Life, hobbies, and everything other then tech stuff and work.
Adam May 2nd, 2009
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: food, photography
For the few weeks in spring that they are available, fiddleheads are a real treat. I find their flavor kind of like asparagus, but a bit nuttier.
This pizza is a whole-wheat crust topped with pesto (some of the last of the 3 gallons I made in 2007), fiddleheads, portobello mushrooms, red bell pepper, and mozzarella.
Adam April 21st, 2009
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: bicycle commuting, commuting, cycling, outdoors
Tran Send DX photo from the Giant website
I’ve been regularly bicycle commuting since 2002 — though only since 2007 has my commute increased to 3 miles each way up from less than one. I commute pretty exclusively on my Cannondale road bike, as the full-suspension mountain bike with downhill tires is way too slow and the unicycle is even slower.
The road bike is wonderfully fast and a blast to cruise through traffic with. What is less fun is carrying my laptop bag and a duffel-bag for my gi (heavy cotton Aikido training clothes). A backpack is a little better at handling the weight than the two smaller bags, but hotter due to more contact with my back.
After a few wet rides last week and increasing frustration with the weight of the laptop and sweat-soaked gi I decided it was time to get a dedicated commuter bike with fenders (for the wet) and a rack with panniers (to get the crap off my back). I test-rode a Trek at the Middlebury Bike Center and a Kona and the Giant “Tran Send DX” at the Middlebury Alpine Shop.
While the Trek and Kona felt like perfectly good bikes and were reasonably priced, the Giant felt wonderfully peppy and nimble for a pretty beefy bike. I really like how its geometry manages to maintain an efficient peddling position while still being quite upright. The other bikes didn’t feel quite so efficient. What fully sealed the deal was that the Tran Send came with a custom rack and fenders that felt really solid and fit well on the bike, all for the lowest total cost.
After riding the new bike home I mounted a set of head and tail lights for the bi-weekly rides home in the dark. The tail light will be much more visible on this bike than my road bike as I was able to bolt it to the back of the rack where it won’t get covered up by my coat or bags like the under-seat mounting position does. I also picked up some rain pants and ordered a set of panniers to complete my foul and fair weather setup and plan to ride rain or shine through at least November.
Adam April 15th, 2009
Filed under: Computers and Technology , Life and Everything Else
A few days ago we noticed that our internet connection seemed to be grinding to a halt. We’ve been on the same DSL plan for years without problems until Fairpoint bought out our service area from Verizon. I despise Verizon and just about all monopolistic telecoms and cable companies, but Fairpoint is just a mess.
Fairpoint’s online account services (just now available after many months of paper billing) do not work with FireFox or Safari, just Opera. While Opera is a fine browser, it seems like an odd sole-choice.
Anyway, the slowdowns seemed really sporadic with sites very slow to start loading, but then loading content quickly. My hunch was DNS problems, which I verified by setting my router to point at the OpenDNS.com name servers at 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 rather then the default Fairpoint DNS servers. Instant speed up of all web access. So if any one with Fairpoint DSL has noticed a slowdown recently, try changing your DNS server settings in your router or computer and see if that helps.
Adam March 15th, 2009
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: woodworking
This weekend I build an outfeed table for the table saw and a stand for the new planer. The outfeed table was inspired by a design in Jim Tolpin’s Table Saw Magic. It folds down to make room or for moving the saw.
Adam March 11th, 2009
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
After getting several inches of snow on Monday, the weather has now warmed up and I was able to get out for my first bike ride of the season. It was a pretty blustery evening with west winds gusting up to 35mph, but was quite warm at about 50°F. I ended up going out for an hour and covering about 15 miles.
After having the wind at my back for the first 20 minutes to East Middlebury I got it into my head that I wanted to ride up Route 125 to Ripton. Halfway up the first pitch my legs disabused me of that notion and I decided to ride down to the Shard Villa instead. I enjoyed the rest of my hills, but that first pitch was more than I was prepared for.
All in all it was great to be back in the saddle and I am looking forward to a lot of riding this summer. Last year I only covered 527 miles, we’ll see what this year brings.
Adam January 18th, 2009
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: food
(photo by Sarah Franco)
Ever since I first tasted it on a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico in 1999, I have maintained a special place in my heart for tortilla soup. Since then I’ve had good and no-so-good tortilla soup at restaurants and enjoyed a decent version in the Middlebury College dining halls. Over this past Christmas holiday my mother made a tortilla soup from a New York Times recipe convincing me to give this soup a try myself.
I went into my soup planning to generally follow the New York Times recipe, with the addition of chicken and corn, but ended up deviating quite a bit with good results. As well, Sarah and I usually just use corn tortilla chips rather than frying or baking flour-tortillas. This saves a bit of work and makes for very easy left-over eating.
This recipe should serve 4 as a main course and leftovers are great frozen.
Serving
Adam October 8th, 2008
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: home improvement
For a long time Sarah and I have been dreaming about getting a wood stove, both to add a physical and emotional warmth of our home as well as to offset our usage of heating oil. In September we got our first heating oil delivery at $3.80/gallon and decided that it was time to get off the fence and buy a wood stove. We spent quite a bit of time looking at stoves and fell in love with the the Hearthstone Heritage. A few of the things we liked about it were
After purchasing the stove a week and a half ago I picked it up from the Chimney Sweep on my utility trailer last Friday and spent the past weekend assembling the hearth pad out of two layers of Micore 300 (an insulating ceramic-fiber board) and some slate tiles. I still need to trim the hearth with wood for aesthetic purposes, but that can wait.
While I was expecting the stove to be heavy, I hadn’t realized how much weight 475 pounds is. There was no way I was going to move this stove alone. This evening (Wednesday) I rented a ramp and wheeled pallet jack to minimize the lifting and recruited the help of 5 strong friends in moving the stove. It took four of us to lift the stove at all and we made use of all six of us shuffling together to carry the stove 4 feet from the pallet jack into its final resting place. That many hands made as light work of the job as possible and all in all the move took about 15 minutes.
This coming weekend I’ll install the chimney if the weather is good and we’ll hopefully soon be heating with wood. Thanks again Alex, Bryan, Dean, John, and Jonathan for your help!
Adam August 19th, 2008
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: photography, weather
This has been a crazy summer with only about 5 days between June and mid-August that didn’t have rain. The thunderstorms usually start in the afternoon and sometimes last over night. A few drop several inches of rain at a time causing the flash-floods that have taken out Route 125 several times as well as other bridges and roads.
Adam July 28th, 2008
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: photography
As a proponent of open-source software and freely usable culture I try to encourage others to make use of my work as much as possible by applying the GNU General Public License (GPL) to all of my software and the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (
) to any writing or photography.
Aside: The reason I use different licenses is that for software I have a reasonable expectation that commercial use of my software would result in feedback, bug-reports, translations, or patches that would further improve said software, whereas I do not feel that commercial use of photographs without compensation would improve my photography.
While I encourage others to make use of my work, I do expect them to respect the (liberal) license that I have applied to them and properly give credit where it is due. What particularly bugs me is Flickr’s so-so support of Creative Commons licenses. They encourage usage of CC licenses (decent) and display license information on the photo page (good):
But in the HTML snippets that they provide users for showing an image in one’s blog, they do not include any attribution or CC license information as required by the CC licenses (bad).
One of the knocks against the Creative Commons effort as a whole is the lack of clarity as to how attribution should be done in different media. For web publishing however, how to attribute is quite clear – though buried as the 11th item in their FAQ. Major services like Flickr failing to provide good example of attribution and how to properly credit work just makes the whole Creative Commons thing that much less clear for the general public who now find Creative Commons work readily available and with copy-paste code that violates the license by default.
In an effort to push Flickr to provide a good example for users of Creative Commons-licensed works I’ve started the following thread (reposted below) on the Flickr Ideas forum. I encourage others to weigh in if proper attribution is important to you. Such a fix should only take a Flickr developer about 15 minutes to do, but first such a feature needs to hit their radar.
Flickr Ideas: Update embed code to properly attribute for Creative Commons Licenses
As discussed in this Help thread from a year ago, the “Share This” and “All Sizes” embed code does not meet the Creative Commons license requirements for proper attribution. To quote the CreativeCommons.org FAQ:
How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work?
If you are using a work licensed under one of our core licenses, then the proper way of accrediting your use of a work when you’re making a verbatim use is: (1) to keep intact any copyright notices for the Work; (2) credit the author, licensor and/or other parties (such as a wiki or journal) in the manner they specify; (3) the title of the Work; and (4) the URL for the work if applicable.
You also need to provide the URL for the Creative Commons license selected with each copy of the work that you make available.
If you are making a derivative use of a work licensed under one of our core licenses, in addition to the above, you need to identify that your work is a derivative work, ie. “This is a Finnish translation of the [original work] by [author]” or “Screenplay based on [original work] by [author].”
Further recommendations and guidelines for marking works can be found at the CC Marking project.
The creator’s name (2) and license logo/link (1) are required for proper attibution, but missing from the Flickr-provided embed code. This means that when a user copy/pastes the embed code provided by Flickr, they violate the license by default if they do not take other steps (not mentioned anywhere on Flickr) to give proper attribution.
After no response on the previous thread for a year, TeX HeX has utilized the Flickr API to create an embed code generator at www.ImageCodr.org that can take the URL of any CC licensed Flickr photo and generate the proper HTML code on the fly. This ImageCoder example page provides embed code with the results below:
Note the proper link to the license and attribution of the photographer. Also, note the very understandable description of how the Creative Commons license terms affect usage of the image:
I applaud TeX HeX for his wonderful work, but this embed code really should be generated by Flickr itself as only a small percentage of users are going to find their way to ImageCoder.
Please Flickr staff, update the embed code with proper attribution lines so that users of our images can properly attribute by default.
Adam April 4th, 2008
Filed under: Life and Everything Else
Tags: projects, woodworking
For my wife Sarah’s birthday I built her a hanging jewelry case. This was my first fine-woodworking project built out of solid wood and it was quite a learning experience. The case is made of Red Birch with dots of Wenge (black), Satinwood (yellow), Chakte Coc (red), Sucaperē (brown), and Purple Heart (purple). It is finished with three coats of Watco Danish Oil after sanding to 600-grit. The outer dimensions are 23 inches tall, 19 inches wide, and 4 inches deep.
I had originally hoped to construct the case over 2 months of weekends, but this time-line turned out to be a little optimistic and though I didn’t count the hours, it didn’t get completed until 4 months after I started. Work on the project went much faster after I got my own table saw at the end of February and could pop downstairs whenever I had a free moment. Until that point I did most of the work in my friend John Filan‘s shop in Weybridge (VT). John is a wood-artisan, master cabinet-maker, and was an amazing resource throughout this project: from showing me the ropes at Lathrop’s lumber mill, to machine setup, to notes on grain direction. Without his expert help (and workshop, and tools) this project would not have been nearly as successful. While I have so much more to learn, at least I now know where to begin and how to safely and successfully use all of the major machine-tools.
I read (after the fact of course) that it is usually best to start with simple projects before cabinetry to avoid dealing with the close tolerances of all of the joinery and inset pieces. I’d have to agree. Though I consider this project to be a success I did spend many periods just staring at all of my pieces, dry-fitting them, and trying to convince myself that if I trim off 1/64 of an inch off one side that they would all fit together properly.
As I mentioned, the case started as about 20 board-feet of rough lumber stacked on the upper rack of Lathrop’s mill. Once in John’s shop it was flattened on the jointer, planed to thickness and made square, straight and ready for use. I had sketched out most of the design prior to starting, but many things changed over the course of construction. For instance, I hadn’t planned for wood movement so the back panel had to become floating and interior header and footer pieces added to replace the strength I was planning on getting from the panel. Similarly, my initial plans to hang trays on the insides of the doors fell away as I contemplated the additional complexity of cramming them into an already-tight location.
The ring-pillow I made from a piece of foam cut into a wedge-shape with rows then sliced into its surface. I wrapped it in dark red velvet and put stitches in the base of the slices, the ends, and elsewhere to keep it all tightly together.
Happy belated birthday, Sarah!
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