Rolling Along

Bike The Barns

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:29:15 GMT

Well it’s coming up on that time again! Bike the barns season...

check out our pledge page!

Sev

Help support the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition’s (MACSAC) 3rd Annual Bike the Barns bike ride!

This event raises critical funds to support MACSAC’s Partner Shares Program, which brings fresh, organic food from local farms to low income families in our community. Please visit my personal rider page and pledge your support.

Pledging is fast and easy; please support my ride and this great cause!

I truly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress as I prepare to ride and continue raising funds to support this critical program.

Together with MACSAC I am working to create a sustainable, local food system in Southern Wisconsin by supporting CSA farms and ensuring that fresh, local food is available to all.

Thank you so much for your time and your support of local farms, food and families!

Your pledge of $250 or more can be TAX DEDUCTIBLE! If you’re mailing a tax-deductible pledge, please make checks payable to: REAP Food Group

WebLink: http://bikethebarns.dojiggy.com/samandaddibikethebarns2009

Piscine accomplishment

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:42:32 GMT

Well, I don’t get to avoid my old shop as I had planned. The boss called and asked me to come in and help out with projects around the shop. Building bikes, cleaning, reorganizing etc. I can deal with this... I think.

In personal news I had a fine day cycling to a coffee shop then down to the river to do some fishing. I caughts me 6 bluegills! Yaarr! I am the mightly huntrly!

ahem....

I should mention that Bluegills are some of the dumbest fish to be found in nature. They will literally bite at goobers if you spit in the water above them. They are just that dumb.

Plans for the week

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:39:20 GMT

Well, the new store is supposed to open officially tomorrow July 6th. This will not be happening. We don’t even have real walls or a completed floor. I am highly disappointed. Due to some festering personality conflicts at my previous shop I am considering taking furlough just to avoid the heartache. In the mean time I have the following plans:

1) Build storage bench for the garage.
2) Plan some semi-permanent canning shelves for the basement
3) Go fishing (gonna do some of that tomorrow I think)

I am also going to attempt to use Journler to post some code to LiveJournal. We’ll see how it works. If it does I will possibly include this as a weekly supplement to my normal post.

TEST TEST TEST

Severian Log Your Rides @ MyCyclingLog.com

Back into the swing,

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:39:16 GMT

Back in Madison after a weekend away.

Things to do:
Get some bike rides in. Tomorrow I will probably do a 20 mile loop. With the cool weather I will need to break out my wool jersey.
Go fishing on Thursday. I’ve re-considered fishing the mid-yahara. I think I can get access to the river source just north of Mendota
Clean my fishtank.

Things I’ve learned:
Anarchists who couch their philosophies in legalistic terms are really just Libertarians.
Libertarians want the protection of the rule of law without any of the responsibility.
If you have a sip of Ola Dubh 12 yr Scotch Ale and then a sip of J. W. Lees Vintage Harvest ale you get a taste of BBQ.
Road Paving Equipment is ridiculously cool, and causes interesting patterns in freshly-ground dirt.
It is a shame that Bella Lugosi and Mel Brooks never made a movie together.

During Vacation, or, what's next?

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:17:29 GMT

aetrix9 and I are going out of town for the next two nights. Gonna B&B it up somewhere quiet. Talk, walk, poke around some odd shops, eat too much. I can certianly say I’m looking forward to it. And to the fact that, when we get back, I will still have 2 more days left of my vacation time I took from Work.

I believe that I will go fishing on Wednesday. Pack my rod and kit on my back, bike over to the East side of Town and fish the Yahara. I stopped at Fontana yesterday and grabbed some panfish flies. If I keep buying flies I may have to pull together the scratch to get a hook vise, materials and some instruction. I turn your attention to Oliver Edwards (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFYlIwDuPiE) whose skill at tying a fly is rather ridiculous.

Cheers!

fishing for the first time on a new rod

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:54:08 GMT

Went fishing this evening. Had two little brown trout jump at my fly. Lost one fly to a treebranch. Stood in an icy stream up to my knees.

All in all, it was a good time!

My friend Justin tried my rod out (har har). He likes my “cheap” rod better than his expensive rod.

Movie Origins

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:01:23 GMT

I just watched “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans” and found it to be much like the previous two. If a bit more Conan the Barbarian in its type.

However, I found out that one of the principle actors in Underworld 1 and this latest Underworld 3 is also one of the writers of all three films AND the original concept creator. His motivation is to explore interracial dating. This really bears some thinking about if true.

“Using Romeo and Juliet as an archetype, Grevioux, a former microbiologist with a background in genetic engineering,[citation needed] based Underworld on his experiences with interracial dating and the tension that it often causes. He also brought a scientific element to the world of vampires and werewolves by basing vampirism and lycanthropy on a viral mutagen rather than the mysticism typically associated with these two mythic creatures.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Grevioux

Strawberry day

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:30:12 GMT

First canning day. Picked 20 lbs of strawberries. Canned a few dozen jars of jam. We have a vegan strawberry pie setting up in the fridge. Gonna freeze a few pretty soon. I also made up some pear sorbet today, it came out a bit too sugary.

For my caffeine research I found an un-sourced document online that gives a minimum threshold dose as 10-20 mg.
http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/caffeine/caffeine_dose.shtml

Interesting starting point. I discussed my ideas during picking with aetrix9. She’s offered me access to pubmed and her pharmacokinetics book as there is a wealth of data on caffeine in the latter and good general info in the former.

Aparently when pharmacists (not the folks at walgreens, but the boffins at drug labs) make a drug they will package the human trial tests with caffeine in order to measure the metabolic life of the test drug versus the very well known metabolic life of caffeine.

As an aside:

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:01:13 GMT

Recently I began using a journaling/GTD productivity application called Journler (http://journler.com/). For those on a Mac who would like to post and retain offline copies of their posts, as well as keeping extensive project notes and life documentation where you get to choose what and how much goes up in your public space (concept: the internet message boards and social networking sites as “public space”). As well as giving you a fully functional way of tracking and processing your projects (art, academic, media, life etc) I highly recommend it.

Notes to restart a project

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:57:18 GMT

A bit ago I was interested in the affects of caffeine on sports performance. Most of the documentation I read was very thorough on exploring dosage intake in various forms. Focused on the MAXIMUM dosage intake of a particular vector (be it supplement, tea, coffee, candy, soda etc). The questions I want to explore are...

1) Minimum effective dose (MED, or CMED for CaffeineMED); broad category explore the following:
a) resting event; no activity level previous or following
b) ramping; increased minimum dosage for setting up the body state for activity (see glycogen and carbo-loading)
c) active intake; coasting rate for MED
d) cooldown; if the intent is to cut back on MED at what point must intake be cut in order to metabolize remaining caffeine and return to a non-enhanced state
e) recovery; a common discussion among athletes, particularly endurance athletes. This is the time to restore the body.
2) Long Term CMED use:
a) eventual desensitization
b) chemical dependency
c) resensitization to CMED after period of abstention

WHY? I think that the caffeine intake of the average American, and quite possibly all Americanized Food Cultures, is excessive. If the goal is alertness, mental acuity and/or some modest athletic benefits then those states should be attainable by an MED. There seems to be extensive opinion and fact in the literature that raises concerns about caffeine hyper-Dosing. I hesitate to call it Over Dosing.

addendum

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:57:06 GMT

I realized recently that I neglected some inter-personal commitments I had made. All of them are very old.

For those who had depended on me to honor those commitments, please forgive me. Let me know if I will be able to get in touch with you to resolve them.

I’m not quite sure if anyone to whom I owe contact will even read this. I’m being self-centered about this, and going about it all wrong. crap.

Oh the passage of time

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:43:22 GMT

I’m not quite sure why I’ve decided to post after a long hiatus. I’m not quite sure what I feel at this moment.

What I do know is that I can’t sleep. I haven’t been going to sleep at a reasonable hour for the last handful of days. I think this may be a symptom of not being entirely happy with life as it is right now. But, I couldn’t tell you what, why or how.

News For Anyone Who may be Interested

I have a semi-new job. Still with the same company. We’re just opening a new store in the downtown area. This is only relatively exciting.

I’ve taken up fly fishing and bowling.

I’ve given up on the Martial Arts.

I have less time in my life...

Some years ago I mentioned pulling up the stakes like a nomad and going somewhere new. But, this is not wanderlust. Think “Starsign” by Apoptygma Berzerk

Maybe there will be more later.

links to check out:
http://www.mycyclinglog.com/profile/Severian
http://madisonbiking.com/profile.php?id=145
http://www.bikeforums.net/member.php?u=38112

That’s my public existence on the internet. Very bike-centric. Maybe of interest.

Cheers

numbers

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 01:43:40 GMT

Severian Log Your Rides @ MyCyclingLog.com

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:29:49 GMT

I have sand under my nails. I set off fireworks. I'm toasting our new president with some Whiskey.

I got 4 voters to the polls.

Yours,

Sev

bit of synchronicity

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:28:45 GMT

Another giant of my world, and member of the bicycling community, died this week.

Sheldon Brown, known for being the head tech and webmaster of Harris Cyclery as well as his own website, died this monday at the age of 63. Heart attack is the listed cause...

in memorium I rode my bike yesterday in a "Wintry Mix"... icy roads.. .yuck. But my new headlight works nice.

I also cleaned the kitchen of Superbowl Detritus.

for my cephalopod friends

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:57:08 GMT

Well.. I'm now three days back from Ashland... a few days of work, a few days off. I'm glad to be home to my wife (who is playing with her phone and trying to get an internet connection up and running on cellular modem for her computer). Catching up on my reading I found a gem on metafilter.com.

Octopous now goes to 11

The main link is to a talk from TED (very cool talks about any subject under the sun, any subject currently studied by humans). The second half of the talk covers nifty camo and communication abilities of cephalopods. Ya'll should check em out!

cheers!

wooden bike

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:58:59 GMT

WOW.... JUST....... WOW...

topical considering what I'm doing this week.

I am amazed.

mooo-oil

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 03:37:49 GMT

A few days worth of suspension overhauls and an hour long bike ride makes me feel pretty good. My hands have been COMPLETELY covered in lube for the past two days. Not good lube mind you... but lube non the less.

And I got to watch a calf being born this evening. After class I went out into the hills around Ashland for a bike ride. Did probably about a thousand feet of climb over two miles. I passed a farm and the cows were out wandering around in the still evening. I heard lots of mooing and looked around at all of these cows, and one mother cow off on her own, licking her newborn calf.

Cool shit. I got a pic of the calf.

I didn't get a pic of the deer I saw later. A whole herd of them. I was tackling the last few hundred feet of climb before the road I was riding on turned into a fire-road and went up higher into the mountains. The herd passed me and ran into the woods to watch me huff and puff my way up the hill.

perhaps I should get an advanced account so I can post pictures.

First day

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:34:38 GMT

I didn't sleep well last night for some reason... may have to do something with not having drunk enough water all day and sitting around on my ass.

Got up today panicking that I'd missed classes or work or something. But, I made it to the UBI facility before anyone else... except the owner. Whom I haven't met. First day of class was interesting, but not anything I don't already know. They grade performance though. I find their grading scheme kind of distasteful... or at least, it seems a little heavy-handed.

The information was good, there was actual discussion on wheel theory. Tomorrow we get to build a pair of wheels! But I don't get to keep em (sad).

I'm seeing a lot of mountains while I'm here... its very comfortable in this little valley. Not like the poorly named "Valley of the Sun" that Phoenix AZ sits in.

more later

grief so huge

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:27:23 GMT

I'm reading "Variable Star" at the moment. i'll just be short and say that now I'm wrestling with a very large question. It'll take a while to resolve it. This is a very good book. Corny at first and no it's got too much in it to fit in my head but I can't stop reading it and I don't know when I can finish it.

Location: The Mix coffee shop in Ashland OR. Local time 12:30 pm... gonna have to go find food soon. Or wander around the city on my fixed and take some pictures to SHOW this place.

travelling to UBI

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:00:19 GMT

Current Loc 45 degrees 35' north, 122 degrees 35' west

Sitting in the Rogue Ales Public House in PDX airport in Portland Oregon, waiting for a garden burger and drinking a Brown Ale. Very very tasty.

I miss my wife.

UBI... I don't know what to expect. Other than a few days of learning about wheel building and a few days learning about suspension. My bike, at least, I know made it here to portland with me... we'll see if it makes it all the way to Medford.... if it does then I should be able to survive this whole week.

I know that during this time of year in this part of the states I can expect a lot of rain and not much sun. I don't know which is worse... sub zero temperatures or 4 months of no sun.... hmm...

mmmmm.... veggie burger...

hey annan_dum.... if you've got a few hours..... I'll be here till 5 pm.

If not... I'll catch you later. I should have posted something about this before now. and let you know I was going to be in your world for a few hours.

cheers all

Fighting flying

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 04:54:30 GMT

I'm trying to think of the chances a human being has to climb a natural land feature and look out at the top and all around to see a a steamy rumbling mass of humanity and human progress. All the order, chaos and manipulation that we as a species apply to our world.

It's hard for me to look at all that a thousand feet up in the air and not feel as if I am about to fly off into the sky. My toes want to dig into the rock and hold me down, my palms sweat and my head spins. Very difficult to see the vista without knowing EXACTLY how far down it is in the unlikely event that I go flying off the side of the hill.

for globe geeks: Lat 33°30'52.52"N Long 111°57'42.52"W
Camelback Mountain, Phoenix Arizona 11:00 am

By 2 we were exhausted. aetrix9 and I retired to our hotel, after lunch, to hottub and lying out in the sun. Yeah, it was only 65 degrees out. But, god it felt good.

I suffered through a trip to the Sanrio Store, and then amazing thai food and gelato.

hey lostboy_

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:20:56 GMT

have you seen this knife yet?

source: http://www.boker.de/us/index.php?c=24,1,16&a=084DAMASCUS&p=&pp=0

On our way.... Vacation!

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:56:54 GMT

(On the plane from Minneapolis to Phoenix 1/7/08 :: Central DST)
Been a damn long time since I actually went on vacation. Last March aetrix9 and I went to Mexico. Since then I've done a fair amount of traveling. But, if you've been reading this journal over the past year you'll remember that it hasn't been under the most pleasant of conditions.

(In a coffee shop in Phoenix AZ, 1/8/08 :: Mountain DST)
Under odd synchronicity. Our trip to Arizona started in the fog, with yet another plane cancellation and aetrix9 spending an hour on the phone with our airline trying to get a decent flight out. We ended up with a pair of tickets to leave Milwaukee at 5:30 am. aetrix9 is blogging where she's sitting. She's writing down the date, time and chair that she's got her butt perched on. I'm doing long-hand in a rather comfy chair... make that wine-red chaise lounge lady_fox would love this chair... I'll get aetrix9 to take a picture of it.

Anyway... our roommate Sue very graciously, and cheerfully I might add, agreed to drive us to the Milwaukee airport. He's a saint!

When we arrived in Phoenix we got our car, and I think I like modern car rental. At least, how we got our car. And we're driving an 07 Subaru Forester... me likee. Especially the drive-by-wire sport shifter. aetrix9 is calling it the lesbaru. I'm reminded that lostboy_ likes his Forester, I'm mentally calling it the "Ho-bag Mobile".

The plan for the day... before lunch we're gonna go visit a local desert conservatory, then after lunch we'll go for a hike in Echo Canyon... canyon... yon... on... n... (or maybe not it's considered a "Very Strenuous Hike"). We can get into our hotel room at 3, when I intend on taking a nap. Then it's off to dinner with some Faerber family friends.

more... .later?

sometimes I feel like a....

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 06:23:56 GMT

I've been playing too much EV Nova lately. It's an excellent and addicting game. And it makes me think about my first memory of Star Wars (A New Hope). I have thought at times that I wanted to be a Luke Skywalker with the fancy weapon, powerful ally and the whole save-the-galaxy schtick. Other times I have wanted to be a Han Solo. Extra-doublemint-Ordinary, with a simple workmanlike blaster and the only drive is to not have barriers put in my way. To be free and solid. Or, at least, ignorant of the forces that drive my destiny.

Yes, EV nova makes me think these things. And the current thought string ended up hurting a bit. EV Nova to Star Wars to wondering if a friend who got a Mac in the spring of this year has played EV Nova thinking about that friend and thinking about hanging out with him and then thinking about how people see me.

What people would think about my Luke vs. Han mental tug-o-war. If people see me like a stone. And then thinking about WHY people might see me like a stone. And then thinking that I really wanted to talk to my dad and how much I miss his voice. And that hurts alot.

I wouldn't mind being a stone sometimes. Though... I'd rather be a smooth river stone, or a small hand-carved Buddha statue. Something that can be accepted where ever it is found. Not some thick, repellent, non-Euclidean and thoroughly out-of-place block.

Something that is complete, something that is peaceful, something inviting. Or if none of these then something that fits so perfectly that it could disappear into the weave of reality and be present and welcome in all things.

I'm rambling at 12:30.