New Year's Resolutions

First, my resolutions for last year:
1. Eat pie - Success!
2. Run 365 miles, including the Tough Mudder and the GORUCK challenge - I ran enough (I ended up with 443 miles) but I didn't do either the Tough Mudder or the GORUCK.  However, I'm signed up to do the GORUCK on May 18th in Charlottesville and I may do the Tough Mudder in April as practice.
3. Lose weight - I'm ~5 pounds lighter but also just in better overall shape from the running, so I'll count this as a mild success.
4. Climb more - Nope.  Pretty much none.
5. Do more photography - Nope.  I did some, but no more than the previous year.
6. Stay organized - I'm a bit more organized than I was, but not as much as I was hoping.
7. Write - Nope.  Pretty much none.
8. Draw - I drew more than I have in the past, but not as much as I could've.  I'll continue to work on this next year.
9. Get involved in some form of community service - Nope.  None at all.
10. Be a better person - No idea.

Now, for this upcoming year:
1. Eat 12 types of pie - Always a good thing to do.
2. Run 365 miles - I want to continue running, but if I work more different types of exercise into my schedule, running more than I have in the past isn't necessary.
3. Hike 100 miles - I really enjoy hiking, but I never do enough of it.  I'm going to try to do more this year, and although I won't have the big mountains of the west at my disposal anymore, I'll have the Appalachians.
4. Make 12 cool things - I've made some cool things this year (primarily the arduino gun turret and a bunch of knives), and I'd like to step this up in the coming year.  I'll have easier access to tools and I won't be limited by having to think about moving all my stuff cross-country, so I should be free to get a bit more creative and ambitious with what I make.  Expect some add-ons for my Forester (rooftop attachments and possibly interior improvements), probably a weapon or two (knives and maybe projectile launchers), some brewing gadgets (I'm already working on planning two of these), some brewed beverages made with those gadgets, and some interesting furniture for my new apartment (once I have a new apartment).
5. Have 4 "adventures" - Somewhat loosely-defined, I realize, but an overall good goal.  I'll probably count the GORUCK in May as one of these, and I expect two of the others will be camping trips and the last something more urban.

In order to perhaps actually remember them, I'm going to stick to just these five resolutions instead of the usual ten, and by making them all quantifiable, I'll hopefully have an easier time tracking them.  Expect occasional updates here about how I'm doing with them, especially the adventures and making cool things.

Loose arduino turret writeup

Because I didn't really document things as I went, and because my style of construction is absurdly haphazard, I wasn't able to write up a terribly good guide to making the turret.  However, here's what I was able to toss together.  Hopefully this should be enough to guide you in the right direction and help you learn stuff as you fill in the gaps, but unfortunately it won't be enough for you to sit down and build this from scratch if you don't have any previous fabrication or electronics experience.  If you have any specific questions about stuff (materials, wiring diagrams, detail pictures, anything like that) feel free to ask and I'll do my best to answer.

Turret writeup:

-Overall structure – the big picture
-Horizontal control – making it look left and right.
-Vertical control – making it look up and down
-Fire control – making it fire
-Electronics – the brain that ties it all together
-Specific links – links to components and code websites

Overall structure:

From a mechanical standpoint, the turret has three main pieces. There's the base, which remains completely stationary no matter how the turret moves. There's the body, which rotates on top of the base. There's the gun platform, which rotates up and down while rotating left and right with the body. The main structural material I used was lexan, although some other plastic, plywood, or (if you're careful about avoiding electrical shorts) metal would also work.
The base is simply a 12” by 12” square of 1/4”-thick lexan. It has a lazy susan bearing bolted to its top, and in the center of the square (centered with respect to the lazy susan) is a large sprocket gear that's used in the horizontal control.
The body is mounted atop the lazy susan, to allow it to rotate freely with respect to the base. It's bolted on top of approximately 1 1/2” spacers (in my case, I used extra nuts on the bolts) to leave room for the gears that allow horizontal movement. On top of the body's panel are two upright legs, atop which are situated bearings that hold the axle of the gun platform.
The gun platform is a 1/2” diameter lexan rod, to which two flat sheets of lexan have been glued (Weld-On 4 acrylic solvent makes connecting lexan to lexan ridiculously easy). I put pieces the same thickness as the axle between the sheets at each edge of the platform, to ensure that it was a consistent thickness. In order to connect the gun to the gun platform, I used electrical tape. Many more elegant solutions are possible, but this was basically the last thing I did when making the turret, so I was getting sloppy.

Horizontal control:

In order to power both the horizontal and vertical movement, I use motors taken from cordless drills. The one for horizontal control is affixed vertically, pointing down, to one of the legs. The chuck is still attached, and it holds a short length of 1/4” diameter steel axle. This goes through a hole in the body's bottom panel, and on the other side of the panel a small sprocket gear is attached to the axle. This sprocket gear is connected via chain with the large sprocket gear in the center of the base.
This motor on my turret is held in place by a strange series of wrapping done with spare 1/8” lexan rod. Gluing it in place, using hoseclamps to connect it to the leg, making some sort of bracket, duct tape, or almost anything else would be better, but it works.

Vertical control:

The motor to control vertical movement is mounted horizontally along the body's bottom panel, parallel with the axle of the gun turret. It's held in place by being tightly stuck in a large hole in one of the legs. The chuck of the motor holds another small piece of 1/4” diameter axle, that extends through a 1/4” hole in the other leg. On the far side of this leg, a small sprocket gear is attached to the axle.
The gun platform axle has a large sprocket gear attached to it, and it's connected to the motor's gear with a chain. To make the gun platform move more smoothly I've attached its axle to the legs with rotating bearings; for most purposes, 1/2” holes drilled in the lexan (or whatever material) will probably work almost as well, and be cheaper.

Fire control:

The gun I'm using is the cheapest electronically-triggered airsoft gun I could buy at the super-store down the street from my apartment. It's activated with just a small switch inside the body, connected via some levers and springs to the trigger. It's a pain to actually physically pull the trigger with a solenoid, so I just drilled into the gun body (it's transparent plastic, so it was pretty easy to figure out what to do) and unsoldered the wires from the switch. I connected these to two longer wires that lead back to the electronic control unit, where a relay closes the circuit to make it fire.
Because the batteries for the gun were stored in its handle, and I wanted to remove the handle to make it easier to mount on the gun platform, I had to replace them with an external battery pack. This is fairly simple – get an external battery pack of the same size (in this case, four AAs) and attach the leads to the two springs that connect the batteries to the internal gun circuitry.

Electronics:

To control the turret, I use an Arduino Duemilanove. It's an open-source microcontroller platform designed for hacky prototypes like this. I'm also using two Arduino “shields,” circuit boards with additional components that easily pop onto the Arduino. One of them is a Pololu motor controller to allow me to have precise control over the power and direction of each motor. The other is one that I made that has a Wii Nunchuck adapter and a pair of relays, chained together, to allow the Arduino to receive input (the Nunchuck adapter) and trigger the gun (the relays).
The motor shield just pops right on top of the Arduino, and the wires for the motors plug in easily. The relay/nunchuk shield takes a bit more work but is still relatively straightforward.

Specific links:

The motor controller: Pololu Dual MC33926 Motor Driver Shield for Arduino [http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/2503]
The wired nunchuk library: [https://github.com/GabrielBianconi/ArduinoNunchuk]
The wireless nunchuk library: [https://github.com/stevenorum/ArduinoNunchuk]
The Arduino code: [https://github.com/stevenorum/ArduinoTurret]

Remote-controlled airsoft gun turret

I spent a good amount of time this spring making knives, but this summer I decided to move forward to the modern day.  As such, my free-time project for the last two months has been building a remote-controlled gun turret.

It started in July with a couple basic sketches while manning support at the Amazon Puzzlehunt.

I looked at a couple possible materials for the supports [various plastics, aluminum, and steel] and ended up going with off-brand Lexan because a) it's non-conductive and so won't interfere with my extremely hacky wiring, b) is strong yet not impossible to cut with only a Dremel and a Leatherman, c) is easy to glue strongly with solvent, and d) because it's clear, leaves the inner workings visible.  For the control circuitry, I used an Arduino Duemilanove that I had lying around, coupled with a motor shield for the movement and a shield of my own design for the relay chain necessary for the firing circuit.  To move it, I used motors from two thrift-store cordless drills.  (I had to go through four drills to find two suitable motors, but that's still far cheaper than buying the motors new.)

Both the horizontal and vertical controls make use of sprocket chains.  I considered using normal gears, but that would've required more precision (my tool selection is quite limited) and wouldn't scale well (without getting absurdly expensive).  I'd like to re-make this about five times larger for mounting in a pickup truck bed, so I wanted the design to be practical at a bigger scale.

For the gun, I used a cheap airsoft gun from the grocery store.  I needed something that was purely electrical, as making a mechanism to actuate a trigger and mounting it to a remote-controlled turret is just begging for the ATF to arrest me for making a machine-gun precursor (yes, this turret is sturdy enough to hold an actual firearm if it's properly balanced around the axle; no, I'm not going to actually do that).  The larger version will likely have a battery of model rockets, because it's impressive and takes advantage of the remote control aspect. (As an added bonus, if I add an angle sensor and a rangefinder, I could have it automatically calculate trajectories.)

The controller is an off-brand wireless Wii nunchuck.  Initially it used a wired one, but because the controls are on the part that moves, the wire was getting in the way.  It required re-writing one of the control libraries a little bit, but that wasn't a problem.  The top part of the turret is entirely self-contained, with the Arduino, motors, and power source, so I didn't need to worry about it over-rotating and catching wires or anything like that.  I'll have a wireless webcam for the larger version, but it'd be impractical on this one.

Overall, it works pretty well.  Because of some slack in the chains, and the low torque output of the motors, aiming is a bit jerky.  I considered improving the gear ratio and fixing the slack, but it'd be a lot of work for minimal gain.  Also, it's ugly as sin.  That said, in its current state, I think it's good enough to call done as a first draft.

The target audiences of open-source vs. proprietary software

I worked for a few months as a developer at a mobile security startup working on encrypted text messaging (in order to prevent this from showing up in searches about them, I won't name the company).  It was a good learning experience, and I generally enjoyed the work.  However, the target audiences (as shown on their blog and in public presentations) seem to be a) people who sext and want to keep it secret and b) healthcare professionals wanting to avoid HIPAA lawsuits.
I also follow the development progress of the Guardian Project, an open-source collaboration to create secure mobile applications (in order to avoid running afoul of my various contractual obligations, I don't contribute to the codebase).  They posted an interesting piece in April about their targeted users, such as nascent social movements attempting to organize, diffuse organizations in oppressive countries, and journalists needing to avoid monitoring in foreign locations.  There's also been talk on the mailing list about the need for secure mobile communication applications among activists, human rights workers, and journalists in Cambodia (the talk was of Cambodia because of a specific case of an activist being killed by military police, but the need for secure communications is universal).
Clearly the difference in targeted audience can partially be explained by the need for a business to make money, compared with the more altruistic forces driving a non-profit.  I don't want to make it seem like the start-up is greedy and only focused on money whereas the Guardian Project is only focused on helping the world (I currently work for a massive corporation and not some charitable non-profit, so it'd be highly hypocritical of me to fault others for making the same decision).  Certainly helping doctors is good, and not all random organizations that will use the Guardian Project's software will be engaged in legal activities, but I think it's interesting nonetheless to compare the targeted users of the two groups.

DREAD/STRIDE applied to physical security and urban exploration

As some of you may know, I have an interest in urban exploration.  I also have an interest in computer security, and learning about that field has introduced me to two concepts developed by Microsoft to rate threats, DREAD and STRIDE.

DREAD is a method of rating the seriousness of a threat. Scores are given for five metrics:
Damage - how much damage an attack could do.
Reproducibility - once the attack's been carried out once, how easy it would be for the attack to be replicated against another target.
Exploitability - how difficult it would be to carry out the attack.
Affected users - how many people could fall victim.
Discoverability - how easy it is to discover that the attack is possible.

STRIDE is a way of remember the six main kinds of attacks:
Spoofing - pretending to be someone else.
Tampering - altering data.
Repudiation - doing things without leaving a way to show that you did them (if this doesn't seem like as much of a threat as the others, imagine if you could withdraw money from an ATM and then convince the bank that you didn't).
Information disclosure - gaining access to stuff you shouldn't see.
Denial of service - preventing users from having access to information or services that they want to use.
Escalation of privilege - gaining the ability to do things that you aren't allowed to do.

Also, a clarification on the difference between urban exploration (where my interest lies) and physical security: urban exploration is exploring areas not often seen, for the purposes of discovery, education, and the joy of seeing usually-unseen things.  Physical security is the field of securing physical places.  For some people, the two come into conflict, when they attempt to explore illegal places (I myself prefer to stick to legal places, of course, but for the purposes of this post, let's think about the kinds of urban exploration that require accessing illegal areas).  I think of it using a comparison to computer hacking.  There are "white hat" hackers who attempt to access systems with good intentions (usually finding security holes so that the owners of the system can then fix them) and there are "black hat" hackers who access systems to do illegal things like steal information.  Urban explorers are the "white hat" hackers of physical security, compared to the "black hat" hackers better known as burglars.

I think metrics like these could be very useful for dealing with urban exploration.  Both urban exploration and computer security deal with ways to gain access to places that are (believed by their creators to be) secure.  However, these kinds of places vary, in the same way that computer attacks do.  So, let's adapt STRIDE to classify urban exploration.
Because proper urban exploration doesn't damage the environment being explored, these parallels won't be as direct as with DREAD.  Instead of different forms of attacks, it'll be different types of exploration. (And I wasn't initially intending to use the same letters, but it started working out that way so I kept going with it.)
Secret places - Not as much a specific physical location as any place that's not specifically secure but just isn't known to people.  The biggest focus of legal urban exploration.
Tunnels/basements - A lot of places have underground tunnels that can be explored, or unfinished basements and utility spaces.  These are a big target for exploration, as they're interesting and don't have the same level of personal connection to one individual (and so it seems less invasive to explore them).
Rooftops - one big area of urban exploration is gaining access to rooftops.  Pretty self-explanatory.
Interiors - The interiors of buildings finish off the trifecta started by below (tunnels) and above (rooftops).
Deserted areas - I find a simply amazing amount of beauty in places that used to be inhabited or used by mankind in some way and no longer are.  Whether it's deserted buildings, abandoned towns (Pripyat, Ukraine is a prime example, as are the ghost towns of the American west), or ancient ruins, they're always popular places for exploration.
Engineering/construction sites - Okay, this one was tough to get to fit the letter.  Buildings that are still being built are another of the big areas of exploration, and although once completed they'd fall into the tunnels/rooftops/interiors categories, they're definitely distinct when still under construction.

So that's STRIDE applied to urban exploration, and I think it covers almost all places people explore.  Now, on to rating those locations.  DREAD is used to rate the seriousness of a risk, and so when applied to exploration, it makes sense to have it be a rating of how likely people are to explore a place.
Desirability - How desirable is a place?  Does it have a good view, or interesting contents?  Does it look cool?  Basically, all other factors aside, how much people would want to get to the place.  If a place is extremely desirable, that'd be a rating of 5, if it's pretty boring, that'd be a 1.
Risk - How risky is getting there?  Some places are completely safe - you just walk there.  Others are absurdly risky, either because of injury or getting arrested - you climb the side of a building, or walk through a constantly-monitored hallway.  This one is rated the opposite way from how it might make sense to - if it's exceptionally risky, it's a 1, if it's safe, it's a 5.  (This is because the overall DREAD score is supposed to be a measure of how likely people are to explore a given area, in the same way that the computer security equivalent is a measure of how important it is to secure a system.)
Ease of access - How easy is it?  A location can be risky but overall easy to get to (you only need to walk through a door, but the door is almost always guarded) or absurdly difficult but not really risky (an abandoned building that requires a ten-mile hike to reach it).  1 is difficult, 5 is easy.
Affected locations - How many places are accessible in this method?  If ten roofs can all be accessed in the same way, once somebody's gotten to one, they know how to get to the rest.  However, if all the roofs somewhere are easy to access, but each one in a vastly different way, it might actually be easier to get to all the roofs where access is difficult but the same.  1 is if the method of access is unique, 5 is if it's the same a lot of places.
Discoverability - How easy is it to find out how to get to a place?  Difficult to find is a 1, easy to find is a 5.

There is still, of course, the question of why this is useful.  It could be used to rate urban exploration opportunities, but in my experience explorers couldn't care less about a number attached to an experience.  However, there is one group of people who would care about something like this, and that's the people in charge of stopping urban exploration.  When prioritizing measures to stop burglary, it's easy - you start by securing the most expensive or sensitive stuff, and then work backwards.  But with urban exploration it's not so easy.  If you take the approach of securing the very riskiest places, in the name of safety, you're only helping keep a few people safe, as opposed to much more frequently visited places that are only a bit less risky.  Alternately, if you focus on the most-visited places, you might leave unsecured some places where people could get seriously injured.  What you need is a metric that combines all of these different factors together, hence the usefulness of DREAD.  A place like the Rotunda roof might be dangerous and desirable, but it's also risky, difficult to reach, and is only a single place, so it'd score two 5s but three 1s, giving it only a combined 13.  Something like the UVA steam tunnels, though, would get around a 3 for desirability, 3 for risk, 4 for ease of access, 4 for affected locations, and 5 for discoverability, giving them a much higher score of 19, and thus indicating that it'd be more useful for people to try to secure them.  (And, as it turns out, I've heard about a lot more about security being added to the steam tunnels than I have about security being added to the rotunda.)
So, do people at places like UVA actually use this method?  Not as far as I know.  If I had to guess, I'd say they work based on two factors: how well known a destination for exploration is, and how easy it is for them to secure it.  This is great for giving an outward impression of safety, but by only taking into account two metrics instead of considering all five, UVA is missing out on potentially securing some prime targets for urban exploration.
(And I'm not going to complain about it one bit.)

Running and injury update, and preview of a post that might actually be interesting

I'm working on one of those essay-ish posts that doesn't really relate directly to my life, just tangentially to my interests.  I'm hoping to finish it tonight, but I might not, and definitely not before it switches over to April for the vast majority of you on the east coast.  The title will be "DREAD/STRIDE applied to urban exploration" and hopefully it'll be potentially interesting to a few of you.

Anyway, that's a different post.  This one is a continuing update on my running and various injuries.  So, an activity-by-activity breakdown:
Running - this one I've been able to keep up with.  I just got back from a 7-mile run, putting my total for the year at 78.5, and I'll be doing another 4 tomorrow to get to my goal of 15 this week.  So far I haven't had any injuries to derail this one (since the stress fracture last fall, of course).
Parkour - this one I haven't been able to keep up with.  In mid-February my organization at work had an outing to go snow tubing.  While going over a jump I came off the tube and landed badly, on my side with my arm extended over my head, and my shoulder's been hurting ever since (on the other hand, I've witnessed far worse injuries from accidents like this, so I'll consider myself lucky).  I kept up with parkour for a few more weeks but then two weeks ago put that on hold to give it time to heal (climbing and pull-ups and push-ups don't combine well with hurt shoulders).  It was getting a lot better until Thursday when I was in a bike accident on the way back from work.  The accident didn't hurt it at all, the only thing that did was skin my knee, but having to pick up the 480 pound bike definitely did something bad to it.  So it'll be at least a few more weeks until I can get back to parkour.
Kendo - I was doing this once a week at the parkour gym, and I haven't since I paused that.  Once the weather improves I'll start practicing in the park near my apartment, but at the moment my shoulder also makes swinging a sword a bit unpleasant.

February 29th New Year's Resolutions update

1. Eat pie - I've been failing at this one a surprising amount.  Living alone, and 3,000 miles away from my usual pie chef, has left me rather pie-less.  I'll make sure to get some in the near future, though.
2. I was able to start full-on running two and a half weeks ago, and since then I've done 23.5 miles.  I'm allowed to do 11 miles this week, and increase that a mile a week.  I'm going to see how long I can keep that increase going.  The first couple weeks will be easy, but when it gets to 20-30 miles a week, that'll be tough.
3. I haven't really lost any weight yet (although I haven't really gained any, either) but I've been working out more than I used to, so odds are the balance has moved a bit more towards muscle as opposed to fat.
4. I haven't climbed much, but I started going to a parkour gym three or four times a week, so I'll count that.
5. I haven't done much photography recently.  Definitely failing at that one.  It's tough to take pictures when it's dark by the time I get home from work.
6. I'm staying relatively organized so far.  Could be better, but it's a lot better than my living spaces in the past.
7. I've written a bit.  Wish it'd been more, but it's more than I was writing, so it's a start.
8. I've done a fair amount of drawing and I think improved a little.  Still needs a lot of work, though.
9. No community service yet.  I need to work on that.
10. Not sure how much of a better person I am, but given that I don't know many people out here, I've at least been able to avoid being much of a bad person.

General life update

Sorry for the infrequent posts lately, but, well, I'm lazy.  However, a few things of note have happened lately:

1. I'm in Seattle - My long saga of finding a job has (hopefully) ended for a while as I got an offer from Amazon to work for them as a Software Development Engineer.  I moved to Seattle this past week and I start work on Monday.

2. My leg is (healing from being) fractured - In my distance build-up while training for a half-marathon last fall, I got a stress fracture in my leg (hence the abrupt halt in the Twitter updates about my running).  I was in a brace for a few weeks and on Monday get to start running (small amounts, sticking to a schedule) again.

That's about it for now, on the news-of-my-life front.  More will I'm sure come as I settle into place up here in Washington.

New Year's Resolutions

First, last year's resolutions:

1. Eat pie - definitely succeeded.
2. Run 365 miles, including in the Charlottesville 10-miler - Success. I ran the ten miler, and in November hit the 365 mile mark as I crossed the finish line in the Richmond Half-Marathon. I did a few miles after that but wasn't able to do much as I found out a short while later that I have a stress fracture in my leg, and won't be able to run until mid-February (and even then, much less than I had been).
3. Lose weight to 160 lbs. - Ha. Not a chance.
4. Test in Myo Sim - I tested for my 3rd degree black belt in kendo, and passed.
5. Be more organized - Hard to say.
6. Build stuff - I built a bed, as previously mentioned, and completely reassembled my bike.
7. Climb stuff - I did a bit, but nowhere near enough.
8. Work on learning an instrument - I worked a bit on guitar but not enough to get much better.
9. Work on learning a language - Nope. I worked a bit on my Spanish in the spring but since then, nothing.
10. Be a better person - Again, definitely not my place to judge whether or not this was successful.

My resolutions for the upcoming year:
1. Eat pie - as always.
2. Run 365 miles, including the Tough Mudder and the GORUCK Challenge - I've shown I can run this far, but a) I won't be able to start until mid-February and b) I want to put more of a focus on endurance runs and overall strength, hence the non-traditional runs I've set as my goals.
3. Lose weight - If I can lose any weight at all this year, it'll be an improvement from previous ones. That said, if I can gain muscle while staying the same weight, that'd be fine, too.
4. Climb more - There are three climbing gyms convenient to where I'll be living and working, and as I don't currently have kendo filling up evenings, I have no excuse not to go. I was going to sign up for a membership today but the one I was going to join was closed today due to snow.
5. Do more photography - I did a bunch back in 2009 with the trip to Vietnam and Europe but it's fallen off a lot since then. I want to change that.
6. Stay organized - I just moved into an apartment in Seattle (post explaining everything about that to come) and I'll be living here for at least the next six months. It's currently not messy (even I have trouble getting a place cluttered in a few days) and I want to keep it that way.
7. Write - I haven't really written fiction in a few years now, and I'd like to give it a shot again.
8. Draw - I always feel like I'm right at the border of being happy with how I draw, and I want to practice enough to get over that hurdle and into the range of art that's at least good enough for me.
9. Get involved in some form of community service - In elementary - high school I had Boy Scouts, and then in college I (eventually) got involved in APO. Now I'm out in Seattle and I want to find some way to get involved in service. Not sure exactly what yet, but something.
10. Be a better person - partly a cop-out because I had trouble coming up with my usual ten, but also something I'll always think I need work on.

Knife

Here's the knife I made for my brother. It's for karate, so it's blunt (both blade and tip), but apart from that and the lack of heat-treating (not very necessary when no edge-holding is required) it's made exactly like a sharp knife would be. The blade is 1095 high-carbon steel, and the handle is African Blackwood. It took about eight hours to make and another six to eight hours to polish, but the polishing is easy and was primarily done while watching TV or reading.



There are a couple things I wish I could've done better with this. For one, there are still a few filing scratches visible on the blade. I should've spent more time with rough sandpaper when polishing it. In addition, I countersunk the holes for the bolster pins a bit too much, leaving small divots around the edge, and I used a pointed punch on the bolster pins when it turned out to not be necessary, so there are tiny holes in the middle. I wish there were a bit more blade definition, but that's more just aesthetic preference.

I've got another shipment of knife materials coming tomorrow (wood and synthetic scales for two handles and enough metal for seven blades), so hopefully I'll get a chance over the weekend to get started on another one.

Recent stuff

Sorry about the lack of a post in October, but I forgot. It happens.

Anyway, a bit of interesting stuff has happened lately.
1. Running a half-marathon: This past weekend I ran the McDonalds Half-Marathon in Richmond (putting me at exactly 365 miles on the year). I was aiming somewhat optimistically for a time of 2 hours, but due to the complete lack of hills (compared to my normal running routes, at least) I managed to finish it in 1:55:10, and like the Charlottesville Ten Miler I ran the second part faster than the first (8:54 a mile for the first 10k, 8:41 a mile for the rest). I need to do more practice at these distances so I have a better idea of what pace I can handle.

2. Looking for a job: Due to budget cuts at the place I was going to work, I no longer have a job lined up once I finish with the start-up in a few weeks. I'm working on fixing that. I've applied a couple places, so hopefully I'll get something.

3. Knife making: Back in September I decided to make a knife for my brother for his birthday, as he was in need of one for karate and hadn't had much luck finding a suitable one. I'd made one or two really crude ones in high school and college, but nothing fancy or nice-looking, and nothing with a design as specific and tight as this one needed. It ended up turning out much better than expected (I'll post pictures of it once I get a chance to take them later this week) and now a handful of other people want them, as well, so that'll be my project for December after I'm done with my current software job.

Stuff has actually happened this month!

So, unlike the rather boring couple months since my two-wheeled trek to the Pacific ended abruptly, stuff has actually happened this month.

-Job? Kinda? I have something resembling a job now. I'm currently working for a start-up while waiting to find out if I have a job with an established company. I'm working on an app for Android devices. Probably shouldn't say much more than that. I'm not getting paid yet (it's a pre-funding start-up), which is unfortunate, but it also has the benefit that there's no office, so I can work from my couch. It's pretty interesting stuff. It's giving me a chance to learn more about mobile development, which is something I've been meaning to learn, and it's interesting to see the inner workings of a fledgling company, instead of just being buried in code and nothing else.

-Moving to NoVa: I've recently moved up to Northern Virginia, due to that whole job thing. I'm living with a couple other guys from APO, which is working out pretty well. My room is a bit tiny (8'10" x 9'2"), but at least it's letting me practice my creative furniture building.

-Creative furniture building: Due to the miniscule size of my room, I'm having to conserve and double-use space. In order to fit both a bed (which is kinda a necessity) and a couch (which is definitely a necessity) into my room, I built a loft bed so they take up the same area of floor space. However, I was bored back in August/early September before starting work, so I decided to make it without the use of anything other than wood. This meant no nails, screws, glue, or even lashings, and instead a lot of chiseled notches for various pieces of wood to slot through, with a few pegs to hold the diagonal braces on. Somehow, it actually worked, and I think it's even sturdier and more stable than the loft bed in my room at home, despite initial skepticism on the part of all involved (that is, me and my dad). As an added bonus, the design actually incorporates my required couch as one of its braces. I'll post pictures once I take them tomorrow, but currently it's sitting nicely in my room ready to be slept in. And, with the exception of moving the couch into place, I was able to assemble it entirely by myself (Zak, thanks for the help with the couch).

-Other fun stuff: One nice advantage of working as opposed to school is that I don't have homework for the weekends (although I've been putting in a few hours of work out of my own curiosity about the project and not because I have to). This means that I have the time to do fun stuff, such as this weekend when I went climbing on Saturday (at a gym, as opposed to outside, but it was still quite fun) and scuba diving on Sunday (I'm now advanced open-water certified by NAUI). Next weekend will probably be climbing again on Saturday, and then I don't know about Sunday. Something fun, hopefully. In addition, I've been able to run most evenings after work, which is always good.

Now, though, sleep.

Obligatory August post

Too many of these posts are obligatory end-of-the-month ones.  Hopefully that'll change once I'm actually doing interesting stuff.
On the topic of doing interesting stuff, that'll hopefully actually start happening soon.  More details once I have more details.
As for what I've been doing for the past month, the first little bit was finishing up at CTY, followed by coming home and attempting to get out of Charlottesville.  It looks like that'll be happening in the coming week.  I'm currently about to start one job in the dead space while waiting to find out if I have a different job.
As the Twitter sidebar thingy probably shows, I've been trying to do more running lately.  I set a resolution to run 365 miles this year, and just yesterday I got back up to having done an average of a mile a day.  Today I ran more and gave myself a week's buffer, but my ankle isn't happy with me so I'll probably take a few days off.

That's it for now, but expect more frequent posts once I actually have things about which to write.

Obligatory July Post

So it's the last day of July and I realized that because of CTY I hadn't yet posted anything on here. It's always busy and there's so much fun stuff going on that I don't have much time for outside communication.
A good portion of what I've had to do the past few weeks (aside from work for CTY) was figuring out what I'd be doing in the fall. I'd previously accepted an offer from Datran Media, an internet analytics firm in Reston, Virginia. I'd chosen them primarily because of the location: I wanted to get out of Charlottesville for a change of scenery, but I still wanted to be on the east coast.
However, in June I was told that they were moving from Reston to Austin, Texas. I've heard wonderful things about Austin, but I didn't particularly feel like moving there. I started looking around for a new job, and ended up getting offers for a few interviews. I was only able to do one of them due to being away at CTY, an interview with SAIC in Bethesda, Maryland, but it went well and I got the job. Assuming I can get the requisite security clearance, I'll be starting work there in September.
This upcoming week is the last one of CTY, and it's weird to think that it'll be my last summer here for a while. Having a real job means I probably won't be able to come back until I'm in grad school, which won't be for at least a few years. I've been at CTY in some way, either as a student or a TA, for 8 of the last 9 years and it feels strange to be leaving that.
The next month will be spent finding an apartment up in North Bethesda/southern Rockville, or somewhere in that vicinity, and preparing to permanently move for the first time in my life. I've moved to a dorm plenty of times, but I've never moved anywhere to stay for an indeterminate time frame.
Anyway, time to get back to work for class.

Well, I'm home

Sorry for the lack of updates during the last part of my trip, but after leaving Lone Pine everything started happening far too quickly, and so I didn't really get a good chance to sit down and write without the feeling that I'd be doing everything a disservice without knowing how the current episode was going to play out. Now, though, I know how it all ends (admittedly, right now I don't, as I'm writing this the night before arriving home, but, well, at this point, my vehicle had better not break down again or else, well, that'd be very, very bad).
So, where I left off: I'd just arrived in Lone Pine. My first two days in Lone Pine were spent sleeping in and gathering supplies. I needed food for my hike, albeit not much, and I decided I wanted that food to have the option of being hot, so I got a tiny camping stove (this has the added benefit of being able to quickly melt snow into drinking water). I also needed to pick up a bear canister, due to their habit of eating food brought by campers (and, on quite rare occasions, the campers themselves), and I needed to get my permit from the ranger station in town. All of this took only a very short while, and the rest of the time was largely spent reading and then fixing the muffler on the bike, as it'd gotten further damaged.
Quick note as to the construction of the muffler system on a Nighthawk: It's a two-cylinder engine, and it's got two mufflers. They emerge at the top front of the engine, one on either side, and then curl down the front and then beneath the bottom of the engine, just off to the sides, and continue on back to the rear of the bike. The mufflers themselves don't start until behind the engine; everything in front of that is just pipe directing gases. Beneath the engine a pipe goes across between the two mufflers, to redirect the flow in case either one gets blocked at the end (at least, that's what I think its purpose is). Overall, the system (or at least the part of it with which I was concerned) is a capital H shape.
The previous damage had been that one of the connection points between the pipe, muffler, and bypass pipe had completely failed – each part was broken off from each other, so there were three bare pipe endings just sort of sitting there in space with a small gap between them. Fixing such a junction is hard, because there's no easy way to wrap anything around it and get a perfectly opposing anchor point.
Sometime after the accident in Utah but before arriving in Lone Pine, the bypass pipe had fallen off, leaving both mufflers with holes. Based on the gas mileage (good on one tank and then bad the next), I think it happened somewhere either shortly before or in Death Valley. Despite the fact that, technically speaking, this problem was worse, two holes instead of one, it was significantly easier to fix – the holes were bigger, and there were two, but by hose-clamping pieces of sheet metal around the pipes, they were as good as new (minus the lack of the bypass, meaning I had to make sure no hooligans stuck potatoes or anything like that in the mufflers). It was eerie how quiet the bike was – coasting back from Whitney with the engine idling (due to there being a mile of elevation loss in 13 miles of road, I only needed to actually use the engine at the very end), I couldn't hear it over the wind.
Anyway, motorcycle fixing accomplished, and reading accomplished, as well (I finished The Lost City of Z, a good book about the Amazonian explorer Percy Fawcett), it was time for Mt. Whitney.
I decided before starting that 'd hike to Trail Camp and no further. Trail Camp is at 12,000 feet, six miles up the trail from the 8,000 foot or so trailhead. It's the last campsite before the summit, which is at a bit over ten miles along the trail, and at an elevation of 14,497.61 feet (although on a summit that's probably covered in dirt and gravel, I don't know how they measure the elevation to an accuracy of a hundredth of a foot or, roughly, the thickness of a nickel). It's also the last spot that was reachable (safely and sanely, even by my distorted standards of each) without an ice ax (pretty self explanatory) and crampons (spikes you strap onto your feet). I don't have either of those, and I decided to not rent them as a way of forcing myself to stop at that point.
I left town shortly before eight and arrived in Whitney Portal, the base of the trail, at shortly after eight. There isn't anything there except a store selling last-minute essentials, which in my case meant a map (I thought I had sent mine home, although I later found it at the very bottom of my motorcycle dashboard bag) and breakfast. I'd read on the online forums about the delicious pancakes made by the store, so I ordered one of those. I thought it odd that the menu listed pancake, singular, and not pancakes, but once it was prepared I understood: the singular pancake was probably sixteen or eighteen inches in diameter and in the middle approaching an inch thick, and when draped across two paper plates only slightly overlapped it still hung off both sides (long-ways, of course). I ate a small amount of it and saved the rest in a ziploc bag for later (although I never did end up finishing it).
Breakfast and map acquired, I set out up the trail. The first part wasn't that much different from trails in the Blue Ridge – the section I hiked had a gain of 4,000 feet over six miles, which isn't that much different of a grade from something like Humpback Rocks (although, for comparison, this hike started at roughly 2,500 feet above Virginia's highest point, Mt. Rogers, which is about 5,500 feet at the top).
The first part of the trail was, I'd say, even easier than Humpback – the slope was shallower due to the large number of switchbacks (only around two dozen, though – one late section of the trail, past Trail Camp so not a section I hiked, is called the 99 Switchbacks, but even that's an understatement, as it's actually somewhere in the 140s). That stretched about two and a half miles up to Lone Pine Lake, the point at which the permit became necessary (although the ranger who's supposed to check them wasn't there).
There had only been a few spots before the lake where the trail had snow, but past the lake it was almost non-stop. The first section was a winding trail through rocks and snow to get up to the first main campground, Outpost Camp, at three and a half miles along the trail. I'm not sure how good of a campground this actually is, as it seemed to be not much more than a shrub-filled swamp with a few dry spots at the west end, but there were tents there, so I suppose it counts.
I chatted briefly with the ranger, who was walking the trail instead of just waiting at Lone Pine. He didn't check my permit.
From this point on, it was entirely snowy, icy slopes. Immediately out of the campsite, the trail was a series of switchbacks, but because of the snow, the only viable route was straight up, cutting across all of them (it was tough to tell that it was even supposed to be switchbacks). This point led to a trail over some large rocks, at the end of which was a long, tall slope of snow, periodically interrupted by massive boulders. It was less intimidating than the slope up to the summit of Mt. Elbert, primarily because I'd already climbed Elbert and thus knew that it was doable, even by someone inexperienced like me, but the fact that I was carrying 57 pounds on my back (they have a scale at the trailhead) certainly added a bit of difficulty.
This section was about a mile long, gently tapering off at the top until where it reached Trail Camp, and it took me about an hour. A relatively sizable lake lies right to the side of the trail, and it was barely visible, just discolored ice.
Overall, it took me about six hours to make it the six miles to Trail Camp, which is, somehow, faster than the predicted pace. The rule I've heard is to assume an hour for each two miles and an hour for each thousand feet of elevation gain, but given that I knew I only had to do six miles and not the full ten and change to the top, I could move a bit faster.
Just as I was walking into Trail Camp, it began to snow. Not terribly heavily, but enough that by whenever in the night it stopped, it had left a noticeable amount, maybe a quarter inch or so, on previously bare surfaces.
At Trail Camp I found a spot surrounded by some improvised rock wall and began to set up my tent inside it, but there weren't spots to properly secure the stakes, so I had to move to slightly more exposed ground twenty or thirty feet away. I left my stuff here and climbed up onto a nearby slope (the southern face of Woten's Throne, a big rock formation towering a few hundred feet over the camp) to look for a better spot, either on the slope or visible below, but I couldn't find one. Upon returning to boulders next to the trail, it took me a good ten minutes to find where I'd left my things, despite my things including two bright red poles stuck vertically in the ground in, as I said, an exposed area.
Note to non-mountain-people: When I talk of a landscape with boulders, you might initially think of a field with a big rock sitting in it. This isn't quite what it's like. Imagine taking a handful of dirt and a handful of gravel, mixing them together quite well, shaking it all up, and then pouring this into a bowl (and then, of course, make everything a few hundred times bigger). That surface, with dirt and buried stones all intermixed so that there are flat spots of dirt, mounds of stones, and plenty of places where there's a mixture of the two intermingled, is what it's like.
Anyway, that's where I camped. I had everything set up by around five, and after cooking dinner and doing a bit of clean-up from that, it was six. I was tired from lugging myself and a third of my body weight all the way up to the camp, but I knew if I went to sleep right then I'd wake up around 3 am. Had I been continuing to the summit in the morning, that'd have been perfect, but as I was just hiking down, I didn't particularly want to wake up before sunrise. I read the introduction to Tom Sawyer, and then lay there for a while thinking my usual middle-of-nature philosophizing while listening to the snow land on the tent. It was somewhere in the twenties outside, or would get there overnight, but my sleeping bag (a zero-degree mummy bag) worked just fine at keeping my warm.
For someone who enjoys camping, I actually sleep really badly in tents. Not sure why. The fact that I never carry a pillow probably plays a role, but I also like to splay out a lot when I sleep, and sleeping bags and narrow sleeping mats atop cold, rocky ground really don't mesh with that desire. Anyway, despite a rather sleepless night, the morning came. I slept enough, somewhere between three and six hours, I'd guess, after lying there for between nine and twelve. I'm quite good at keeping myself entertained with just my thoughts (anyone who's gone on a long-distance motorcycle trip probably is, or else the hours with nothing to distract you, not even music to listen to, just the road occupying a bit of your brain and your body fully constrained by the task, would drive you mad) so it didn't bother me.
I awoke in the morning to find that the snow had stopped. My portable weather radio thingy with built-in thermometer told me that the current temperature was 27 degrees, and that was inside my tent, so outside was probably a degree or two colder. Keep in mind, if you've lost track of the date in this narrative, that this was the morning of June 8th.
I got up and explored a bit more up on Woten's Throne, but I didn't get very high up before I didn't feel safe climbing on the icy rock. When I go back to climb Whitney in a warmer month I'll take chalk and climbing shoes and go to the top. Technically speaking it isn't that tough, certainly not worse than a 5.7, and there's probably a route up that isn't even a 5. Still, more than I wanted to do that morning, improperly prepared, carrying a camera case.
I packed up camp and headed down. No bears had attempted to get into my bear canister, luckily. Even though they're kinda designed for that sort of thing, I think I might have a hard time getting my deposit back on the rental if it had massive claw and teeth marks in it.
There's a small lake at Trail Camp (it's more of a pond, but the map calls it a lake). Without a map, you would've had absolutely no way of knowing about it, due to the snow. I hope the ice is thick enough to support a person's weight, but I certainly didn't search it out to find out. On the way down, the new snow had also made the significantly larger lake below Trail Camp (I think it's called Consultation Lake, but I could be wrong, however shocking that might sound) completely invisible. It just looked like a flat, surprisingly level and rock-free meadow.
I took two wrong turns on the way down. Neither was really an issue. The first took me down a steep snow- and ice-covered slope instead of down the switchbacks above Outpost Camp, but it was interesting, it gave me a chance to do a bit of glissading, and I got to see the remains of my first natural avalanche (as opposed to the tiny one I prompted on Wheeler Peak). It was different than the Wheeler one, anyway: whereas that was nothing but loose snow, a liquid flow of it, this one seemed to have been more a rockslide of blocks of ice and packed snow, far less fluid and probably less graceful but more intimidating. Either way, it seems to have happened during the night, so probably no one saw it to tell one way or the other.
Below the avalanche (below as in farther down the slope, not below as in buried by) was Outpost Camp. On the way up I had climbed to one rock overlooking the Camp, to get a good view of it, and on the way back I did so again, but with a different rock. From this rock I slid down to another and then planned to make my way across the slope to the far end of the camp.
One important fact to realize is that, because of the snow the previous night, the ground was four layers: there was the ground itself, rock and dirt; there was the underlying dense snowmelt from the winter, there was the crust of ice atop this that I discussed in my explanation of postholing (which luckily only happened once or twice on this hike, with no ill consequences), and there was that night's snow. This made getting a good foothold difficult, if the slope was too steep: the snow atop ice was quite slippery, and due to the large discrepancy between daytime and nighttime temperatures the ice crust was thick. It's these conditions that make an ice ax useful, as you can easily drive its serrated pick through the ice to get a hold if you start to fall. Getting through any other way is difficult, and can't really be counted on in a time of need.
However, I was rather in that time of need. Because I'd reached my spot by sliding down a slope too steep to walk, just retracing my path wasn't possible. Likewise, going straight down wasn't possible, because I had no way to self-arrest (slow my speed of descent) without an ice ax and it was too far, and onto too uneven a pile of rocks, to slide. I had to continue on sideways, but I could barely stand on the slope, even after driving the edges of my boots into the snow/ice as far as possible (these are the conditions that make crampons useful).
If I had been forced to go down, I probably could've made it. I would've tied as long a cord to my pack as I could've managed and slid that down first, and then just aimed for the best spot and prepared for the impact at the bottom. However, I did have one tool, or pair of tools, that might be useful, and those were my hiking poles, which, however silly I thought them before this trip, have actually proven to be quite the lucky addition to my gear.
I was, mostly, able to drive them through the ice crust, due to their relatively sharp steel tips (not sharp, per se, but small, about the size of a ball-point pen tip, so capable of generating great pressure). About two-thirds of the time I could get them all the way through and also into the couple feet of snow below, but other times I could only get them partly through, embedded a few inches. When they went all the way through they provided a perfectly stable handgrip, but when they went only partway in, they held if I had my feet planted and were iffy otherwise.
By leapfrogging these over each other a foot or two at a time, I was able to slide over to the next rock pile, and from there to the final one at the end of the slope overlooking the camp. From there I could reach the proper trail again, and continue down.
(I should clarify here that although the slope was too steep to walk across or control my slide down, it was by no means a vertical wall or anything approaching it. Taking into account the fact that people are terrible at judging slopes, it was probably 45 degrees. I'd guess it to be steeper but people normally vastly overestimate. Regardless, try turning an ice rink to the slope of a staircase and see how you can manage, even if it seems not that bad when thinking about it in the abstract of just 45 degrees.)
From here I made a similar poor choice of path when descending to Lone Pine Lake, but the snow here was easier to get a grip in and the ice was easier to pierce with the hiking poles, and I had more practice at this point. After Lone Pine Lake, there were only a few spots of trail left. It was just hiking the last few miles down the gravel trail through the trees, down the switchbacks, back to the trailhead, and then biking back into town. I had skipped breakfast because I didn't feel like cooking, so I went across the street from my motel and had one of Lone Pine's delectable veggie burgers. Seriously, that town has awesome veggie burgers. Every place I went (a whopping total of three, including the Whitney Portal Store but not counting the Subway) had them on the menu, and the two I tried were both delicious.
I packed everything up and mailed a second box home, making it so that, surprisingly enough, I actually had some empty space in my bags for the first time during the trip.
I decided at this point to change my plan. Well, I decided during my malaise in Leadville to change the plan after Whitney, but it wasn't until this point that I made my new plan: head out to the Pacific, specifically, Monterey, then ride down the Pacific Coast Highway to a bit north of LA before cutting east to Austin, Texas, due to suggestions from multiple friends, and then from there, home, through the south on some route that would intersect my old roommate's Bike And Build trip. I booked my places to stay through Austin, at two KOA campgrounds and then a motel in Austin itself (I was also spending one night along the coast, but that would be at a national park campground that didn't accept reservations). From Austin, then, it'd be another three days of riding, and then I'd be home.
Heading out of Lone Pine, the ride started out going pretty well. The chain on the bike had developed a bit of a habit of coming off the rear axle, doing so twice on the way to Lone Pine and then once shortly after leaving. It was probably due in part to the accident on Pike's Peak, as it happened then, and the accident in Utah certainly didn't help, either, as it happened there, as well. After this it was loose, so a bad combination of braking and shifting gears while moving at the right speed would knock it loose. Easy enough to fix, but annoying.
Well, about two-thirds of the way to Monterey, it came off again, and this time got stuck somehow such that I needed to remove one of the side panels near the engine in order to jiggle it around to get it back in place. Unfortunately, I didn't have the tools to do that, as I needed an 8mm socket and I only had a very cheap 8mm flat wrench. Luckily, after being stopped at the side of the road for upwards of an hour, a guy passing by stopped, and happened to have the right tools. However, even though it was temporarily fixed, the chain really needed either seriously tightened or replaced.
I managed to make it to Monterey, although about three hours later than planned, and due to that and weather conditions I bailed on the campground idea and instead opted for a motel. In the morning I took the bike to a repair place (morning #2 starting in a bike shop), and they replaced the chain, and suggested that I get the rear sprocket replaced as soon as possible, too, although they didn't have the proper one in stock.
In Monterey, while waiting on the bike repairs, I walked over to the ocean and dipped my fingers in the Pacific, about two weeks after swimming in the Atlantic.
As I was leaving Monterey, I noticed that the rear tire was showing serious wear. Specifically, the rubber in one spot had worn away far enough to expose the underlying fabric (rubber on its own is pretty strong, but the added reinforcement of fabric or metal embedded in the rubber makes it even stronger). This is, to put it mildly, not good, as that means there isn't much tire left, and when it's the drive tire on a motorcycle that's doing five hundred miles a day at 60 miles an hour, that's not going to last very long. Blowouts on cars suck. It can damage the rim and, if the conditions are bad, can jeopardize your control of the vehicle. Blowouts on motorcycles, especially at highway speeds, are many times worse, due to both the fact that it's one of two tires instead of one of four and the fact that while cars are inherently stable, with their default position being upright, motorcycles are not. If you just stop doing anything to a car, it'll drift to a stop eventually with no real issues. If you just stop managing a bike, for example, if your attentions drifts for a few seconds because your tire just burst, the bike loses balance, and that isn't good. Quite bad, in fact.
I was already on the famed Pacific Coast Highway, CA-1 along Big Sur, at this point, and I figured (correctly, there isn't any surprise disaster coming, at least not yet) that I had enough tire left to make it to San Luis Obispo at the south end of the desolate (human-civilization-wise) stretch of parkland.
The ride was beautiful. The winds at points were annoying, but that's the case with most roads, and given that this was right along the coast, it easily could've been a lot worse. The only problem I ran into was that I wanted to stop every few miles to visit the beach. I'll need to visit some other time when I have a week to see just that hundred-odd-mile stretch of road. Maybe I'll try it on a regular bicycle instead of a motorcycle.
Anyway, I made it to San Luis Obispo to the south, with just enough time to go by one of the motorcycle shops. They had the right tire in stock, but they didn't have time to install it that night. I said I'd be back in the morning and went off to find a motel.
I have a problem where I lose track of time like it's my job. When I'm doing something largely untethered like this trip, it's even worse, as I drift in both time and date. When you combine that with the fact that I don't know the schedules for random west-coast universities, you get the result that I had no idea it was Friday, and Cal Poly's graduation was the following morning in SLO. Finding an open room, okay, that actually wasn't difficult. Finding an open room for a price I was willing to pay, though, wasn't possible, so I had to go a town or two north and stay in a park service campground (which still cost as much as a cheap motel). When I got back into town the next morning, the size of the section of fabric wear on the tire had increased substantially, from maybe an inch long to four inches long, going through two separate fabric layers. Given that my next stretch took me across a few thousand miles of desert, it was a good thing I caught the problem when I did.
I got the new tire and I set out, headed east for the first time that trip. I had a reservation at a KOA in Blythe.
Here's a hint: I don't know if it applies to everyone (well, I know for a fact that it doesn't, but anyway), but if you want to ensure that you'll run into mechanical difficulties that mess with your schedule, make a reservation at a KOA. They have a mystical power of just picking up a sledgehammer and going at whatever means of transportation I'm using (well, so far just the bike).
Anyway, I was rolling through the Desert Cities (the stretch of I-10 in California from Palm Springs to Coachella) when, all of a sudden, the bike engine starts rapidly losing power. I pull into a gas station (the last one for twenty miles, as the bike luckily started dying less than a mile before the last exit of the cities) and see large quantities of oil all over, well, pretty much everything around the engine. I refill the oil, turn the bike back on, and confirm, yep, it's leaking oil. A lot. And due to the engine temperature, I can't do much, so I head inside to let it cool down for a while. After it's all cooled down, I make sure the oil is at the proper level and turn it back on. No oil seems to be leaking, so I head back for the interstate, three quarts of oil and a gallon of water crammed various places in my bags, as I'm heading into twenty miles of desert, and still have 90 miles to get to Blythe.
I just switched to present tense instead of past. Oops. Well, I'll leave it like that. Just don't think I didn't notice.
Anyway, I'm heading out of the parking lot, but the power doesn't seem right. I glance down and, yep, still leaking oil. I head into the nearest town with a motel, Indio, a mile or two to the west, and wait.
The next day is Sunday and nothing's open, so I just wait and nap and read. I finish Tom Sawyer and start The Screwtape Letters (I want to like C.S. Lewis, but he's just terrible at that whole “subtlety” thing), but that's not terribly interesting.
Monday comes. I take the bike to the shop and walk over to the nearest bookstore, well, the nearest store with books, which is a Target, and pick up The Devil and the White City, about the Chicago Exposition of 1893. It's excellent.
I read and nap more that day, and in the afternoon get a call that, well, the bike could be fixed, but it'd take at least a week and cost at least $700 in labor, before parts are taken into account, and it'd need a good deal of those. Basically, the engine needs completely redone. I pick it up from the shop and get it to limp back to the motel, but it isn't making it home under its own power.
I'd talked over this possibility with my parents the previous day, and had settled on a somewhat strange plan for if it was unfixable, or if it'd take too long to fix (I have work in Pennsylvania starting on the 23rd, and it's a four-day bike ride from Indio to Charlottesville, so there was only a week to get it fixed, and even that'd really be pushing it). The plan, as you may have noticed in a Twitter update I posted, was to mail it.
Well, not technically mail. I used UPS, not the USPS.
The following day, Tuesday the 14th, was a fun day. First thing in the morning I walked to a rental car place and picked up an SUV, and from there I promptly went to UPS to get boxes, Home Depot to get tools, and Target to get ziploc bags for bolts. I then spent the next seven hours in the parking lot of a Motel 6 completely disassembling the motorcycle, part for part. One box held the wheels, one held the body panels and the assorted bolts and small stuff, and one held the frame and the electrical system, as well as the shock absorbers. The gas tank got its own box. Originally I'd been planning on having the engine be my airline carry-on, but it was too greasy, so I wrapped it in some trash bags and headed into the UPS store to ship some of the boxes and pick up boxes for the engine.
When I got boxes in the morning (and then again at lunchtime), I had made passing reference to the fact that I was shipping a motorcycle, but I don't think they quite understood what that entailed. That trip, I carried in two boxes, one about 70 pounds, one 82, and both large enough to fit several bodies (possibly with a bit of dismemberment involved). I just brought in the raw gas tank and got a box for it and packed it on the spot, as it was small and easy to pack. I was about to purchase another couple boxes and some bubble wrap when the guy at the counter pointed out that they'd box up whatever you brought in for a couple bucks. I let out a probably somewhat disturbing laugh and walked outside, and walked back in from the parking lot carrying a 90-pound engine, still with cables, hoses, and kickstand attached. I set it down on the counter and just said, “Have fun.”
He found it entertaining, luckily, or else I'd be preparing right now for one of my packages to be mysteriously lost in transit.
I had to take in the final box, the one with the wheels, the next morning, as it wouldn't all fit in the back of the Jeep at the same time. I then dropped off that rental car and immediately picked up another one, as I needed to get to LAX for my flights home this evening (the first one of which I'm writing this during). While waiting to pick up the second one I read an article saying that, although I had found it absurdly hot, Indio and the area was actually going through an abnormally cold year:there had only been one day out of the first two weeks of June that was over 100 degrees, and that was the previous day, when I'd spent seven hours in the sun on asphalt disassembling the bike, at 108.
I took my time getting to LA, as I had to check out of my motel at noon but didn't depart until half past midnight. I had an excellent lunch at a little taco restaurant in Indio (one good thing about being so close to Mexico is that the Mexican food is delicious) and took three stops while driving to read a bit. Upon arriving at LAX I checked in, and found that my bags were slightly overweight, by a total of about four pounds, meaning instead of costing $60 to check them, it'd cost $160 (I'd basically just shoved my camping backpack in one duffel bag and the saddlebags in another). I'd need to get them down to 50 pounds each to prevent that. After much shuffling, including switching my FiveFingers that I'd been wearing with the boots I'd packed and deciding to sacrifice my shampoo, bottle of water, and sunscreen, and packing one FiveFinger shoe in each bag, I got them each to come in at 49.5 pounds. I checked them through, carried my daypack and motorcycle helmet up through security, and flew home.

Now that the detailed travelogue is done, time for all the inevitable philosophizing that naturally springs forth from adventures like this.
One thought that's been on my mind a lot in the past week has been that I need to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I've read a passage or two in philosophy classes, but only a few pages. However, it struck me, both while just riding and actually doing maintenance, how necessary a sense of focus and calm is when traveling extended distances. For the riding itself, you need to be able to remain focused on the road, completely on the road, while at the same time have your mind free to wander. If it isn't free to wander you'll burn out far too quickly, or at least I would. Riding isn't a stimulating enough activity (except on Californian highways, due to lane splitting being legal) to occupy me for the ten hours a day it sometimes had to, and so my I know have four pages of story ideas as well as seven different iPhone apps to write, as well as a song to attempt to compose. For the maintenance, you need to be able to pull together what you have with you, your knowledge of what's wrong, and your ideas about how to make it right, in order to do a quick patch on a 350-pound hunk of steel and rubber that'll soon be carrying you and a hundred pound of projectiles immediately behind you down the road at 80 mph (not that I would ever break the speed limit, of course). It takes confidence in your abilities and a calmness to ride anyway, even if you know things aren't perfect. Now, it wasn't quite this intense for me, as none of my fixes were the sort that'd cause a crash if they failed, but I think I could have managed if they had been.
This adventure stood in stark contrast to my last big adventure, Vietnam, in that this one was almost entirely transient, moving quickly from place to place, whereas in Vietnam we spent over a month in just one city (and then traveled around, to be sure, but the big part of the Asia section was just in Hue). Afterward we went to Europe, which was moving around, but staying in each place for longer.
As long as I can remember I've broken adventuring and wisdom-gathering in general (of which I consider adventuring a subset) into two groups. (These are by no means groups that I came up with myself; I'm certain they are not, and that I heard them somewhere else, although I'm not positive where. It may have been a book by Jostein Gaardner about Christmas that my parents used to read me each year, but it may also not have been. Anyway, point being, not my original idea, I just like it.) The way I remember it being explained was as a comparison of two desert wise men. One sits on a camel, and travels all across the world, learning a little bit about everything there is to see. The other sits atop an astronomy tower and, night after night, studies a single constellation, perhaps a single star, until he knows it completely, in and out. The analogy to adventuring should be clear. Having now tried both, I think I prefer the latter, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do more of it. I want to return to Vietnam and spend a lot more time there. It's a beautiful country, and there's something about the culture that's also quite intriguing. It'd help to learn Vietnamese (or at the very least French), but I have a few years until I'd be able to return anyway, so if I can work up the motivation, I'll give that a shot.

Well, that was the trip. I'm sure I'll write more about it when I post photographs, but that probably won't be for another day or two as I still need to transfer them over to my Mac and then sort through them all. (Also, I apologize if there are any typos or misspellings in this post, but it was primarily written on the plane ride home, which means I'd been up for twenty-four rather busy hours, and as such was a little tired.)

The past four or so days

Sorry about the long time with no post, but once I got back to Leadville from Colorado Springs I was pretty busy for a few days.

Southwest:

After leaving Leadville I went to Taos, New Mexico. It's a little tourist town in northern New Mexico primarily centered around outdoorsy stuff in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountains, and just general southwestern-style Indian-themed stuff for people from Colorado who don't want to have to go too far south. I rolled in about midday after a mostly uneventful ride. I had a bit of trouble balancing all my bags on the bike, as I had accumulated a bit of stuff in Leadville, but I managed without crashing.

Upon arriving in Taos I realized I had a voicemail message on my phone (it's hard to hear anything above the sound of the engine of the motorcycle, especially with a somewhat-busted muffler). I'll write a whole post about that message later, but in this case later probably won't be until the end of the summer.

Once in Taos, I dropped all my stuff in a motel and set out in search of maps of Wheeler Peak, the hike I wanted to do the next day. After the troubles on Mt. Elbert I wanted to make sure that I had a damn good map.

I was able to find a quite good one, in what seems to be Taos's only outdoors store (the only one of which I could find any mention, at the very least). The cashier warned me, though, that there'd be two feet of snow on the mountain above 10,000 feet (that is, the entire length of the trail). A bit more than I'd like, but I wasn't going to let the weather stand in the way of another hike. This one was only to a bit more than 13,000 feet anyway, so at the very least there was less height to climb.

Someone in the restaurant I'm in just ordered a Miller Lite. It should be pointed out that I'm here for breakfast on a Sunday.

Anyway, after getting the map and a guide to the hike I headed back to the motel and got to sleep early, as I wanted to wake up before 6 the following morning. That didn't quite happen.

Marmots:

I rolled out of bed around 6:30 and managed to make it to the trailhead by 8. The trailhead was in the Taos Ski Valley, a small town (I believe the population is ~47, no joke) in the mountains outside of Taos that is, as you could probably guess, primarily concerned with skiing. The hike broke down into two parts. The first two miles was a hike up to William's Lake, a small (one or two acre, I would guess) lake at a hair over 11,000 feet. It was an easy hike, the kind I'm used to from Virginia. Elevation-gain-wise, even Humpback Rocks is more difficult (and as for the altitude, I was pretty much completely acclimated to Leadville's 10,000 feet at this point). I stopped at the lake for a breakfast of trail mix and to watch the chipmunks scurry around. Taos Ski Valley has chipmunks like UVA has squirrels. It's awesome.

Once I was ready to go I checked my GPS to see how far it was from there to the summit. It said about 4,000 feet. Not that hard. The hard part (that you already realize if you've been keeping track of all the numbers I've tossed around) is that there was also 2,000 feet of elevation gain.

(Aside: For those of you who don't have experience hiking tall mountains, for each 1,000 feet, imagine taking the stairs to the upper observation deck of the Empire State Building. It's about comparable.)

There was a trail that led from the lake to the summit along a slightly longer and less steep route (it probably stretched the distance out to a mile and a half of lateral motion), so I took this. The main change was over the first 500 feet of elevation gain, which wasn't too terribly much steeper than the earlier part of the trail, but it, like the trail up to the lake, was covered in fairly deep snow. On the way up, it was still early (I got to the lake around 9 and headed up around 9:15), so postholing wasn't too much of an issue.

(Another aside: “Postholing” is one of those terms used on internet forums that's never defined. If you've ever been hiking in the winter in an area where there's season-long snow cover, it doesn't need defined, as once you hear it, you know exactly what it means. Over the course of the winter, when the temperature gets above freezing, the uppermost snow melts, seeps down, and re-freezes, leaving a fairly strong top surface but normal fluffy snow below. If you're lucky you don't break through the top surface and it's just like walking on rough ice or dirt. If the ice isn't strong enough, you sink straight down, into snow that can be up to a few feet deep, as if you've just stepped into a post-hole. It happens more in the afternoon after the snow has had a chance to melt, but hasn't refrozen over the night.)

After that, it hit the last mile or so, where there was still 1,500 feet to gain. The first quarter or so was spent getting to the treeline, hiking up the rocky side of a chute of snow. After that, it was more rocks, just a steep, steep rocky slope, occasionally having to cross a bit of snow. There was a fair amount of snow, maybe a quarter of the mountain, but it was easy enough to avoid. The wind was strong, probably upwards of 60mph at the top, but not unmanageable (it was nothing compared with Pike's Peak).

Once I got to the top, I realized that the southern side of the mountain had significantly more snow – although it gets more sun, I guess the strong wind out of the north melts more snow. The summit itself was snow-free, except for a bit underneath some rocks piled to mark the top.

Also, marmots! It's good to know that no matter how good humans get at climbing mountains, marmots will be better. There were, in addition to the countless (okay, not countless, I did count: eleven, I think) marmots I saw on the way up, three just chilling on the summit as I approached. They scampered away once I got too close, but they were just sitting there, enjoying the view from 13,000 feet.

I got to the top a few minutes before noon, so over two and a half hours after leaving the lake. I stayed for a few minutes to take pictures before starting down a bit after noon. The first part of the descent was on the slow side – the highest part of the slope was nothing but talus and scree, so it was important to keep a steady footing while descending (although there were certainly parts where I felt like the illustration from the Magic card Avalanche Riders).

After that first part that was only rock, it sped up. The snow was avoidable, if I had wanted to avoid it, but that really didn't seem fun. There's a technical mountaineering term called “glissading” (not to be confused with the ballet term of the same name) that's basically a fancy-sounding French word for “sledding down a mountain without a sled”. Theoretically you do it with an ice ax to keep your speed in check, but I didn't have an ice ax, so my feet and my hiking poles had to do. And they worked masterfully – although it had taken me nearly three hours to get from the lake to the summit, it took me less than an hour to get down, because of the 2,000 feet I needed to descend, I'd estimate that at least a thousand of those were just sliding down the snow.

Back at the lake I took some pictures of the chipmunks before heading down. New Mexico is a really good state for seeing rodents: in addition to the marmots and chipmunks on Wheeler, I saw my first prairie dog in the wild in New Mexico, and also saw, although by no means for the first time, plenty of rabbits.

I got lunch (gazpacho) at the Bavarian Restaurant, conveniently located at the base of the trail (which happens to also be the base of the ski lift), and headed back to Taos proper. I did a bit of souvenir shopping for people (a reminder to people who have reason to believe you'll be getting something: keep in mind that I have highly limited packing space). Then, random work that needed to be done and then packing, and bed.

Desert Solitude:

The following morning was shipping a box of stuff home to Virginia so that I had less stuff with which to bike, and setting off for Shiprock, New Mexico, and then Page, Arizona. Shiprock was cool to see – it's a massive rock formation – but it was just a quick stop to admire it and take a few pictures. After that, on to Page.

Page is best known as a town set up to house the workers building the Glen Canyon Dam. As some of you know, I rather like Edward Abbey, and Edward Abbey rather hated Glen Canyon Dam, as he loved Glen Canyon, which was effectively destroyed by it (the canyon is still there, but it's now completely filled with water and known as Lake Powell). I wish I could've seen Glen Canyon, as from everything I've read it seems like a beautiful place, but such is life.

I camped there, and in the morning set out for Lone Pine, California. It involved crossing more state lines than any other day, I think (although it was only tied for most different states visited, at four), as I went from Arizona, to Utah, to Arizona, to Utah, to Arizona, to Nevada, to California, back to Nevada to fill up (so I didn't run out of gas in the middle of Death Valley), and then back to California.

A Surprising Lack of Mormons:

As I was going through Utah for the first time, the road twisted its way between a bunch of different mesas and hills that I just couldn't resist the urge to see closer up. I turned off onto one of the dirt side roads the cut across the desert, a rocky, tire-rutted trail across the sand, and less than a mile in, I crashed.

Not too bad, mind you. My wheels got trapped in a deep tire track left at some point that the road had been muddy, and the track turned before I was able to stop the bike, and I crashed. I wasn't doing more than fifteen miles an hour at this point, probably not more than ten, but the bike tipped over onto its left side (same as on Pike's Peak) with me still on it. The gear-shift pedal lever thing got bent, but I was able to bend it back to almost its original shape, and the left mirror shattered. With a ballpoint pen, the casing for the mirror, some electrical tape, and a supplementary convex mirror from an auto parts store I was able to make a passable replacement. I also lost the left passenger footrest (it didn't come off in the accident, but must've gotten loosened and fallen off sometime later), and the muffler repairs all got knocked around so as to be pretty much useless. I picked up more muffler tape but haven't had a chance to re-patch it yet (probably later today).

Pulp Fiction:

After that, it was relatively smooth sailing. I got annoyed and frustrated in Nevada in the section leading up to Las Vegas (now my second-least-favorite metropolitan area, just ahead of St. Louis). Way too many tractor-trailers. If any of you ever happen to drive a truck, please keep the following in mind: if you're going roughly the same speed as a small motorcycle, let the motorcycle be in front. Although it makes no difference to you, driving behind a truck is exceedingly difficult, due to the turbulence created, and as a result we either have to continually play leapfrog with you to avoid it, or slow down and let you get significantly ahead. This holds true for large motorcycles, too, but they've got enough power to just straight-up pass you and keep going. Small bikes such as mine max out at roughly 55-85 mph (depending on steepness of road, amount of luggage, and wind), and so we're stuck if you're doing the same speed as us, because on the interstate we're going as fast as we can.

Rant over.

Anyway, after that, Nevada wasn't too bad. After Nevada, after getting to California, I realized that, unless there happened to be a gas station in the middle of Death Valley, it was highly unlikely that I'd make it through with the amount of gas I had left. I turned around and had to backtrack about forty miles to the nearest service station (however beautiful the midwest and the southwest are, the barrenness is annoying when you're traveling with a 4-gallon gas tank). Tank filled, I set off into Death Valley, only to find that, about twenty miles in, there was, in fact, a gas station. The gas was $5.459 a gallon, but I'd have payed it given that I only would've needed two gallons, and that would've saved me about an hour and a half of driving time. Such is life. Next time I'll know.

Driving through Death Valley was fun, although it was also a little scary. I don't know whether it would've been better or worse to do it during the daytime, instead of the pitch blackness that I had. If it'd been light I could've seen the road a bit farther ahead, but I could've also seen over the side of the road, which, especially after Pike's Peak, would've been a bit scary (despite what almost all of my behavior seems to indicate, I am actually somewhat afraid of heights). It's called a valley, and yes, in the sense of having mountains on either side, it is a valley, but when you think of a valley, you, like me, probably think of a low place between two strings of mountains. It's true that Death Valley has low points – at one spot, I was over 100 feet below sea level. However, it then rises up to almost 5,000 feet, before dropping back to nearly sea level and then rising back up over 4,000 feet again, all in the course of twenty miles of road. I'm sure the views were excellent, but as it was as close to pitch black as I've ever come in nature (excluding one cave in Ha Long Bay where I literally hit my nose on the wall in front of my face), I couldn't see them.

California:

After that, Lone Pine, California, in Inyo County. Inyo is notable in that it contains both the highest (Mt. Whitney) and lowest (Badwater) points in the continental United States. I passed a few miles northeast of Badwater yesterday, and on Tuesday I'll be hiking to within a few miles of the Mt. Whitney summit. Due to the snow conditions, I won't be going for the top. It's advised that only those with significant winter mountaineering experience attempt the summit, and I have none, and am traveling alone (and, admittedly, don't much feel like looking for a group to join, as I like doing the hikes on this trip alone). So, I won't be going for the top, just one of the lower base camps. (To see the importance of experience and the potential risks of failure, go to the Wikipedia page for Mt. Whitney and look at the picture. There isn't currently that much snow, but still a significant amount.)

So, after arriving in Lone Pine, I checked into a motel and quickly passed out, because yesterday was a very long day. Today is planning and preparation and relaxation, as will be tomorrow.

I've taken photos of stuff the past few days, but because of the difficulties of working with them on this computer, I'm just going to hold off on posting them until the end of the trip. Speaking of which, where should I go next? I feel like changing the plan, so suggestions are welcome. I'm currently in eastern California, about the middle north-south wise, and after leaving here on the 9^th I've got about 10 days to make it back to Charlottesville. I can ride upwards of 600 miles a day. Any suggestions?