anweg”) combines tutorials with a showcase and trade show. Having limited time, we went for the showcase–displays by each of the member guilds–and the trade show. We’re members of two of the guilds, the Tacoma Weavers Guild and the Olympia Weavers Guild. The Nice Person contributed to the Olympia display, which won the award for best interpretation of the conference theme, “Exploring Fiber Horizons.”

Judy with her "challenge of the day" project at the quilting retreat

After spending way too much money at the vendor show on tools and yarn and drooling over looms we can’t afford, we headed northwest to Montana, where the Nice Person attended the Jackie Robinson quilting retreat at Lakeside, on Flathead Lake and the Unix Curmudgeon plied his trade at his primary client’s site further south and did a bit of pruning on winter-damaged trees and shrubs at the old house, including opening the sprinkler system for the season. The quilt retreat is actually a marathon exercise in which the 40-odd attendees focus on assembling extremely complex and beautiful quilts, inspired by brief glimpses of the stunning landscape.

The Unix Curmudgeon spent most of the week in meetings, bracketed by coding and testing to recover files from a damaged backup archive, for the second time this year. More on this phenomenon later: it is almost inevitable to have errors in very large data sets, and new techniques need to be devised to ensure the integrity of data that takes days to write and results in a structure many terabytes in size. The meetings were largely to discuss implementing policy and infrastructure to support handling and preservation of large data sets.

Record snowpack turns our "intermittent watercourse," a dry swale for the past few decades, to a babbling brook during late spring runoff..

At the end of the Montana week, we spent a day at the Big Sky Fiber Fest in Hamilton, where the Nice Person took a class in Magic Warp, then headed north to open up our tiny cabin (formerly the Y2K Bunker) in the Mission mountains south of Flathead Lake, where the melting record snowpack has turned what is marked on the topo maps of our property as an “intermittent watercourse” into a babbling brook winding through what has been a dry swale for the quarter-century we have been associated with this area. The stream was rapidly cutting through the road above and the neighbor’s driveway below. A few hundred meters to the south, the saturated earth had created a sinkhole in the road and inundated another neighbor’s basement. We watched in amazement as the mountainside oozed trickles and torrents that combined into streams and rivers dropping toward the sea, explaining why the spillways of all the dams along the Flathead, Clark Fork, Pend Oreille, and Columbia rivers are wide-open.

Returning to Washington down the Clark Fork and Pend Oreille rivers, across the coulees marking the path of the great deluges of Glacial Lake Missoula, and up the Wenatchee over the Cascades, we repacked our suitcases–after a quick visit with grandkids–and headed back south to Portland, the City of Roses, for the USENIX Federated Conferences Week, where the Unix Curmudgeon spent two intense days in tutorials on Linux security and performance tuning, while the Nice Person toured the city’s historic and shopping districts.

The City of Roses, from the Pittock Mansion

Escaping Portland during rush hour, we arrived home at dusk, just in time to get ready for the annual Olympia weavers picnic the next day. We have a couple of weeks of “taking care of business” and wading through a mound of mail at Chaos Central before heading east again. Oh, yes, we did get in two brief shakedown cruises on the big Green Machine in Montana, then it went back into its trailer for the trip home: somewhere in the next two months, we need to train for our September tour in Upper Michigan.

Versatility: The Green Machine Phase I Testing

As we noted in our last post, the Green Machine arrived on schedule.  The Bike Friday Project Q was chosen for several reasons:

  • We needed a tandem bike that could be transported easily in any car, on trains, buses, and planes
  • Sometimes I need a single bike
  • Quality is important

To get all of these qualities in one machine, one has to make some compromises.  The bike either has to fold, or be easily disassembled.  And, it needs to be convertible from the tandem, two-seat configuration to a single bike.  And, it has to be compact for transport.  The Q is all of these.

The Mean Green Machine - transport for two

But, with any “some assembly required” product, there are adjustments to be made and a learning curve to get the bolt torque right, to get the alignment right, and to set the adjustments right. The plan of action here was to come up with at least an abbreviated version of the Phase I testing that our homebuilt aircraft will need to go through. The first ride must be solo, and not stray far from home base.

 

So, after having assembled the bike, the next thing, after installing luggage rack, was to disassemble the bike, at least partially, to convert it into its alternate configuration, from the Mean Green Machine to the Lean Green Machine. This entails essentially removing the center section of the bike, with the stoker seat, crankset, handlebars, and the two main frame tubes, along with the shift and brake cables that pass over them. This was fairly simple, and before long, the Lean Green Machine appeared.

The Lean Green Machine: ready for solo sprinting

Since we live on a fairly steep hill, the test area was chosen uphill, or, more specifically, working around the ridge to the south and east that juts between Hammersley Inlet and Little Skookum Inlet. A brief familiarization with the shifters put the bike in uphill mode and off we went. After a short steep climb and a dip, the route ran downhill at a fair grade for a few blocks, with a stop in the middle. Applying the brakes firmly, I forgot the machine is designed as a tandem. Riding solo in short-wheelbase mode, the front binders grabbed smartly; the rear wheel came up off the road. Fortunately, the old biker still had quick enough reflexes to avoid an endo, and we (the machine and I coming to an understanding as a result of this bonding exercise) proceeded.

At the top of the next uphill jog, I noticed a tendency to slide off the front of the saddle. Ah, fear of overtorque results in looseness. A quick stop to adjust and tighten the saddle and we’re off again. Once out on rolling Arcadia, the shifting becomes second nature. The best choice in the Q Project is Bike Friday’s Dual Drive option, with a three-speed rear hub and a nine-gear freewheel cassette, giving an honest, usable 27 gear ratios. Even with the 20-inch wheels (necessary for transportability in disassembled mode), the gear range is surprisingly close to what we’re used to on the Santana, with nine more absolute gears and a whole lot more usable (generally, with a front derailleur, only about half of the gear ratios are actually usable, due to the cross-over between the front and rear gears).

A few more steep hills and we reverse course (avoiding a Rottweiler loose in the road at the top of the next hill) and head for the barn. The only other item of note was a knocking under load in the last half of the ride, with a definite thump in the right pedal, that needs looked at, and might be movement of the pannier on the rack, or pedal adjustment. Next time out, we need to convert back to tandem mode for Phase II testing, then disassemble for the all-important packing test, to see if we can fit the components into the shipping case (which converts to a trailer, for total self-contained travel).

The Deliberate Bicycle Tourist: New Beginnings

A while back, we reminisced on our evolution from childhood bike freedom to bicycle commuter to bicycle tourist (The Accidental Bicycle Tourist: A Life Journey).  We left off looking forward to the next phase in our self-powered journeys, awaiting the arrival of our first new bike in 15 years, the Bike Friday Traveler Q.

The Green Machine - our new Bike Friday Traveler Q

Well, it’s here, at last.  It will be a few days before we give it a test run, but we got it unpacked and assembled without too much confusion.  It’s a well-made machine, designed to be packed and unpacked on tour to take advantage of planes, trains, buses, and automobiles without racks.

The new bike, disassembled, fits into a large pullman case that also functions as a trailer.  It also converts to a single bike by removing the stoker’s section, creating a versatile travel solution.  We’ll be experimenting with rack configurations over the next few months, as we plan our touring strategy and get used to the new machine.

We haven’t had it outside yet, but had to sit on it in the hallway: it fits just like the Santana–after all, it was custom-built, just for us, and has a nameplate on the frame with our names on it, giving new meaning to the bicycle as personal transport.

We’re putting our Santana, Leviathan, which has served us faithfully for 25 years, up for sale.  It has a lot more miles left in it, but we no longer have the capability of transporting it other than getting on and pedaling.   With upgrades and regular maintenance, it’s still like new.  Santana still makes a fat-tire tandem, but has switched from the classic Arriva road bike frame geometry to the lower, bent top bar configuration modern off-road mountain bikes sport, and renamed the model Cilantro XC.  But, the old Arriva XC is still an excellent back-roads touring machine.  It served us well on the unpaved sections of the Galloping Goose Trail on Vancouver Island last year, and we have ridden a few miles of gravel road in Montana when that was the only option along the route.

"Alas, poor Leviathan, we rode thee well": Our Santana posing for its sales listing.

Living Without Computer Viruses

Most of us have received at least one of those urgent forwarded virus alert emails from friends and relatives.  I got one last night, announcing a “new and very dangerous” greeting card or postcard virus that will “Erase your C: drive.”  This does not concern me, since none of the computers I use to read email have a C: drive, for one.  Second, this is just another one of those viral email hoaxes, that provoke well-meaning folks to flood their friends’ mailboxes with empty warnings.  If you get one, check it out before you forward.  Most of them say the virus alert has been issued by McAfee or other anti-virus company and verified by Scopes, a site that tracks these things.  But, if you go to those sites yourself, you will find disclaimers exposing the hoax.  Trust your friends, but verify their information.

This does not mean there aren’t dangerous computer viruses: any executable attachment or link in an email can be the source of a Microsoft Windows virus. Note I did _NOT_ say “computer virus”. Viruses infect vulnerable software, not computer hardware.  By nature, single-user computer systems like Microsoft Windows are vulnerable.  The constant parade of security fixes attack symptoms, but do not change the fundamental design.

Please consider switching to a safe operating system. The obvious choice is one based on Unix, a multi-user system built on the premise that the system files must be protected from the users and the users’ files from each other.  Unix-like systems available to the home and small business user are Apple’s OS/X, GNU/Linux, Oracle’s Solaris, or one of the several BSD variants.  If your budget or preferences exclude Apple Computer from your choices, you can convert your unsafe Microsoft Windows system to GNU/Linux for free (or, at most, the cost of a blank CD or DVD disk and a long download). And, if needed, you can keep Windows on the hard drive to run programs you “must” have, using the Grub menu to select which system to boot.

Keeping your Windows applications might not be necessary, as GNU/Linux comes with every type of program imaginable, either on the install disk or downloadable over the Internet (from the distributor of the system you install). If you are comfortable with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice will be easy to switch to.   For those who need to make the switch gradually, many of the most popular Windows programs can be installed on Linux directly, running under Wine (or the easier-to-use commercial Wine wrapper, Crossover Office), and still enjoy the safety of the underlying system.

Firefox, with which many Windows users are already familiar, is the default Internet browser in Linux. A wide variety of games, chat clients, and other office productivity tools for managing and editing photos and documents are either built-in or available with a mouse click–at no additional cost. Updates and fixes for the software you have installed are automatic, but on your schedule–the system never reboots without your permission or interrupts your work.

How is this possible? Because of a 30-year movement started by Richard M. Stallman and maintained by the Free Software Foundation to promote freely-sharing the ideas embodied in computer software, embodied in the source code itself.  It is possible because the developers are paid to solve a problem, usually through leveraging other solutions through source code written by others and freely distributed. You only pay if you need personal services installing and using the software, through print books, telephone support, and consultant support.  Even though only the source code is freely available (as in free speech), companies package complete systems on CDs and DVDs and distribute them for free (as in free beer), or for the cost of packaging and shipping.  You only pay if you decide to keep using the product and need support.

Free (openly published) software enriches society, not corporations. And, it creates jobs, by reducing startup and operating costs for small business and permits rapid adoption by larger companies.  The vast majority of publicly-accessible web sites are served by computers running GNU/Linux–a secure, stable, and scalable system that you, too, can adopt for greater peace of mind and to unlock the full power of your computer.  After all, your computer is not sick, your software is.