Another Great Bike Post

Best Craigslist Ad Ever

Schwinn Varsity – “The Bike that Time Forgot” – $75 (Kirkland)

If you have dreamed about finding a time machine and going back in time to a kinder, gentler time, a time when conversion vans ruled the earth, hair was big and bikes were made of steel, really heavy steel, this is the bike for you. This Schwinn Varsity bike is older than I am. it’s older than you are, too, unless the kind of bike you ride is marketed by “Rascal” and you like to beep your little electronic horn at those fifty something youngsters and their imorral reader’s digest magazines. This bike was probably present when life crawled up out of the sea. It’s also possible that it was actually responsible for the cambrian extinction. I know, I’ve read that whole meteorite thing too, but I have a very convincing test: Drop this bike on your foot from a couple inches up. When you regain consciousness and ween yourself off of morphine from the pain, imagine what it would be like if this bike were to slam into the earth at full speed. Mountains would rise, seas would fall. Lava would spurt and you would need to buy a new front reflector for the bike.

What is it made of? STEEL.
Steel frame, steel wheels, this bike scorns aluminum “Aluminum is for beer cans or tiny people, both of which I crush,” says the bike.
The only way this bike gets carbon fiber on it is when it rolls through a pack of spandex wearing electrolyte sipping flower sniffing protest bikers, crushing both bikes and riders into paste. This is not a bike to trifle with. If it had a blade in front you could plow snow with it. People will admire and fear you when you zip by on it.
Be warned: It is called “Varsity” for a reason, not “Junior Varsity.” This means that no matter how much your dad paid for the basketball court, you cannot play ball with this bike if you are short. If you are not tall (at least 6 ft) you will find that this bike is too large for you. It seems it was built to mock short people. “Genetics have made you unfit to ride me,” it says, “but perhaps my owner will let you clean my wheels while he towers over you. Also, there’s a bit of ground up hippy stuck in my front wheel – remove it NOW.”

The solid steel seat post is pretty much stuck in place. I have no idea how people adjusted these when they were new but I suspect it involved taking the bike to a machine shop and having them use a press to move the seat post. If you needed the seat post higher it was probably easier to weld on a piece than to pull it out. The bike shifts cleanly, has fresh tubes and tires and the wheels are about as true as your average fox news story. It has stylish shifters on the front with stylish “S” printed on them. I assume this was to remind you who made your bike. That way, when you were coming down Rose Hill as you took your hands off the handle bars to shift, you’d think “Wow – S. That must stand for Schwinn. They make great bikes,” right before you slammed into a cement truck. If you cannot remember who made your bike, do not take your eyes off the road to study your shifter in hopes of jogging your memory, or at least sign your organ donor card first. The bike and the cement truck will be fine (the cement truck may need a tune up afterwards). You will not.

This is like the alpha and omega of bikes. It was here before you. When you are dead, it will still be around. It will still be monsterously heavy, huge and require an odd tire size too, but we won’t get into that.

• Location: Kirkland
• it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

HAT TIP to random guy from Kirkland.

So cool…

It’s a 49cc motorcycle made to look like a board track racing bike.  In case you don’t know, 49cc means it’s more like a moped and can be street legal without a motorcycle license.

A Clean,Well-Lighted Place

If you have visited a professionally run datacenter you may have noticed how organized and clean it was kept — hopefully.  It is not uncommon to see a messy one.  In fact, in the past, I have been a party to that myself.  However, I learned the hard way about the importance of a shipshape datacenter.  This might seem a little obvious and didactic; but it is important.  The most critical reasons to keep your computer room clean have to do with reliability, troubleshooting and (I argue) presentation.

Messy cables twisted around one another can cause network instability.  The most common issue that I have seen with copper and fiber cabling is that the cable is not able to make a good connection because it is pulled to one side.  However, all cables have a minimum bend radius, which dictates how far you can bend the cable before it no longer works properly — think: kink in the garden hose.  The manufacturer usually specifies the bend radius, but the rule of thumb is that the bend radius is 15 times the diameter.  Therefore, a cat5 cable (which is a bit under .25 inch) should be bent or coiled so that it makes a circle not much smaller than 7.5 inches in diameter.

An unorganized shop causes chaos; and troubleshooting a problem in a messy datacenter is a serious drag.  Time moves a lot faster when a production website or business service is broken.  The last thing you want to do is spend fifteen minutes digging through a mess to find a screwdriver or track down a cable through that rat’s nest you and your coworkers created. You can increase your up-time by keeping clean.

People do not generally discuss my last point.  It is the presentation of your datacenter.  It may seem like a surface-level issue, and it is exactly that — but it is important.  When people visit your computer room, they cannot see how lovingly you have configured your gear.  Your clever network architecture is not visible to anyone.  They just look around and see messy cabling, disorganized gear and old shipping boxes lying around.  There is nothing worse than having a new CTO comment negatively on the state of your datacenter.  I don’t want to experience that again.  I have since changed my ways and have been proud to present my datacenter to others.

I like to think of the computer room as a fire truck; it should be kept clean, shiny and ready to fight fires.

-B

tonematrix

I’m not quite sure how to describe this musical flashy thingy, but I like it.

Running Pace Study

This is really interesting; it might be more efficient to run faster (or slower) to match your optimum pace.

Death Star Canteen with Legos

Yum

A fairly easy recipe that is authentic (to me) and tasty.

The Teenager Audio Test

I found this with StumpleUpon and I think it’s neat. My six year old said he could hear it clearly. I could occasionally hear parts of it. It seems to works in IE, not Firefox.

Amazing 2008 Photos

Pixcetera has a fantastic collection of photos here — it’s their 2008 Pictures of the Year collection.