Tour de Sewer 2009

The Tour de Sewer this year was run on March 21. It was a good day for riding since it was a little on the cool side, but it wasn’t raining. Participation was noticeably down this year. The start was free form without staged groups receiving individual lectures on the route condition. As it turned out, the route conditions were good without any mud flooding the paths on the river. However, I was glad that I brought my hopped up Cannondale F-300 since the road was rough in places and I jumped the curb a number of times. I did go on the 30 mile path for a while until I figured that one out. Also missed a turn on the return leg to the river bed, but that took me to a 7-11 that was pretty convenient.

The rest stops were the same as usual, but the cookies were seriously upgraded. I ate way too many of them. The people who missed this ride must have been the ones in my time category. I pretty much brought up the tail end except for a couple of other guys. I usually have some company on the ride. On adavantage, or disadvantage, depending on your point of view was that I could eat as much food as I wanted. They were already shutting down as I rolled in and there was still a lot of food left over. Noticeable was the lack of any vendors. The recession was pretty evident.

The bike worked pretty well till the end when I noticed some drivetrain problems. Since the end of the route was flat, coming back up the bike path by the river, this wasn’t a problem. I’d been meaning to install some XT shifters, so this looked like a good opportunity. Photos at http://ikemi.info/graphics/Sewer2009/index.html

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom, the software that changed my life. I never really figured out Photoshop. I did use Photoshop Elements, but it took a while to process a large number of raw photos. I was excited when Apple’s Aperture came out. In fact, I went out and got a $400 graphics card so I could use it on my G5. And that is the problem with Aperure, hardware dependencies. At that time, Aperture needed a fairly high powered Mac, and the selection of digital cameras it supported was limited. Updates to support new camera models came out very slowly. Finally, there were software bugs that could cause you to lose your work. When Aperture worked it was great. The idea was right, but the execution was flawed.

Adobe soon came out with its Lightroom. Lightroom could work on even my 12“ laptop and supported all the weird camers I owned. I gave away my copy of Aperture and never looked back. At first I missed the Aperture loupe and the way it could correct the horizons in photos. However, I figured out how to do this in Lightroom. Lightroom has also been much more stable than Aperture. My main grumble, which I’ve also read in the forums, is that stacks don’t work with collections. Collections seem to be the natural way to organize photos. Then again, stacks in Aperture had never quite worked right for me.

Lightroom has changed my photo life. In the past it was a major task to produce galleries for my website. I had backlogs of photos to process. Now I can get my photos online soon after I shoot them.

Storage

The problem these days is that we have so many files and some of them are large as cameras get more megapixels or you shoot video. The good side is that storage get cheaper per gigabyte (soon we’ll be saying per terabyte.) No matter what, though, we probably end up with more than one device that we have to attach somehow, even in the case of laptops. In the early Mac days it was some kind of serial attachment that no one probably remembers anymore. Then came SCSI which was a cantankerous pain in the rear. Firewire was supposed to be our deliverance, being pretty fast and trouble free. However, the external housings were pricy, especially in the case of Firewire 800. The pain of discovering that your PATA Firewire 800 housing was now a dead end since SATA had take over the world was excruciating. USB came along shortly after Firewire and USB external housings proliferated like rabbit even though it seemed like a really bad idea. In spite of the spec. claims, USB is slow and the though of a terabyte USB drive is mind boggling. Price and convenience seem to be the driving factor with performance only of interest to hardcore users. The latest, but strangely not hyped, development is eSATA, or external SATA. eSATA is fast and cheap, but few seem to have heard about it, probably since eSATA ports don’t come stock on most computers, desk nor laptop.

Photography is the main driver for my storage needs these days. I’m also concerned about security, redundancy, and reliability in relation to certain Mac hardware issues. With the Mac Pro tower you have four internal bays for cramming in drives. On my G3 and G4 I’d already been doing this using PCI card controllers. Early G3 provided tray room for 3 drives and the G4s had room built in for 4. By the way, my Yukon Mac was the best and most reliable Mac I’ve ever had, living way beyond its design life and I hope it’s still running somewhere. Only the lack of compatibility with Leopard made me give it up.

The Mac G5 had only 2 drive bays, but after market kits allowed you to add at least 3 and sometimes more. The first SATA Mac, PCI cards allowed compatibility with older PATA drives. There was also a trick where you could tap into the CD drive harness to support a PATA drive. However, the power supply of the G5 started giving up under the load of so many drives. By the end, I could boot up with only one drive. I read somewhere that the failure rate of G5s was up to 25%, probably due to power supplies, a problem which has troubled other Mac models. Of course, there was also the jet engine fan problem.

Anyway, my G5 problems started me thinking about more dependence on external drives. I’d had some early firewire 400 housings, but these were limited to 120 gigabytes due to the early controllers. Looking for a better soluiton, I went to firewire 800 dual housings that supported RAID. The first ones I got supported PATA, of course. These types of housings were not easy to find and there was really only one online vendor, operating under different names. Of course, I am talking about a consumer type housing. There are plenty of firewire 800 housings if you are looking for something really expensive intended for commercial applications. SATA versions were even rarer and more expensive. I spent the money and ended up with 3 PATA and one SATA, although one was an unintentional buy. On one order the vendor sent me an extra drive, and I ended up buying it since straightening things out was a mess. The vendor was a jerk about the issue and I think I ended up being blackballed by them, which cut off my future access to firewire 800 RAID drives.

At the same time as I was making this transition, I gave away my ailing G5 and picked up a Mac Pro. Originally I did fill up all four bays. However, I started worrying about security and wanted the option of being able to lock up most of my drives physically. I had my Firewire 800 drives, but 3 of them were dead ends since PATA drives stopped at around 750 megabytes and future availability seemed uncertain. One thing I know is that my storage requirements always grow. I also started worrying more about backups and started using Timemachine. I also like maintaining a lot of headroom on my drives.

Firewire 800 is almost as fast as internal SATA, but the cost is too high. I wasn’t going to convert over to all SATA RAID housings. Compatibility isn’t that great since only the Mac Pros and the 15“ and larger Mac laptops support it. The writing is also on the wall that Apple is dropping support of Firewire, which is the killer. New 13” Macbooks don’t even have a firewire 400 port.

While researching how to put a bigger drive in what was at that time my Mom’s Mac Mini, I started reading about eSATA. Sure enough, a PCI-X eSATA card was available for my Mac Pro, as wel as a ExpressCard 34 for my 15“ Macbook Pro laptop. I gave up on fast external disc solutions for my 13” MacBooks since one only has USB and the other only Firewire 400. The cards are relatively cheap ($60 late 2008) and the external eSATA housings are much cheaper than firewire ones, only a little more than USB ones. Single drive eSATA housings are readily available in brick and mortar stores, since they usually also support USB. A $75 dual drive housing is available from macsales.com. Although I initially went with a hardware card for my Mac Pro for convenience, Apple actually supplies two unused eSATA ports in the MacPros. It’s a trick getting to them, but after I decided that I liked eSATA, I decided to tap into them. The kit for doing this (Newer Technology http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/), which provides cables and female ports that go where a PCI card should go, is only around $25. One hitch is that drives hooked up to the internal ports are not how swappable. They behave just like internal drives.

You’re supposed to disassemble half your Mac to get at the ports, but I’d read on the net that it can be done without disassembly if you’re very careful and patient. Whatever else I like about the eSATA, I have to admit that the connectors are not user friendly, even under the best of circumstances. I did use a pair of large angled tweezers. On the forums they recommended forceps. I ended up bending back part of a fan housing to ease getting access.

With the Newer kit that gives you 2 ports and I also have 2 on the PCI-X card I installed. Only the
PCI-X card supports hot swapping. It is possible to get more expensive cards ($200+) that support multiple port enclosures, so that you can attach up to 20 drives at one time.

Currently I have a single 1.5 terabyte drive in the Mac Pro housing. The rest of my drives are in two double eSATA housings plus singles that I swap in as needed. One drive I clone from my boot disk. One of my old Firewire 800 RAID housings I use for Timemachine. That one supports SATA so it has a future. There’s another Firewire 800 RAID housing I use for general purpose use. That one only supports PATA so its future is limited. Mostly I use just the boot drive.

I’d also like some backup in the clouds. I subscribed to mac.com, but the transition to me.com ticked me off, so I’m dropping that. Storage is also limited and expensive.I signed up with mozy.com, but I was never able to get it to make a complete backup. It always had some kind of error. A colleague who did get it to backup said that it was very hard to recall any files from mozy. In the forums I read that other people have had the same experience. When I quit mozy, they did not refund any part of the two year fee I paid. They didn’t respond to my email and there doesn’t seem to be a number to call. I’ve noticed that the cloud backup world seems to be pretty tough since some of the vendors have gone out of business. I’m still looking.

Walking Sticks

Hiking poles changed my hiking life. I first saw modern ones in the Alps where I noticed that everyone was using them. Some people were even using two, sort of like ski poles. We asked some of the locals how they worked and they said that they were great.

Since my knees were going, I decided that the poles might be a good idea. I’d used wooden walking sticks in the past, but not these adjustable aluminum poles. Some came with shock absorbers, that didn’t seem to do too much. Experience with cross country skiing carried over to the hiking experience. You don’t grab the grips of the poles. The straps are the most important interface with the pole. You only grab the grips when you need to steady yourself or apply thrust. I’ve tried explaining this technique to others with little success.

Carbon fibers poles having the highest performance since they are light and have inherent damping, delivering the effect that the mechanical shock absorbers were supposed to deliver. The only problem is that the adjustable joints never held. They had a tendency to collapse at the worst possible times. After going through two sets of poles, I gave up on carbon fiber. Titanium poles are a good compromise, being fairly light, but noticeably heavier than carbon fiber. For most people, basic aluminum poles can do the job at a fraction of the price of the more exotic poles. My favorites are Black Diamonds with lever action length adjusters instead of all twist adjusters. For overseas use I have a pair of really short poles that can fit into my bag when collapsed.

When I first started using hiking poles I wondered why they came with rubber cups, like the ones on ski poles. On hard ground they are pretty useless. Hiking in the Swiss Alps I learned why you need those cups on the end of your hiking poles. Those Alps would probably be like our Sierras if the Swiss hadn’t been herding cattle there since the Roman era or before. The soil in places is cow pies and squishy. Your poles sink in without the cups. Also, you don’t want to wear loose cuffs on long pants. That’s why you see the Swiss wearing those short pants and the long stockings.

Dahon Folding bicyles

Originally I got a folding bike so that I could take it on a plane. However, that idea fell through. I found that it cost $75 one way to take the bike with me. On the return the derailleur hanger was bent. I still liked the idea of a folding bicycle since it’s more convenient to throw one in the back of my Subaru Baja than using the roof rack. The first one I bought had a steel frame and a SRAM 3 speed rear hub plus a deraillieur for something like 18 speeks, or was it 21? With 20“ wheels, this bike was pretty stable and I didn’t mind riding it for longer distances. However, I decided that the SRAM rear hub was too complicated for me and I gave the bike away.

I still liked the idea of a folding bicycle. After looking at other brands, I decided to stick with Dahon, but this time I picked out a model with an aluminum frame and a single speed rear hub. This model came with an 8 speed cluster and some limited suspension. The suspension is good enough for Los Angeles urban streets. I converted the bike to a 9 speed with an XT cluster and an XT derailleur. Originally I had a twist grip shifter, but I changed this first to an XT trigger type shifter, which I raided for my Cannondale. A SRAM thumb shifter is going on next. I bought a smaller front chain wheel to get a little lower gearing. Going to a smaller chain wheel meant that I had to rig up a chain tensioner with a pulley. I didn’t care for the way the front wheel was built -radial spokes-so I got it restrung by http://www.gaerlan.com/. That probably wasn’t necessary.

For commuting I got the Dahon fenders and rear rack. I don’t think the rack was really meant for this bike since it has a swing arm suspension, but I adapted it with a U-bold. The fenders are pretty nice, albeit a little heavy. I replaced the handlebars but I haven’t replaced the seat since it uses a funny monorail system. I may replace the entire seat post someday. The pedals I’m currently using are the the ones from Performance that take an SPD on one side and a street shoe on the other.

I’ve used the bike on a 21 mile urban commute plus for getting around in San Diego. When I commute I use the SPD side of the pedlas. One good thing about a folding bicycle is that I think no one wants to steal one.

The Lake District

This time, Monday and my last day in England before I fly out, the Virgin train service functioned without failure and took me to Oxenhome, on time even. Unlike the bus tours, this one was almost empty, with only three participants. Golden Tours contracts this tour out to a local service called Mountain Goat, for whom it’s really a half day tour since you spend the other half of the time on the train.

In Windemere we picked up the other two participants of the tour. Someone else was supposed to have come up from London on the train, but didn’t show. Outside of Windermere the Short Sunderland flying boat was manufactured, and there is supposed to be one in the lake. That’s of a little interest to me since on the previous trip to England one goals was to see the Sunderlands in the aviation museums.

Besides drving around to various scenic overlooks, the highpoints for me were the visit to Beatrix Potter’s first home in the Lake District, HIll Top, and the Bearix Potter gallery in the little village of Hawkshead. Ms. Potter was something of a Luddite, and she did not have running water nor electricity installed in her home. It now has the latter, but not the former. The gallery is housed in the former law offices of her husband. They are part of the National Trust, as is most everything in this area.

Leaving London the sky had benn miraculously completely clear, but after reaching Oxenholve the sky had clouded up. By the latter part of the day it was raining, killing most of my photo ops. Before the rain, actually one of our first stops, we did get to Wray Castle, which Ms. Potter’s family rented when she was still traveling with her family. We did go for a short cruise on Coniston and saw Brantwood, John Ruskins’s house from the Lake. Also passed by where the Bluebird flipped over during a record attempt, killing Donald Campbell. Learned that Border Collies are the favored dog around here these days and that the type of sheep raised here are actually territorial and don’t have to be fenced in once they learn the land. Left my umbrella behind on the boat, but I had rain gear and the trip was near its end so I didn’t care much.

My two silent companions had to catch a 4:00 train from Windemere, so I was by myself for afternoon tea at a hotel that Ms. Potter and Mr. Ruskin had frequented. Used way too much butter and cream. Tea was a welcome break, especially after the cold and wet, and my first opportunity to relax on this trip. Lunch was a rush in Hawkshead since I had to fit in the visit to the Beatrix Potter Gallery, which wasn’t part of the tour. The gentleman at the coffee shop said it was a shame to rush around in this area and I had to agree. I only had time for a very tasty ginger soup and a coffee cake that was marvelous. It was sin to gulp it down as I did. The proprietor also said that there is a bus service that can take one around the Lake District.

After that it was back to the Oxenholme train station for the three hour ride back to London. For some reason the Beatrix Potter Experience was skipped, although it was advertised in the tour description, but I was pretty tired as it was and I’d seen Hilltop. When I get home I’ll have to order some more of her books. Since I am a fancier of comic books and manga, I appreciate her clean illustration style and character designs. It’s a shame she didn’t also keep up with the fungus research.

Photos at: http://ikemi.info/graphics/LakeDistrict/index.html

Warwick Castle to Oxford

On board with Golden Tours again. Except for the Lakes District fiasco, they seem well organized and I trust bus travel more than train travel. Also, they include lunch with the tours, which gives me a chance to meet people. The day before lunch was with a gentleman from Australia, one form India, a woman from Mexico City, and an Indian woman living in Paris.

Our first stop was Warwick Castle, my first English castle, although I have visited castles in Germany, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. This is a very complete castle, and is now sort of an extension of Tussaud’s, with exhibits of an Edwardian dinner party and Medieval preparations for war. I saw both but the former was of more interest to me. Prince Edward and Winston Churchill were once entertained here. Captions were provided to describe who the figures portrayed were. These included short family trees. These were presented for some of the servants as well as their masters.

One may climb up into one of the towers and along the ramparts. The tight spiral stairs reminded me of the ones in the tower of Chartres, but much shorter. The tower does give a good view of the city and the church. One may also climb via switchbacks onto the mound that preceded the castle. The Victorians built a little false extension of the castle up there, although it looks as if the mound had been worked into the castle’s defenses. The top of the mound does give a good view of the rier. Didn’t have time to tour the grounds outside of the walls, but that was okay since they were very extensive and they presented another opportunity to be left behind.
Photos at: http://ikemi.info/graphics/Warwick/index.html

Lunch was at a pub in Stratford that dated to 100 years before Shakespeare. Inside they’ve setup a window so that one may see what the construction was like under the plaster. It’s sort of like adobe with a filler including dung and horsehair forced between the wood. They say it smelled bad for the first couple of years.

I shared a table with a family from Saudi Arabia, which was very interesting. The husband is training to be a petroleum engineer. I didn’t feel like having a beer since I was little exhausted from lack of sleep. Besides the jet lack, I’d made the mistake of having a cup of real coffee before retiring.

We next walked to Shakespeare’s birthplace. That’s about all we saw in Stratford since it’s very slow to get into the house, once you’ve left the modern visitors center. Inside there are three lectures on life in Shakespeare’s time. The garden has been restored to Shakespeare’s time, but the adjacent buildings were pulled down because of fire worries. The house was in its natural coloration. The practice of painting Tudor houses black and white was a Victorian affectation. Due to the time constraints, didn’t get a chance to go down to the River Avon itself. We had to make time to Christchurch College.
Photos at: http://ikemi.info/graphics/Stratford/index.html

Oxford was more urban in setting than Cambridge, which seemed to be designed with tourists in mind. However, it was still a thrill to see the colleges where Lewis Carroll lectured, as well as the where T.E. Lawrence studied, plus many others. The Christchurch dining hall was the model for the one used in the Harry Potter movies, although I don’t much care for them. Did get to see the semi-hidden door behind the High Table which was the inspiration for the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. One may also see stained glass images of Alice and the Reverend Dodgson in the dining hall, as well as many portraits. Oxford seems to be a very vibrant campus with students dashing all about, some in very interesting get-ups-I imagine that must have been theater sudents.
Photos at: http://ikemi.info/graphics/Oxford/index.html

On way out passed by the tavern where the Inklings used to meet. It would have nice to hoist a pint in there.