Night Crossing

A bridge on the W&OD trail, about 9:30 PM Friday.

Late Nite Biking

On the trail at night.

And by day...

...same place as last night.

Warp Drive

Who would have thought that the Virginia Transportation Dept, of all people, would have a sense of humor?

Orbital Sciences is on that road.

Not Gonna Set The Alarm Clock

I have tomorrow off.

My second day off in three months.

My first Saturday off in eight years.

Earthquake

We just had a pretty strong earthquake (at 1:51 PM). Lasted about 30 seconds. The interior walls appeared to be shaking back and forth about six inches. No apparent damage, not even any cracked windows, but wow.

In Woodbridge, VA.

These days, if all it is, is an earthquake and not a shock wave from a nuclear explosion, I'll consider myself lucky.

It Was A Dry Heat

I went on a 25-mile bike ride today in the middle of this scorcher. It was 90 degrees at 11 AM when I started, 95 at noon and the high was 97 at 3 PM. But I took this snapshot at 1 PM... local temps were a bit higher. Riding on the sidewalk next to the traffic was like breathing from a blow-dryer. I took a Camelback canteen full of ice and water and today I used it all; first time for that.

Busy Day

I took an eleven-mile bicycle ride in the Prince William Forest Park this afternoon. It's adjacent to the big Quantico Marine Base. This bridge is over the Quantico Creek. Sometimes, if I'm in a part of the park close to Quantico, I can hear the "pop-pop-pop" of our nation's youth at play.

And this evening I took in a minor league baseball game. This seat cost me $12. I had a wonderful view of a bunt in the fifth inning. The ball rolled down the first base line, about a foot to the left of the stripe. The first baseman charged it, but the batter sprinted ahead and passed the ball before the first baseman could reach it. The first baseman picked up the ball and did a wild spinaround to try to tag the batter, but the batter arched his back and the tag missed, by about an inch. The umpire and the manager had a heated discussion about that play, but I think they called it right: safe at first.

The commercial tie-ins were amusing. Nearly every inning was sponsored by a business or product. The first inning was sponsored by a car wash, "The Official Carwash of the Potomac Nationals." The second inning was sponsored by a cookie company, "The Official Cookie of the Potomac Nationals." The third inning was sponsored by a spa, "The Official Spa of the Potomac Nationals." And the fourth inning was sponsored by Kraft Singles, "The Official Sliced Cheese of the Potomac Nationals."

Scorcher!

It was 92 degrees when I started this ill-advised bicycle trip, and 95 when I got back. Only about ten miles, and I had plenty of water (and ice!) but it was hard going. The new kevlar-lined tires worked fine. Stopped under a shade tree, rested and downed an icy cold soft drink, then headed home.

Last week this bike and I were touring the wilds of the Monon Trail in deepest, darkest Broadripple. Around here, though, you make the best of the sidewalks and parking lots.

Maps and GPS

Last week I had a flat tire on my bicycle and had to walk home. This simple task was complicated by the layout of the suburban streets hereabouts. I could get to within 100 yards of my home, but could not reach it without crossing private homes and climbing backyard fences. The shortest alternate route was a two-hour walk, which I did.

It seems the local pols have had a policy of closing streets and erecting fences to limit motor vehicle traffic in residential areas. And it also prevents bicycle traffic and sometimes even foot traffic.

At the time, I asked my GPS to find me a quick route home, but the suggested route directed me to pass through a barricade at a closed intersection. This barricade even had a chain-link fence with a narrow right-left-right pedestrian chicane, to prevent folks from bringing bicycles through!

Here's the view from Tom-Tom:

I was at the intersection of Mathews and Grayson and I wanted to get to the little "home" icon. But no, the road is closed, as shown on this view provided by Google Maps:

Silverwood Lane is a blocked-off alley, with dozens of small trees growing there, and completely impassible.

Tom-Tom does allow users to make "corrections" to their maps and now when I call up the same intersection I see this:

Here's a closer look:

Silverwood Lane is still there, but Tom-Tom will no longer try to route me through this intersection.

Today I bicycled 2 miles to the local Starbucks for breakfast and I crossed over I-95. As I did I noticed that the northbound lanes were jammed but the southbound lanes were moving well:

Facing south, with northbound traffic on the left and southbound traffic on the right. The two center lanes are the reversible HOV commuter lanes that drove Jay G so crazy when he was here a couple of weeks ago: "They go one way in the mawnin', and the other way in the awftahnoon! Those Vahginyuns ah wicked crazy!"

And here's the traffic view from Tom-Tom at the same spot:

The orange arrows on white background indicate a traffic jam to be avoided. And only in the northbound lanes. My Blackberry using Garmin GPS could not differentiate between the lanes and simply reported the whole highway as jammed, even if traffic in one direction was moving normally.

Pop

I was exploring the local suburbs this afternoon when I noticed that the rear end of the bicycle was sliding from side to side. Yep, a flat tire. I carry a full set of spares but this time I was SOOL because my mini-air pump was hors de combat. I walked about two hours to get to the nearest service station and an air pump. I replaced the tube with the spare from my kit, and dropped some coins into the air compressor. The rated pressure for this tire was 30-60 psi. As the pressure indicator reached 40 psi there was a loud bang and the new tube ruptured. Badly? No, extremely well! See below:

Can't patch that! So I set about seeing if I could find and fix the puncture in the old tube. I put a few pounds of air back into the tube and passed it by my face until I felt a stream of air. It was just a tiny puncture. So I patched it and inflated it...very carefully this time! And biked home.

New tires and tubes will be the order of the day tomorrow. The rear tire was slightly damaged by the explosion, and the bike is going on two years old now. The tires look OK, but they have a lot of miles on them. So I'll be getting two new tires, three new tubes (one as a spare) and a new pump for my tool kit.

The repair took only about twenty minutes, but a pump or a source of compressed air is absolutely essential.

Four In One

I've been struggling with an old desktop computer for years now. I'm too frugal to buy a Mac, although they are very tempting. So last week I plunked down several hundred dollars on an HP desktop with a 64-bit AMD quad-core processor, 4 gigs of RAM and a terabyte drive. I bought a new copy of Windows 7 and an ebay copy of Windows XP. I already had an OEM (bootable) copy of Windows 2000 Pro. I have some old home movies that I want to edit using Adobe Premiere on Win2K, a legacy scanner that works under WinXP, and I wanted to run iTunes on Windows 7.

So I installed Ubuntu Linux 10.10 as the base OS and repartitioned the disk. Ubuntu is free, but I paid $10 for a set of commercial install disks. Then Oracle's VirtualBox (also free) and then the three windows OSes on top of that. Total time spent was about four hours.

On the bottom is Ubuntu, running Firefox. Next is Win2K running Adobe Acrobat Reader. Next is WindowsXP, running Internet Explorer. And on the top is Windows 7, running iTunes. All running on the same computer at the same time. They can share files, network connections, CDs and DVDs and USB ports. And even cut and paste between applications.

I have no idea how this works.

Lorton To Vienna And Back

Monday was a beautiful day so I set off from the former Lorton Prison

headed for the nearest point on the W&OD Trail (my old stomping grounds). Packed a lunch and set off about 12:30. There was a nice tailwind as I set off, and this was actually of some concern, because I would have to pedal into it on my return trip. But in my experience, winds are very variable and unpredictable, and it was quite possible, even likely, that the wind would reverse by mid-afternoon and I would have a tailwind for the ride home, too. Wouldn't that be nice?


A little more than two hours and eighteen miles later I was closing in on my destination.


I stopped for lunch near this historical marker on the W&OD Trail in Vienna.

The trip back was difficult. The wind had picked up and was now gusting, and it was a headwind. To me, there's nothing harder than pedaling into a headwind; it's like going uphill for mile after mile, with no downhill sections. I must have walked the last five miles.

The Minty-Boost battery charger worked better this time. I loaded it with four new alkaline AAs. At 4:30 the iPhone reached 20% of capacity so I attached the Minty-Boost and rode on. It charged the iPhone from 20% to 47% in about an hour, even while the Cyclemeter GPS app was running - it's a big power-hog. After an hour on charge, the iPhone beeped to indicate that something was wrong - the charger was depleted - and I ignored it, just to see what would happen. What happened was that the iPhone rebooted itself. So I disconnected the charger. Cyclemeter didn't miss a beat, however - it picked up where it had left off. And at the end of the ride I still had 32% of iPhone battery left.

Long Ride

Friday was a beautiful day. Bright overcast, high seventies. No wind to speak of. So I took a long bike ride. Packed a lunch and set off from the old Lorton Prison, now called the "Workhouse Art Center". I pedaled up route 123 toward Fairfax along the paved bike trail. It's called Ox Road in Prince William County, and Chain Bridge Road in Fairfax County. Then back by the same route. I pedaled for 4:45 and rested for 25 minutes to cover nearly 35 miles. Not the longest trip I have ever taken but a grueling slog; I haven't biked in months and I'm out of shape.

Check out the display from the iPhone:


Notice how little battery is left after less than 5 hours of continuous GPS use. That battery was in a car charger until the minute I pushed off at 12:20. I brought along a neat little USB charger like this one:

But the iPhone didn't like it; it reported, "The charging device is not supported..." So the iPhone was nearly dead after five hours. This is an app called Cyclemeter.

Here's a snapshot from near the end of the trail:

Waples Mill Road in Fairfax. Just a mile from the NRA's HQ the country is surprisingly wild; I saw a large adult red fox a hundred yards farther down the road. And an eagle carrying a squirming fish in its talons.

The NRA building is at the 16-mile point. As you can see, I had some trouble finding a bicycle route across I-66!

When I got home I was exhausted and fell asleep for a couple of hours. Then I took a shower and the salty taste of the water surprised me.

Was It Something I Said?

Actually it was something that Uncle said. Thanks for the link, Unc!

A Third Opinion

I've been working on getting my ham radio station back on the air. The new place is a tiny apartment, so a stealth antenna is called for. I used a slingshot to loft about 100 feet of stranded #26 copper wire (with black insulation) into the trees outside the window. The far end is in the trees and the other end travels under the window screen and into the room, where it is soldered to a banana plug. The banana plug is inserted into the post of a 4:1 balun. On the hot end, the output of the transmitter runs to the Daiwa 2-needle SWR meter, then to the LDG tuner, then to the 50-ohm side of the balun.

I had read that the little SWR indicator on the Yaesu 857 was not only too small (it's about the size of a cellphone signal strength indicator) but was inaccurate, too. So I wanted to verify the SWR. For that I got a little LDG analog meter that plugs directly into the "meter output" connector of the transceiver. Much easier to read, and with much more precision.

There's an HRO (Ham Radio Outlet) about 2 miles from my new address; I'm doomed!

So I put it on the air tonight, at only 10 watts, just to check the SWR. After adjusting the tuner (just push the button, actually, and it does all the work) I obtained the results shown: All three meters indicate a perfect match on 40 meters.

Then I switched the transceiver to 3675 kHz and pressed the key down. The two analog meters both read 5:1 and the Yaesu SWR indicator was offscale and flashing "SWR-SWR-SWR".

So technically this looks like a successful foray, but on the non-technical side not so much: my morse code skills have deteriorated to about 8-10 wpm. Very slow, even on the (so-called) Novice CW bands. I found some morse code practice sessions on iTunes (ain't life grand!?) and downloaded 'em to the iPhone. I can copy 8 wpm in my head no problem, but you know there's more to it than that. There's dealing with fading and noise and interference and those ham abbreviations: "VY GD ON YR QTH" and so on. I need some practice!

Battlepack

I cracked open a battlepack and took the M1A out to the NRA range. "BF 79-78" means Portugese, I think.

Merry Christmas

Light snowfall on Connecticut Avenue, looking towards Dupont Circle.

Early This Morning

Standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue at 3:27 this morning.

Google TV

I got a Google-TV box, partly because it includes a blu-ray player (found a $9.99 blu-ray disk of Le Femme Nikita at the grocery store last night!). And it does one really cool thing: you can browse the web and watch a little TV picture-in-picture...that's CNN-HD in the lower right corner.