Tue, 16 Sep 2008
We Like Ike - Or - Taco Tour 2008
Earlier this year Bike Ypsi cohort Tom L. devised the Taco Tour: pick a handful of Mexican restaurants and bike a loop to all of them, having a taco at each place. The 2008 Taco Tour happened this past Saturday, 14 September.
The remnants of Hurricane Ike were working their way into the Michigan area, and all morning I kept an eye on the NWS radar, watching the giant blob over Illinois. It didn't look like it was moving all that quickly, and in fact when I arrived at Recreation Park for the start it was warm and humid, and there were even bits of blue showing in the sky.
I think we had 25 people or so show up (Tom said that the limited number of spots he had were all full two or three days after he announced it). Starting at 1, our first stop was also the longest without tacos, about six or seven miles to Los Amigos out on East Michigan. Around the time we got to Los Amigos it started sprinkling, and I debated pulling out the new rain jacket I had gotten, but decided it wasn't worth it.
For the next stop the carnies and vegetarians split up, because the next two stops were too small to hold all of us at once. We veggies arrived next at Dos Hermanos Mercado, which is a few blocks from my house and I had always ment to stop at. I was rather fond of the bean tacos there, which is slightly sad since Dos Hermanos normally only has meat tacos — the owner made bean tacos for us specially since so many of us were going to stop.
Around the next stop, Taqueria La Loma on West Michigan, it started to pour. And leaving La Loma I developed a flat, fortunately close to Chappell Elementary and its inviting front overhang. Nat and Andy C. held back while I changed the tire, rather slowly; my glasses where fogged up and streaked with rain, and I could see about as much with them on as when I took them off.
Also around this time my tummy told me that it had had enough, and I passed on tacos at the next two stops: La Casita Taqueria and Zorro's. Missing tacos at both places made me sad; several of the veggies liked La Casita, and it's very close to Temptations, which we visit a lot at work, and Zorro's used to be Taco Boy of ancient fame and glory before it became a crappy buffet and then finally became Zorro's. Tom is really fond of Zorro's, and I had wanted to see what it had became, because we used to go to Taco Boy a lot at work.
We finally ended, after a jaunt down the recently re-surfaced railbed trail between the EMU stadium and campus proper and a dash through campus, at Corner Brewery, which would be my favorite bar if I drank (well, it's still my favorite bar, since I can get Ugly Mug coffee there). A few hours hanging around and drying out were the perfect end to the day, which yielded some other ride ideas that I hope come to fruition.
I normally don't do rides, because I'm more of a meander about town person than I am actually riding with any speed, but this was fairly laid back and I had a ton of fun. Besides, how could I miss a Taco Tour?
Photos can be found here.
Posted at: 08:34 | category: /bicycle/2008/08 | Link
Thu, 14 Aug 2008
Logging with Time Stamps -or- Why doesn't this already exist?
From the "I can't believe this doesn't already exist department":
I have at work on occasion the need to pound the shit out of things. What can I say, I like breaking things. A side effect of this is the need to go back, after pounding the shit out of things, and trying to decypher what happened. To help with this, I really want my log to look something like this:
20080814-134403 stdout> standard output here 20080814-134404 stderr> standard error here
And, along with the proverbial pony, I really want to do this with a command
like timelog
, e.g.
timelog 1,2 log.output my-command -flags -go -here.
After asking my co-worker Steve, who I tend to ask weird Unix questions of, if such a beast existed, we sat and thought for a moment of a few ways of doing this. Steve started doing some searching, and, since watching someone else search Google is painful even in the best of times, I ambled back to my office and started looking as well.
It starts with using something in bash called a Process Substitution. Whether or not this is a POSIXly sort of thing or not, I'm not sure and is something I should check up on. Anywho, process substitution looks like this: >( list of commands) . On systems with either named pipe support or support for using /dev/fd what this does is runs the list of commands in another shell and tying those commands' input to a named pipe, the name of which is returned to the command line. For example, let's say I ran the following command:
Tying this all together, I threw together a simple program to put a timestamp and prefix
for every line of input, and throw it in a file:
#!/bin/sh
CAPTION=$1
OUTPUT=$2
DATE="date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S-%N"
touch $OUTPUT
while read line
do
echo "`$DATE` $CAPTION $line" >> $OUTPUT
done
Which I could then use like:
./big-program > >(./timelog "stdout>" stdout.out) 2> >(./timelog "stderr>" stderr.out)
This provides me with two files, stdout.out and stderr.out, which I could then cat together and sort, to get one long list, sorted by time, of the output of the program, with stdout and stderr interlaced as they appear. Sharp-eyed readers may notice I used the %N option to date, which gives you "nanoseconds" --- it's unlikely you'll actually get nanoseconds, but it's enough to get lines of stdout and stderr interleved like you'd expect them to. When I started, I had only one second granularity, and you can get a lot of output from both streams in one second, which will get muddled together with the sort. This solution isn't perfect, but I think it is good enough for the job at hand.
Again, I don't know why this program doesn't exist. It should --- I simply can't imagine this not being a common enough thing that someone's thrown together a nice program to just do this. I'm tempted to write one that will do this for you, but in any case, I at least learned a neat trick in bash
Posted at: 14:18 | category: /computers/unix | Link
Wed, 13 Aug 2008
Lentil Soup
Once again, the beauty and simplicity of soup is overwhelming. I threw this together earlier this week, and it gets better with age.
Chop up an onion (I had a Vadalia on hand, so that is what I used). Drizzle a little olive oil in a 5 quart soup pot, sweat the onions for a bit, until they start to become translucent and soft. Chop up some carrots into medalions, throw in the pot. Add some salt and pepper, let the carrots cook until they start to grow soft, stirring occasionally. Give a pound of lentils a brief rince, throw in the pot, add a quart of veggie stock and enough water to cover things. Stir and taste, add salt and pepper as necessary. Cover and cook on medium heat until the lentils are soft but not mushy.
I like soups a bit creamy, so I took the stick blender to this --- not so much as to make it a smooth puree, just enough to thicken it but still leave some texture.
Seems particularly good with sourdough rolls.
Posted at: 12:55 | category: /food | Link
Sun, 20 Jul 2008
Demetrius Run I Results
Yesterday was the first alleycat that Luke and I organized, Demetrius Run I. Didn't get many folks (I think the rain we got in the morning did that, plus we were idiots and scheduled the start of the race when Ann Arbor Cyclery, where a number of folks we know who come to alleycats work, was still open. Lessons learned, I guess). But otherwise things seemed to go smoothly, and the post-race BBQ was wonderful, as was the unplanned ad-hoc gathering at the Corner Brewery later that night.
| Peter Gamberg | 55:15 |
| Georgina Hickey | 1:05:15 |
| Josh Glassman | 1:22:27, with bonus 1:18:27 |
| Nick Tenbrink | 1:36:25 |
| Andy Hromadka | 57:37, with bonus 56:37, but forgot a checkpoint |
See photos here
Posted at: 09:52 | category: /bicycle/2008/07 | Link
Mon, 07 Jul 2008
Demetrius Run I
Demetrius Run I
19 July 2008
Recreation Park, North Congress and Oakwood, Ypsilanti, MI
Registration @ 2:30 pm
Race @ 3 pm sharp, rain or shine
$5 includes post-race BBQ
Bring yourself, your bike and a pen
RSVP appreciated, send along with any questions to ypsirun@tproa.net
Posted at: 20:52 | category: /bicycle/2008/07 | Link
Wed, 28 May 2008
Carpooling to the 2008 Allied Media Conference
I've registered for the 2008 Allied Media Conference. If anyone from the Greater Ypsilanti area wants to carpool, e-mail me: kula@tproa.net.
Posted at: 23:54 | category: /random | Link
Sun, 04 May 2008
Ypsilanti Bicycling Coalition Festival
For the past several weeks I've been helping out with the Ypsilanti Bycycling Coalition in our plan for a spring bike festival, which happened today. In a single word, it was completely Awesmoe.
The crummy weather we've been having lately cleared up, and we enjoyed an absolutely gorgeous day — sunny, warm, a perfect spring day. So I was happy as I biked from my apartment over to Recreation Park around 8:30 this morning. There were three rides: the long ride (30 miles), which has about 20 - 25 riders, the middle ride (15 miles) which had 40 or 50 riders, and then the community ride, a threeish or so mile loop through downtown Ypsi, which had to have had over a hundred riders. It was amazing watching this massive throng of people leaving Recreation Park heading down Congress towards downtown. One of the Ypsi PD bike patrol officers stopped by as the ride started and he just said "Wow". Afterwards we had booths with about a dozen organizations and local bike shops on hand, some grilling — hot dogs and veggie dogs, chips, fruit, water, snack mix (to give you an idea of how many people showed up, we started with 150 hot dogs and had to run for more). The mayor stopped by and said a few words. One of the Bike Ypsi people did a rodeo for little kids, taking them through an obstacle course. One of the more fun parts was doing the bike polo demonstration, and then having this throng of neighborhood kids all join in (Andy and I half-joked afterwards about forming a youth bike polo league).
All in all, a completely amazing day. We had close to 200 people show up, including people from neighboring towns and a couple that came up from Columbus to take part in the long ride. The day simply could not have been better (as I mentioned to a couple of the other Bike Ypsi people, next time we have to top this). An amazing about of thanks goes to all the folks to volunteered at booths, who donated food for the cookout, and to everyone who showed up. And I can't say enough about the Bike Ypsi folks — we did an amazing thing today, and I only wish I had started helping out even earlier. It is events like this, and the people who make them happen and who come out and support them, that make me absolutely love Ypsilanti.
Photos can be found here.
Post-script: so I don't forget (and as a way of publicly shaming us into doing it), Luke and I discussed organizing an alley cat in Ypsi this summer (I've always wanted to do one here, and Luke said he's promised himself to make one happen this summer). So, here's our reminder, and your hint to keep bugging us until it happens.
Posted at: 20:52 | category: /bicycle/2008/05 | Link
Tue, 15 Apr 2008
Bike Polo
After several months of showing up at bike polo but only watching and taking photos (photographing bike polo seems to be a good way of picking up taking very quick shots) I finally decided to start playing. It just looked too darn fun to keep standing on the sidelines.
So this past Sunday I packed up the Flaming Meatball and headed over to Ann Arbor. This was my first experience really riding the FM, other than just tooling around the apartment parking lot, and it seemed to go fairly well. There's still a bit of trouble getting into that second rat trap, and balance when stopping pedalling is impossible is still a bit wonkey (although, it is certainly much easier to do a track stand when you can use a polo mallet as a cane....
I'm not sure I aided much in the game — I'm not fleet enough to dash in front of the ball to block it (although I did have one memorable block with my knee, that was all luck). But I can try to get in the way of people, which has some utility, at least. All in all, pretty fun.
I was totally exhausted afterwards, though. After two-and -a-half hours I basically had enough energy to pick up a quart of some hippie fruit juice and the makings for a giant sandwich, eat it, watch a few episodes of Good Eats (my recent YouTube obsession) and fall asleep at the certifiably Old Man Mode time of 9 pm. I wasn't nearly as sore the next day as I thought --- I could tell when I got up that I had moved about a lot the previous day, but once I started moving around I limbered up and that quickly passed. Part of my butt is a bit tender, but not painfully so, and I suspect that once I become accustomed to the saddle I have on the FM that will pass. It was remarkably comfortable otherwise.
I was also struck with enough inspiration and gumption the previous week to create a logo for the Ann Arbor Bike Polo group, and print out several, have them laminated and cut them out into spoke cards. The wheel graphic is some modified freeware SVG graphic, but the rest was mangled by me, with some helpful advice from my friend Bas in Vermont. Since it is an obnoxiously large graphic to throw up here, you can see it here
Posted at: 20:53 | category: /bicycle/2008/04 | Link
Wed, 26 Mar 2008
The HMSDB Order of the Flaming Meatball
After dawdling and dinking with it for over a year, I finally got the last part [1] needed to make the Flaming Meatball ridable, if just slightly not complete. So after work today I put the seatpost and saddle on, and took it out to the parking lot of the apartment for a little bit of a spin.
Holy Jebus, what fun. Also, there are certainly muscles in my legs that haven't been used since last fall. I think a good goal for next winter is to do some riding at least — living in the Midtown neighborhood will mean that I can take less traveled side streets and be safe, instead of having to maneuver down Golfside and Clark and environs, making that a much easier goal. Anywho, nothing seemed to fall off, which was enheartening, since I'm totally faking knowing what I'm doing here. I could feel the rear cog slipping a bit, which is to be expected (my body mass pedling can certainly torque it more than I could with a cog-wrench); I'll need to remember to tighten down the lockring. Also, I really need to get some break cable, at least for the front break. I should also put the clip pedals on the Zephyr (which has been missing pedals since last fall) and put flats on — I'm not sure mastering clips and riding a fixie are the best goals to combine. Some work still needs to be done, and I need to get a rattle-can of clear paint to cover over a few chips in the paint, but it's mostly done.
[1]: Apparently, 25.0 mm seat posts (not 25.4, not 26 and above) is something of a rarity. At least, it is on eBay [2]. Oh, there's a lot of old Campy ones there, but apparently they're all coated with the blood of Tulio Himself and rabid monkeys like to drop more on them than I do.
[2]: Don't worry, the Local Bike Shops get plenty of business from me. In fact, this weekend one of them is going to sell me a decent floor pump with a gauge on it, since the crufty thing I'm using is showing its age, has no gauge, and with Presta valves I can't go steal the pressure gauge out of the car (which goes up high enough for what I put in the three-speeds' tires, but not in this thing).
Posted at: 22:05 | category: /bicycle/2008/03 | Link
Sat, 15 Mar 2008
The Ides of March, 2008
Today was a glorious day, at least by the standards of the weather we've been having around here lately. Mid-40s and sunny, warm enough to wander about town wearing a long-sleeved shirt and vest. Which is exactly what I decided to do after noon after decided that the weather was to nice to stay inside and clean.
I started with my favorite fair-weather activity, wandering around Riverside Park and taking pictures. After an hour or so of doing that, I meandered over to Depot Town, and happened to take a fortuitus duck into one of the antique stores there because I saw some books. After wandering about a bit, I picked up a couple of books about Ypsilanti (the first volume of the book published by the Depot Town Association back in 1999, and a copy of the 1973 Ypsilanti city charter). The lady who ran the store was chatting with a friend of hers, and was joined buy the guy who runs the store next door. When she saw my books, she pointed me at two other books in a part of the store I had only glanced at, which had a 1920's history of Ypsilanti and some early photographs of town. This lead to a fifteen minute chat with the three of them, in which I picked up little historical tidbits and had the Ypsilanti Historical Society recommended to me.
Being a nice day outside still, and the Ypsilanti Historical Society being just around the corner up on South Huron, I wandered on up. I had always wanted to stop in but never did, and today was as good of day as any. Two nice ladies showed me, and a couple with a young child from Novi that showed up a few minutes after me, the lovely Dow House that the YHS is housed in. It's really a treasure trove, and I will certainly be back there. The highlight was the beautiful Tiffany stained glass window that was originally in the Starkweather Library just down the street. There's also down in the basement a wonderful archive which anyone can come down and ask for help in finding materials, which I certainly will be using in the future. Perhaps I can finally find out what is up with the apparent editing of the statue of Demtrius Ypsilanti that I talked about in issue 0 of Late Night Thinking.
After I wandered through I talked briefly to one of the ladies who was there, who suggested that I show up sometime to do docent training and volunteer as a docent. I think I'll take that up sometime, as it sounds like something fascinating.
Finally I made it to my traditional ending point, the Ugly Mug, for some coffee and wireless. Photos I took today will appear here as soon as they filter up through the toobes.