Gecko Bloggle

I’m not going to put up photos for another day or two, but I’m taking shots daily, so maybe by tomorrow or Friday.  In the meantime, if you got a few bucks kicking around, and can’t think of anything better to do with them than give ’em to some sorta good cause, like maybe Movember?

Of course, a bucket of icecream’s good too, if you wanna go that way.  Costs about the same these days.

So what sorts of things have I been reading about lately?  It’s always fun to do a linkdump, right?  Right?  No?  Tough.  Buckle up, ’cause Kansas is going the way of the Feces Ape.

• The long unanswered question of the four Doc Browns.
• Use the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool with custom ISOs
• The XBox Media Center Minus the XBox

• The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

• Change Product Key On Windows Server 2008

• Run Windows 7 on two different computers from only one install

• David Lynch and his people are running around the States interviewing random strangers
• The cutest owl in the world that you keep thinking is gonna eat your head
  

• Sysinternals Disk2vhd helps migrate physical desktops to virtual machines

• Know-Em: Check Usernames on a whole bunch of social networks at once
• Hard-to-Place Accounts (Insurance People have a forum for the “Yeah but what if…” accounts)
• Boing Boing Video remix of documentary about Synesthesia

Anyone still here after all that?  You haven’t wandered off into space yet?

I’m on the emergency call number for this and next week for work, and I’ve been woken around 2am three times now, and I’m starting to get used to it, ’cause it’s the same overnight wrangler calling me from an out-of-town studio to help with things that so far have been either “Okay, let’s see what happens in an hour” or “Phone the guy (yep, at 2:10am) who knows the site best and have him figure it out.”

I feel bad about it, but when you’re baaarely awake, and you can’t think your way out of a sketch of a paper bag, just about anything sounds like a pretty good idea.  I bet one of these days I’m going to either suggest she put the spaghetti back into the frog swatch before the king of the potato people harvests the sunjuice OR I’m going to tell her she should just go get a pillow and a blanket and wait until the sun comes up before watching TV.

The only problem so far is that I have a little trouble getting back to sleep after having to suddenly be awake and play calm support person while the person on the other end, while not at all panicking (awesome), is WIDE awake, and has been at work for a couple hours.  Gotta be a weird job for them.

Arwen’s worked the graveyard shift for a coffee place (if you lived in Vancouver’s West End  during the mid 90s, you probably bought coffee from her), and she used to talk about heading homeward for dinner and sleep when the rest of the world was waking up and heading, blearily, to work.  Working graveyard at a coffee place is one thing (you get the club kids and the folks who can’t sleep and the crazies), but when it’s a hightech job at 3am… how’s the… who d’ya… I mean.

Yeah, I don’t know if I could do that job.  Maybe for a little while.

I’d need to go somewhere for coffee though.  Coffee from a nightowl who’s used to it.

BREAKING NEWS:

Just saw the ad for the HTC “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you.” which was quite good, except for the fact that a number of the snippets of reasoning they showed looked more like heartbroken stalker footage than actual “here’s why you need one.”  The other problem was all these shots of people going places and using transit and trains and planes and stuff, but the music riff they’re playing the whole time is Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman.”  All these “isn’t it cool that people have GPS and cameras” clips and all I kept hearing in my head was “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?”

I think that’s why I’m somewhat grey hat about my use of security technologies.  There’s the part of my jobs that have always meant I had to know about viruses and security systems of some sort, but then I’d turn around a corner and I was being asked to defeat those same systems in order to determine whether or not someone was up to no good with something.  I’m certainly no forensics expert, nor would I even consider myself a script kiddie, much less an actual hacker at all.  I’m hackish though, in that any time I’m presented with something that claims to be secure, I’m trying to figure it out.  It’s a new puzzle for me to play with.  A new game.

When the web was young, we didn’t have to worry about viruses, ’cause nothing worked well enough, fast enough, or often enough to actually spread a virus that would work on the fly.  It had to be copied manually.  The virus would have to attach itself to a file that people wanted, and that they’d share around.

Now?  I think it’s something like four minutes that an unprotected Windows machine attached directly to the net (not behind a firewall/router or anything) will be infected with at least on piece of malware, and that first one will usually invite friends over.

I think what’s going to very quickly become the new battlefront isn’t going to be hackers.  It’s going to be friends, family, and staff.  Social hacking, or social engineering will be where the real money is.  Mostly because the money is real.  The money is actually MONEY.  We’re back to the oldest tricks in the book to scam people, but because there’s technology involved, somehow everyone think the magical technology will protect them from giving all their identifying information to some punk who’s going to use it to buy a new pair of sneakers for $300… or a new boat for $30,000.

So everyone needs to THINK a little more about what they give to whom.  Quit freaking out about strangers snooping in your recycling box in the alley for your returnable bottles, and start worrying about Uncle Wally, who blindly forwards whatever thing crosses their inbox without thinking that maybe somehow, someone, somewhere might have started that chain email in order to collect email address that he can sell off to some spammers in Russia so you can have your mailbox stuffed with P4ent3RMINEsez.

Oh, too much babbling, I missed Midnight.

ka-publish!

I was going to write about the guy who cornered me while on my bikeride home, but it’s obviously not totally processed for me, so I’m gonna have to sit on that story for another day.

We’re watching the Grapes of Wrath, and just heard the “I’ll be there” speech.  My brain keeps trying to treat it like some sorta documentary.

“Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

Then I remembered hearing this piece by Mario Savio

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” – December 2, 1964

And I think about activisty types, and I wonder if they were scared.  Were they aware what they were doing was dangerous to the establishment, or were they just trucking along and doing what they figured needed to be done?  I suspect maybe it was a little of column A and a little of column B, and that they may have started out thinking “Okaaaay here we go…” and ended up starting each morning thinking “Okay, what’s left to do?”

I think I started shaking the tree a little when I was at BigCo, because I had a nice long conversation with my manager, during which he kept asking me why I hadn’t applied for the position of Desktop Manager (have I told you guys this story before?) and talking about Military Presence and Royal Jelly and a number of other things that I had never thought would apply to me, and that got me thinking about it.  A few weeks later, when I was transferred from my little outpost at Blackbox to the Mothership, I lead a meeting in which I started out by asking the following question off the top of my head:

“Anyone hate their job?”

That question was literally met with a couple of jaw drops, and a nice long uncomfortable silence.  I thought maybe I’d overdone it.  Maybe I’d gone too far, and maybe I’d outed myself as someone who enjoys a good overdramatic moment.  I knew there’d been a problem at the Mothership with morale, and that the existing Desktop Manager was away (he was on his way out, and he knew it), so I figured this was our moment to find out what was making things difficult for this group of people who were keeping the systems running so the artists and programmers could keep doing their thing.

What slowly happened, once they realized that I wasn’t trying to create a bitch & moan session, was that we started talking about the stuff that was bugging us.  We were being driven by our numbers.  By statistics.  Not actual deadlines for real things.  Nothing that would cause stress and then let up, but just these magical numbers that could be manipulated by those who were willing to fudge a little here and there, and could be ignored by the higher-ups the second something happened that was outside of what they thought should be happening.  It was eye-opening.  It was somehow good for us all, I hope.  It was good for me, even though I didn’t get anything out of it personally.

Eventually, the current Desktop Manager was shuffled off, and a new one was hired.  I got the distinct impression that she’d been told/warned that I was someone who she should talk to, and that I had information about some of the things that were causing friction and problems in the department (and outside of it).  We sat down and had a good long talk, and then she hit me with this:

“Please don’t organize them.”

It turned out that someone, somewhere, high up enough in the system had noticed that maybe I was one of those people who’d unwittingly made the shift from “How do I start?” to “What else needs doing?” when it came to making myself and those around me start taking themselves and their work environment seriously.  They thought I was going to try to unionize EA’s desktop support team.  Even better, they thought that if I tried to do it, it might work.  I was flabbergasted.  I’m not entirely sure I even responded to the request to not do it.  I’d often said that the job was hard enough as it was without also having to deal with outside stuff that had NOTHING to do with our jobs and everything to do with the lifeblood of that place: Politics.

At my next job, there was no politics.  No, that’s not true.  There was politics, but we in IT generally didn’t see it, thanks to a great head of the department.  It meant that I could just dig in and have those “What else needs doing” moments more and more often.

Today, at the new job, I got a little piece of news that something I’d (mostly) penned was getting really positive reviews.  That people liked it, that it was changing the way staff was perceiving IT.  As we all know when you work in an “Overhead” department, perception is reality.  If they THINK you’re doing a bad job, you are.  Simple as that.

Today I heard that there was one thing that was clearly being seen as being done right.  Something that was shining a positive light on the department.  Difficult to do, when your department is generally invisible unless something is going wrong.

So yeah.  Today was good.  Now I just need to work on whatever’s next to make that keep happening about once a week, and we’ll start getting more and more of those good moments, I hope.  It helps, when so much of the studio requires hardware and software to “just work,” if the IT department are seen more as some crazed pit crew instead of the punching bag of the company.

No Movember photos yet, but once they start, you’ll see what’s happening on my face.  It’ll either be subtle, or I’ll end up looking like some weird cross between Billy Idol and a motorcycle cop from 1982.  Are you scared?  As Yoda would say “You will be.”

Long post warning: You has it.

November 2nd.  No point in posting the picture of my alleged moustache, ’cause there’s hardly anything there unless I have *just* finished shaving with a Bic, and I don’t have a camera or the patience to even bother getting anything approaching a macro setting for some hairs on my lip.  Also, even though I initially thought I was going to go for some sorta triple-threat thing and blog every day AND grow a stache for Movember AND ALSO PLUS cycle to work every day, I can’t, ’cause my back tire has a slow(ish?) leak and is currently flat.  Yes, the back time with the kevlar tube guard thing that’ll stop anything sharp from getting anywhere near it unless that sharp thing happens to be on the road, I guess.  Oh!  Story about the crazy who jumped my bike last week.  I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow okay?  Okay.  Coffee?  What coffee, YOU shut up.  Ahem.  Starting now.

[Monty Python Man At Desk]: Good evening.

I like to think I type gibberish like that because it’s witty, somehow, but mostly it’s just that I’ve found that typing damned near anything will get me going off on some tangent, usually with way too many parentheses, and far too few periods.  Especially dangerous at work, lemme just say.

Is it a tangent if I wasn’t going anywhere in the first place, or just mental bumbering?

I remember reading once that one of the signs (not necessarily a warning sign, mind you) of Asperger Syndrome is “atypical use of language.”  This pretty-much includes anyone I’ve ever enjoyed spending more than about an hour around.  Whether it’s friends who enjoy odd sentence structures, or those that use of words that haven’t been in a newspaper or magazine in… oh, maybe a century, or just about anything by Soul Coughing’s front man, Mike Doughty

(and then, instead of continuing to write, I just went out bomping around on the ye mighty ‘net, looking for good examples of why I like Doughty’s stuff, and instead of finding one thing I found about eight and then went looking for a track he did with another guy who normally does music I’m not actually that into but thought that maybe all y’all would be a little more interested in his lesser-known…)

Whoo, lookit that little brain try to skitter away from what it doesn’t wanna do, huh?  Flip the lights on and watch ’em scatter.

Here’s what I’m not saying:  I’ve been thinking about death today.  No, that’s not true.  Not death.  Not even sipping tea and watching ferryman coming for us.  Just thinking about the grandfather figure I mentioned yesterday.  Ace.  He was one of those mythical creatures in my life that gained the less-than-heavy-enough title “Friend of the Family.”  He was a old dude who was a friend and coworker of my mom and step-but-not-really-since-they-married-years-after-I-moved-out dad.  {Imagine a ricochet sound, as I jump to the top of this post and type what you THOUGHT was the first paragraph, but actually the seventh, which ends at the phrase “Good evening.”}

Cool.  Brain doesn’t wanna go there.  Check that out.  Pyeerommm….

Here’s the short version: Ace, an old friend of the family, and, as he would put it “A good shit,” showed me that me playing with computers was something that was possibly a legitimate thing I could do as a job.  Turned out he was right, of course, but before I ever got to be enough of an adult to spend time doing these sorts of things, he died.  I don’t know how to tell his part of my story.  I had a C64, he had a C64, but when he got a C128, and then later a PC, he and I would sit around trying to figure out what we could make these things do.  I’m pretty sure he’s one of the first people I knew who owned a “pc.” annnnd he was a friend, ’cause he would sometimes swear around me, and there was no “Whoops I swore in front of the kid” moment.  He knew that at twelve, I’d heard swearing before, but he also knew that I’d mostly heard it from the kids at school, who had no sense of tone, timing, or delivery.  He would swear with gusto, like he meant it, and like it was okay.  It was fun, it was joyous, it was powerful.  Not everything that contained force has to be ugly or mean, his swearing said.

He and his wife were crazy hippie bastards who’d gotten old, but were still active and still fighting the good fight.  I think Marge may have been a Raging Granny at one point, but don’t quote me on that.  She may have been “A” Raging Granny, but not necessarily “A Raging Granny.”

Fuck it, there’s no short version of Ace’s story, so lemme just tell you my favourite story of Ace, even though I have zero first-hand experience of it, and was told that he always felt really bad about what happened (it’s okay: Ace stays a Good Guy through the whole thing, you don’t have to start reading through your fingers or anything).

Ace had a daughter (or was it two?) and she was grown and out of the house, but came home one day to visit and let herself in.  Ace came home and when she stepped out of one of the bedrooms and spoke to him, he was so surprised that he turned around, bringing both hands up and then down in a sort of air-traffic-controller-guy (with the orange cones) move, hitting her in both collarbones at once, breaking them (or maybe it was just one).  There was something about military training at some point in his younger years.  Something about it all coming back in that split second, when he heard a footstep and a voice behind him he wasn’t expecting, in his own home, when he knew his wife wasn’t in the house.

Something about hearing that story for the first time (when I was still a kid, maybe 14 or so) made me see, in crystal clarity that adults are humans who have lives we didn’t know about.  That parents are humans.  I knew that, of course.  They were people with past lives.  I knew that too.  They were people who’d maybe learned things they hadn’t used in a long long time.  I don’t think I’d really known that.  I just assumed that everyone went to school and then to work, and what they did day in and day out was the culmination of everything they’d learned so far from DNA up to that afternoon.

I came to the slow realization that sometimes people learn things they maybe didn’t want to use in the first place, and maybe never wanted to use again if they could help it.  Left me wondering if this six-foot-something gangly guy with a huge rockstar smile and tinted glasses had at one time been a bad mutha, and had maybe done things he had never quite healed from.  That he had pains that were more than just the limp that I was always told was from some of his many motorcycle accidents of his youth.

He also, without ever a word between us, showed me what a broken heart looks like when you spend your whole life with the person you love most in the world, and then they get older just slightly faster than you do.  He aged fast then.  He was still in there, still driving behind his eyes, but he didn’t have that same spark.  That same fight.  The old crazy hippie bastard who’d marched in peace rallies and swore with grace and warmth had kinda gone out of him.

Yeah, no, there it is.  That’s it.  The fight had gone out of him.  His “military presence” was gone.  He was an old man now.  Old and sitting in a Tim Hortons, having a coffee, by himself.  Thinking about things.  He was still teaching at the College (or the University, or whatever they hell they were calling it that month), and he was teaching old folks about computers.  20 years later, and he’d taking all the stuff he and I had cobbled together about what we thought about computers, and turned that into the end of his career.  Helping the little white haired grandmothers NOT send hundreds of thousands of dollars to Nigerian scammers, or something.  Helping them take whatever gumption they had left and get it online.

I only saw him for a few minutes, but he caught me up really quick on what he was doing.  Folks my age would call themselves techs, nerds, or geeks, but not Ace.  He was “still teaching.”  I got to introduce him to the woman who would later become my wife, and I could see him light up a little at that.  He could read in me that I was happy, and that I was full of all the fire and brimstone and alarmingly deep focus on a topic that he’d had when he was starting out way back when.  He knew I’d found love that’d keep me going until I was old, too.

He died less than a year later, I think.  Never really got to say goodbye.  Don’t think I could have, given the chance.  Wouldn’t have wanted to put him on the spot like that.  I wrote him in my head as a character for a story my buddy Rick and I came up with a few years later, and one that Arwen wrote a chapter for (but it didn’t include Ace).  He was the first line of my version of the same story.  In it, he was a fence for some sorta futuristic information pawnshop, hauling ill-gotten data around between buyer, seller, and thief, and cop.  He’d been caught in the middle of all of it one time too many, and the deal had gone wrong, but he hadn’t disconnected from the technology.  He’d hidden away the last little bit of what they’d come for deep in his mind, and then exported himself into a system that he’d knew our heroes would look through for clues.

He’d passed the torch, expecting us to… no, demanding that we pick up the fight.  That we understood the weapons, the dangers, and the loss of what was to come, but didn’t let any of that leave us standing in the middle of the room when the bad guys came back to clear out the rest of his memories.

Was that what I wanted to write?  Who knows.

Felt like that ricochet swung back round a bit though.

Hi,

Greetings everybody, all twelve of you that still check this feed.

Yep, check it.  I’m doing one of those NabloPoMo things.  Sorry Karla.

You’re excited, I can tell.

So, last year, I did the NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month) which went pretty well.  I *think* I did a post every day, and certainly grew a moustache, though it was a fairly odd one due to my silver hair not quite translating into anything more than salt & pepper and some cayenne in my ‘stache.

So yeah, the moustache part is for Movember, which started in Australia, it seems, and is all about “changing the face of men’s health,” whatever the hell that means.  I’m guessing/hoping that it means we’re looking like cheesy 70s actors in order to remind ourselves to NOT ignore our aches and pains, and to get checkups, and to see doctors when weird shit is going on, physically speaking.  Do not tough it out, I guess, is the message.  What do I know?  I haven’t even read any deeper than the posters and pre-scripted bumpf that comes with registration.  Maybe it’s a month of excessive chest bumping and high-fiving, but I somehow doubt it, even if it DOES come from Australia.  “High-Five” doesn’t seem very Australian to me, unless it’s the kids’ TV show, which is better than the Doodlbebops, but nowhere NEAR as good as the Upside-Down Show.

Uh, yeah, here’s my pre-scripted thing to ask for donations so I can shave raise awareness.  Of stuff.  Or something.

Hi,

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to prostate cancer.  I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation.  The funds raised go directly to Prostate Cancer Canada.

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men with 25,500 diagnosed and 4,400 dying from the disease each year.

Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved.

To make a donation, you can either:

•    Click this link http://ca.movember.com/mospace/273776/ and donate online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
•    Write a cheque payable to ‘Prostate Cancer Canada’, referencing my Registration Number 273776 and mailing it to: Prostate Cancer Canada, 145 Front Street East, Ste. 306, Toronto, ON M5A 1E3, Canada.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Prostate Cancer Canada will use the money raised by Movember for the development of programs related to awareness, public education, advocacy, support of those affected, and research into the prevention, detection, treatment and cure of prostate cancer.

For more details on how the funds raised from previous campaigns have been used and the impact Movember is having please click [HERE].

Thank you

Yeah, no.  Seriously.  Don’t die at 40, like my friend Jan did.  Or at 43, like my grandfather did.  I was two when he went, so I never got to have a grandfather I could remember, (aside from Ace*, maybe.)  Get things checked out.  Mmkay?  Not that any of them had prostate cancer, that I’m aware of, but still.  Early this year, I had this harsh pain in my right calf muscle, and went to the clinic just to make sure I wasn’t hurting it more by walking around after some sorta pull, and the doctor there decided that she couldn’t let me go without scaring warning me that it could be a deep-vein thrombosis, and sent me to the hospital.  It wasn’t.  I was fine, but still.  I was okay just kinda limping around.  Women?  Women get stuff checked out.  Props to Arwen for getting me to the clinic in the first place.  I guess she didn’t want me dying of a blood clot from my leg.  A good sign she isn’t going to kill me in my sleep any time soon.

Or is that just what she wants me to think?  Sneaky.

So now that you read a little about me, and I have nothing more interesting to say than last night was fun with the 4yo and the 7yo running around Marpole and getting candy from maaaaaaybe every seventh or eighth house (c’mon people, don’t let the malls run Halloween.)  I bet the DND and collectible figurines place at Metrotown would be fun once they started having the odd drink under the counter, though.  Weird to think I used to work in that mall, way back in the day.

Wait, what?  Oh, yeah.  Now that you see I have nothing to say, maybe you can go visit a few of my friends (actual, live, in person, PEOPLE who I’ve MET) at their blogs, even though they’re not all involved in NaBloPoMo.

Arwen, Bubbledom, Claire, Barb, Monkeypants, MoxieSnacks, NoPantsIsland, Ramdon Ranblings, The (Mighty Mighty) Cheeseblog, St. Aardvark, Skonen Blades, Unknown Origins Podcast, and even Johnny Bliss from way over in Vienna.

And now, I shall stop procrastinating, and go fold some laundry, ’cause that’s what hardcore gangsta techie dads DO.

First pics of Movember will start later this week.  Stay tuned for that.  No point right now, ’cause it’s just day one, and that’d result in a picture of ME, not my stache.

Also, XKCD rocks my world.  I need a wall-sized poster of this.

* I’ll tell you folks about Ace some time this month.  He keeps pestering me from the back of my head to write him into a a book I haven’t done more than start the first chapter of.  He deserves space on a page somewhere, so maybe I’ll finally get to him online somehow.  He would have liked that, I think.

Warning: This (freakishly long) post is about me, my bike, an omelet, and my mom.  If you’re looking for geekery and music stuff, skip this post.

Middle of last week, I had a terrible ride home.  I had driven a CAN car back to Rupert station, which is outta my way by quite a bit, but I was sorta looking forward to getting to see a different part of Vancouver, and riding North/South across Burnaby instead of East/West that I’d done for a year while at EA.  Somewhere at the 1/2 way point of my ride, my back sprocket sorta freaked out, my rear derailer wouldn’t hop the chain into any higher gears, and my back tire started rubbing against the fender.  Were I a richer person, I would have thrown my bike into the nearest dumpster, and cabbed home.  I didn’t.  I managed to limp myself home while stuck in 3:1 (3rd on the front gear, 1st in the back), and locked up the bike.  Took way too long.  I’d gotten cold.  I’d gotten hungry.  I felt wobbly and somewhat pukey after having my legs pumping around so fast for so little mechanical return.  Worst time ever.  55mins or something.  Longer than my very FIRST trip to our new home, some two months ago.

I’d also accidentally learned that Mary-Anne Hobbes Dubstep show on BBC Radio is a terrible thing to listen to when you’re just trying to get your late-30s beleaguered self home on a broken bike.  It’s the inherent bleak sadness in so much of the genre, which is attention-grabbing when you’re feeling good, but bad when you’re ACTUALLY having a crappy time.

After a frustrating evening of having my hybrid (which sounds cooler than it is) bike upside-down in the middle of the living room floor (my understanding and long-suffering wife is truly a Saint), and trying to convince my rear tire that it didn’t really *need* to have a little “play” at the axle, and reaching some sort of position that would mean my:

1. brakes don’t rub against the rim of the wheel,
2. …or the wheel itself, for that matter,
3. new treads don’t rub against the fenders,

Much like the holy triangle of IT (cheap, good, fast: pick any two), I could get EITHER the brake to grab, but not to let go, or to grab AND let go BUT rub against the fenders, OR I could end up with the gears go psycho again.

I thought I was done. Everything seemed to be spinning smoothly, and I had some halfway decent grip on the back brake that would be capable of stopping me suddenly if I needed to. Excellent. Only 1am. My hands are all greasy (I’m not sure why, but we have a verbal tic in our house of having to follow the word “greasy” with an overly enunciated “grrreezee” instead of what everybody actually says, which should be spelled “greecey,” but I digress), and I’m only slightly worried about not having enough sleep before my ride tomorrow, so I crash out after reading a few pages of The Wee Free Men.

Next morning, I wake up at not-much-past the break of dawn and get dressed, mumble morning things at Arwen and the kids, mutter to myself, pack my stuff, get some water together, grab a granola bar, find my various nefarious keys and security fobs and thumbdrives (I’m carrying two these days, and I have no idea why), and scoot out the door.  Okay, feelin’ good.  Here we go.

I can see my breath – s’gonna be a chilly one this morning.  No ice yet, so I can still go for it on the way down the big hills.

Wrestle my bike out of the garage, check that I still have my brakes and everything in the right places, hop on, kick my pedal back and…

BRRRRRRRNNNNNNNN….

The tread is rubbing against the fender, and the brakes aren’t squarely hitting the rim any more.  What the hell?  I don’t have rear shocks or anything, so there’s no way there should be that much change in placement on the wheel between me working on it last night, and me sitting down on the bike this morning.  I know I’m a solid “240lbs of grunt” on top of this thing, but c’mon, the bike’s been fine since I bought it.  Some, uh… let’s see.  Three years ago?  Four?  I think we bought it right after I found out I was going to be working at EAC (the “MotherShip”) as opposed to EAX (“Blackbox”).

ANYHOO, the bike’s not gonna get me to work this morning, and I don’t have the time to fix it now.

So a bunch of mental leg-hold traps snap shut at once.  I go from “Whoo, chilly this morning,” to the following crappy ways to start your day:

• I’m fat, and broke my bike because of it.
• I’m an idiot for not testing the bike out last night before going to bed.
• I’m an idiot for not knowing how to tune a bicycle’s brakes without screwing it up.
• I’m going to be late for work (cycling takes about 35mins, transit takes 45-50).
• There goes $5 we don’t really have (transit is $2.50 each way).
• What am I going to do tomorrow?

So I (literally) dropped my bike into the garage, burst back into the house, did a quickchange, found some change, and flurried myself back out the door.  I pouted for a bit.  I read Twitter feeds on the way into work, and once I got there, tried to do something useful with my brain.  That part went well.

The next morning I was going into work a little later than usual (10am) so I hauled my bike onto the CanadaLine, which (brilliantly) has bike spots on every train, so I don’t have to try to muscle people out of the way.  This is Canada, so a little plastic sign is all the authority people need to acknoledge that they should maybe move outta the way.  Made it downtown, and limped the bike over to the folks at Bicycle Sports Pacific, where I’d bought the bike in the first place.  The woman who checked it out said that it just needed a tuneup, and that my tires were good, brakes seemed fine (I should hope so: they were both less than three months old), and that everything would cost “about 80 bucks or so.”  Okay.  Fine.  I removed my under-seat toolkit and lock, and I traded my bike for a little slip of paper, and wandered out into the brisk Fall morning.  Now what?

I was feeling like this was $80 I didn’t have, on TOP of the $5 in transit per day I’d be spending, but still, this is okay, we’ll figure it out.  I walked up to some weird mom & pop greasy (everybody now: “greeeezzeeee”) spoon cafe with six wobbly tables and a drinks cooler that made an egregious amount of noise, and bought myself what passes for comfort food at breakfast time.  Too-hot coffee and a ham and cheese omelet.  What better way to celebrate health and fiscal responsibility than buying myself breakfast?

Then I emailed my mom, who’d asked last weekend if I needed a new bike.  “Naaaaah,” I’d told her, “there’s nothing wrong with the one I have.”  Famous last words, I know.  Pretty much asking for trouble from that point on.

I emailed her, asking if maybe I could partially take her up on the offer, and instead of buying me a whole NEW bike, she could maybe pay for a tuneup of the one I have, since I’d managed to make mine worse by trying to do it myself (I used to be pretty good at this, when I was 18).  She immediately responded that she’d be happy to.  We figured out how to push money through the series of tubes and the next day I picked up my bike at the shop.

It was $155.  Thankfully, my mom, the psychic that she is, had sent me $150 instead of the “eighty or so” I’d quoted her.  She knew better, probably due to her many many years as a car owner.  The lady at the bike shop and I had an ever-so-slightly toasty conversation about “estimates” and “parts and labour” and “quotes” but after my initial panic, I finally got down to “so what the hell was wrong with it?”

• Bike chain and gears bathed and lubricated. $15
• Broken.  Rear.  Axle. Replaced.  $15 (Oh, well that would explain it)
• New brake and shifter cables needed (okay…) $15
• 5 minutes of making fun of (or possibly, being in awe of) my “humongous rack – is that from MEC?” $FREE
• Reconstruction and Tune Up $75
• PST, GST, GEST, BCST, $TAXES
• Not stealing my chrome skull air nozzle caps?  Priceless.

They did a really good job.  Totally worth it.  Just wish I’d been asked/told BEFORE I got there that the total was about 95% above the original agreed-upon amount.

Rode home from the shop.  It was like new.  Smooth.  Silent.  Strong.  My thighs actually seemed to enjoy the hills now that I wasn’t fighting against my own brakes any more.  Rode most of the trip in 2:5 (2nd on front, 5th on the rear), which sets my cruising speed at about 22km/h while on flats.  Felt good.  Forgot to get water*, so didn’t really go for it, or I’d end up coughing all night due to sucking wind.

No more Dubstep though.  Maybe back to some nice happy Public Enemy.

Not that I ever listen to music while cycling.  No-no.  Of course not.  That’s almost as stupid as riding on a broken axle for a few weeks.

I packed up my stuff tonight, and even laid out my cycling gear for tomorrow.  Like first day of school or something.

I’ll try not to yell “WHEEEE!” on the way down Heather bike path tomorrow, but if I do, I’ve got my mom to thank for it.

* That’s not true, I was going to buy myself a new bottle with the extra money mom’d given me, but after the little “adjustment” in pricing, not so much with the $5.00 water bottle.  Besides, I prefer the wide-mouth “Sport Drink” bottle types, and most of them fit into my clip.

We had 8 kids here today. Two of them were ours, and while there were a few tears, and lots of screaming, I think most of it was happy screaming.

I may have to steal the Nerf gun Tate got, though, or at least modify it so he can pull the pump on it.

The place is NOT a total shambles, and there’s only a little bit of Oreo cake on the carpet. Pin the tail on the donkey is still fun for the kids under the age of 10. Arwen (on her third trip through being 10) did pretty well, too.

I decorated (not my forte) and generally stayed outta the way when kids played, and tried to not get the same headache I had yesterday.

Mission accomplished.

Best moment: Tate rushing into the house announcing “I hafta poo!” and jumping onto the toilet. Okay, he made it. Great. I stuck my head around the door, and asked if he’d need any help when he’s done, and he said “Nah… Because I’m four now.”

Wish more of life was that obvious.

Sleep: Daily routine of unconsciousness with vivid hallucinations, and possibly followed amnesia about the experience. – XKCD

I had a blow out last week during the ride in, and have been slowly getting everything I needed back together, which has been “fun” (did you know there’s thread count in tires just like for sheets?)  Nilo was kind enough to bring a new tube to our lunch, and so I made it back home that day, but then I realized that the flat had been due to a mis-aligned brake pad that was touching the tire during stopping just enough to cause a small hole and finally to pinch the tube itself.

So now I’ve got a new tube ($Lunch), new tire ($21 @ MEC), installed my “Mr. Tuffy” tire liners (woo, extruded plastic!) which I’ve had for ABOUT three years but hadn’t installed (maybe now’s a good time, AFTER the blowout?)

After pulling apart my bike, Arwen’s bike, and removed Ripley’s training wheels (they were just slowing him down, I think, in the grand scheme of things), I managed to get everything working properly again.  Need to go look up how to finetune my brakes, ’cause right now they’re a little, uhm… let’s say… passive.  I need them to be able to lock up both tires so I can do that cool move where you lay the bike down and slide under the flames-a-burning semi as it hops sideways down the six lanes of traffic and…

Wait, I think that’s something from Matrix, isn’t it?

I’m saying that when you are ready, you won’t need to brake.

I want to be able to hit my brakes hard enough that my bike disappears from underneath me, and I highside into the back of a Smart Car.

Okay, let’s take a look at the numbers, shall we?  Survey SAYS!

• Avg Speed: 17.1
• Distance: 11.5
• Time: 40:30

So, longer than normal by quite a bit, but I was taking it easy after filling up my brand new tubes at the Chevron (no idea what pressure I’m at, so I dunno if I’m a little under, or what, but I didn’t wanna go over and start my day off with a “Rapid Airloss Situation“!).  The new tires have thicker tread than my old ones, so they’re dragging me a little bit.  Have to adjust my back fender ’cause it rubs when I’m standing in the pedals (from a stoplight, etc).  Bandana helped keep sweat from pouring down my forehead.  That’s good. 

No music this ride, so I was OCDing about every little creak the bike made.  Sounded like maybe there’s a bit of plastic in the front fender that’s rubbing once in a while.  Should probably pull those off and re-seat them.

Couldn’t find a water bottle this morning, so I bought some blue POWERADE Olympic Hockey Berry Blitz carbo stuff for $1.50.  Sugar while riding hot is not a good combo.  Bleah.  17% of my daily carbs in a single drink?  Wooftie.

Was very stiff when I started out, but feeling pretty good now.  Am planning to ride home tonight, but will have to remember it’s gonna be hot (28, radio lady said) so I gotta drink lotsa water.

I need to go to bed earlier, and wake up a little earlier, in order to not be stumbling around the house muttering and swearing until 7:15.  Too stressful.  Means I don’t get to see the kids in the morning, and only get to see them a little in the evening.

Figured out we have a channel at home that lets us watch Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson at 10-ish instead of 12:30-ish, which is good.  Now, if we could just watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report at 9-10 instead of 11, we’d be (literally) laughing.

For anyone who actually, y’know VISITS the blog on the actual domain, you’re probably seeing it change almost daily (maybe I’ll put one of those things that lets YOU people change it for yourselves). Sorry ’bout that.

I found one I liked, and then reminded myself that I hate that “purple/green/blue bars” visual effect that happens after you’ve been staring at white text on a black background, and then switch to white background. Will have to change the theme AGAIN.

I know you’re all crushed.

Oh, and no more “Twitter Posts” to make it look like I’m postier. If I don’t have an actual post, I’ll just not post.

Which should make me post MORE, to make up for the fact that tweets aren’t filling any gaps.

We’ll see.

• Have to adjust my bike's brakes tomorrow morning, as I had a teensy bit of a closecall today. Also, need to wake UP on the way home. Hi mom! #
• BBC's Mary Anne Hobbs dubstep experimental radio show is freaking me out. It actually makes me sad there's nothing CLOSE to this here in BC. #
• For those of you wondering what the heck I'm talking about, listen for yourself here. http://is.gd/33Sfy Happy 090909! #

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