Bye Bye MacBook
So, when the MB broke down recently I was left with an easier decision about upgrading. The new HDD is a clean install of 10.5. There’s a lot of work to do finding and downloading apps, passwords, unique Windows-ish settings etc. The MB was deficient in two areas. Neither were a factor when I got it. One was memory. It originally came with 1 gig and I upgraded it to 3, the max. This helped out quite a bit, but the current ones max out at 4 gig. The second was the built in video card, which uses the CPU and main memory and is a plain 2d business class device.
Over the year I’ve had it my usage and needs have changed. This little thing is now my main machine and I need more out of it. The big driver is Virtual Machines or VMs. I can run several flavors of Windows in one or many different VMs. This is a priceless feature at work and has been handy at home for building Windows applications.
VMWare Fusion had just come out when I bought the MB and since then has expanded from working with WinXP and Win2K to Win95, WinNT, Win98, WinXP, Win2K, and Vista w/Aero. Each VM consumes memory locked away from other apps. And for graphical 3d elements in WinXP and Vista a 3d video card is required. So, the MB is a little constrained for this.
So, I went to Mac of All Trades and got a quote of $600 for it. That’s about half what I paid 1 yr ago. Now I just have to box him up in the original package, which I kept.
His replacement is in limbo. This is the time of the year when Apple announces upgrades and everyone feels that it is time. There’s also the chance of a big change. I’ll hobble along for a month or so until I find out. Then get a clearance or new box. Maybe. It’s a hard temptation to resist.
My eye is currently on the entry level MacBook Pro (MBP). It has a 4 gig max memory limit, 200 gig hard drive, separate nVidia 8600 256 meg gaming video card, FireWire 800, aluminum case, backlit keyboard, and 15″ screen. Though the midlevel MB is very tempting. It has a weak 3d video card, 4 gig memory limit, 160 gig hard drive, glossy plastic case, $700 less, and is 1″ smaller on each side. I like smaller. Either way a 4 gig memory upgrade is needed and doing it myself will save $60.
Mac Harddrive Fixed
They finished with the MacBook on Thursday, which was very nice. Unfortunately, it’s a clean install of 10.5. I had 10.4. It’s like buy XP and getting Vista for free. 
Instead of rebuilding everything I think I will look at trading this one in and getting a new one. Until then I don’t have a proper computer. This is on the Mac Mini for the TV and there’s the work laptop, but I don’t really consider either one a good hometop.
Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic
I was thinking about doing this next year. 200 miles in two days sounds challenging. I have family in Portland that it would be good to visit. Maybe Gma or Patience will come with part of the time. It coincides with Wild West 150 training, which is the last weekend in July.
The 30th Annual STP will be held July 11 - 12, 2009!
The 2008 Group Health Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic was a terrific success. Thank you to all the riders who rode safely and respectfully from Seattle to Portland. Thank you to all of the wonderful volunteers who helped make the event smooth and enjoyable for the 9,500 participants.
Cascade Bicycle Club
Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic
The Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic, or STP, is an annual one and two day supported bicycle ride from Seattle, Washington to Portland, Oregon in the United States. The STP “is considered one of the 10 biggest recreational bicycle rides in the country, drawing riders from across the nation and from other nations”, and has been operating for more than 25 years.[1] The ride is organized by the Cascade Bicycle Club. It is approximately 200 miles (322 km) in length. Most riders complete the distance in two days; however, about 15% complete the ride in one day.[2]
The ride takes place on the second or third weekend in July mostly on country roads, avoiding the direct freeway (U.S. Interstate 5) route between the cities. The Cascade Bicycle Club describes the 2006 route as “pretty flat with the “Big Hill” coming at the 45-mile mark. It’s a mile long with about a 7 percent grade. … The majority of the ride is on beautiful, rolling rural roads”.[3] In 2005 approximately 30 miles (48 km) of the 202 miles (325 km) were considered uphill with a combined ascent of approximately 2,000 feet (600 m).[4]
The halfway point is near the towns of Centralia and Chehalis in Washington. For two-day riders, the hotels and guesthouses in the area cannot accommodate the thousands of cyclists, so schools, churches and other charitable organizations provide indoor spaces for riders to sleep and food for a fee. Some riders also arrange to camp in parks or fields near the halfway point.[4]
on Wikipedia
Mac Laptop Harddrive Died
The Laptop hard drive died last night. RIP little drive. I was working on the computer when it locked up so I turned it off. When it came back on it showed a flashing folder icon with a question mark in the middle.
Booting off the external backup hard disk let me run attempt to diagnose the issue. I reset the PRAM and tried to repair from the Install CD. Nothing recognizes the drive. One time I heard it boot up and it ticks softly like the head is stuck or something.
Fortunately, it’s been 11 months since I got my first Mac and it’s still under warranty until 9/14. Double luck struck when I looked up Apple Repair Shops and the only one for 200 miles in any direction is less than a mile a way.
This morning I took it in. They verified everything and said, if it were just the hard drive, that it would be ready on Friday. Pretty amazing. I expected 2 wks and shipping around. I asked if they could fix the fan, which has gotten extremely noisy; almost to the point that I would buy one and replace it myself.
I’m temporarily using the work computer for internet at home. It would be great to say I didn’t lose anything. What with the NAS, Drobo, backup hard drives and stuff. But I had not copied my system disk in 6 months or more. That hurts. Passwords, settings, installed programs, serial numbers, photos, etc. And the time to set all that crap up again. That’s what I hate the most. Maybe, this time I’ll schedule the System disk backup job.
Old Tascosa Classic Bike Tour
This isn’t the story that the other bike tour post was. We left when it was breaking from a night long rain. Rode dripping in sweat and condensation through Timber Creek; which was spectacular by the way. Out to the canyon and back then around Canyon.
It was exciting riding with or rather getting passed by people. The recombinant bikes and tandem were interesting to see. I didn’t see much of anyone for an hour before the last rest stop. Thought I was the only one left. The route into the wind was hard. Then back into town riding through Canyon.
The last stop was at the WT stadium. They had cold water. Thank God. It had been almost two hr since the last stop. The back out through the country side. Not the I27 access road.
Heading to Amarillo you could see the dark storm clouds covering Amarillo and obviously raining. One last incredibly cruel trick was a Northeast wind instead of the perpetual South wind. A 20mph easy return trip turned into a 10mph painful slog. The road headed, finally, toward the access road and the home stretch.
I exchanged places a few times with another rider. And a big black pickup followed us in. I don’t know if this indicates we were the last ones on the 80 or not. The 25 and 50 mile riders must have finished an hour or two earlier.
Without any ceremony I rolled in at 12:17. 5 hours and 4 minutes. That beats my MS bike tour speed by .5mph.
Ars: CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
CAPTCHAs are those wierd, distorted, hard-to-read letters that websites use to filter computers from people and keep the spambots out. It seems that the difficulty in reading artificially distorted text and time worn manuscripts is very similar. One group is using pieces of scanned images of damaged paper to get people to sort out man and machines. As the pieces of text are typed in more of the manuscript is digitized.
For now, computer programs designed to break CAPTCHAs are unable to read the pieces of text. Imagine if they get to a point where they could. On one hand it opens the spambot flood gates. On the other we get computer vision that can exceed a human.
Over the course of history, humanity has suffered some horrifying damage to our collective cultural legacy in the form of books and other text lost to accident or neglect. The digitalization of text holds out the promise of permanently preserving the written word in an archive that can be distributed widely and kept safe from accidental damage. This presents archivists with a challenge: the works that are most in need of preservation are likely to already be damaged or distorted, making the use of automated scanning and text processing less likely to succeed. Researchers are now reporting on a successful way to identify the words that computers can’t handle: turn them into CAPTCHAs, and get people to do the work.
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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon noticed a while back that there are parallels between CAPTCHAs and the problem words in scanned works: in both cases, the letters were distorted to the point where computers weren’t capable of recognizing the underlying word. So, they created a system, reCAPTCHA, in which words that weren’t recognized by character recognition software were distorted slightly and converted into CAPTCHAs. We covered the announcement of the system over a year ago. Today’s issue of Science contains a paper describing the result which, by all measures, appears to be a resounding success.
According to the authors, humans handle over 100 million CAPTCHAs every day. “This mental effort is precious,” they write, “since deciphering CAPTCHAs requires people to perform a task that computers cannot.” Their automated system attempts to harvest this precious effort. Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two optical character recognition programs; in cases where the programs disagree, the questionable word is converted into a CAPTCHA. It, along with a control word of known identity (used for cases where a bot is trying to crack the CAPTCHA) are then distributed to participating websites. Currently, over 40,000 sites are using reCAPTCHA.
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The researchers tested the system using a random sampling of 250 New York Times articles from different eras where the identity of every word was confirmed by two independent transcription experts. Each OCR software program managed about 84 percent accuracy but, when their results were combined with the reCAPTCHA system, the overall accuracy shot up to 99.1 percent. That’s actually within the bounds of professional transcription services that use two independent experts to generate copies that are then examined by a third party. The few remaining problems typically came when the OCR software missed word breaks.
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CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
Computers
Recently, I’ve aquired the computer storage gear that I wanted in Jan. The stuff intended to keep me from having a massive loss of data; pictures, songs, movies, documents, etc.
At the time, one computer hard drive went down. An old one I had used 24/7 for 5 yr or so. When I went to rebuild it other hard drives seemed to be down too. After a lot of work and a major disheartening realization that all of my scanned photos, movies, songs, games, everything was probably lost I quit working on it and set the box aside. Something needed to happen and I didn’t want to face it at the time.
So, Drobo came out with a new box and put the old one on sale for %30 off. I got one of those and a separate dual NAS with 750 gig. Plus, I started buying movies from Amazon/TiVo and iTunes/Mac. These have to go somewhere. Deleting them is like throwing money away. Finally, the laptop hardrive has filled up many times. It’s only 80 gig and the external disk is nearly full.
This weekend I took stock. All of my CDs from the past 10 yr plus all the hard drives. Something on CD I rediscovered. Which is nicely surprising. Turns out that 8 out or 10 hard drives is unreadable. All the songs. Hours of scanning my photos. Old Bittorrents. My own ripped DVDs. My own ripped CDs. Nearly all of it is gone. At least a few hundred hours of work vanished. That really hurts.
The new rule is that something important must be stored in two places. Immediately. No waiting. The laptop drive, the external drive, DVD, CD, NAS, and another external drive, and Drobo are the options for now. There’s some space to do this for everything except DVDs. Even handbraked they take ~600 meg/hr. Drobo is the big help. It holds up to 4T and drives are interchangeable. Right now, it holds 1.6 T and isn’t even close to full.
Another suprise was discovering old games and old operating system disks. Making images of Win98SE, WinNT4, and Win2KSP4 is exceedingly easy with Mac. And I’ll try to use VMWare with the old images and install some old games. That would be interesting. Also, since I have decided not to build 2 WinXP boxes I can use my extra lic. to make a WinXP VM. This is something that costs $100 more to do on Vista.
Bike Pics
Internet Connection Restored
Yay! My Internet works again. It cut out on Sat. morning and I thought it would pick back up. By Sun. night it hadn’t and wasn’t going to. I called first thing this morning and they finally fixed it about 15 minutes ago.
I was jones-ing for it kind of bad. Podcasts hadn’t downloaded, My questions went unanswered, Email unchecked, Blog unposted to,.. It was awful.
Had to come into work this morning, because I couldn’t work from home as planned. At 11:30 the cats went to the vet and I was hoping to save a trip.
At least this was a significant issue. If it’s going to be down, might as well be down most of the day. Some piece of equipment filled up and they had to add another one. So, that’s good. Growth.
Bike vs Car
I’m reading a lot of stuff lately about bicycles including advocacy movements like Critical Mass. It’s interesting and very surprising to see the big outcry from drivers against cyclist. And they say the lamest things.
The most common would be that they don’t stop at Stop signs and at various times they have seen cyclists ignoring posted street signs. This is hilarious. Hasn’t everyone who has driven for one year seen dozens of other drivers ignored posted signs. One time I saw a Mustang run a red light, thus all Mustangs should be banned from using the public roadways. Replace Mustang with bicycle and you have the motto for the Combustion Engine Defense League.
Let me explain some differences between my bike and my car. The latter has something referred to as blind spots from the doors and roof frame. The limits of vision on my bike are my head. My car has 70 years of technology for blocking noise and temperature fluctuations. My bike has none. And two organs on my head placed as far apart as possible let me triangulate the source of sounds. When I pull up to a Stop sign in my car I HAVE to look. On my bike, I can hear a car a couple of blocks away.
Then there is the safety issue. Cars have airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, antilock brakes, etc. My bike has zip. A car is classified as a deadly weapon and can become a large, heavy, self-propelled low-speed projectile representing a serious threat to other vehicles, pedestrians, and the occasional building. My bike weighs 30 lb + 210 lb and maxes out at 40 mph. The only deadly threat I present is to myself. Cars can kill me. I can’t kill someone in a car. Can’t even scratch ‘em if I tried.
Well, you might be worried about a lawsuit for running over a cyclist. Don’t be. It’s my cynical and as yet disproven belief that drivers are not responsible for hitting cyclist in the Texas panhandle. If you run me over, I’m dead and you have some paperwork to sign.
I freely admit to skipping through certain lights and Stop signs. If no one is there or even close, why stop. My bike does not accelerate like my car. 0-60 in 20 seconds. Not unless it’s 60 feet/sec and I’m an Olympic sprinter. It takes forever to stop, put a foot down, bring a foot up, and cross a 24-60 ft intersection. Let’s say I average 7mph and seek to cross a 5-6 lane intersection. That will take 6 seconds. A car will take 2-3 seconds. Am I going to take this trouble when I can see and hear that oncoming traffic is 1 block away? In a car yes, on a bike no.
And how ’bout the times when the lights at large intersections don’t give me time to cross? Some light switch allow traffic to flow while I’m half way across the pedestrian walkway. The most frightening time riding in the city is at large Stop lights.
Let’s talk about inaccessibility. Cars and truck can legally go where I can not. Amarillo is divided by the BNSF railroad. There are three crossing, all for heavy vehicles only and all dangerous to bicycles. Lack of bike trails force cyclists into harrowing rides in the gutters. Street layouts force one to ride circuitous routes or risk sprinting along with 40-60 mph traffic in 12-16 in of space.
Cars regularly park in the bike lanes. Some even take up the full width of the lane. No one tickets in these residential areas. If we double parked some Semis in a residential neighborhood with just enough room for one car to scrape by at a time, would anyone complain? You can be riding along safely in a lane and then have to stop for traffic, because someone is parked in the bike lane. And what good is a bike lane for a block, skip two blocks, another bike lane for a block, etc.? It would be quite challenging to accommodate these lanes today, but nothing is requiring new housing developments to have 45 ft wide roads for bike lanes. Today’s problem is tomorrow’s problem.
The only thing that matters is whatever conduct can safely traverse me from point A to point B. My bike is a church mouse in the middle of a longhorn stampede.
Wired: Shimano Shuns Cables for Full Electronic Shifting
Japanese parts manufacturer Shimano is launching an electronic shifting system for high-end road bikes that it claims will vastly improve performance and reduce maintenance. By replacing the conventional levers that pull wound-steel cables through protective housings with solid-state switches and rubber-coated wires, there’s no chance for road gunk to clog things up and interfere with shifting, or, for that matter, your post-ride beer.
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Thursday’s announcement that the system, called Di2, will hit shops in January 2009 settles a question first raised in 2005 when prototypes began cropping up on the bikes of select Shimano-sponsored racers in the pro peloton. The system’s development has been photographed, chronicled and Angsted over ever since.
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Shimano plans to offer the electronic setup as an upgrade option within the 7900 group — which is preselling for $2,600 — so parts such as the two-tone cranks and brakes will be the same. (No word yet on the additional cost for electric; it could be double.) Di2 consists of two brake-and-shift levers, two derailleurs whose springs have been replaced by servo-motors, a 7.4-volt lithium-ion battery pack, and the wiring harness that connects everything.
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