Rantings of a Lunatic

Grey Ghost: Phase 2

dnovotny — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:28:32 +0000

Got both of the tires and tubes replaced so far. I also removed the kickstand and attempted to change the brake-pads. Unfortunately the brake-pads I got are too large, and will keep the brakes activated permanently. I know there are a few things I need to do to get it road-worthy yet, but, I did take it for a test ride today. I still need to replace the brake-pads. I also need to change the tension cables for the derailleurs and brakes. Unfortunately it appears I need to replace the return spring for the front brakes, they activate when I squeeze the handle, but they don’t return to the released position. Also, the front wheel to handle-bar alignment is way out of whack, but, I think all of my large wrenches are at my storage facility. I will check tomorrow. The front derailleur doesn’t seem to be adjusted correctly, so when I switch to the smaller front gear the chain doesn’t correctly seat on the gear. But, I will learn how to fix that. Luckily Austin is a very bike friendly city, so there are lots of small independent bike shops around. Now its just a matter of finding the appropriate parts to fix a 40 year old bike. Almost all of the parts are labeled Shimano, so hopefully it will be easy to get the parts. Oh, and I should probably re-wrap the handlebars.
I am trying to limit my upgrades to essential repairs though, because I really enjoy that its an old bike, and I want to try to keep it as original as I can. Just a decent cleaning, and some necessary repairs. Reflectors, maybe lights because they are apparently a city requirement after dark.

Project Grey Ghost: Phase 1 – in progress

dnovotny — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:12:04 +0000

Due to the unnecessary theft of my bike, I have embarked on a new project. I was at my parent’s house over the weekend, and picked up my dad’s old bike. I am in the repair/restore phase of getting it back roadworthy. It’s not a great bike, but, its an awesome bike. My personal favorite part of the bike is that it still has the registration sticker from when my dad was ridding it to work, which expired in March or April of 1976. Its a K-Mart All Pro, and it seems to shift smoothly. I still need to remove the kickstand, which over the last decade in storage has become bent and is impeeding the rotation of the pedals.
Today I got new tubes and tires, new brake pads, a pump, and a U-Lock for it. I will be keeping it inside as much as I can, and the lock is for when I get to the point that I can ride to work. Anyway, here are a few photos:

Tonight I got the front wheel cleaned up and the tube and tire replaced on it.

To the bastard who stole my bike

dnovotny — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:44:12 +0000

First: Fuck You.
Second: I hope you don’t live near me, because if I see you riding my bike you will be lucky to see me use the same amount of effort to get it back as you used to steal it. I know you made a trip back to get it after you saw it, because you had to bring the bolt cutters to cut the lock.
Shame on me for using a cheap lock, thanks for pointing that out. Next time I will put a better lock on my bike.
I hope that you stole it so that you could pawn it. Further, I hope you used the $20 that it was worth to buy bread and Peanut Butter to feed your family that is now homeless because the recession and global outsourcing have robbed you of your career. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure that is not the case. I am pretty sure you are just a lazy dick who isn’t capable of doing an honest job for honest pay. So you stole my bike for a quick buck.
In the case that you haven’t figured it out yet, let me warn you that my back tire was flat; which is the reason I haven’t been riding it. I hope you didn’t try to ride it and mess up the rim or the tube. That would just make it worth even less to the pawnshop.
Also, the rear shifter is cheap and doesn’t align properly between the fifth and sixth gears, so don’t force it, just jump from fifth to seventh. It will work fine, though someone of your class would probably just ride it in whatever gear its in, and try to pedal harder to go uphill. Oh, and if you see someone running fast at you, faster than it seems they should be able to run, that would be a good time to learn to shift gears, because I want my bike back asshole.

Drop-down’s that go up? Genius.

dnovotny — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:41:14 +0000

Why is this the first time I have seen/thought about making the drop-down go up over the wasted header space?

It’s a Microsoft world, and you get to live in it

dnovotny — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:52:05 +0000

As the Director of Technology at my job, I have several responsibilities. One of which is to oversee the rollout of Windows 7. This is an awesome responsibility because I am a POSIX compliant computer user at home. I use that term pretty loosely, but it fits for the most part. I love Linux, and I have used it for many years. I am currently pretty devoted to my hackintosh because it has the desktop application support that just doesn’t exist for Linux. This is all changing though. As part of the Windows 7 rollout, I have to know, use and breathe Win7 before I overwrite all of my user’s hard disks. So, for the undetermined future, I have decided to switch to Win7 at home. I have installed an evaluation version, because I am not sure I will continue to use it after I do the roll out at the office, but if I want to, I will be able to purchase the license then. As I have just started using it, I haven’t installed any software yet. Well, I installed the Lightroom Trial, thats good for 30 days, and is as good of an opportunity to give it a test run as any. I also installed Firefox, but that’s it at the moment.
So far, its fine. I used Windows for years, from 3.1 through to XP64, so I know what I am doing. Admittedly, there are some new features I don’t know about, but, that’s the purpose of this experiment. But to be honest, I find myself really just looking at my computer now, and feeling that its a blank slate that I really don’t have a use for. This is probably not related to the Operating System, its probably just me deciding what’s important in my life at this point.
I have gotten back into photography, I am just finalizing all of the moving into my new apartment and basically I am not sure that as I move forward I want to find myself chained to my computer any more.

Dulled Consciousness

dnovotny — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:32:32 +0000

This has been sitting in draft state since March, and I don’t know when I will get back to it, so I am publishing it. Maybe I will follow up later.

I have been thinking about this for a while, mostly on my drive into work in the mornings, but, how many of those vehicles that have been recalled/had problems recently had manual transmissions? I haven’t found the answer to that out yet, but my guess is that its somewhere below the number 1%. The reason for that is driving a manual transmission requires conscious thought. In addition, driving a manual transmission requires simultaneous action from multiple limbs. I feel very confident that if my vehicle had unintentionally suddenly accelerated it would only be a matter of seconds before I had my vehicle under control. I am actually not sure if I would even have a thought process involved, I think it would be more muscle memory that instantly pushes my left foot forward to hit the clutch, and simultaneously pulls my right hand with the shifter into the neutral position. In the split second that this would take, I have already safely counteracted the entire problem. I have not solved it, however, I have taken myself out of the dangerous situation. Next, I can make the judgement decision of whether I will apply the brakes, attempt to downshift or both. Thats the next point about a manual transmission, it allows me multiple options on what to do in any given situation.
My point of bringing this up is that there is a huge clammoring for a quick fix, and whats being offered up is a software fix. I know a little bit about code, and understanding the complexity of a modern automobile, I find it very difficult to believe that even with a workforce of hundreds of programmers, its in any way safe to release a quickly coded patch to a brake and acceleration system. Think about the system before people start clammoring for the software patch. What is it? Its hundreds of processors running millions, if not hundreds of millions, of lines of code. Its a set of software that has been built and tested over the course of years, and has been ammended and grown such that it has probably spawned its own entities into other vehicles. And now, the solution is to rush through and patch some code in a matter of weeks?
That just doesn’t sound well thought out to me.
And to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it solves the root of the problem. Now, I will admit, I am no Luddite. I love technology. I love to tinker with it, and I love to let it make my life easier. Though to be fair, I usually pick the harder parts of technology, so that something is always broken, and I by consequence always have something to tinker with. However, I have grown to believe that we as a society have come to rely on technology too heavily. We have begun to allow our technology to take over so much of our lives that we are dulling our own consciousness. When I was a kid, I knew every bodies phone number off the top of my head. My parent’s number, all of my friend’s parent’s numbers, the pizza place, everywhere. I was reading people’s tweets the other day, and someone had retweeted a conversation with a person being loaded into an ambulance. The conversation was about calling the girl’s boyfriend to let him know that she was ok, but going to the hospital. Her response was that she didn’t know it. It had been saved on the phone that was smashed in the accident, and she had no idea what it was.

Sorry Mint, we are done.

dnovotny — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:28:23 +0000

So, I had reset the password on one of my accounts, and neglected to reset it in mint as well, and apparently it tried to login to the account enough times to get me locked out of it again. Now I have two financial institutions that I get to call and unlock my online accounts to. That on top of the fact that they still don’t support my non-mega-bank, I just don’t see any value in keeping the account. I appreciated the graphs, but, really, if they aren’t getting my day to day spending into the budget its not much value.
It was swell, but, the swelling has gone down…

1 year late for the DTV transition

dnovotny — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:53:23 +0000

So, over the weekend I moved, and as a consequence, I cut the cable. My old apartment was giving me free cable, so I watched it. Moving into the new place, we made the concious decision not to have that extra bill or time-suck. So I went and got a digital converter box, so that we can still get the local weather. Its nice to have access to it, but, we certainly aren’t looking to stay glued to it. Anyway, its been one year, almost to the day since the switch, and I finally got my box. And, my oppinion? Well, its resoundingly a failure. I can’t get the basic channels well at all. And if I want to get KNVA, one of the local stations I used to work for, I have to adjust the antenna’s so that I can’t get anything else. If I want to keep the majority, about 5 stations, I don’t have access to either of the stations I used to work for. And even then, at best I am only getting approximately a 60% signal level, and there are terrible dropouts and stuttering. I feel about as impressed with digital television as I do digital cable, and if I were paying for it, I would cancel. I don’t have a problem with the digital formats for storing of video or television, but, I have yet to see a digital transmission system that works or looks well. Netflix is pretty good, but, its still obviously compressed, and its not live by any means. More opinions will come later. I get my internet connection at home tomorrow supposedly, I am using tethering right now, but, thats only so useful. Maybe I will start looking for an all online service, preferably with an XBMC script or plugin for watching online news video.

A programmer will eventually tell you…

dnovotny — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:43:01 +0000

“A programmer will eventually tell you to use Mac OSX or Linux. If the programmer likes fonts and typography they’ll tell you to get a Mac OSX computer. If they like control and have a huge beard then they’ll tell you to install Linux. Again, use whatever computer you have right now that works.” – via Learn Python the hard way

New Photos

dnovotny — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:10:59 +0000

Recently I got myself a new lens for my SLR, and I have been trying to take better photos with it. The lens is a Canon 50mm 1.8 Mark I, and I have been using it on my “ancient” Canon EOS Rebel 2000. The person I bought the lens from had bought it with an Elan 7 back in 1987 or 1988 he said. Its a faster lens in terms of aperture, but the autofocus is incredibly slow on it. Because of this, I have been using the lens in Manual mode, and subsequently, I have even been using the camera in Manual mode. Its been a long time since I shot a camera without all of the automatic features, so I am finding that some of my photos are what I am expecting, and some are not. I think part of this is that I am still getting used to the camera, so I am not as fast with the controls as I might like. I do feel like I am getting better in general, but I do have a ways to go. In all honesty, it has reinvigorated me, and my savings goals have shifted again. The 7d/t2i has once again risen to be an initial savings priority. The two bodies are mostly the same, with the two notable differences being the Burst capabilities, and the storage media formats. I think in the long run, I would end up upgrading before too long, so the t2i is a better choice. (I have had the 35mm for 9 years, and the digital P&S for 3 with its predecessor lasting 5, so too long may be relative.) I could also afford the t2i and a 135mm or 85mm Prime Lens for the price of the 7d body, so that is a consideration.
Anyway, here are the recent photos, and more will be posted when I finish the rolls. Over last weekend I shot 2.5 rolls of 35mm, 10/12ths of a roll of 120 film, 20-30 digital shots, and a couple of phone pics. Though the phone pics were mostly inconsequential shots to capture gps/time metadata.
MemorialDay 2010 Photoset on Flickr