Category: life

where everything else happens

Gone Skiing.

Many of you have noticed I haven’t updated the site in several days… that is because I’m on vacation. Once a year I visit my parents, who have had the remarkable foresight to retire to a ski resort. Yeah… tough life but I gotta admire their smarts for that! So we bring the grandkids and test the limits of my long-gone lateral meniscus on the slopes.

It seems that 4 straight days of fixed-heel skiing is all my knee can take anymore. I left the telemark skis at home this year to lighten our luggage load, and I’m paying for it now. The on/off alpine/telemark shift helps me last the whole week, but relentless fixed-heel skiing wears me down. I realize to many people this is completely counter-intuitive, but Telemark turns are much easier on my bad knee than fixed heel alpine skiing is. In alpine boots, every shock is transmitted into my knee as bone-to-bone contact. On tele’s impacts are transmitted through a bent knee… so it is far less stressful.

Of course, my toes are happier, as my tectonic shift from leather (Asolo Snowpines!) to plastic tele boots a few years ago leads to a yearly loss of a toenail or two. The suffering we do for fun! I still haven’t fallen for the overly Alpine, up to the knee Tele boots… and have a barely-over-the-ankle Garmont “touring boot” for my freeheeling pinhead ski style. I also have tele skis that are 200cm long… some Wolf Cold Smokes. I guess I’m a throwback to my 80’s tele retro beginnings. I still have my snowpines and 205cm Karhu XCDextremes in the garage at home.

The week started on old snow and sunshine and I was happy to not have the teles, and pin-skiing on hard snow is no fun really. But the powder arrived yesterday and I stare longingly at the free-heelers and banged my knee up so bad I had to take today off.

Back on the slopes tomorrow and I suspect you won’t see another word here until sometime next week.

Tough life, but somebody has to live it.

(oh, and I had to fix my parent’s wireless network… ugh.)

A footnote: I skiied a few days ago for half a day without poles. I found it a liberating experience! I tend to be a lazy, hip/foot focussed skier anyway due to my bad knee, and as such the poles become sort of useless. Telemarking for 20-some years has given me great balance and edge control (all alpine skiers should spend time on teles, or even snowboards, to truly learn edges and balance. I snowboarded for a few years back in the 80s.) so I can shift edge to edge without much upper-body fuss. I don’t do much serious mogul skiing anymore as the loss of all shock-absorption properties in my right knee make it excruciating. I can do it, I just can’t function for days afterwards! As such, I have found poles to be sort of plastic and metal appendixes… useless extra stuff hanging off the end of useful bits.

It was great fun to ski without them. I may continue to do so.

VW hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S. – Autoblog

Officially Official: VW unveils Jetta TDI in D.C. and hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S.

Volkswagen is searching for the oldest running Diesel VW in America. My very first car was a 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel. I loved that car. It carried me all over the American West during my college years (’81-’85)… many climbing and skiing roadtrips. I went to college in Lubbock, Texas and spent virtually every 3-day or longer weekend or holiday break in Colorado (Estes Park and Boulder being the favored locales), or New Mexico (Taos mostly… staying at the Abominable Snowmansion Hostel in Arroyo Seca!)

It was never a very fast car. I got a speeding ticket once (a federal offence… long story, some other time, I promise) where I was clocked at 74 MPH on flat ground and was astonished it could go that fast. 0-60 was clocked in minutes, not seconds. But these were the 55 days, so we couldn’t go 60 anyway. Patience was the virtue the car taught me. Passing required plenty of forethought and a lot of good timing. I learned aerodynamics too as I frequently drafted off of big 18-wheelers, both for passing assistance and just dealing with headwinds. Truckers seemed OK with it so long as I let them know I was back there.

It taught me frugality as well, since it faithfully carried me from Lubbock to Boulder (575 miles) for under $10.

My only mechanical issue with the car was an alternator bolt that slipped out while I was underway in a remote New Mexico highway. I walked up and down that road for hours looking for the bolt, and never could find it. I rigged up a climbing chock to wedge the alternator housing off the engine and keep the belt under tension and limped the 70 or so miles into the next town to a NAPA. This was a very small town, in a very remote place, and even though my car was built in Pennsylvania (yes, VW was the first “import” to have a factory in the USA) they didn’t carry any metric fasteners and I had to make do with an SAE bolt and a shim. The shim rattled out at some point later down the road and the bolt wobbled just enough to enlarge the softer metal of the “bracket”… which on a VW Diesel of that vintage was cast into the block of the engine. Needless to say it became a persistent issue as I kept having to put larger and larger bolts in. I eventually found a machine shop (somewhere in rural Montana IIRC) with a guy willing to drill both the alternator and the block to a metric size and properly fit a bolt in there. I doubt that car is still running on the original engine.

I traded it in on a Mk2 Golf GTI in early ’87. The old rabbit had well over 120,000 miles on it. I should dig up my old photos of it and post a Roger Los style obituary for it.

Muscle Car Madness

Russian roulette with a semi-auto and a full clip.

I have to agree with this. In fact I read it in the “dead tree” version of SCM… AS I was watching the opening night of the Barrett-Jackson Arizona auctions last night. The muscle car market baffles me completely. I do not understand how two essentially identical cars, can be valued so differently. I can not fathom how one, optioned just a bit different from another can somehow raise its value from $12,000 to $250,000.

That. Is. Insane.

The temptation to create a fakey-do is so high, and the ability to pull it off is SO easy. Hell, most of the parts are available at your local NAPA! In fact people even SELL them AS fakey-dos… calling them “recreations”, “continuations”, or “tributes”. It makes no sense.

I can fully understand six or seven digit values of machines that were made in Maranello in numbers fewer than 100… but six figures for machines that were mamde in Detroit by the hundreds of thousands??? It does not compute.

I can understand six figure values for cars that have a rich history on the famous circuits of the world… but six figures for cars that were used as commuters??? I don’t get it.

I’ll tune into the Speed Channel again this week and see how far the insanity goes, but it would not surprise me in the least to see this market bubble pop on live TV either.

San Francisco to Seattle in under 10 minutes

I picked this still above not for any scenic value, beyond that of the sunlight illuminating the speedometer at a few ticks below “the Ton.”

I drove back from San Francisco on Saturday, having spent the week at Macworld Expo. I love long-distance driving and try to drive rather than fly down to SF once every few years. My record door to door was made back in 2002 with Chris Kilbourn when we made the southbound run just under 11 hours. I was not so lucky this time as southbound I was plagued by a 40+ MPH headwind on the first half and way too much traffic and speed control patrols during the second half.

My northbound run started well.

I left SF around 4pm, and headed for the East Bay. I stoped in Emeryville first to pick up a load of network equipment stored at a friends place. Craig worked for me at The Bon Marché years ago, and now lives down there. He graciously assisted me by picking up some equipment of ours from a decommissioned network site in San Rafael last year. I stopped, chatted for a while. He is also running his vehicle (an old Ford Diesel pickup) on a veggie oil blend. We loaded my Jetta TDI with the DSLAM, routers, UPS, etc and I headed off to Berkeley. There I stopped at Bill Woodcock’s house. It was interesting to finally see the famous “basement NOC in Berkeley.” I got the tour, picked up a server that Woody is dropping in our datacenter, chatted for a bit, and got directions over the Berkeley Hills over to my next destination, Lafayette. It has become tradition now to spend the Friday night after Expo at Michael Swan’s house, eating takeout BBQ with his wife Sharon Doi and my co-presenter at Expo, Shaun Redmond. The BBQ was awesome, and afterwards I dropped Shaun off at the BART station and accepted Michael’s hospitality and offer of a bed for the night. I had imagined I’d drive a few hundred miles Friday night, but realized how tired I was, and decided some sleep would be better. I left Lafayette before dawn, and blazed north.

I managed to fly along in the early morning hours. From 7:30 to 8:30 AM I travelled ninety miles. Yes, that is an average speed of 90 MPH. I stopped in Corning CA at 9 am, and filled my tank (more on that later), bought some local Olives and Olive oil stuff, and some cheap low-tax California liquor for Sue. My next few hourly average speeds were: 77, 83, and 68. The last being through the Siskyou mountains. So I basically flew along for the first 450 miles, and ended up crawling for the last 450.

In Corning I grabbed the wrong can of home-brewed Diesel from the trunk. It was the 100% veggie oil can instead of the 40% VO one. All these gas cans nowadays have these stupid air inlets in the nozzle and pour so damn slow that I didn’t note the appreciably thicker fuel. I spent the rest of the trip fighting dropping temps and gelling fuel. You can read the details here.

Oh well, so much for setting a record. It was fun though… really.

You can click the image above to watch the video, or click here Be patient while it loads, and don’t click unless you have a nice wide Internet pipe… it is 50 megabytes in size.

Note about the video: I wanted the music to fade in better, and have re-rendered it a couple of times with the correct fade-in, but each time it comes out HUGE (well over 100 megs)… I can’t figure out how to get the magic encoder to give me the same output as before (480px wide h.264, AAC audio, ~50 megs size)… oh well. I’m definitely NOT a video pro.

I used iStopMotion software from Boinx to capture the timelapse, with my G4 powerbook and my iSight camera.

Back in Seattle again…

I just had to share this. Dawn over the digital.forest offices.

Mt. Rainier is in the background, the waning crescent moon hangs over digital.forest world headquarters. The chillers for the 1st floor datacenter have transformed the driveway into a frozen lake. I meant to take the train into work today, but missed it at Everett by about 1 minute. Good thing though as I would have missed this sunrise. Traffic was very light due to the holiday, so I breezed in. I arrived about 30 minutes before the van from the train station. I stood outside in the cold taking photos. I fully expected Rainier to (pardon the pun) erupt into full golden alpinelgow, but due to the geometry of sunrise at this latitude in January it stayed cold and blue through the dawn. Oh well. I’ll have to capture the same come springtime. It will be cloudy tomorrow… and likely for the next few months.

I even grabbed the laptop out and made a timelapse.

UPDATE: New version of the southbound timelapse

I re-rendered the timelapse footage from the trip south. It is higher-res and better video quality. It is also 30 megs, twice the size of the original. Be patient while it downloads. Click the image above (or here) to watch.

You can also right/control click and download it to view in QT player.

Back Home Again…

The return trip was more eventful than I really wanted it to be. I left SF on Friday afternoon, went to Emeryville to pick up some d.f equipment that was stored there after we shut down the last of the Infoasis T1/DSL network. Then I went to Berkeley to pick up a server from a Bill Woodcock for delivery to d.f. Following that, I drove over the hills to Lafayette for the traditional post-expo BBQ dinner at Michael & Sharon’s house with Shaun Redmond. I ended up staying the night there, and leaving around 6:30 AM.

I made great time for the first half of the journey, and was on-pace to beat my time coming down by a good margin.

Unfortunately…. I stopped to fill the tank and grabbed the wrong can from the trunk. I had two fuel cans, one was a 5-gallon 60/40 mix of petro/VO, the other was 6 gallons, 100% VO. I poured the latter in, and did not realize this for an hour or so. The car ran fine in the rich VO mixture… at first. But as the temp dropped and the fuel thickened things got worse. It seemed that as soon as I got under the Oregon clouds the car didn’t run well. Temps were in the high 30’s and I kept stopping to top it off with dino-juice to thin the mix. It didn’t help because it just kept getting colder. Finally I figured I needed to stop and get some anti-gel at a truck stop or something. I had just passed an exit when the car started to slow way down and the “check engine” light illuminated. Great. Of course another 10 miles rolled by until the next exit… I barely made it up the ramp when the car shuddered to a stop and refused to start. I rolled it back down the slope to a safe spot and got out. Damn it was cold… high 20’s I would guess. Due to my bonehead error earlier I was running a mixture that would be fine if it were in the 70’s, and perhaps even the 60’s but in sub-freezing it was turning to syrup.

I grabbed a jerry can and started walking across the overpass… looking for some Diesel at what appeared to be a truck stop. When I arrived it was closed. Shut down some years ago by the look of it. I started walking back, to fetch the phone and start exploring options when two older gentlemen in a Saturn SUV stopped to inquire about my situation. They informed me that the nearest open station was 6 miles north, and offered me a ride. I gladly accepted. At the station, I bought 5 gallons of Diesel and a bottle of anti-gel. On the way back we discussed alternative fuels a bit, and one of the guys was convinced that Big Oil pays off anyone who publicizes running off an alternative sources with million$ to keep them quiet. Where’s my check? Back at the car I poured in both the dino- and anti-gel-juice and after some hard cranking the engine finally fired and I thanked my saviors profusely. The car ran well for a while but soon it was all it took to keep up with traffic. I could manage 80 MPH on a downhill, but at level I could barely make the speed limit (65) and uphill I was lagging with the trucks. Thankfully I was done with the really big hills and mountains.

I rolled through Portland three and a half hours after I should have, and once within the land of self-serve fuel partook of as much as I could. I looked for Diesel fuel treatment at every stop, but mostly what I found was food & drink and stuff for gasoline. This was one time where the frugal behavior of my car was counter productive. I wanted to burn off that tank fast, but instead the gauge barely moved. Of course the outside temp was plunging… probably into the teens. In Kelso the car died at the bottom of an off-ramp and I walked all over the place looking for Diesel. None at the Shell, or Arco… so I walked under the freeway over to a Target store looking for anti-gel – NONE. The Safeway fuel stop had Diesel so I bought 5 gallons. It was probably a half-mile walk back to the car with the 5 gallon can. Ugh. The car took 3 gallons and started under protest.

Once again, in Olympia the car started losing power badly and I pulled off one exit prior to Sleater-Kinney road. It shuddered to a stop JUST shy of a Shell station. I rolled off into a Shari’s parking lot and walked over to the shell, where I bought some ant-gel. I topped off the tank with both it and some Diesel from my can filled in Kelso and hit the road. The car ran fine through Tacoma and chose the hill approaching the I-5 express lanes to lose power and drop down to 45 MPH. Ugh. Again, level or downhill was fine, but any uphill grade would suck the life out of it… I’d just roll in the far right lane, or even the shoulder and pop the hazard flashers on if I dipped below 50 MPH. I nursed it all the way to 164th in South Everett where I thought it would die. Through some amazing driving through snowy/icy streets and parking lots I managed to get to a Shell station without stopping the car or having to be out of gear for more than a fraction of a second.

Amazingly it did not sputter to a halt, and I parked it facing downhill and let it idle while I topped off the tank from my jerry can. I sat for a while and since the car kept running OK, I ventured back onto the freeway. It was mostly downhill to home. And everything ran fine until Marysville when it once again lost power going over Steamboat Slough. Hazard lights flashing I nursed it along the shoulder to the Quil Ceda Road exit and it died literally as I was pulling into a Shell station forecourt. I coasted over to the Diesel pump and went inside looking for anti-gel. None was to be found so I shoehorned as much fuel as I could (about 2 gallons) onto the top of the tank. The TDIs have a little button inside the filler that allow you to squeeze fuel in past the point where the nozzle shuts off. I literally filled it to the brim, hoping to thin the mix as much as possible.

It took some serious crankage to turn the engine over, but once running, it was its old self again! I could drive as fast as I wanted! Too bad the roads were snowy, or I could have made the last 15 miles in 10 minutes! 😉 I arrived home, unloaded the car at the front door and then parked it in the barn. I turned on the barn’s heater as well. I figured it would help keep the VO from gelling even more.

I left the Bay Area at 6:30 AM. Managed to drive the first half of the trip in 5 hours. The last half took over twice as long, 10.5 hours. Yep, almost 16 hours on the road. 🙁

I managed to timelapse the whole thing. It should be fun to watch, the first part with me passing everything in sight – the last part with me being passed by everything I passed before, and more! I’ll have that up soon.