Several weeks on a 6-speed Brompton C-Line

I bought a six-speed Brompton C-Line several weeks ago, replacing a Zizzo Forté. I like having a non-electric "get around" bike, and I like having a folding bike for camping trips or flexible city travel. The Zizzo was fine, but a little creaky for my tastes, with an ungainly fold. I bought the Brompton on the strength of a good test ride that told me it'd be fine for my purposes: Steel frame, interesting suspension, decent gearing, and surprisingly comfortable geometry. I was imagining round trips of six or seven miles within my part of town, and the occasional slightly longer...

October 19th, 2024 Tools

The imposter director revisits the cradle

It isn't something I really emphasize on my résumé or in interviews, but for a spell (more than a year? Less than two?) I was Puppet's engineering director for the platform team — the people who made the core open source Puppet distribution. I was assigned the group in the wake of a re-org that had made a ton of theoretical sense for the many teams working on everything but the platform, but had made no sense  for the platform team itself. I wouldn't have ended up with that group, but there was a lot of disaffection over the re-org, a...

October 18th, 2024 Life

re: RMS/FSF

Regarding The Stallman Report, which I tried to discuss in a single toot but couldn't:  I owe my career and life as I know it to a chance reading of the GPL while tending an industrial photo copier on third shift.  Professionally: I have co-written a book about Linux, contributed to FOSS  projects, helped build an OSPO at a major open source company, and worked for a FOSS foundation.  If you're a GNOME user, you've possibly encountered docs I wrote. If you're a Puppet user, you've definitely encountered docs I wrote, or read docs that were part of the three-fold expansion...

October 15th, 2024

Goodbye, Pranayama

I sold a few boards this week, including this Pantheon Pranayama. As much as I admired the design, with its super narrow tolerances for such giant wheels and such a low deck,  I didn't  warm up to the TKPs: I was never a traditional skater, so they didn't feel quite right. I was happy to sell it to a buyer who was plainly delighted with it. He wanted to talk boards for a while after he got back from a test spin around the block, so  I don't think he's going to flip it. So that leaves me with my other...

October 12th, 2024 Life

On Metal

Before deciding I was a punk guy in high school, I was a jazz guy. I was rescued from staying that way by the guy who sat in front of me in American History and sensed some hope for me. He made a tape with the Repo Man soundtrack on one side, and Dead Boys' Young, Loud, and Snotty on the other. On the other hand, there were all the kids on the school bus. There were a lot of metal people on that route. Ozzy Osbourne was sort of the baseline. I suppose Motley Crue was big. Also Scorpions and...

October 1st, 2024 Life

Zizzo Folder Notes

I met some friends up on Burnside last night, and planned to ride home with Al from there, so I decided to take my Zizzo Forte: We could meet up, hang out, and I could fold it up and stick it in the trunk and ride home with Al once the evening was over. The longest ride I've ever taken the Forte on happened at Diamond Lake a few years ago, when we rode our Zizzos around the lake trail, which is about 11.5 miles. It's a very different ride than the one from far SE to close SE Portland, but...

September 28th, 2024 Tools

Dialing in the ADV 1.1, getting the Forte out of storage

I got a bike fitting at Pedal PT for my new Co-Op ADV 1.1 two weeks ago. We didn't end up changing much: The seat needed very small adjustments forward and up, but everything else was in a good place. The one thing I left a little uncertain about was the stem: The bike shipped with a 100mm stem, and I still felt, even with the seat moved forward a bit and the bars turned up, that I was more stretched out over the bike than I like to be. I could feel a little tightness in my shoulders and neck,...

September 24th, 2024

M43 wasn't on my list of things to appreciate in 2024

I took my OM-5 (with the kit 12-45 zoom) along for our coast trip. I liked what I got from the combo, especially considering the low weight and small size. It was fine hanging over my shoulder for a hike with a 1700-foot climb, and it felt compact when I'd need to tighten my strap to clamor over rocks or in and out of a boat. A 3-lens + body kit works great in a Peak Design 6l sling.  I liked the images I got out of it, minus a few issues with dynamic range and some exaggerated reds that got...

September 11th, 2024 Photography

Down the Southern Oregon Coast

We took a trip down the Southern Oregon Coast for Al's birthday this year, staying in Gold Beach but ranging as far down as Brookings on day trips. We passed through there on a Spring Break trip a few years ago, camping outside of Port Orford and Brookings, but we were headed for the Redwoods, and didn't spend long. That part of Oregon is really its own thing. It feels apart from the cultural presence of Portland in a way that the northern coast doesn't, for good, ill, and indifferent.  We rented a condo that overlooked the river on the north...

September 11th, 2024 Life

Co-Op ADV 1.1

More for purposes of a placeholder than even a preliminary review: My friend Patrick mentioned doing the Reach the Beach ride in May. You never know how something is going to hit you, and this time hearing him say that hit me like, "huh, I wonder if I could do that?" I think I could, because I remember being in far worse shape and being 50 pounds heavier the year I decided I wanted to bike 22 miles round trip to work every day of the week  and used the Bike Commute Challenge to push me to meet that goal....

September 6th, 2024 Tools

Kinds of builders

After a few years at a startup I started slipping two of my own questions into the interview plans I was handed, regardless of why I was on the interview team: • Tell me about a time in the absence of working process or tooling that you built something. • Tell me how you measured its success.  I started asking because I kept seeing a certain kind of failure pattern: Well equipped, bright people with plenty of success behind them who were hitting our environment and either bursting into flame or quietly failing out. Maybe because we were a startup and...

August 30th, 2024 Life

Long Haul Day and a Meditation on Meat Crayons

I put a lot of miles on the Haul today: Two runs to Johnson Creek after I left my wallet at home,  then one up to River City Bicycles to exchange a part, then a detour through Woodstock.  By the end of the day it was claiming 16 miles of range left in PASM level 2, where I had spent most of the day minus a fast run down Foster. It looks like I put over 20 miles on it. My previous two e-bikes used Bosch mid-drives with four levels of assist: "Eco," "Touring," "Sport," and "Turbo." I usually ran them...

August 26th, 2024 Tools

Specialized Globe Haul ST

I ended my cargo bike search with a Specialized Globe Haul ST. It's basically replacing three other vehicles: A car I seldom drive if I can help it, a more traditional e-bike, and a Yamaha TW-200 motorcycle (about which more later). I went into the search thinking in terms of long-tails, but the Haul won me over because it's a bit of a hybrid between the "cargo" and "utility" categories, with a huge amount of capacity if you add the front and rear bucket-style panniers and put storage on the front and rear racks. It's rated for 419 pounds of carrying...

August 23rd, 2024 Tools

How do you know anything?

Lots of crowing and the eventual deletion of a comment calling for journalists to be "curb stomped" for their inadequacies. And if we set the gleeful neo-nazi motif from a presumptive "progressive" aside, there's still the general tone of celebration over the idea that the press is finally getting what it deserves by being shut out. Pretty weird times, and I've given up trying to make sense of any broad political current's commitments based on a quick survey of what I can glimpse through a handful of online knotholes. But also, a bunch of liberals celebrating the marginalization of the press...

August 20th, 2024 Politics

Carver Store, Carver, OR

We drove into Carver from Metzler Park in Clackamas, Co. The Carver Store is a few aisles wide and probably sells more drinks than anything, but you can get snacks and fishing supplies, too. 

August 18th, 2024 Life