Via Today’s Big Thing and Thane
Morning Bike Commute
Distance: 11.8 miles
Riding time: 82 minutes
Max speed: 21.5 mph
Average speed: 8.5 mph
Temperature: 46º
Soundtrack: Rage Against The Machine
Route:
- Private drive to 156th
- 156th to Fremont
- Fremont to the subdivision
- Subdivision streets to 158th
- 158th to Airport Way
- Airport Way to Interstate 205 bike path
- Bike path to Old Evergreen Highway
- Old Evergreen Highway to 164th Ave
- 164th to 34th Street
- 34th to 168th Ave
- 168th/169th Ave to 26th Way
- 26th Way to Fred Meyer parking lot
- Fred Meyer parking lot to 167th Ave
- 167th to work
This ride went smoother than last night because I knew the way and had plotted a course on Google Maps to avoid 164th which is heavy with traffic. Climbing the mile long hill on the bridge was exhausting and it took me about 20 minutes to cross the whole bridge. The rest of the way was a grind and I was shaking from exhaustion when I finally arrived. Hopefully, my stamina will be a bit better next week.
Evening Bike Commute
Distance: 13.5 miles
Riding time: 90 minutes
Max speed: 20.4 mph
Average speed: 8.9 mph
Temperature: 45º
Soundtrack: none
Route:
- 164th to Old Evergreen Highway
- Old Evergreen Highway to Interstate 205
- Interstate 205 bike path to Airport Way
- Airport Way to 158th Ave
- 158th through subdivision to Fremont
- Fremont to 156th Ave
- 156th to home via “the private drive”
This was my first ride since mid-December and, more notably, the first ride from my new job. Although the route seems straightforward, I did not note all the sidetracking and goose chasing I did because of my unfamiliarity with the route. At one point the bike route sign pointed to a road that was marked “Dead End” with another sign. Since there was a bike path only yards away, I took that instead. 10 minutes later, I’m on a freeway ramp getting onto Interstate 205. I had to turn around and ride the shoulder in the wrong direction in order to get back to the aforementioned “dead end.” It did, however, lead me to the Glenn Jackson Bridge which has a bike path that runs down the middle of the bridge between the 8 lanes of auto traffic. The bridge spans about 2 miles and over a mile of that is downhill. Still, when I reached Airport Way I was pretty exhausted and limped home the rest of the way.
I’m using up my time by feeling fine, every day
I think I failed to mention that Tina bought an Xbox 360 for me a few weeks ago from a good friend of ours who had recently upgraded to a better model. This particular unit had already suffered the Red Ring of Death but had been repaired by Microsoft for free right before we took ownership. Our main motivation to getting an Xbox is to have a console on which we can play Rock Band, a game that takes the concept of Guitar Hero one step further. Although it will be coming out for the Wii in a couple of months, it will not support downloading new songs which is one of the great Rock Band features. I’m also planning on buying Guitar Hero II for it because it has some great songs on it and we’ll need the extra guitar for Rock Band.
Unfortunately, after using it for just a couple of days, the boys turned it on and it had the Red Ring of Death again. We tried to have it serviced by Microsoft ourselves, but the serial number is already registered to our friend so he had to apply for the repair. The good news is that he has already received the box for shipping and all we have to do is pick it up sometime.
We have been trying for several years to get Graham to embrace the idea of bike riding, but every time he crashes, he swears it off forever. The last time he tried it, he swerved off the sidewalk and knocked over our mailbox. I don’t think he would hurt himself during these falls as much as he would be frustrated that he wasn’t very good at it. We’ve been trying to “sell” him on the idea for a long time but it really became a sore point with him. Finally, last night Tina convinced him to try again and he finally “got it.” He fell down numerous times, usually when he was turning, but each time he got up and went again. When it started to get dark and was near his bedtime, we practically had to drag him into the house. The first thing he asked me this morning was whether he could ride some more tonight. I think he only needs a little practice before we switch him from the little 20″ BMX he’s riding now to Thomas’ 24″ mountain bike. Thomas has taken possession of Tina’s old 26″ mountain bike and we need to find a new bike for Tina soon.
Graham’s “conversion” came none too soon because we have several bike rides planned with Thomas’ Boy Scout troop this year. Next weekend we’re taking a short 10 mile ride in the Gorge and then a few weeks later we’ll be riding 14 miles out to Oxbow Park. This summer we’re going on a 4-day, 80 mile bike ride in Idaho. We’ll really looking forward to all of them. I need to get back in bike shape!
The Return of Charlie the Unicorn
If you don’t know about Charlie, you might want to watch his previous adventure first.
I’ll be writing more in a week or two
If you’ve been reading this blog from my web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick, you may have noticed that I’ve been reorganizing things over there. I have been consolidating links to all of the articles there onto a single page, which is available from the “Archive” link on my web page or from the “Archive” link in the “All Things Mick” section on the left side of this page. When I’ve finished putting all the links on the Archive page, the web page at www.rynosoft.com/mick will cease to exist.
I’m doing this because everything I write these days is on my blog and I write very few, if any, website pages any more. I want to keep the old stuff around and I think a single page archive linking to all the old articles is a good way to keep it available without having to maintain the labyrinthian structure of the website as I envisioned it back when I first started it in 1996.
So what does this all mean for you, the reader? You now have a couple of options for viewing my blog:
- Replace your www.rynosoft.com/mick bookmark(s) with a bookmark to www.rynosoft.com/blog in your web browser. If you want to view old articles, use the Search field (for blog content) or the Archive link on the left (for older content).
- Subscribe to an RSS feed to this blog with your favorite aggregator. I use a dedicated reader called NetNewsWire but Safari, which is free and available for Windows and Mac, also has a fine built-in reader. If neither of those options is appealing, Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in reader (or so says Wikipedia) and I hear that Google Reader is an excellent web-based solution. If you’d like to do your own research, you can start with Wikipedia’s fairly comprehensive list of aggregator clients. WordPress, the wonderful software that powers this blog, supports atom, RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0 (RDF) and RSS 0.92 feeds. You can also click the “RSS” link at the bottom of the page to subscribe to this blog.
If the second option sounds totally technical and incomprehensible, I apologize. However, you should be using RSS even if my blog is the only blog you read. RSS makes web browsing faster and easier by doing all of the mundane work for you. You can expect a future article here explaining all about RSS: what it can do for you and how to use it. If you don’t want to wait, check out some of the links above.
Ida Mae Russell Sills: Rest in Peace (and laughter)
Various sites on the internet are proclaiming this to be the best obituary ever written. Here’s a choice excerpt:
Ida developed a cold that progressed into pneumonia. Now Ida was a smoker. She said “to quit smoking well that’s easy. I ought to know. I have done it a thousand times” but the years of smoking left Ida’s lungs damaged and beyond repair. On this Good Friday March 21, 2008, Ida Mae Russell Sills slipped away and joined her beloved daughter in Heaven. Fortunately her husband Albert preceded her and joined his mother in a much warmer climate.
Despite the Onion-like quality, this is a real obituary.
Vital Statistics
Van odometer: 151601
Weight lost (in pounds):Â 10
Aches & pains: sciatic, right ankle
Current reading: The Book of Totally Useless Information by Don Voorhees, The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman, My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Recent listening: Clutch, This American Life
Recent viewing: The Quiet, The Office, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Democratic Presidential Debate, America’s Funniest Home Videos
Recent playing: n/a
Recently accomplished:Â Joined Bally’s gym, finished 401k rollover, replaced heating element in clothes dryer, tagged old blog posts, prescription refill, coordinated Xbox repair
Imperative To Do:Â Sell G4, get rid of junk (couch, vacuum cleaner, mower), buy trailer for van, activate new Tivo, weed & feed, change voter registration, develop comprehensive reward/punishment plan for homework, bike to work
A junk yard fool with eyes of gloom
When things break, I am always compelled to take them apart in an effort to find out what is wrong. Most of the time, I remove the top cover/back panel/what-have-you, glance inside and conclude that I am simply out of my league. I can see nothing wrong or even recognize anything that I am looking at. On a few occasions I have been able to identify potential problems but did not have the expertise or knowledge to confirm and fix the problem. Last night I was able to make that final step: identify the problem and find a solution.
Sunday was the first anniversary of the new heating element we had to get for our dryer last year. At that time the dryer was less than a year old but surprisingly out of warranty. Although a certain amount of blame lies with us for failing to check the warranty terms (90 days) at purchase time, I mostly blame Sears for selling such shoddy products that they can’t warranty them for a year or three. I suspect they have done this in order to push their extended warranty programs, or “maintenance agreements“, as they prefer to call them. As you might imagine, we were angry over the warranty issue and even angrier when we had to pay the Sears repair man over $200 to fix something we considered to be “new”.
So how did our heating element celebrate the end of it’s first year in service? It quit. It totally stopped heating the dryer and Tina had to take our weekend laundry to the nearest laundromat to dry it. Once again we were angry, but there was no way we were going to call Sears this time. After mulling the situation for a day, I consulted howstuffworks.com for any advice they might have about fixing dryers. Their article on clothes dryers was informative, but did not contain any advice for fixing broken dryers. They did, however, point to a link at RepairClinic.com which eventually led me to a section entitled “There’s no heat.” That article lays out a basic inspection plan for determining which electrical component has failed. With this knowledge and my multimeter in hand, I unplugged our dryer and removed the back with only a little hope of actually accomplishing anything.
What lay behind the cover was much simpler than I had counted upon. After testing the thermal sensors (as prescribed by the RepairClinic article) it wasn’t long before I narrowed the problem to a little box near the bottom. After removing two screws, the little box came off easily and revealed that it had a matrix of coiled wires attached to it. I had discovered the heating element! A quick continuity test confirmed that this was the faulty component and I even found the broken coil after a quick inspection. An online search for the model number yielded an average price of about $40 for the replacement part.
I can’t tell you how good I felt at this moment. Not only was I victorious in finding the problem, disassembly had been so quick and easy that I have full confidence in being able to install the new element. It is also reassuring to know that if the element breaks again, I can replace it myself relatively cheaply. And we won’t have to call the damn Sears repair man ever again.
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Update 4/17: I found a little additional information about Kenmore appliances on Wikipedia. Most large appliances are manufactured for Sears by Whirlpool, who also manufactures under the brand names Maytag, Amana, KitchenAid, Jenn-Air and many others. In addition to Sears’ OEM business, Whirlpool also makes products for Best Buy, Home Depot and IKEA. Iowa residents might note that in 2007 Whirlpool shut down the Amana manufacturing plant in Newton as well as plants in Illinois and Arkansas. I’m guessing those jobs probably went to China and Mexico where Whirlpool does much of it’s manufacturing.
New Muxtape: Howling Guitars
I removed the “Live Acoustic” set mentioned earlier and have uploaded a new set: “Howling Guitars.” Check it out here. I also added my muxtape link to the “All Things Mick” list of links on the left side of this window.