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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. 

The Echo Inn, Carver, OR

Saturday night we drove in to Carver from Metzler Park for dinner. We've spotted the Echo Inn a few times on the way through, so we decided to give it a try. It's a bar with a large center table and a few smaller tables plus a bunch of lottery machines. The outdoor covered area is an interlocking warren of aluminum carports and outdoor shelters.  We sat in the covered area outside and saw the occasional flash of lightning while it stormed. 

Metzler Park, Clackamas Co.

We spent the weekend at Metzler Park in Clackamas County. It's about an hour from home and it's part of the Clackamas County park system so it's a little under the radar.  County parks are great places to go if you're trying to get away for the weekend.  They're sort of like a cross between National Forest campgrounds in terms of quiet, and state parks in terms of facilities. They seem to attract people who just want to go out and enjoy a campfire with an extended friend or family group. So, lots of kids ranging around on bikes and scooters,...

Yo La Tengo at Pioneer Courthouse Square

Wow, they just settled in and went. 

The AI Poop Ouroboros

Today one of my IT customers pinged me asking if I could help with a quality-of-life issue in one of our apps. They had a few ideas about tools we could adopt, but if I can figure out how to solve the problem with what's already in the stack, I want to go that way.  So I do a quick search. Since I'm in my work profile in Chrome, my default search engine is still Google. Probably that's fine, because it's a Google product I'm trying to get more detail on.  Google's handy new AI search result widget kicks up a...

Hazel, shell scripts, Kagi's AI Quick Answers, and Magick photo borders

I was looking around for "resize and add a border" options for photos. Lightroom mobile will do it. There are some iOS apps that will do it. I really wanted to work it into my desktop workflow, though, and the desktop version of Lightroom doesn't have a border option. There are some poorly reviewed apps that might to do it, but none of them seem to think a simple white border is a sufficiently interesting problem to solve, and assume you want, like, a simulated gilt painted frame like you'd find on sale at Michael's. There was also the GraphicConverter option....

Bridge Pedal

We got up early and rode our bikes across town to do the Bridge Pedal.  Getting there and back plus the route itself, plus a small detour for brunch when we were done and headed home took around 35 miles and a bit under 4 hours.  Our morning got off to a slightly off-kilter start: I noticed Al's bike was making more noise than I'm used to hearing. I recently fixed a flat for her so I was worried I'd messed something up. We pulled off and she said "it feels like the wheel's dragging," which was pretty alarming, because I...

Dusted off the Framework 13

I haven't used the Framework 13 for a long while. Maybe a year or so. It was mostly a "I'm in a gray area using this thing for work, and I'm not a fan of Zoom on this thing anyhow" call that led to "I am also tired of muscle memory shear dividing my time between this thing and a MacBook." But I was feeling preemptively irritated with macOS this afternoon and I felt like futzing, so I fired it up and sat through the updates to get it to Fedora 40/GNOME 46. What an interesting window into my preoccupations and...

Along I-5 South

Got some rolls from the Olympus OM-2N back

I put off taking these rolls from a month ago because the camera back opened while I was rewinding and I wasn't sure what would happen. A ton of exposures survived, though.  The first couple are at Lava Lake. It was super hazy thanks to some large fires in the area. The remainder are from a walk down a Woodstock alley.