2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Punta Grand Tamarindo to Punta Del Soldado

 The morning found everyone refreshed and free from sea-sickness. Niniane had a work related call from 9 in the morning, so I moved the boat from the north side of Punta Grand Tamarindo to the south side just so we could see different things. The snorkeling was indeed better on the south side, and we had a grand old time.

After her call was over, I asked the crew if they wanted to explore Cayo Luis Pena, the south side of which supposedly had good anchorage. Nobody disagreed, so I moved the boat there using the motor, since it was too close to bother sailing. We pulled up to a mooring ball and tied up. A motor boat came in carrying divers. "Hey Arturo, you can swim over to the dive boat and see if they will take us diving tomorrow!"

Arturo swam over, and sure enough, they were willing to meet us here tomorrow at 10:00am. I pulled a playbook out of my bicycle touring bag of tricks and negotiated them down to 9:30am so we could have time to move the boat to another spot the next day and do some snorkeling. We did some snorkeling, walked on the beach, and had lunch.

After lunch, however, Mark pointed out that the boat was encountering quite a bit of swell. We had two choices --- anchor closer in to shore (not advised because there was coral that we could damage), or change locations. I made the call to change locations and we released our mooring ball and motor'd over to Punta Del Soldado, hoping against hope that the swells would die down there.

Indeed, the swells were much reduced, but upon doing a dive check of the mooring ball we discovered that the pennant line was too long and was causing the line to move under one hull. We redid the moor directly onto the mooring ball and that solved the problem, allowing us to do more snorkeling. We called Aquatic Adventures to make sure they could pick us up from Punta Del Soldado and they said no problem, and then proceeded to do more snorkeling.

The location indeed had great snorkeling, though it also had a number of jelly fish, which put Bowen and Boen off getting into the water. I actually had one tap me on my shoulder but fortunately I was wearing my rashguard. We also saw a ray and starfish, as well as a coral farm.

Right at the end of the day, Arturo and I found a Spotted Drum, unusual because they're nocturnal and not easy to see. This one was very shy but Arturo managed to get a good photo!

Dinner was BBQ hot dogs! We went to sleep early and discovered to our dismay that because we'd tied directly to the mooring ball, it would tap against the hull of Arturo's cabin and wake him up on occasion. In retrospect we should have moor'd at the other mooring ball, but we weren't about to run a fire drill in the middle of the night. No matter what, it was still quieter and better sleep than a land-based hotel.

Review: Gran Turismo 7

 I didn't set out to play Gran Turismo 7. What happened was that I found a good deal on a Thrustmaster T150 for $100. Since I had a collection of racing games from PS Plus, I got it, installed it on a desk, and played Dirt 5 with the kids. Dirt 5 was a lot of fun, but the throttle kept slipping under me, and Dirt 5 had such a strong force feedback that the steering wheel would actually vibrate loose from its clamp and come off!

Pengtoh suggested that I got a FGT-lite racing chair, which looked expensive, but would solve a lot of these problems. The darn thing took me 2 hours to put together on a summer evening, dripping with sweat. It was heavy and solid but required quite a bit of tweaking to get positioning right. Once you got it setup, you never wanted to move it and I never successfully folded it. Worse, while getting it setup once in a while I would knock one thing or another out of alignment and in the middle of a game I'd fall over!

At the end of a month, Xiaoqin asked me to send it back and I didn't argue. It took another hour to take it apart and then I had to drive it to the UPS store to return it but I didn't regret it. The thing might be useful if you had a dedicated video game room, but it was simply too difficult to fold.

Finally, I got the Playseat Challenge. This wasn't a heavy duty chair, and was considerably lighter and easier to put together. It's so light that when you flip up the steering wheel to get in or out of the chair if you didn't stabilize it with your hand or body weight the chair would flip over! But this one folds nicely, and comes with a velcro strap that keeps everything together neatly. I can get it to fit myself or Boen properly, and it handles up to a 200 pound weight limit.

OK, was the steering wheel worth it? The answer is yes. I don't really enjoy racing games but this setup actually made them worth playing. When there was a Gran Turismo sale on the playstation store I picked it up and had fun --- you can actually tell the difference between cars from the feedback on the steering wheel, which is very impressive. I'm never going to buy a sports car, so this is much cheaper than the real thing. In fact, I even finished the single player campaign (called "Menus") and watched the post-game credits. It's been a long time since I actually got around to finishing the video game, so that says alot about how much fun it was.

And Boen at least enjoys it.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands Index Page

 From Nov 20th to Nov 27th, my family, Arturo, Mark, Niniane, and Dan chartered a 420 Lagoon Catamaran out of Puerto Del Rey Marina and motor'd and sailed the islands of Culebra, Culebrita, and Vieques, which are usually collectively known as the Spanish Virgin Islands. This is the index page, collecting the photos from the trip as well as a day by day trip report.

Pictures

• Piaw's Photos
• Arturo's Photos

Trip Report

• Prologue
• Nov 20th: Puerto Del Rey Marina to Punta Grand Tamarindo
• Nov 21st: Punta Grand Tamarindo to Punta Del Solado
• Nov 22nd: Punta Del Solado to Ensenada Honda
• Nov 23rd: Ensenada Honda to Culebrita
• Nov 24th: Culebrita to Esperanza
• Nov 25th: Esperanza to Bahia de Isla Chiva
• Nov 26th: Bahia de Isla Chiva to Punta Arenas
• Nov 27th: Punta Arenas to Puerto Del Rey Marina
• Epilogue

What I learned from 32 years of cycling

 I first started cycling seriously in 1990, when I was an intern at Bellcore and had totaled a car that I had bought for $200. The bike was a Shogun, too big for me, but I rode it to work every day, and rode it on weekends. When I graduated and got a real job I got myself a Bianchi Eros and rode that a lot too!

Over the years, I've ridden quite a few bicycles, including tandems, mountain bikes, and various touring bikes. Cycling is, as someone once wrote, a marriage between a body which is somewhat adaptable, and a machine that's somewhat adjustable. But the psychology of the cyclist is actually just as important, if not more so than either the machine or the physical aspects. A bicycle that's fun to ride hard will entice you to ride harder and more often. Frequently people buy bicycles for resale value or for trails or conditions that they'll never ride (or learn to tackle). It's far better to buy a bicycle optimized for smooth roads and only switch to mountain or gravel bikes if you find yourself riding them.

For instance, I learned that while I was a good enough mechanic to fix most parts of the bicycle, and even build wheels, it's not something I enjoy. It's something I'm frequently forced to do so since many professional mechanics aren't even as qualified as I am, despite being more practiced. Many people buy bicycles and do not ride them, and the enthusiasts who pour money into cycling will buy new bikes every 2-5 years, while I tend to retain the same bicycle (and even components) for decades or longer whenever possible. That makes me a very bad fit for the bicycle market. So, for instance, that means that ball bearing hubs which require an overhaul every 2000-5000 miles have a TCO much higher than sealed bearing hubs. Despite owning the tools and requisite skills to do my own overhaul, the pre-load adjustment faff of a ball bearing hub meant that I almost never did my own overhaul, paying a bike shop $30 per overhaul once a year or so.

Similarly, the expensive bottom brackets like Phil Woods just wouldn't get maintained either, and once they needed maintenance, you needed an expensive tool to press the bearings out and install new ones. By comparison, the DuraAce BB cost $40, install without hassle, and when they die (in about the same time as the expensive BBs), are easy to replace. On wheels, sealed bearings almost never die! The only wheel part I ever had die on me were the freehub mechanisms on DuraAce 7700 rear hubs (which are made of titanium and nearly impossible to source!), and the Freehub on the Phil Wood touring rear hub, which cost $300 to replace (and Phil Wood refused to honor their lifetime warranty --- the new owner definitely does not believe in preserving the reputation of the company!).

Cycling is incredibly fashion driven, so over the years I went from being the person showing up at rides with the widest tires (Michelin 25mm, which actually measured 26mm or more) to being the person with the skinniest tire (Continental GP5000 25mm, which measured 25mm). The "gravel bike" revolution isn't bad though --- now you can get high quality tires in 40mm or more, and while I don't always appreciate the roads I used to ride in solitude now having lots of cyclists using them, all cyclists are always better than a car driver.

Many modern "upgrades" such as electronic shifting, disc brakes on road bikes, tubeless tires, and even indexed shifting do nothing to improve the performance or enjoyment of the bicycle, but rather make the bike harder to maintain and subject to unpredictable failures, such as the batteries running out on electronic shifters. I avoid those to the extent possible. Some upgrades, however, can get to the point where a phase change suddenly makes what used to be burden something worth using. One example is that the increase in the number of gears on the rear wheel went from 5 to 9 or 10, all it did was make the rear wheel weaker, as the range of the gears available didn't change all that much. However, when SRAM introduced the 11 speed wide range cassette for mountain bikes with the 11-50 cassette, suddenly you could eliminate the front derailleur while getting a close to identical range of gearing for the bike. At the point it was worth upgrading since a simpler drivetrain wasn't just lighter, it was also more ergonomic and eliminated the unreliable front derailleur. Even for such upgrades I usually would stick to the old tried and true system for a bit longer to give the prices a chance to drop and for potential issues to surface.

There are people who claim that for instance, triple cranksets with front derailleurs are pretty reliable, but they've never been problem free for me. A lot of it is that typical triple setups seem geared towards a 30/40/52 crankset, while I would want the lowest possible gear so I'd go for a 24/39/50 crank. The reality was that this meant that I was running the front derailleur out of spec, so would encounter problems others who didn't ride as low a gear did. In practice, the 50/11 gear almost never got used, so giving up the high gear was the right thing to do when it comes down to switching drivetrains.

I discovered that I enjoy bicycle touring enough to try to do a big tour every year, and love it enough to have written a book on it. The book sells badly, but I have a fondness for it that I don't have for my more successful books. I discovered that I don't like carrying lots of weight on the bicycle even though I've done it a lot. I even bought a triplet so I could carry the kids along, and it was a relief to me that my kids actually enjoy it, never opting to take the train when they have the opportunity to ride. (Though I did learn early on that if they had a sag wagon they would avail themselves of it more often than not!) To be honest they travel better than many adults, never complaining about rain or the difficulties of the day. They finish each day with plenty of energy.

People ask me about ebikes on occasion. I've learned that batteries are the hardest to maintain component on a bicycle. If you use them they wear out and die. If you don't use them, they wear out and die. Sometimes even if you only use them once in a while they break. It's a lot of hassle --- my suspicion is that unless you were an enthusiastic cyclist, an ebike won't make you one and you'll end up driving.

I learned that I really like the geometry of Grant Petersen's bikes. Grant pays more attention to how bicycles ride than most designers. His designs over the years have evolved for the better from an already high standard. I still want to tweak his geometries. For instance, because I ride clipless pedals and he doesn't, I want a BB still lower than what he's willing to use. For a road bike with 25mm tires I want a 80mm BB drop, and he'll go for 75. For a gravel bike with 40mm tires he'll spec an 8cm BB drop, and I think I'd go with 85mm. This sounds minor but when I ride I notice the difference.

I've learned that I'm not sensitive to saddles in general. I went from an Avocet saddles to Brooks B-17s (which never needed breaking in for me) and to Ritchey WCS saddles. The B-17s could last me 10 years before they "broke in" too much to be comfortable, but then I started riding tandems and 2 years of butt sweat would destroy the saddle, so I switched and discovered that the lighter (and more durable) saddles were just as comfortable as the B-17s.

Despite having ridden for 32 years, I'm still learning more about cycling on every ride. Hopefully I'll be cycling for another 32 years!

Thinking about Frame Geometry

 I spend too much time thinking about bike geometry. Not just that, specifically, the geometry of a single "road" bike. I put "road bike" in quotes because unlike many others, I ride my road bikes every where --- road, off road, loaded, unloaded, and I'm not opposed to carrying my bike if I have to and walking. I suppose I could use Jan Heine's "All Road" terminology. In any case, what I'm coming to realize is that the geometry of your bike probably needs to be customized to a degree most bike builders don't consider.

When I first got a bike that fit me in 1992, Terry Shaw put me on a 55cm Bianchi Eros. I used that bike for commuting, touring, and running errands. It was a nice, neutral handling bike that was perfect for beginners. Once I tried a Bridgestone RB-1, however, all the other bikes just feel wrong. I loved the responsiveness of the geometry (73.5 headtube with a 45 off offset for a 54mm trail with a 25mm tire), and the wide tire clearance meant it was truly versatile. Sure it wasn't designed for carrying a heavy load, but what I've since realized is that touring with as light a load as possible is far more fun anyway. One of the interesting things about trail nobody thinks about is that when you increase the tire size, the trail increases, which is exactly what you want whenever you need those wide tires --- slower steering.

What's funny about bikes is how fashion driven it is. I regularly rode 700x25 tires, and from 1995 to about 2008, I'd get people commenting about how I was being unnecessarily conservative in choosing "wide" tires. Everyone else was riding 700x23 (I did for a while, since the Michelin Hi-lite comps were $12 each, which was a bargain). Nowadays, you see people riding 700x42mm tires, and when touring in Europe, I'd get people commenting that I couldn't possibly be riding a particular bike path since my tires weren't wide enough.

I recently purchased a Rivendell Roadini to serve as a backup bike, and it's easy to see how different it is. It's got a significantly longer trail than my custom touring bike, but still manages to feel responsive. The BB, however, is higher (13mm higher), and I definitely feel that when descending. This comes from 2 places: first, the wider tires, and secondly, Grant Petersen designs his bike for people riding platform pedals, which don't have as much ground clearance as clipless pedals. There'll be lots of people who write about how BB height doesn't matter, but then I read Dave Moulton on the bike he designed for himself and how low BBs were in the early days of his riding:

While out training after dark, and coasting down hill; we would sometimes lower our heel so the steel tip made contact with the road, sending out a shower of sparks. A pretty spectacular visual effect, especially if several riders did it together.

Note that these were racing bikes, people who would certainly pedal around corners. Notice how by contrast, modern "gravel bikes" have gone the other way, with much higher BB heights (and reduced BB drops). Now some of those bikes are designed for 650B wheels, which are smaller and hence need to have higher BBs to clear obstacles, but the Specialized Diverge, for instance, has an 80mm BB drop and can run both 650B and 700c wheels. (Note that people do complain about the low BB) Another interesting titbit from Moulton's blog is that he off-handedly mentions that he managed to convince Reynolds to let him brass braze 753 frames (which are supposed to be silver brazed for lower temperature) because of his developed brass brazing technique.

Again, a lot of this is dependent on the kind of riding you do. If you frequently have to climb obstacles and jump them, I think a higher BB makes sense. But to be honest how many people do you see do that? I'm a decent bike handler, and many times ride trails that rarely see gravel cyclists. An occasional hit to the pedals doesn't do any damage (I've done it a lot on my single and my tandem --- just keep pedaling --- it's not the end of the world!), and while I've broken frames, none of those broken frames have ever been attributable to off-pavement riding.

To my mind, you have to design a bike's geometry for the size of tires you plan to run. If an 80mm drop is useful for 25mm tires, then raising the size of the tire to 40mm, you'd need the drop to be increased by about 15mm, so a 95mm drop. Now you might argue that a manufacturer can't stop someone from putting 25mm tires on a bike designed for 40mm tires, so maybe you can't go that low, but I'd argue that an 85mm drop wouldn't be extreme given that fewer riders are now using anything less than 28mm tires. Again, this doesn't apply to cyclists riding 650B wheels --- you'd have to do different computation.

Note that the lower the BB, the longer your chainstays will be for a given wheelbase. That also affects handling --- Dave Moulton will say that you'd need to stiffen chainstays so they don't flex as much. In any case, there's not much experimentation with frame geometry nowadays --- some of that is attributed to the same factory churning out frames for many different manufacturers. The other is that for better or worse, many people just get used to the bikes they buy off the shelf and don't think hard about how they could be improved.

I guess one of the big reasons why Grant Petersen has been so successful is that he's one of the few who's actively experimenting with frame geometry over the years, something that almost no one else is doing. His bicycles don't ride like anyone else's as a result, and even his imitators like Soma frequently miss the point of his bikes.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands: Puerto Del Rey Marina to Punta Tamarindo

 After a bad night of sleeping, we woke up and ate the rest of the food we'd bought, packed up, and headed down to the lobby to checkout. After hearing me complain about the fire alarms and the loud parties, the resort took $100 off our checkout fee. It turned out that Niniane didn't have room in her car anyway, so Arturo and Mark converged into our lobby. When Niniane turned up with her car, Arturo realized that with some judicious rearrangement of luggage he could fit in it, so the ride was just us and Mark.

It rained pretty hard on the way to the marina, but once we got there the weather was nice. The marina was huge and heavily trafficked, and to get us from the parking lot to the boat the charter company supplied a trolley! The trolley was big enough to take all of us, plus it also had a trailer large enough for all of our luggage AND provisions.

The Yamuy was a Lagoon 420 Catamaran with 4 cabins, 2 v-berths, very little lazarette space, an AC, and a water maker but a tiny 73 gallon water tank. We selected cabins and tested everyone for COVID19, and was relieved when everyone was negative. We loaded all the provisions and luggage into the boat and unpacked, and then the boat briefing started.

The boat briefing was surprising --- this was the first boat where we weren't told to check the engines and generator oil every morning. That meant the boat had a relatively new set of diesel engines and generators or the charter company was full of confidence that their regular maintenance intervals would catch all problems. We were told that the water maker was finicky, and told that under no circumstances were we to tow the dinghy behind the catamaran. We were told never to let the B&G marine GPS update, and told to be patient for it to go through its reboots when starting up. People complain a lot about Garmin's software, but trust me, B&G is much much worse!

The chart briefing was similarly cursory. We were told that all the places that were crossed off on the chart were disallowed, and told that the best snorkeling was on Culebra on the West side of the island. We asked about our first night and they said we could sail to Isla Palominos, which was close but would be full of boats and people partying, or we could just motor all the way to Culebra, which was 2 hours away, and get the painful beating into the wind/waves over with right away. Since we weren't interested in parties, the latter was an obvious decision.

The boat looked like it was going to be in good shape, though we would learn later that sail deployment and furling would be a pain in the neck. The water tank was topped off, and then we were taken to the fuel dock to top up the fuel tank, which should have been topped off by the previous person who chartered the boat, but wasn't. After puzzling over it, the charter company crew finally realized that the last person who took the boat out was the owner!

With that, we were off! We beat directly into the wind with the engines going at full cruising speed. I was prepared for a rough crossing, and thanks to my ancestors who'd sailed all the way from China to Malaysia I never ever got sea sick, but to my surprise nearly everyone else did. Mark had taken his drugs and so was OK, and Bowen was fine as well, but Boen threw up, which is really unusual. Others looked kinda green, so it was with relief when we pulled onto the mooring ball at Punta Grand Tamarindo.

We got into the water, which wasn't crystal clear because recent storms had churned it up. I would have been dismayed if I'd known that this was as good as it got! The flip side of the Spanish Virgin Islands being relatively untouristed is that nobody shared a Bay with us for the first few nights.

It rained while we were in the water, but as one of my diving instructors once said to me, "it's not wet underwater!" Once you're already in the water, the rain doesn't do anything, and I got a few nice pictures of the boat in the rain.

Dinner was kept simple as everyone was exhausted --- hamburgers! The water on the boat was nice and warm from running the engines for so long, so everyone had a good shower.

2022 Spanish Virgin Islands Prologue: San Jose to San Juan Puerto Rico

 We rose at 5:00am, caught a ride to the San Jose Airport, and sailed through the TSA Pre check line. The flight from San Jose to Atlanta was fine, but the flight from Atlanta to San Juan was delayed for some unstated reason. We took the taxi to our rental condo, only to discover that the place was nothing as described --- the sofa bed wouldn't even fold flat. Xiaoqin immediately booked the resort hotel next door, and but it was too late in the morning to do much, so we just slept as it was.'

In the morning, I walked down to the 24 hour supermarket to buy instant noodles, which we had for breakfast. We set out to walk to the beach around 10:00am, but the most direct route walked us through the hotel! We walked to the hotel and asked for a checkin, expected to be told no, but instead, they checked us in right away and gave us our resort bands. The kids went to the beach and I walked several trips and moved the luggage from the inadequate condominium to the fancy resort hotel room.

After that, I had time to relax and do an open water swim near the beach. The water was too churned out so there was not much to see, but it still was more appealing than the huge hotel swimming pool. We ate a late lunch at the local Mexican place, relaxed at the hotel for an hour, and then walked over to the dinner location that Niniane had picked, where Arturo, Dan, and Niniane and us had dinner.

We planned for the next day's rendezvous. Niniane and Dan had valiantly bought all the provisions, and was still optimistic that she could fit Arturo, Mark, and their luggage into their car, but I had to plan to have an Uber XL, since I had a huge suitcase (which Arturo had kindly brought over to California for us using his copious luggage allowance). I asked the hotel taxi service how much to bring us to the marina, but they wanted much more than the Uber prices!

We tried to go to bed early after dinner, but the hotel had a wedding that night, complete with loud music and beach drums going thump thump thump all night making it hard to sleep. To add insult to injury, there was a problem with the hotel fire alarm system, which made it go off twice in the night. The hotel might have been more expensive but it was by no means any better for sleeping!

Review: Specialized RBX Knickers and Grail Gloves

 Specialized Men's RBX Knickers were on sale during the holidays so I bought a pair for $40. Wearing these keep your knees covered while not going all the way down to the socks for winter cycling in the Bay Area. They also eliminate the need to wear leg warmers, which have the tendency to slide down on long rides and eventually not cover your knees or thighs. I wouldn't have paid the full $80 for them, but at $40, these are a great deal and well worth using.

At the same time, the Men's HyprViz Body Geometry Long Fingered Gloves are for sale at $22.45. These are a bit finicky to get my hands into, and their color isn't as visible as I'd hoped, but once my hands were in them, they fit like a glove. I've tried a bunch of long fingered gloves in the past which claim that they'll work for touch screens. These are the first I've tried that actually live up to the advertisement.

Until December 15th, you get free shipping directly from specialized. Don't miss out. (the links above directly link to specialized and I don't get a kickback or affiliate money from them)

If you don't ride your bike in the Bay Area in winter, you're missing out. We have the best winter riding in the world --- the temperatures are cool enough that you can work as hard as you like and not sweat very much, and the air quality is always perfect. Even during the worst rainstorms there's always a couple of hours where you can get out and ride. Put a pair of clip on fenders (or in my case I only ever bother with the rear fender), and explore!

Review: The Cuckoo's Egg

 I first read The Cuckoo's Egg way back in the 1990s, and recently someone referred to it and I figured why not read it again --- it's been so long since I'd read it it would be like a new book. And indeed it has been --- the process of detecting an intruder on a VAX, along with using physical paper printers to log his terminal without tipping him off, and even making phone calls to sysadmins all over the country in order to warn them of a security hole in their systems ---- these all ring true and probably to some extent still happens today.

What is dated are the stakes involved. The intruder turned out to be no particular people of any consequence, and weren't even selling secrets for that much money. (One of the incidents in the epilogue in the book, the Robert Morris worm, has no been long forgotten --- mention it today and nobody's likely to remember it) Today, security breaches regularly cost the identity of thousands of customers, maybe even millions, and even those might not make front page news.

What probably hasn't changed is how hard it is to get even the 3-letter agencies to do anything about an obvious intruder who's looking for defense-related information. Though after 9/11, that might have changed. In any case, the book's well written, a fascinating read, and a good reminder that when dealing with incidents like this, it's important to keep a logbook that's supported by evidence. Many times near the end of the book, the author, Cliff Stoll was told by others that his wasn't the first incidence of a security breach, but rather the first well-documented incidence!

Review: The Betrayal of Anne Frank

 I read somewhere that the mystery of who betrayed Anne Frank had been solved, and The Betrayal of Anne Frank is the book that explores the story and how it happened. Not having actually read Anne Frank's diary, I was very happy that the first couple of chapters delved into what happened and why, as well as the cultural significance of the book. I also learned many details about why it was important, for instance:

by the end of World War II, the Netherlands would have the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: 73 percent of Jews in the Netherlands died. In Belgium, 40 percent of Jews were killed; in France, 25 percent; in Denmark, .6 percent. In Fascist Italy, only 8 percent of Jews were killed (kindle loc 556)

 The book offers multiple competing theories about who betrayed Anne Frank, but points out a few intriguing details about the whole thing. For instance, there's a lot of evidence that Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, figured out who it was who betrayed them, and then deliberately obfuscated accounts of the arrest process to cover the tracks of the person who betrayed them. Why would he do that? There's also evidence that he confided with one of his close friends (former employee) about the identity of the said betrayer.

Even more interestingly enough, one of the foundations that were founded by Otto Frank refused to help with the investigation!

There's obvious controversy over the conclusions drawn by the book, but having read it, I found the book's arguments convincing. But read the book and figure it out for yourself!

Review: King Arthur - History and Legend

 I started watching King Arthur - History and Legend out of curiosity and got sucked in and ended up watching all 24 episodes on Kanopy. The lecture series started with a description of all the myths about the King Arthur of history that are in popular culture that probably never had any correspondence in history. That was enough for me to decide that it was worth listening to the rest of the series.

What was interesting, for instance, was how little we knew about the origins of the myth, and what was tacked on much later. So for instance, Lancelot was introduced by French writers and added to a myth that was borne across the water into Brittany by people who were escaping the invasions of Britan. Dorsey Armstrong would provide rules of thumb about how much time it takes to travel over water vs land, and noted that it meant that interaction between Wales and Brittany were much more frequent than between Wales and London!

The description of the King Arthur legend as a giant vacuum clean sucking in many unrelated stories from the Celts was a sticky concept that helps you remember that for instance, the story of Tristan and Isolde was probably from a completely unrelated origin that got attached to the King Arthur framework. So in some sense the Arthur legend was the original shared world universe created by writers.

It helps that the lecturer Dorsey Armstrong has good taste --- she calls Monty Python and the Holy Grail one of the best King Athur movies ever made. She praises Camelot 3000, a comic book series I read as a teenager that at that time seemed radical in its gender bending.

My major criticism of the work is that there were many places where I wanted better visual aids (such as in her description of Arthuriana in Medieval Art), but she never makes good use of the video medium to provide more detailed pictures of said art.

But regardless, it's an enjoyable watch and educational. Recommended.

Review: Energizer X400 Headlight

 I was looking for a headlight on my Roadini, and the Energizer X400 was onsale for about $10, which is even cheaper than my usual cheap Blitzu lights. It comes with a rechargeable tail-light as well, which will be useful for the kids' bike, and a dual-head USB cable - USB-A on one end, and twin micro-USB on the other, so you can charge both head and tail lights together.

The headlight mounts using a rubber clamp, and is easily adjustable, and stays put. I was impressed by how bright the light is --- it's definitely brighter than my old Bitzus, and bright enough that you can do a descent on the road with it. I also appreciate the beam pattern --- there's a cut-off at the top like many higher quality European lights which have to conform to European standards.

The light doesn't charge fast, but it's good for about an hour or so on full brightness, which is enough for any commute, but not enough if you're going to go out at night. On flashing mode it'll last pretty much forever.

The light will not hold a charge for 2 days. That means the best strategy is to keep the light on the charger until you need it. That's not a big deal for this light --- unlike other lights the mount is very quick to use.

I will note that Blitzu has upgraded their lights, and you can now get their USB-C rechargeable light for about $19. (The Energizer is $21 full price but frequently there's a coupon for $5 off, making it cheaper) If you're touring, the USB-C port makes it easier to travel without carrying more cable tips, so I think that's the way to go. But if you can replicate my $10 deal, I think the Energizer has a lot to stay for itself. Recommended.

Review: Spiderlight

 Spiderlight is Adrian Tchaikovsky's high fantasy novel. It's revolves around the small D&D dungeon party (complete with cleric, thief, paladin, ranger, and wizard) who attempts to rid the world of its current lord. The complication, for anyone who knows Tchaikovky's work, is that they need the help of a spider being to do it.

Most of the adventure is fun, with plot twists and unexpected (and expected) events turned on its head, including meeting people in inns, as well as an unexpectedly genre defying climax and conclusion that is a more than competent payoff for making it to the end of the book.

The characters are a bit cliche, and while they do develop a little bit, sometimes it feels as though they develop for purposes of the plot, rather than being organic.

Nevertheless, it's an easy short read that's worth your time. Recommended.

Putting together my Roadini

 After I broke my Ti frame in January, I decided that I should get a backup road bike. Anyone who's broken 2 titanium frames in around 12 years should probably have more than 1 road bike. Or at least, anyone who was completely unhappy about having to ride his mountain bike around for 2 months should have a backup.

I settled on the Rivendell Roadini. Other bicycles that were considered were either a Rock Lobster custom steel frame (and fork), or a R&E cycles Rainier. Both would have cost more, and while a A Homer Hilsen was available in May, I finally decided against that as well, not because of the cost, but because it used 135mm spacing and I only had 130mm wheels.  The Roadini had downtube shifters and I decided that I might as well take advantage of them.  I've had a long history of liking the way Grant Peterson's designs ride, and even though prices went up to $1300, considering the bike came with a headset, fork, and seatpost, I was happy to return to the Rivendell fold, after I'd sold my Heron Touring bike way back in 2008.

While waiting for the Roadinis to arrive, I built up or scavenged the parts:

• 26mm handlebar sitting around in the garage, probably from an older tandem or road bike
• Shimano DuraAce rear wheel (back before I built a new rear wheel with the white industries hub)
• Ksyrium front wheel which Roberto gave to me before he moved to Seattle
• Shimano Ultegra SL triple crank which came from the Strong bike after that bike was reincarnated as a 1x
• Wolf-Tooth 38t drop-stop narrow-wide chainring (and the 6mm bolts to convert to 1x)
• M5100 11-51 cassette
• M5100 rear derailleur
• Dia Compe 11s downtube shifter
• SRAM 900 carbon brake levers
• KMC 11s chain (2)
• Nitto Tallux stem 10cm
• Shimano PD-ES600 pedals
• Shimano BC-9000 brake cables
• Reused old derailleur cable and housing (downtube shifters require shorter lengths, so you can cut off the frayed ends of older cables and reuse them!)
• Ritchey WCS saddle
• Kalloy seatpost (came with the frame)
• Tektro 559 brakes (retrofitted with kool-stop salmon pads)
• DuraAce BB
• Continental GP5000 700x30mm tires (on front)
• Michelin Pro Endurance 700x28mm tires (on rear)
• Blue Lug Shifter Boss Cover

When the frames arrived, I had a call with Will from Rivendell, and after realizing that I was going to put a drop bar on the bike he decided that the 54cm would work better for me than the 57cm frame. I didn't object --- a look at the geometry diagrams indicated that the 54cm was indeed a better match for my Strong ti frame than the 57cm would be. I would have a lot of seat post showing, but it looked normal to my 1990s-trained eyes.

The frame, fork, and headset weighed 7.1 pounds straight from Rivendell bicycle works. The bike after having built up and hung with a bottle cage and a topeak mini morph pump  (but no water bottle) came to 23 pounds even. By contrast the Strong ti bike was 20 pounds. (The Ti frame with headset and BB is 1540g), so just the frame and fork easily accounts for the 3 pound difference between bikes!

The frame  came without a frame cable guide, so I had to walk down to the local bike shop in the middle of the build to get a guide. To my surprise I had to use 2 KMC boxes of chains (these were the ones with 118 links each) --- I had to extract 2 links from the second box and use 2 sets of quick links to stitch enough chain to wrap around the derailleur and the biggest sprocket. The extra long 45cm chainstay definitely meant that you needed all that chain.

Shimano's 11s Duraace chains do come with 126 links, but I'm boycotting Shimano chains for being directional, which I consider to be an unnecessary burden --- you do not need a chain that can be put together wrong. Rivendell does sell 11s 130 link chains from FSA, but you can easily find SRAM PC-1110 11s chains for about $10 each, so in the long run that's probably cheaper.

I adjusted the stem height and the saddle height, and took it for a ride. The bike rides really nice off pavement, but I spent the first ride on the bike adjusting the seat post as it kept tilting up. It wasn't until I got home and used a really long handled allen wrench that I could torque down the seatpost clamp to the point where it would survive a ride of any length without coming out of adjustment. I suspect that I have to get a Thomson elite seatpost in order to get good behavior out of the bike.

To my disappointment, I measured the 700x30 tires on the front with calipers, and they came out to 27mm wide. The 700x28mm tires on the back did measure around 28mm.

The bike has a long front center, so as a result, even though my saddle to handlebar distance is the same on both bikes, my knee is significantly behind the pedal spindle on the Rivendell as compared to the Strong frame. In practice, this is no big deal, but I'd have to ride hard and compare both bikes to figure out if there's any difference in physiological efficiency.

Steel bikes have a riding resonance that's very different from titanium bikes. I find that when I ride a steel bike, there's a "ring" that emanates from the steel tubes of the  bike in a way that the titanium frame doesn't. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, but if you prefer steel frames that's most likely one of the reasons. Regardless, when I took the Roadini over the dirt road from Montebello over to Page Mill road, there was a surefootedness that definitely wasn't there on the titanium Strong frame. It could be the longer wheelbase or the wider tires. The bike, however, doesn't seem to climb as nicely standing up for short steep efforts --- it prefers for me to sit and spin. This might have something to do with the extra long chainstays.

The Diacompe shifter downtube shifter is responsive. A little nudge and the bike shifts. I have to over-shift a bit when shifting to lower gears. Again, it's something to get used to, but I definitely like how fast the bike shifts. The downtube shifter was a deliberate attempt to make the bike lighter, and to some extent I succeeded. Of course, that means that you have to move your hands low when you shift. Not a big deal, but you will shift less often.

When climbing, the Roadini feels fine. The "ring" I mentioned earlier offsets the heavier bike. Off pavement, the stability of the frame makes even deepish gravel feels rideable. Standing up though, the longer chainstays definitely makes you feel like the rear wheel is further away than on a shorter chainstay. Because Grant switched from a 73.5 head tube angle to a 72 head tube angle and increased the fork rake to 50mm, he was able to get the same geometric trail as my Carl Strong frame with a 73.5 head tube angle and 43mm rake. But the result of that change was that I have no toe-clip overlap. At low speed, I'd have to mount a much bigger tire or turn the wheel more than 90 degrees to get my toes to touch. Not that the toe clip overlap on the Strong frame ever bothered me --- I'm a good enough bike handler that touching the toes of my tire was just no big deal. But the Roadini can handle much larger tires and tighter turns at low speed as a result.

When descending, the Roadini is actually slower than my Strong frame. The extra 5mm of extra BB height doesn't feel as nice, and of course, I'm still not used to the bike so I may not be descending at my full potential.  I would later measure the BB and discover that it was 13mm higher off the ground than on my Strong --- 8 of those mm of additional height came from the tires! There are people who'd swear up and down that it's not humanly possible to feel the difference in BB height but for me the difference is night and day. I would later swap over the wheels from my Strong frame and with a 10.75" BB height the Roadini rides much better, so the increased BB height does affect how the bike feels quite a bit. With 25mm tires, the Roadini rides very nicely, but isn't as plush.

Upon braking, I was prepared for the longer armed Tektro 559 brakes to feel squishier, but they do not. They feel great and no worse than my standard reach caliper on my Strong frame. Part of it could be because I sprung for the super-expensive BC-9000 brake cables. I'd bought those because they got me over the free shipping limit for getting an extra pair of Specialized RECON 1.0 shoes. They were a little finicky to install but fortunately my cable needs were such that I had plenty of spare cable to screw up on. After using the Roadini for awhile I did a back to back comparison against my Strong frame and realized that I needed to do the same thing for my Strong --- the brakes felt so much better!

The SRAM 900 brake levers were great! I was leery at first since the Campy Record carbon brake levers were what were on my triplet and single, and I was worried that I wouldn't like the SRAM 900s. Turned out they're very comfortable. Even the strangely shaped levers that look like they're biased the wrong way turn out to be great.

Over time, as I rode the bike more, I got to appreciate the plush quality of the ride as well as the way it handles. Frequently riding the bike feels like riding on a leaf spring --- the bike removes chatter from rough roads and unpaved roads --- I set PRs coming down Fremont Older. I can definitely see myself riding the Stevens Canyon MTB track with a set of 700x38mm knobbies.

Needless to say, buying the Roadini was a good decision. It's given me sufficient data about how to get similar handling and correct some of the deficiencies of past designs, while giving me insight as to what I really like about bike geometry. After a week of riding I discovered a chip in the paint on the head tube which I didn't know how it got there. It's another reminder that I'm just not kind to bicycles and all sorts of damage appears that I don't know about. I want the frame to be lighter, not need paint, and I would like the BB drop to be lower, especially for using big tires. The chainstay could stand to be about 1cm shorter. But I'm not sure I'd change anything else about the bike!

I frequently have to remind myself that I'm very spoiled. I've ridden/test ridden many bicycles, but had the luck to ride a Grant Petersen designed bike early on, and have essentially been riding a variant of one of his bikes for much of my adult life. If you've never ridden a Grant Petersen design you owe it to yourself to ride one. He's a legend for good reason. The Rivendell Roadini is sure to be sold out completely by the time you read this, but it's worth the wait!

Nelson Lakes Backpacking Trip

 I'd failed to take the kids camping this year. I actually had one organized the weekend before our Tour of the Alps, but I actually got sick a week before that and was on medication, and when the forecast called for rain I called it off since I didn't want to jeopardize a very expensive upcoming tour. So when Arturo suggested a High Sierra backpacking trip I signed up and so did Bowen and Boen. Boen, of course, is famous for changing his mind at random, so he eventually backed out, opting for a sleepover with a classmate instead. This actually would make my load lighter, so i didn't mind.

On Friday, we picked up Bowen from school, and immediately drove south towards Clovis. It was clear that traffic had resumed to pre-pandemic levels, and the carpool lane didn't help any. In Clovis, it was time to charge his car, and we had dinner at the Pieology next to the Tesla superchargers. We then drove to pick up the ranger permits, and found a campground near the road to camp for the night. The stars were pretty amazing.

The next morning, we drove the rest of the way to the trailhead, and repacked our gear --- we discovered that the 3 of us fit into the MSR Freelite, so Arturo could leave his tent behind. I decided to bring the hammock but not the sleeping accessories for it. This was a good thing because after the first mile it was quite clear that we had complete de-acclimated from altitude after our cycle tour, and would Bowen couldn't carry his sleeping bag and sleeping pad, so Arturo and I had to take those items out of his backpack and onto or into ours.

We had hoped to make it to the upper Nelson lakes, which by all accounts was quieter and had a better swimming platform, but it was clear that Bowen wasn't going to make it. After an hour and a half we made it to the burnt patch, which was ugly but thankfully short and surprisingly well shaded.

From the burnt area it wasn't a long walk to Nelson Lake, but Bowen was whining. Fortunately once you got to the lake it didn't take us long to find an established campground that looked ideal -- sheltered, somewhat shaded, with an obvious cooking area. We pitched the tent, setup the hammock in ideal conditions, and then moved equipment around.

After that, we hiked to Upper Nelson, which as Arturo promised featured a nice granite entry into the lake for swimming.

The lake was impressively warm! I got in and swim hard expecting to be cold like in all Sierra lakes, but halfway across the lake I realized that while my feet were cold my arms weren't! As an experiment I flipped on my back and did a deadman's float and realized that the water in the first few inches of the lake were much warmer! So if you did a breast stroke on your back you could lay back and enjoy yourself. I stayed more than 10 minutes in the lake.

After that, we hiked around the lake and walked back to the camp. Bowen loved campfires and Arturo and he got going on the campfire and gathering firewood while I got to relax and finish the rest of the book I was reading in the hammock.

The next morning was nothing short of stunning when I woke up, with a beautiful reflection in the morning in the lake and mist rising from the water. Even in the cold it was worth it to walk around and take pictures. I made a cup of coffee and enjoyed reading in the hammock again.

After that, we made breakfast, broke down all the equipment, packed it away, and said goodbye to the lake and hiked out.

The hike backdown took about half an hour less than the previous day, but the last bit back to the parking lot was all uphill, and the whining started. Clearly 2 nights at altitude wasn't enough to acclimate us. But we got back to the car and drove back home, eating lunch in a local park on the way. All in all it was pretty good.

2023 Book Reviews

Books of the year for 2023 were chosen!

Non-Fiction

• The Betrayal of Anne Frank
• The Cuckoo's Egg
• The Story of the Tour de France 2019
• What If? 2
• Existential Physics
• Growing Up Human
• Lone Traveler
• Acceptance - A Memoir
• Reality is not what it seems
• A Bike Ride - 12000 miles Around The World
• Slouching towards Utopia
• Let My People Go Surfing
• Freedom to Learn
• The Beginning of Infinity
• How to Raise an Adult
• Song of the Cell
• Superfreakonomics
• Politics is for Power
• What We Owe The Future
• Ultimate High
• The End of the World is Just the Beginning
• Chip War
• Patient Zero
• The New Education
• Scam me if you can
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• Scientist - EO Wilson
• Dark Sun
• Volt Rush
• The People's Hospital
• Delicious
• American Prometheus
• This Will Never Work
• The Science of Storytelling
• The Rare Metals War
• The Knowledge Gap
• Outlive
• Elon Musk
• Going Infinite
• Two Wheels Good
• How We Learn
• The Fourth Turning is Here

Fiction 

• Spiderlight
• Mythos
• Troy
• Fairy Tale
• The Peripheral
• Farewell My Lovely (reread)
• Eye of the Dragon
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
• Young Jane Young
• The Storied Life of A.J. Filkry
• A Half-Built Garden
• Dispel Illusion
• Deep Secret
• Ra
• The Steerswoman
• The Sword in the Stone
• The Phantom Tollbooth
• The Outskirter's Secrets
• The Lost Steersman
• The Language of Power
• The Righteous Mind
• The Graveyard Book
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• The Mists of Avalon
• Stardust
• Odd and the Frost Giants
• Anansi Boys
• Ender's Game
• The John Varley Reader
• Fire & Hemlock
• Yellowface
• The Way Home
• Babel
• House of Suns
• The Poppy War
• Elder Race

Comics/Graphic Novels

• The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
• Chivalry
• Through Open Doors
• Astro-City: Shining Stars
• Astro-City: Victory
• Bea Wolf
• Witch Hat Atelier 1-10
• Astro-City: Private Lives
• Astro-City: Lovers Quarrel
• Astro-City: Honor Guard & Reflections
• Astro-City: Ordinary Heroes
• The Killing Joke
• Blue Lock 1-10
• Fables 1-75
• Logicomix
• Attack on Titan 1-8
• Heartstoppers Vol 1-4
• American Born Chinese

Video

• King Arthur - History and Legend
• Theory of Everything
• Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

Audio Books

• The Big Questions of Philosophy
• No Excuses
• The Sandman Act III
• Great Courses Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Books that Matter: The Prince
• The World of JRR Tolkein

Review: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

 I checked out The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt from the library because lots of people kept referencing her with respect to the current state of the GOP, but I bounced off every book she wrote. If I was looking for an understanding of why she was so great, I was sorely disappointed.

The book does a good job relating the events of Arendt's life, from growing up, to encountering Martin Heidegger and becoming is lover, to her escape from Nazi Germany, to her time in a concentration camp and her escape to Portugal and arrival to the USA and becoming famous.

The book doesn't explain why she's considered amongst the smartest philosophers of her age, nor does it clarify how she thought about herself as a philosopher or as a political theorist. There's a scene where she meets Einstein, for instance, but there's no followup on what Einstein thought of the encounter.

The art was OK. It's nothing great, nor is it so bad that I'd consider it unreadable. It's just meh.

Books of the Year 2022

 This year I read about 81 books, which is more than a book a week. When you read this many books, it gets actually pretty hard to choose which books are the best. In the non-fiction category, I really thought A A Brief History of Equality was the most important, in terms of introducing ideas that I'd never thought about, and questioning the existing social orders (for instance, the unquestioning idea that corporations should exclude labor from their controllers)  It's not a fun book to read, since many parts of history are depressing, but neither are many of the books that cover the state of the world today.   For fun, I really enjoyed Self-made Man, a courageous, gender-swapping story of a woman who succeeded in passing off as a man and the observations she made of male society.

Another great book was Crying in HMart. The story was great and the description of Korean culture entertaining. I read it at almost the same time as Himawari House, which is easily the best graphic novel I read this year. If you have to choose, Himawari House is the better novel. But the best thing about books is you never really have to choose between two great books. Read both!

When it comes to fiction, the best book I read all year was Exhalation. That's cheating since it's a re-read. I would say the best new book was Inhibitor Phase. Alastair Reynolds comes back to the revelation space universe and I love it.

Audio Books played a huge part of my year this year. Easily the best production was The Sandman. I am still in awe that Amazon managed to reproduce a comic book in audio format. I have yet to see the Netflix series, but for it'd have to be ridiculously good to top the graphic novel.

Other honorable mentions for the book of the year: Amusing Ourselves to Death, Dying of Whiteness, and Science Fiction as Philosophy all immediately come to mind as being well worth the time.

I had a great year of reading, and I hope you did too!

Review: The Perfect Predator

 The Perfect Predator is a memoir of the author's successful attempt to shepherd her husband through a horrifying encounter with a multi-resistant bacteria. What comes through in the book is that both the author and her husband are adventurous in ways that make you wonder how they survived this long:

The few mosquito bites on the back of my thigh had started out as minor irritations. Several weeks later they were infected masses the size of golf balls, then baseballs. I kept telling the doctor that whatever it was, it was eating me. I could feel it feeding, especially at night. Occasionally, it hit a nerve and my leg would jump like a marionette being manipulated by a sadistic puppeteer. At such times, I would slap at my bulging thigh and the thing would lie dormant for a little while. The doctor thought I was nuts at first, but when a one-inch pupae with three double rows of epidermal spines suddenly emerged while I was on the examining table, he was stunned. Turns out I had been afflicted with an infestation of Dermatobium hominis, a botfly that ingeniously captures mosquitoes and lay its eggs on their underbelly. When the mosquito bites its host, the newly hatched botfly larvae crawl into the wound, feed on their host’s flesh, and then pupate. Yum (Page 241)

I expected the encounter with multi-drug resistant bacteria to be in some exotic location, and in fact, the Thomas Patterson first ends up in the hospital in Egypt. There, his wife Steffanie discovers that there's a pseudo cyst that's been in his body for goodness knows how long that's finally caused gastronomic distress. He goes from bad to worse and is medically evacuated first to Frankfurt, and then back to San Diego.

There's never a definitive answer as to where he picked up the multi-drug resistant bacteria, but the suspicion was clearly raised that it was likely to be in the Egyptian clinic where he was first diagnosed. What follows is an exercise in understanding what it takes to gain access to these phage therapies. First, you'd have to be capable of reading and searching through research papers. Secondarily, you have to be well known enough (Strathdee is an epidemiologist and is well known to the UCSD hospital system) that when you send e-mail to researchers and various approval agencies for compassionate use of a previously untested drug, the response is quick and in the affirmative. Then you have to get lucky. There were several places in the narrative where Patterson was declining and the doctors had to make a decision as to whether to proceed with phage therapy or to stop it. The decision to stop would have been fatal.

Phage therapy is pretty cool stuff, but it's definitely not a panacea --- the author describes having multiple teams at work searching for viruses that could infect and defeat the drug resistant bacteria. 2 teams came up with two cocktails of 4 phages each, that were then IV'd into the patient's body in various places. But the bacteria eventually became resistant to both cocktails of phages, resulting in another search for more viruses that could do the job. What finally finished it off was a combination of another set of phages along with an antibiotic (in becoming resistant to the first batch of phages the bacteria had lost some of its protection from antibiotics). The recovery still took years. You don't walk out of a 9-month stay in the ICU without consequences, but the authors eventually went back to their risk-taking lifestyle.

The book highlights how bad the post-antibiotic era is going to be. You're probably not socially connected to one of the best medical research centers in the world and get this type of treatment:

A post-antibiotic era. That’s how some of the world’s top health officials, including former CDC director Tom Frieden, describe the global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). By 2050, one person could die from a superbug infection every three seconds each year, making AMR a more immediate threat to humankind than climate change (page 304)

There are many lessons in this book --- first about how important it is to have someone advocating on your behalf when you're in dire straits in a medical system. Second, I thought that medically affiliated people would be inclined to take less risks in travel. Clearly I'm wrong! Lastly, antibiotic resistant is a big deal. The author admitted to bringing cipro while travelling, and at the end admits that she was contributing to being part of the problem. 

The book is compelling, if harrowing reading. Well worth your time.

Review: Limited Wish

 Limited Wish is the sequel to Mark Lawrence's One Word Kill, which I enjoyed but only remembered to read when it was put on sale. Like that novel, it's written in a breezy style, easy to digest, but doesn't tie up as nicely as the previous book. The book picks up a few months after the events of the original book, and immediately dives into more Time Travel paradoxes while picking apart the happy ending the first book finished with.

The teenage angst and 3-sided romance aside, I thought the author did a poor job of presenting time travel this time, with lots of gobbledy gook and mumbo jumbo and of course, the breaking and entering of a nuclear facility facilitated by an unlikely time traveler.

The best part of the book was the author's depiction of D&D games, but it's not enough to carry the novel. I didn't exactly want my time back but I certainly wished I hadn't spent $2 in Amazon credits on it.

Review: Arbitrary Lines

 Arbitrary Lines is M Nolan Gray's book about zoning. It begins with the story of Sim City and how it gave the impression that zoning is the be-all and end-all of city planning, and then goes on to explain how zoning was created (and then promoted) by Berkeley California in order to successfully exclude Chinese laundries and other undesirable from otherwise high class neighborhoods. The book has an entire appendix in order to explain of what zoning is, and how it differs about environmental protection laws (on which Gray has nothing to say), or historic preservations.

The book covers the evils of zoning. You've probably lived it --- too few houses being built, insufficient density, urban sprawl, and car dependence. If you haven't lived it, then you definitely should read this book because he covers it better than I could in a summary.

What's most interesting about the book is the section on Houston, which is apparently the only large unzoned city in the USA. It turned out that zoning was put to a referendum there, and voted down not once, but multiple times, each time with the poorer people voting against it, indicating that citizens in a democracy can tell when the rich people are trying to screw them. The adoption of zoning in other cities throughout the nation was only because they were never put to a vote.

Eventually, Houston got out of the cycle of having to have repeated referendums on the topic of zoning by allowing the rich areas that really wanted zoning to have their cake. A district that wanted to impose rules on building could do so with a supermajority vote and then from then on all the onerous restrictions they want to impose on themselves would have to be made known to any buyers of property in that district, and the city would actually enforce those restrictions by refusing to issue permits and fining those who violate those restrictions.

The rest of the book is about how to get out from the culture of zoning. Since it's popular amongst the rich voters who own houses (by restricting the number of houses you drive up property values), it would seem hopeless. Gray suggests things like tying funding to the removal of zoning ordinances. That would definitely get people's attention. I can imagine Cupertino's Asian population (famously non-political until schools are involved) actually voting if education funding was increased in exchange for getting rid of zoning. So things aren't impossible, you just have to bribe enough people to make it happen.

The entire book taught me a ton of stuff I didn't know about zoning, and is short and easy to read. It's well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: Shimano PD-ES600

 My Shimano M520s have been the mainstay of my cycling pedals for years and years. They have wrench flats, last pretty much forever (suviving multiple titanium frames in the case of my single road bike), and are double-sided, letting me just stomp and go. When contemplating building a steel bike as a backup road bike, however, I found the Shimano PD-ES600 on sale for about $60 shipped. They come with SH51 cleats, but for reference just a pair of SH56 cleats cost about $19! One of the reviews I read said that the shoe's wider platform meshed nicely with the lugs on a MTB shoe to give a firmer connection with the pedal, which was enough (along with the 100g weight savings and the improved pedal clearance --- something to consider when your favorite frame geometry has an 80mm BB drop) to tip me over to purchase a pair.

When they arrived, I had to get out my allen wrenches in order to install them, as the pedals do not have wrench flats. I didn't need to change the tension on the pedals as the default felt right for me. The pedals are single-sided, which means you can't just stomp and go, but the firm connection definitely feels nice! After a week of riding with them on and off pavement, I went out and ordered a second pair. I tried those on the triplet for one long ride and a couple of commutes taking the kids to school an bought a 3rd pair for the roadini.  Interestingly enough, the difference is much less with my stiff-soled SIDI dominator than with my Recon 1.0s, indicating that it makes the biggest difference when your soles aren't as stiff. The single-sidedness can be a problem for some, but what I discovered was that my feet naturally find the correct side about 75% of the time --- this is because the spindle is just stiff enough that if you step down on the other pedal the alternate side will be in the correct side to receive a cleat --- the people who don't step down in order to start a bike (which is the correct method) would probably have much more trouble. The other 25%, I can tell by feel that the pedal is flipped over, and it's not a problem to flip it over without looking at the pedal. Even on gravel/off-road riding it was not a big deal. The lack of wrench flats probably bothers me more than anything else. The improved pedal clearance might also make a difference though to be honest since West Alpine road is closed I haven't had a chance to test it in extreme conditions --- note that pedal strikes never actually bothered me much anyway.

I wouldn't have paid list price for these ($100), but at $60 included taxes and shipping, these are a good deal. I'll stick with M520s for the mountain bike, and if I were riding the tandem triplet with a new cyclist I'd probably still go for the M520s but my sons and I are so coordinated by now that we can feel when I need to stop pedaling to flip over the pedals as needed (which hasn't been often), and on the triplet the extra firm connection feels even more needed! I ended up getting these for all 3 of my road bikes. My brother tried them once on my single and decided he wanted a pair as well! Here's another indication of how effective it is --- once I had them on all my bikes, I stopped switching to the super-stiff SIDI shoes whenever I went on a road ride, preferring my touring shoes instead!

Recommended. If you've been riding M520s, these are the first pedals that felt like a real upgrade.