New job. New route.

I have been more than a bit mum lately. I accepted a new job at the beginning of the year. My old team was awesome, and I keep in touch. My new job is where my passion really is, though: Information security research. While I feel like my old route was as bike-friendly as it could get out here in suburbia, by comparison my new route is a bit more daunting. You can clearly see how my bailiwick is sectioned into islands by highways, where crossings are few, far-between and often part of high-traffic interchanges riddled with frenetic and distracted motorists. The beta test of this route starts tomorrow!

So, this is a first...

When I pulled up to the bike rack yesterday, I saw something new: an unfamiliar lock and chain that appeared to be well-used. I thought that it perhaps belonged to my co-worker, who took the whole team along bike shopping over lunch earlier this week. He ended up with a fine, barely-ridden Trek 4500, which appears to be of a 2006 vintage:



It ended up being for someone else's bike, which I saw later in the day:


So it's official. It took almost two years, but someone else is finally riding their bike here.

I made the mistake of attempting to forge onward through the Indian Creek Trail construction yesterday. I made it, but let's say I won't be doing it again until the trail opens. Bike/Ped-friendly options for getting from one side of US-69 to the other through central Johnson County are few and far between. If you find yourself near Corporate woods, you'll be stuck braving 119th, College Blvd or 103rd street. I've stated previously that Johnson County is split into islands by highways. Within each island, it's pretty easy to get around using residential roads. To jump from one to another is often a frustrating affair.

I'm experimenting with a GPS transponder I built (think of it as kind of like a poor-man's "SPOT" tracker). It fits nicely in the pannier zipper pocket. I'm sure if I parked my bike somewhere with this thing attached, it'd get called in as a "suspicious device" and the bomb squad would get called in.


Inside, there's a waterproof box containing a few gadgets including a small radio transceiver, GPS, a battery pack and some other stuff that's needed to make it all play together nicely.


It's far from perfect. I'm still kind of working on it. I tested it yesterday while riding between home, the office and the hospital. It worked only part of the time. It transmits its location every time you make a significant change in heading (at every turn, basically) and about every 20 minutes when stationary. The problem is that it's largely a one-way operation so the rig doesn't know if the message actually got through, and I'm using a very low power transmitter. There are ways to fix both problems at the cost of increased power consumption and/or more expensive radio equipment inside the box. The map below is missing a significant number of turns, especially through residential and trail areas.


I will experiment with it some more as time goes on. I know there are smartphone applications that can upload your position and track your rides for you. I was looking to build something that operates without relying on the Internet. The above map was drawn using data gathered from a mesh network of amateur radio digital repeaters and internet-connected gateways.

Anyhow, I'm still here. I'm still riding for work and errands when I can. I'm still a nerd. You can call me Captain Dashboard. I don't mind.

Random Tunage:
Plaid - Assault on Precinct Zero
Elite Force - Cross The Line

Bike Ninja

A ratcheting whirr
A cyclist's faint silhouette
It's a bike ninja!

See him up there? Yeah, neither do I. There are two other stragglers who refuse to put their bikes away. One's a well-lit, pannier-toting guy who goes eastbound then south. Then there's this guy who travels west. Black bike, dark clothes, mammoth backpack and either a hipster cyst (knog frog) or a similarly dim, useless single white LED thing on his handlebars.

Bike Salmon and Headwind

The breeze picked up even more this afternoon, gusting close to 30, northwest. Perfect headwind for the early ride home. Noteworthy moment of the ride: Two helmetless 20-somethings on cartoonishly tiny BMX bikes with saddles all the way down, salmoning very slowly against traffic on Santa Fe Trail Drive. I wanted to get a picture, but even with the headwind, I was going too fast (as in, 9 miles per hour, if that) to get my phone out of my pocket in time. Plus, derping with my phone while trying to hold a straight line is probably just as dumb as riding against traffic without a helmet. c'Dude rocked a 200k permanent today. I can only imagine how the north-bound half of that trip went. I had half an hour of wind torture. He probably had more than 5 hours of it. Egad.

Random Tunage:
Margot Meets The Music Maker - Torch (Extrawelt Remix Redux)
Way Out West - Sequoia

Crosswind

On this particular stretch of road, I had a nearly perfect crosswind. About a mile before this, it was the dreaded cross-headwind, which offers the worst of both worlds. I was going to stop a bit closer to the old train depot to capture the full flag of wind, but the big cumulonimbus cloud in the background made me change my mind.



Random Tunage:
Touane - Bassic
General Fuzz - Smiling Perspective

Downtown Today

I like my job, but sometimes I still miss this place. I even miss the bus route. I do not miss paying Interstate Taxes.

This is one of the Williams Foods facilities in the area. If you've spent any time in the sodium seasoning aisle of a grocery store, you've probably seen their pouches of chili and taco mixes, among other stuff.  Occasionally, whatever they're messing with inside this building causes the surrounding air to smell exactly like the spice and cereal cupboard at my grandparents' old house, before grandpa died. It's an odd, pleasant and completely nondescript aroma, so  complex that my schnoz couldn't begin to dissect it to its individual components. It doesn't smell this way all the time. A lot of times, it just smells like chili powder or fresh ground black pepper.

I also encountered a veritable roadside hardware store. Every 10th of a mile or so, I saw a couple of large, unused zip ties. This particular one also had a trailer hitch retainer pin next to it. A lot of times, when I see things in the road that would be hazardous to other cyclists, I pick them up and dispose of them, or if they're too large, I move them out of the way. I snagged a few of these from the roadside for my own personal use. Never know when you'll need some huge zip ties.




I also had a quick chat with some of the regular amateur radio operators, who were going on about the heat and the price of gas. They said I need to get my head examined. I believe one has to be a bit eccentric to ride a bike in the first place, so there's probably a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Hot.

Home-bound heat index today: 105. Wind: travel-speed tailwind. Not a good combo. Fortunately, I keep Gatorade mix at the office, and got it nice and cold for the commute.

I got to scope out Middle Creek Fishing Lake over the weekend. This is where we'll be camping on July 30th. I can only imagine that it could be just as hot that weekend as it was today, or worse. I went fishing out there on Sunday morning, and caught a whole cooler full of bupkis. Mostly, I was checking out to see how viable it would be for a bike camping trip. I think it'll work great, but like I said last week: we'll actually be roughing it.

The whole park is gravel. But that shouldn't put too much of a damper on things.


Toilets: Brick shelters with a roof. Urinal and a hole in the ground. Wasps abound. Bring your own TP and hand sanitizer.

Sinks and showers? What sinks and showers? "Adult Skin Cleaning Cloths" -- essentially grown-up baby wipes are a favorite among commuters that don't have showers at the office. I can't imagine it'd hurt to bring some of those along. You can find them at the drug store.

Water? There's lots of it, but it's all in the lake, and the stuff I saw had twigs, algae, spiders and mosquito larvae in it. I will try to call Rutlader Outpost (a nearby RV park) and ask if they have water we can use (or buy?) but I decided it was high time to pick up a backpacking filter system of some sort.  I went with something similar to this Sawyer Water Filter (but with a transparent blue bottle) that I found at Walmart for half the price of anywhere else. How's it work? How about I show you with my mis-aligned camera, stammering case of the "umms" and fidgety hands?



That was some 36 hours ago, and I'm not sick... yet...

Honestly, it tasted just like the Brita filtered water I drink at home. I really should have boiled it first, but at 0.1 micron, there are only a few things that can make it through with the water, and most of those things aren't a problem here in the United States, even in grimy lake water. I'll probably properly boil the water at camp before filtration. I also found a way to pump water through it by pressurizing the bottle through the ventilation hole. I'll be more than happy to share while we're at camp if others need some purified water.  I'm sure others will also be willing to help.

Random Tunage:
The Prodigy - Fire
Andain - Promises (Myon & Shane 54 Summer Of Love Mix)