Friday, December 14, 2007

Chain Guide Adaptation for the Trail-A-Bike

We have a 7-speed trail-a-bike and since Jade learned how to shift we have been experiencing the occasional dropped chain. The problem is that the combination of a bumpy climb and Jade's down shifting will cause the chain will pop off the front ring and get caught between the ring and the chain guard. When that happens, I loose my "auxiliary motor" and have to tow 70 lbs of bike and child up the hill.

All summer I have been trying to figure out a solution short of purchasing a commercial chain guide system - which is about the same price as the trail a bike. Specialized has the Hotrock 20" which includes a low cost OEM chain guide. I tried to get one in the after market but Specialized or any other vendor offers it.

A couple of months ago, I bought a used Hotrock 20" but the bike is a little too big for Jade. With a little engineering, I moved the chain guide to the trail-a-bike and now we have a great solution for dropped chains! We're going to test this out this weekend.

A chain guide on a trail-a-bike is pretty bad ass!

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Mountain Biking on the Brain


This shot was taken at the Log Gatos Turkey Day ride. It's a nice shot but there are mountain bikers growing out of our heads. The first family of mountain biking has mountain bikers on the brain.

The t-day ride was awesome. It's a great Bay Area tradition and been going for about 14 years. This was the biggest year yet with about 200 riders including a half dozen kids on trail-a-bikes and tandems. I'm sure you can read all about this on the NorCal forums on mtbr.com.
Posted by Picasa

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Fun with Photo Booth

I started a new job on Monday and I got a couple of very powerful Macs. I'm new to the Apple platform so I have been playing with the MacBook Pro every night. Last night I discovered Photo Booth. It uses the camera on the MacBook and a count down timer to a "flash" in which the screen flashes white to simulate a flash. There are a quite a few canned effects.

Much fun was had by all....











Thursday, October 11, 2007

Xemacs 21.4.20 has problem with Windows network drives

I'm working on a project which uses C and SQL Lite. Normally I've been a Java guy and I haven't done any serious work with C since 1996. I also use a PC and Cygwin to give myself a Unixy environment on the PC.

Since I'm just experimenting with the API I figured I would just add the gcc package. I haven't upgraded Cygwin in a while so when I added gcc I decided to upgrade all my Cygwin packages. Big mistake. Apparently Xemacs 21.4.20-2 has a bug in which it reads files and directories on network drives as read only:

http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-April/011117.html
http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-May/011164.html

The solution: use cygwin to downgrade the xemacs package until this issue is resolved. I downgraded to 21.4.19-3 and this worked. I had to troll the net far and wide to find this information and put it together. This post is a service to those who will encounter this problem so they won't have to go though the blind alleys that I did.

This little regression burned about an hour of my time. I definitely can't charge my client for that little digression. Ug!

Monday, October 01, 2007

Happy Beer-thday to me!

It was my birthday recently and I decided to have a party, dammit! I haven't celebrated my party in a very long time (decades, perhaps) so it was a long time overdue.

The theme of my party was beer. Attendees were encouraged to bring a 22 oz bottle or two of beer to share. My friends were really creative and found some interesting varieties. The party didn't go very late (early crowd) so there was a lot left over. I spent the next day finishing up the open bottles. I have enough left over beer for another party - perhaps later this month.

Beer was a pervasive theme of the party. For the BBQ, we had chicken with a beer and mustard glaze. The desert was a chocolate Guiness cake - which went really, really well with the Anderson Valley Oatmeal Stout. Mmmmmmmmmm.... I think I'll be imbibing more of the stouts in the coming months and years.

Good times and it was a great celebration of good beers. Thanks to all that showed up and brought great beers!
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Monday, July 02, 2007

Lick the Toad?! WTF?!

For years I've had the handle "lick the toad" @ Yahoo or Google for my free email address. Just to set the record straight: I've never licked a toad nor do I have an interest in licking a toad. I know my favorite poisons and cane toad sweat isn't one of them.

When I arrived in California, full suspension bikes were ridden by yuppies and most mountain bikers I knew rode XC hard tails with 65 mm of front travel, flat narrow bars with bar ends and long stems. I met Eve on a ride and we were riding and hanging out together. We would look for new rides and we hooked up with Team Wrong Way and started racing with them. Pretty soon we were taking road trips and we headed up to Lake Tahoe for some riding. The high point of the trip was to ride "the Toad". Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is definitely one of the classic California mountain bike trails. Along with the Flume trail, no Lake Tahoe mountain bike trip is complete without checking out Mr. Toad.

I had ridden Mr. Toad the previous year so I knew that it was a technical challenge for my Rocky Mountain hard tail. Back then it was difficult to ride and I had to walk or dab some sections. For this trip it was my goal to clean the ride. To "clean" Mr. Toad meant riding all the technical challenges without dabbing.

We rode the trail and the carnage was impressive. I was riding with the lead group and rode every section but I would dismount and wait to regroup. Contrary to Mike Gin's account of the ride I did clean the trail. I would ride every section and exclaim "lick the toad" after I cleaned it. When describing the ride I would say I "licked the toad" - with the obvious double entendre.

Soon after that trip I found the need to create a Yahoo email address and used "lick the toad" as my handle. When I got a gmail account, I carried this tradition forward. As I get more engaged in civic life "lick the toad" has become a bit of an albatross. The handle elicits explanation or perhaps not being taken as seriously as I could have.

Over the past few months I have been steadily transitioning away from this handle to something more conventional. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Changing the EXIF date stamps for digital pictures

Once again, I forgot to change the clock in my camera when I went to Washington a few months back. All images from mid-March until now are off by 3 hours. I've done this so much over the years that I'm going to transcribe many of my notes for the benefit of the world. This is also for my benefit so I don't have to grep my notes all the time. Note: These instruction are for Unix/Linux/Cygwin type environments.

I've been taking digital pictures since Oct 1999. I have built up gigs of images and I've been using Picasa to organize them. The problem is that when the batteries died on my old Olympus D30, the date and time in the camera would be reset. I wasn't always diligent about changing the camera date/time so I have a whole bunch of pictures which have the wrong EXIF and time stamp. Picasa uses the EXIF data rather than directory location to catalog the pictures so I would see images all over the place.

Using jhead to inspect/manipulate the EXIF data

To change or look at EXIF data use jhead: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Using the command on the image will just print the EXIF data:

# jhead /tmp/IMG_4387.JPG
File name : /tmp/IMG_4387.JPG
File size : 2707353 bytes
File date : 2006:08:30 16:21:16
Camera make : Canon
Camera model : Canon PowerShot SD300
Date/Time : 2006:06:18 15:58:45
Resolution : 2272 x 1704
Flash used : No (auto)
Focal length : 5.8mm (35mm equivalent: 37mm)
CCD width : 5.69mm
Exposure time: 0.0031 s (1/320)
Aperture : f/2.8
Whitebalance : Auto
Metering Mode: matrix

Using the find command to identify files

I'm lucky that I organize all my images in directories which include the date that the pics were shot. This makes it easy to set the EXIF date. My directories are formatted like: YYYY/MM/YYYY_MM_DD.

First create a date marker with the touch command. In my case, the default time of the digital camera will change the date marker to Jan 1 1998 12:00 am. So I added a second to that file as a date marker:
# touch -d "01 jan 1998 00:00:01" /tmp/date_marker
Use the negation of the newer flag for find. This will find all the affected files:
# find . \! -newer /tmp/date_marker
Using jhead as to change the EXIF data

The trick is to automatically change all the EXIF and date stamps on the files which have the incorrect date stamps. The ts flag will set the EXIF time stamp to a specific date using the date format YYYY:MM:DD-00:00:00. For example, this find argument will set all the affected files to 2000/05/21:
# find ... -exec jhead -ts2000:05:21-00:00:00 {} \;
Now we have to synchronize the unix timestamps with the EXIF data. Fortunately, jhead has the ft flag for this. You can run this command on all files in the directory:
# find ... -exec jhead -ft {} \;
Adjusting the time based on the timezone

A more common issue is taking pictures when your camera clock is in the wrong timezone. For this case use the ta argument. For example, if pictures taken on the west coast have a camera which has east coast time (+3 hours relative to the west coast), we must shift the EXIF time stamps by -3 hours:
# jhead -ta-3:00 *.jpg
# jhead -ft *.jpg
You can combine this with the find command to change this in bulk. Remember to refresh your thumbnails in Picasa so that it will pick up the updated EXIF data. I hope this is helpful to you. It's helpful to me.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Our brightest minds are working on the problem

Idiocracy is a film about an average guy played by Luke Wilson who is genetically frozen in a military experiment. The program is forgotten about and he wakes up 500 years in the future to find that he is the smartest man in the world.

The premise of the film is that society has been dumbed down by the onslaught of commercialism, trashy media and the fact that human evolution no longer favors the survival of the fittest but rather those who can reproduce a lot. Picture a world 500 years into the future in which everything is broken, there is trash everywhere and the dominant cultural aesthetic is a cross between NASCAR and World Wrestling Entertainment.

You either love the film (like me) or hate it (like my wife) but I think the message is that with each generation, our society is dumbing down as smart people fail to reproduce and dumb people breed like rabbits. After seeing the film I see the signs of Idiocracy everywhere.

For instance in the opening montage, the narrator explains that the
brightest scientists of the present day are not engaged in solving the current problems of the world but rather they focus their time and attention on solving male baldness and erectile dysfunction. The scene shows a group of white coated scientists gathered in room measuring the erection of a very long haired baboon. It seems like this prophecy is coming true. I just read that scientists are researching stem cell techniques to stimulate and regenerate hair follicles on the skin of mice. This could eventually lead to baldness cures for men.

Stems cell research has the promise of curing lot of diseases and injuries. It also has the promise of curing baldness and our brightest minds are working on the problem. Welcome to the future!


Picture of Sy Sperling President of Hair Club for men from Worth 1000

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

What we call the news

I'm a bit of a media/news junkie and I'm very conscious of my media diet. In general, I read The Economist, listen to NPR and podcasts, watch CSPAN and read CNN/Yahoo News online to get most of my information.

Occasionally, when I stay at a place that has cable like a hotel or with family I will watch the cable news stations to see where the rest of America gets it's information. I'm really impressed with the Jib Jab folks to nail the news issue with satire.

Hi-larious!

Friday, April 20, 2007

10th Anniversary of Living in America

This past April 17th was my 10th anniversary of living in the United States. I celebrated by buying an expensive bottle of Scotch - a 16 year old Lagavulin. I'm not sure what scotch has to do with America but I enjoy it (I'm enjoying it now!) and it's a nice treat for myself to celebrate my integration into my adoptive country. I've been an American citizen for just over 2 years now and I'm proud to be an American.

10 years ago on April 17th, 1997 my long term girlfriend and I had agreed to call it quits. It was long overdue and we had agreed 6 months previous that if our relationship would not progress then we would just go our separate ways. When I got a job with Sun in California we understood that she would not be coming along. It was the dot com boom and Silicon Valley was eager to hire as many engineers from all over the world to build the information economy. Sun took care of the work visa, relocation and organized the move. We had an apartment together and I left most of our shared possessions with her. The movers came that day and had packed my meager possessions: 2 bikes, some tools, a computer, a stereo, a home made plywood desk and a whole lot of books, records and CDs. I was an easy move for them. No car, no house, no wife and no life.

That evening I left Vancouver, British Columbia to fly to San Francisco, California. I used to fly a lot at my old job and I managed to get myself upgraded to business class. This was great since I could drink heavily and use the lounge to take care of some business - like faxing a copy of my work visa to the moving company so they can transport my possessions over the border.

I got on the plane and immediately ordered another drink. I remember staring out the window of the plane and seeing the lights of Vancouver below me with the mountains in the background. As we crossed Point Roberts into the United States I remember the feelings welling up inside me and I wanted to cry. I'm leaving my adoptive country. The country where I was educated, where I got my values, friends, family and great experiences. My one regret was that I never became a Canadian Citizen in 25 years of living in Canada.

Looking back 10 years I'm impressed with how integrated I have become in America. I met my wife, bought a house, became a permanent resident and a citizen. We are raising a beautiful little girl in our little paradise on the central coast of California. I have the means to raise my family and pursue my passions. I'm living the American dream. Life is good.

Despite some of the cynicism one of the most important lessons of America is that it really is the land of opportunity. If you are smart and work hard then you can make a good life for yourself here. America is the most open, democratic society in the world. The opportunities are boundless if you want to pursue them.

This is my home now. I love America!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The iPod shuffle is not waterproof!

One of the great things about the new iPod shuffle is that it can go anywhere. I used to keep it in my cargo pocket so that I can have tunes where ever I am.

One of the bad things about the iPod shuffle is that the small size makes it easy to forget that it's in your pocket. I was really tired and dirty after the Sea Otter and put my pants in the laundry hamper without checking the side pockets. The iPod shuffle and headphones went thought the wash cycle. The headphones went thought the dry cycle as well.

Needless to say that the iPod nor headphones are no longer functional. It seems that the iPod is not resilient enough to put through the wash.

I'm bummed that I don't have a shuffle anymore. At least it lasted for the ski-season. I didn't really use it for much else. The good thing was that I didn't put the 60G in the wash!

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Our Ski Season Comes to a Close

It was our last weekend in Tahoe and it was pretty warm. The conditions were slushy and sticky and it felt more like wake boarding than snow boarding. I gave up after a couple of runs since the snow was pretty "grabby". We decided to come back a day early and we went for a family ride in Big Basin. I love California! Snowboarding and mountain biking in the same weekend!

I got at least 20 days on the slopes and felt like I improved a lot. Eve and Jade got more days in. The great outcome this year is that Jade learned how to ski.



Now that snow sports are out of the way it's time to focus on mountain biking!

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Mr Toad goes to Washington

I was in Washington, DC recently for a bike conference/summit/lobby session. It was my first time in DC and I learned a lot about the political process and American history. My new hero is Thomas Jefferson. His presence and influence is everywhere.

I stayed with a family in nearby Virginia and took the Metro (subway) and the Slug Line (car pool hitch-hiking) into the city. The family is involved with Trips for Kids - a non-profit group who gives disadvantaged children opportunities to go mountain biking.

I felt very comfortable in DC since everyone in the city loves to talk about politics and big issues. I met some great people, rubbed elbows with the players in the bike advocacy scene and even had the chance to see dozens of museums and monuments.

The highlight of the trip: meeting with Senator Barbara Boxer's staff to discuss mountain bikers concerns with the California Wilderness Heritage Act 2006 - which will designate 2.4 M acres of land in CA as Wilderness area (meaning no bikes). High stakes, big responsibility, nice suit.

It was an incredible trip and it's not the last time I'll be going to DC. In fact, I can't wait to go next year!

More commentary and pictures here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lick.the.toad/BikeSummitInDC2007

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Announcing: Santa Cruz Carrot Fest 2007 Saturday May 5th

The Santa Cruz County Horseman's Association (SCCHA) and Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz (MBOSC) will be hosting Carrot Fest 2007 on Saturday May 5th at Horse Camp in Wilder Ranch State Park near Dimeo Lane.

The goal of Carrot Fest is to create safer shared use trails by training horses to be comfortable with the presence of bikes and educating bikers to the needs of equestrians on the trails. In addition, it brings both user groups together in a fun environment to get to know each other and reinforce that we share the common goal of enjoying the open space.

Refreshments will be served. Kids are welcome. Other details will follow and will be posted on http://www.mbosc.org or watch this blog:

This is a write up and some pictures from last years event.

This is a great event to foster some positive good will between user groups. Please contact me (president @ mbosc.org) or Sebastien Praly (openair @ praly.com) if you wish to participate or help organize the event.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Snow in Tahoe! it's time for some winter Fun!

My recent posts about climate change have been pretty heavy these days so this is an attempt to lighten things up. I'm in Tahoe right now and we got about a foot of snow in the past day. We're heading out to enjoy it soon.

Last week my Uncle shot some video of Jade enjoying some winter activities. She made a lot of progress last week and she's really looking forward to getting back onto the slopes this weekend to improve her skills (and show off for Daddy).

Jade is learning to ski. This video was shot on the "Lugi" run at Northstar:



Jade is learning how to skate. This video was shot at the ice rink in Northstar village:



Enjoy the snow while you can!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Another smuggy day in California

Last night I read a really hopeful article in The Economist about the America's attempts to address global warming.

Reading the article made me proud to be a resident of California because my state has taken the lead in America towards decreasing greenhouse gases and energy consumption. As the graph shows, per capita electricity consumption has been level since the 70's and has been recently decreasing.

The article in The Economist requires a subscription to read but it's well worth it. It discusses the security, business and community benefits of changing to a lower carbon based economy. My favorite part of this article discusses how our state is leading the nation in initiatives to decrease greenhouse gases. I've transcribed this section here:
Congress may be thinking about tackling greenhouse-gas emissions, but California has already done it. Its Global Warming Solutions Act, which was passed last year, aims to cut them to 1990 levels by 2020 - an ambitious target for a state that has grown rapidly in the past 15 years and will probably continue to do so. The details have yet to be fleshed out, but the reductions will come from both a cap-and-trade scheme for industry and regulations of various sorts.

Mr Schwarzenegger issued the first such regulation earlier this month, obliging producers of petrol and other fuels to cut the emissions of carbon dioxide from their products by 10% by 2020 - presumably by mixing in more ethanol and other biofuels. It is not California's first attempt to reduce emissions from transport: its legislature voted for stringent cuts in 2002. That move has become snarled in a court battle over whether states have the right to set fuel-economy standards. Meanwhile, the politicians keep trucking. In September, the state showily sued six car manufacturers, alleging they had damaged its climate. It is also suing the EPA, for failing to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

California's politicians are keen on renewables too. State law requires utilities to generate 20% of the power they sell from sources such as windmills and biomass plants by 2010, and 33% by 2020. Solar power has won even greater favour: under the "million solar roofs" scheme, the state plans to spend more than $3 billion over the next decade subsidising the installation of solar-power panels.

California has also pioneered the practice of "decoupling", which deprives power firms of their incentive to sell as much electricity as possible. Instead, the local regulator has devised a formula to reward firms whose sales are lower than expected, and to allow the recovery of the costs of energy-efficiency schemes.

Such measures (along with high power prices to pay for them) have helped California rein in its electricity consumption - although lovely weather and a relative lack of heavy industry have also played a part. Power use per person has remained roughly stable in the state since the 1970s, even as it has doubled in the rest of the country (see chart above). As a result, California's greenhouse-gas emissions per person are on a par with those of Denmark. Relative to the size of its economy, they are lower.
I'm very proud of my state and our green Governator for taking the lead in addressing the problem of global climate change. California may be leading the nation into lowering greenhouse gas emissions but it is also the leading the nation in creating smug.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The debate is over. Now what do we do?

I can't be silent anymore. I've been jumping out of my skin and have been obsessed with climate change since watching An Inconvenient Truth a couple of weeks ago. I was expecting political dogma and fear mongering which is the modus operandi of some of the environmental zealots. However, this film focused on the science and presented it in a way that made it accessible and "connected the dots" between all the global warming events that I have read about over the past 20 years. I'm a scientist by training so the case was extremely convincing. I watched it again last night and listened to the producers commentary and it was fascinating that they were compelled to make this film to inform people about global climate change. Ironically, they marketed it as the most terrifying film you will see and I agree. I've been having nightmares and like the producers I feel compelled do something proactive in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere.

This hit home for me personally this year because of the really crappy ski season. The weather is warm and there is very little snow in the Sierra Nevada. This may be a seasonal variation but last year we got lots of rain dumped on us. Seeing the before and after images of the glacier melts in the Gore film made me think of the end of skiing/snowboarding and there will be warmer years ahead rather than cooler ones. There is no doubt in my mind that weather is changing and is becoming more extreme. The time to act to reduce C02 emissions was 30 years ago.

We're at a tipping point and we have to act within the next 10 years or this planet will become hostile to human habitation. The global warming naysayers are on the wrong side of history and will be judged as quaint as those in Galileo's time who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. There seems to be a lot of news items these days discussing climate change and it is going to be the big issue in the next election. Even John McCain said last week:
"The debate is over, my friends. Now the question is what do we do? Do we act, do we care enough about the young people of the next generation to act seriously and meaningfully, or are we going to just continue this debate and this discussion?"
Global climate change is the most important issue of our generation. Much more important than the war in Iraq. Let the Neocons battle the Islamic fascists for control of the oil fields. Oil is old news and the people in countries who hate us the most like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iran and Venezuela have most of it. We support these countries directly and inadvertently because of our addiction to oil. Our oil dependence has made the United States the crack whore of the global community. They charge us a fortune for our habit and bitch slap us just like a crack whore indentured to her pimp. It was really embarrassing when Hugo Chavez gives us smack talk at the UN. We must move beyond our dependency on fossil fuels to reduce our carbon emissions and increase our energy security. If we can change our carbon addiction then in 50 years these oil exporting countries will revert to the 3rd world deserts that they once were and no one will care.

I want my daughter to live on a sustainable planet and enjoy the mountains, trees, oceans and snow. I owe it to her to fix the damage to the atmosphere that we have done.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide image courtesy of Global Warming Art.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Interweb knows who I am...

I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR and the discussion was on life blogging and user generated media. One of the guests made the remark "who with a computer hasn't Googled themselves or their ex...". Well, I haven't Googled myself in years and my hit hit count isn't really great since Mark Davidson is hardly a unique name. However, I was quite flattered to see that someone blogged about a document I wrote.

I was impressed that he read my Component Assembly Manifesto and he felt compelled to comment on it. I wrote this document during the post boom years when I was a software rock star. I was on a flight to Rochester on a business trip and the movie was Sweet November and it totally sucked so I wrote the manifesto in a fit of inspiration.

This manifesto had a pretty good impact and impressed a VP at a major New York investment bank that he flew me out to the Big Apple under the auspices for me to give a private talk to his staff but his real motive was to recruit me. This was a few months after 9/11 and Eve was pregnant with Jade so I didn't want to relocate. I was afraid of "dirty bombs" and didn't want Jade to be raised in New York City. This was a bit of a missed opportunity since the bank is doing doing awesome since then. The compensation structure at investment banks is based on results so half-million dollar annual bonuses were not out of the question for talented Engineers who lead strategic technology initiatives. If I had made the move then I could have had Google type wealth. I like to think that the type of tools that my document inspired may have contributed to those stellar earnings.

I'm no longer a software rock star - just a working stiff punching the clock humbly in obscurity. I think I made the right choice at the time. I love living in California and I just have to solace myself with the fact that I'm living in paradise with my wonderful wife, child and mountain bikes.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Tunes in My Head

I have been snowboarding quite a lot this season. There hasn't been a lot of snow in the Tahoe area - mostly man made stuff - but we have a ski lease this year and seasons passes for NorthStar. It's still fun since we are teaching our daughter to ski and skate. I also bought a bunch of protective pads and I'm teaching myself to jump and ride boxes but I wish there was a lot more snow. We picked the wrong year to get a ski lease. Curse this global warming!

For years, I have been wearing a snowboard helmet but a month ago, I lost the helmet at the top of the Comstock lift when it fell out of my backpack (update: this helmet was recovered a few weeks later). The old purple chrome Pro-Tec was too small and heavy and it was time for an upgrade.

I bought a matte pewter Giro Nine.9 after much research and fit testing. I also bought a pair of "TuneUps" - headphone replacement earpads. I also bought the second generation iPod shuffle to round out the fun factor and loaded it with 700 megs of Buckethead. The complete package is a light weight party helmet. Who hoo!

I'm having fun with the helmet. The only thing better would be more snow.