2010 North American Handmade Bicycle Show Posted on 03/04/10
My brother and I trekked down to Richmond last weekend for the NAHBS, an amazing trade show for small artisan and boutique bicycle manufacturers. The array of hardware on display was fantastic, from commuters to heavy duty trail rigs, and everything adorned with the special touches and amazing craftsmanship you's expect from the companies attending this show. Here's a video I put together which should give you a nice overview of what was on display.
2010 North American Handmade Bicycle Show from Michael Wendell on Vimeo.
Urban Velo picked up the video last night and it's taken off. In the last 24 hours it's been viewed over 2,500 times! You can find it featured on ProllyIsNotProbably, Ecovelo, SeoulFixedGear, Yksivaihde, Trackasaurus, CycleJerk, BicycleTutor, 407FixedGear, Serfas, Alleycat.hu, FunctionalCycling, SoloGoat, BikeBlips and a bunch of others.
(I'll update the list above with links when my Vimeo stats are updated).
De-Winterizing? No... Re-Winterizing! Posted on 02/13/10
Okay, so I tried to de-winterize last weekend, and failed. Over the course of the week I had the people who'd installed the furnace (Highlands Plumbing & Heating, nee Horrel-Neiderhiser Plumbing & Heating) come up and fix it, and turn the heat on. The plan was to have these guys heat the place up, then drive up and turn on the water so the home inspector could do his thing next week. Well, they say no battle plan survives its first contact with the enemy.
While the heating guy was successful turning the heat on, what I didn't account for was how the mass of snow on the roof would react with a warmer house. Despite the huge amount of insulation up there, the roof will get warm enough to melt some of the snow. And these big eaves, so wonderful most of the year, are fantastic at refreezing the snow melt as it comes down the roof. Yep, we have ice damming, and water's getting into the house. Not much water, but really, how much water coming in from the ceiling is acceptable? I'd guess none.
Additionally, the real estate agent decided to schedule the home inspection on Friday, the day before I was driving up to check the heat and turn on the water. Somehow, and my agent can't explain it to me, the water got turned on before that inspection. I'm guessing ghosts.
So, we can fix the leak by turning the heat off, which will staunch the snow melt, waiting for the roof to clear naturally, and then installing some of the heated wires on the roof that give the snow melt an escape route (I have these on the back roof actually). However, because the ghosts turned on the water, turning the heat off means re-winterizing the plumbing, which means blowing all the water out of the pipes with compressed air like I did back in October.
So I had a new plan. Instead of going up to turn the water on, I headed up with tools and the compressor so that I can re-winterize.
Well, it turns out that there was no way the big compressor was going to make the 50 yard trip from the road (finally plowed) to the house. Not a chance. I could turn the water off, but there was no way I'd be able to blow out the lines, I had to formulate an option C.
I decided that the best plan would be to keep the heat as low as possible, and concentrate it where it's needed. Almost all of the plumbing is in the bathroom, and the bathroom walls. I set the thermostat, which is right outside the bathroom door, down to 40 degrees. This should keep the bathroom just slightly warmer than that. I closed every other register and threw carpet scrap over them to keep the heat out of the rest of the house. I also closed all of the doors (except the bathroom), and even used a mattress to block the hallway at the living room end. Hopefully this will keep the rest of the house at, or around 30-35 degrees.
I drove up to the PA house this weekend. I finally have an offer and needed to de-winterize (summerize?) the house for the home inspector. Alas, with all the snow this was not as easy as I'd hoped. First, the heat came on, but didn't stay on. The propane line had frozen and the thermostat had packed it in. Once the propane in the line was depleted the furnace shut down and that was it, no heat. Well, without heat I wasn't about to turn the water on. Oh well, at least I did some snowshoeing. I also shot a short video of the place. Enjoy.
Went up to Pennsylvania to winterize the house. I didn't do this last year and spent around $500, maybe more, for propane to keep the place above freezing all winter. Not again.
Drained the water lines, tanks, and filters, opened all the valves, and put non-toxic RV anti-freeze in all of the traps. Turned all of the circuits off, except the front door light and living room lighting. Finally, I cleaned up and took as much stuff out of the house as possible. I even left notes to remind myself that all the valves are open (before I turn on the well pump and flood the place).
With any luck, come spring, everything will be just as I left it.
Parting Is Such Sweet So... Errr... Meh. Posted on 10/05/09
Okay, I will miss it I guess, but really it just wasn't the ideal vehicle for me anymore. Here are some final thoughts about my dear, departed '07 Honda Element EX.
Pros: Versatile, drove like a small car, comfortable, decent mileage, cool, cute, agile, quick, utilitarian, stick shift, great color, flexible, decent stereo with aux-in.
Cons: The reverse-opening rear doors just suck (not much more convenient than a two door) especially with a baby seat, cargo area always seemed too small (impossible to fit 8' lumber even with the front seats down), stick shift (my wife can't drive it), lack of always-on lighter sockets (a lot of cars fall short there actually), arm rests too low, serious lack of covered storage compartments, rear sunroof you never use, anything you put on the rubber floor will eventually end up under the brake pedal.
By the way, the sale at CarMax went wonderfully. After having no luck at all with eBay and Craigslist, I drove it down to Dulles, and had a check in my hand less than an hour later. Highly recommended.
A few weeks ago I moved the refrigerator away from the wall. It had been making a godawful racket and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to fix it. I was shocked to find that the floor below it was spongy and soft. I grabbed a few of the tiles, which came up easily revealing the soft, waterlogged subfloor. Ack. As it turned out, the refrigerator had no drip pan, probably hadn't had one for years, and the floor was rotted through. I put some boards below the fridge, rolled it back and tried to forget about it started thinking about how I was going to fix it.
The biggest concern with a job like this is always "What am I going to find when I start pulling this apart?" After finding another spot for the fridge (and not knowing how long it would have to stay there), and tearing up some tiles I started tearing up the wet, rotted floor.
I likened this step to debridement, the removing of dead tissue from a wound. I removed all of the damaged wood and gave a hard, workable edge to the hole. I was happy to find that the damage to the beams beneath was only slight. The hole is 2' x 3', and the new floor will rest on the existing beam a few inches from the wall, and a sistered 2x4 on the near beam (not visible in the photo).
For a few reasons I chose to use simple 2x6 lumber for my subfloor. First of all, the existing combination of old wood floor and tile subfloor was exactly 1-1/2" thick, matching the 2x lumber perfectly. The second reason was that, without a truck, buying plywood is somewhat of a pain in the ass. The patch went in very smoothly and came out great. Took me less than a day and only cost me a single 2x4 and a pair of 2x6's.
For now, this is how it sits (but with the refrigerator back in place). We need to decide what to do about the floor. While we do have some spare grey tiles in the basment, we may go with something else.
The tomatoes are out of control. The photo below was taken before I spent some time cleaning them up a bit. Compare it to the one I posted previously to see what I mean. The cherry tomatoes are exceptionally hardy and have reached 6' tall. Although I've since pulled them back and tied 'em into the bamboo trellis I built, they were lying across all of the other ones forcing them down to the ground.
The sunflowers are nice, although I've had to add some bamboo to keep them upright. We had a bit of a storm last night.
Other than that, we have various peppers coming in (jalapenos, green, yellow, red), as well as yellow squash and green beans. The beans seemed to have been ravaged by something, as well as one of the pepper plants. The broccoli was pretty much a bust, althogh I've been told I can try again with another planting in August. the brussels sprouts are in, but apparently won't be 'sprouting' until the fall.
The zucchini hasn't produced much, if anything, although I can't say that with any real certainty. We were away for two weeks and I asked both the petsitter and a local friend to harvest anything that looked ready. I haven't talked to them about it, so maybe they took some zuc's already.
And yeah, I've picked up the gate. Got to get that fixed soon, Sarah's walking all over the place.
When I heard about the upcoming iPhone 3GS I was excited. My iPhone 3G had a cracked screen that was getting worse by the day and I'd convinced myself that $299 was actually reasonable in lieu of taking on the risky effort of repairing my own phone. Then AT&T dropped the bomb that current iPhone 3G customers would have to pay a hefty $200 surcharge, on top of the $299, and in addition to extending your contract for two years, to get the new phone. Suddenly the repair effort seemed like the way to go, if only to avoid being intentionally screwed by AT&T!
I'd originally noticed just a crack, but started losing pixels about a week later. Because of the pixels, I assumed that both the glass digitizer and the LCD were destroyed. Here I'm running the free Flashlight app so you can see massive number of the dead pixels.
I bought the replacement parts from a dealer on eBay for around $80 including priority shipping. In addition to the digitizer glass, the LCD, and the adhesive pieces, they included a set of written instructions with a link to a video on YouTube, as well as all the tools I'd need to do the job (the toolkit, the suction cup, and a paperclip).
The first step was easy, and not scary at all. Pop out the SIM tray, and remove the two screws from the bottom. The simple stuff ended here.
Next, the small suction cup is used to pull the home-button end of the screen assembly from the phone. I can't remove it yet though, because three minuscule ribbon cables are connection this assembly to the motherboard.
I've already disconnected the cables in this photo, they're numbered 1, 2, and 3, almost as if Apple had expected people to do this. While number 1 and 2 just pop off their connectors, number three slips into the connector and has a small white locking tab. Obviously the hardest part is that until you've done it once, you're scared you'll break a connector or rip a cable. It all came apart nicely though, the aforementioned video helped.
The next part is to remove six incredibly tiny screws holding the screen assembly together. Two dozen of these screws would fit on my thumb nail.
Once the screws are out, you have to apply a little pressure to separate the LCD from the glass digitizer screen. This part didn't go well and my broken LCD broke a little more, but eventually they came apart. At this point I learned that my glass screen wasn't actually cracked at all. This is good because it meant I didn't have to pry the thin plastic carrier and home button assembly from the glass, saving me a step that could involve breaking something that isn't already broken. It also means I can sell my new digitizer glass and adhesive pieces on eBay.
You can see the ugly cracks, now worse than before, in the LCD panel.
Here's the back of the new LCD panel, with it's mirror finish after removing some protective film. The metal piece is the carrier and is simply stuck on with some exceptionally thin adhesive strips which you can barely see running down the edges of the LCD panel. These were already in place, and revealed when I removed the protective film.
Once the LCD and carrier are stuck together, the six tiny screws mate it back up with the digitizer glass. Here you can see the three ribbon cables sticking off of the completed screen assembly. We've come to the absolute hardest part of this entire process, getting ribbon cable 3 reinserted in the appropriate connector. It took me a few tries and some stressful minutes trying to get it into place, worrying that I might scratch or damage it somehow in the process. Argh.
Once done, cables 1 and 2 were a snap, literally. At that point I lowered the screen assembly down onto the body and lined up the two external screws that hold it in place before I thought to take any photos. After tightening those up and reinserting the SIM tray, it's time to boot the sucker up... waiting... stressing...
It works! Again running the Flashlight app so you can see the screen. It works wonderfully. The only thing that seems to be different is that if I put pressure on the screen it seems to flex ever so slightly. It's probably impossible for me to get a factory seal on the gasket that surrounds the screen. And once the rubber case I use is on the phone I can't even feel the flex anymore.
Amy took Mother's Day off and we built a few new raised beds and planted everything we bought at Tatham's yesterday. We've got peppers (yellow, red, green, and jalapeno), tomatoes (roma, cherry, and beefsteak), an eggplant, broccoli, brussels sprouts, zucchini, string beans, yellow squash, zucchini, and a strawberry plant that made it through the winter and is already bearing fruit. We even have a few sunflowers in the brick bed next to the house!
