YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

I was up in Poughkeepsie this weekend and had a few minutes to check my bike. This is the worst of winter. I can’t ride, I can’t work on the bike, the magazine articles are nothing but,”Oh, here’s something new you can’t afford from Bologna (or Munich, or…),” and it will be months before I can get out on the road. So I think about riding.

It’s too cold- even if bundle myself up (good excuse to buy that Gerbing electric vest) it’s too icy. Some of the NeDOD folks ride late into winter but most of them have stopped until the morning temps break thirty again. I could tinker but thankfully I don’t have any real work to do on the bike but even if I did, it’s 70 miles from here. I’m thinking of adding a pair of panniers come spring but will probably hand that off to my mechanic. Hard cases aren’t made for my model and that means drilling the frame and fabricating supports to adapt ones that are close to fitting. That’s more than I can do on a Saturday in my in-laws’ garage.

What I can do is roll change. I’ve literally been saving pennies to buy the aerostich jacket to match the pants Maria bought for me last year. I have a good leather jacket (thanks Dad!) from Heine Gericke but it’s heavy and is hot even with all the vents open. How warm is that leather jacket? During the threat of the transit strike here in NYC I kept the bike around and when the strike was averted rode up along the Hudson to put it in storage. Before leaving Manhattan I had to remove the mylar liner. By the time I got to the Bronx I had to pull off and open the vents. It wasn’t until dusk near Garrison that I had to close the vents. Only my hands were cold despite temperatures of thirty-one degrees. It doesn’t take much to imagine how it is riding in New York’s hot, humid summers. With the ’stich I shouldn’t have to sacrifice any protection but should gain a good measure of comfort. Just trading light gray for black should make a difference.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to roll change. And think about riding.

I bought a Sun Ultra-60 from Anysystem. I plan this box to become a Kerberos/AFS server but it might end up as my primary workstation. I could pull the Znyx quad port card out of the PPro box with OpenBSD that I use as a firewall/router and consolidate other boxes handling nameservice (djbdns), mail (qmail and cucipop) and Apache but it’s just too nice. I picked it up yesterday and they’re a good bunch at that shop. Based on what I’ve seen U60’s selling for, they didn’t make much but were cheery all the same. I’ll do business with them again.

Conveniently, they’re less than 15 miles from my apartment. I used to live in Jersey City and know the roads and traffic patterns, in-bound traffic at 8am was usually lighter than in the evening so I figured that I could drive in, pick up the system and drive back in an hour- maybe an hour and a half if there was traffic- and get to work just a little late.

Yeah. After spending some time watching an idiot who ground their driver’s side against the jersey barrier get flat-bedded away, I get to experience the Peckinpah-esque slow motion silence of traffic as one green and white express bus pushes another off the highway. Fiddling with the radio (the metro New York region has some of the worst stations; even the local NPR sucks when they aren’t carrying the national feed) I settle on the local Infinity broadcasting AM news station in time to get the report that accidents on 80 and 17 are backing up. It takes thirty minutes to cover the next nine miles, working out to a tidy 18MPH. This at least is faster than the average of 7MPH that horses traveled the streets of London circa 1900 so progress was made. I use this handy reference- okay, mantra: This is progress, This is progress- whenever I’m in traffic.

Almost to the day after the six month mark in the new job, I ran headlong into a daily compounding series of foul-ups from which I am extricating myself. “Why?”, I ask myself. On reflection, in every case I had made assumptions, often about myself, more often about the environment and frequently about my (mis)comprehension of how things work. This is embarrassing and frustrating. It is ego and hubris. I must remind myself that here I am the student; that I know nothing in comparison. I must watch, listen and practice. I spent the past two years working within my comfort zone. Things were easy and I took a lot for granted. I’m pushing past that, now, and this is part of the process.

Back to bugfixes.

It was a cold, snowy day so after checking in at work, cooking enough meals to last a week and checking my email a few dozen times, I finally settled down to spending the fifteen minutes needed to setup Blosxom.
It took less than ten minutes to get it working and around an hour to realize I didn’t like most of the visual customizations I inflicted on it.

So here it is, in all its narcissistic glory, my personal weblog. Joy.

Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert. This layman’s introduction to quantum physics is light on the math and has the feeling of being assembled from much longer, more in-depth lectures. Some of the chapters repeat themselves leaving me wondering if the editor didn’t rearrange the material. The short appendix does give a concise list of references for continued reading.