Garden update

The garden is rocking along producing tons of tomatos, beans and squash. The Basil is booming, squeezing out the Japanese Eggplant and some of the peppers. We're buying lots of fresh motz to compliment the tomatoes and basil. Roasted squash is also popular on the menu now. I don't know about the corn. Some of the ears look ok but over all it looks pretty spindly and thin. Pumpkins are coming along nicely with 3-4 already ripe.

I don't think we added enough fertilizer to the soil at planting time which prevented some of the plants from really thriving. I've recently started to add nitrogen and have seen a big response. We have been composting our yard clippings for 6 months and have a good supply of amendment now so things should be better when we replant this winter.

Jens crashed (twice) today in the Tour

But it's Ok, the mountain wasn't badly hurt and is expected to fully recover.

fsck and Time Machine

If you use Apple's Time Machine to back-up your Mac and you notice fsck running (and you will notice because it uses up about 50% of available CPU when it runs) don't kill it. Even if it runs for 24+ hours, crippling your machines performance the whole time, don't kill it. Even if you have a SSD based drive that manages file-system integrity at a lower level, and aren't completely sure it's needed, don't kill it.

If you do get impatient, for example watching an exciting finish of a tour stage and the video re-buffers constantly, and you stupidly kill it, you will immediately get a message say your time machine backup agent explaining that all the existing backups are now inconsistent and you will need to start a completely new 100+ Gb backup set from scratch. Lesson Learned.

Bamboo Framebuilding

Thanks to a friend I recently had the opportunity to take a bamboo bicycle frame-building workshop at the Bamboo Bike Studio in San Francisco.

Bamboo on Wheels is a video
from Jan Sturmann on Vimeo
that describes why bamboo
makes good bicycles.

Here are some of the tubes used to build the frames. Tubes are selected according to rider weight and the ride characteristics desired.

The jig is setup with balsa wood blocks to anchor the main tubes and steel dropouts to anchor the stays. The ends of the tubes are roughed up to increase the grip of the epoxy and carbon used to join the tubes later.

File and saw remove everything this isn't a bicycle.It sure is a lot easier to file than a traditional steel frame.

Filing the non-structural balsa wood to make a smooth shape around the steel head-tube. Glad I had clean fingernails here.

Here is the frame ready to wrap with carbon thread.

The carbon is a thread made of many thousand strands of super-fine fiber that must each be coated with epoxy for maximum strength and stiffness.

The finished joint is wrapped in tape to compress the epoxy deep into the fibers. In 12 hours the epoxy has cured and is hard enough to sand smooth.

Stage 4

Great work by Thor to stay in Yellow today. He's a giant - 6' and 180 Lbs - for a pro cyclist, so staying with the lead climbers for that uphill finish shows was an amazing performance. It takes a great rider to wear the yellow jersey but the jersey makes them greater. Thor & Co. will wear it all week.

Cycling's Phil Mickelson, Cadel Evans, finally kept his head out of his saddle to win a much-deserved first stage. It's great he's found a place where he is happy and I look forward to seeing how well he can do now.

Day 1

I like that the Tour started without the traditional prolog, kinda like jumping right into the deep end of the pool. Contador's lost minute is gonna make things interesting. After his Giro performance he needs the handicap. The finish fit Gilbert like a glove and he crushed it, destroying Cancallara in the process. Mark Cavendish says it better than I could...

MarkCavendish Just saw todays last kilometre. Gilbert humbled everyone with the equivalence of pulling down his pants to reveal a 13incher. #YIKES

Le Tour

That big bike race in France starts tomorrow and after the brutal appetizer that was this year's Giro, it should be quite a show. Seems unlikely anyone can even get close to Contador this year. He was a monster in the Giro. Two years ago I was a huge fan having watched him as a junior rider, but after close call of Puerto and the Clenbuterol train-wreck, he seem to be just another pro doper now.

There is one rider I have followed for years, since his spectacular performance on Stage 15 of the 2004 tour, and look forward to his antics this year especially. He'll never challenge for the Yellow, but he's always there to drive the break and steal the odd win. My man is Jens Voigt. With 15 seasons in the saddle, he's nearly my age yet he yet he races with the abandon of a junior and the power of a machine.

Reflecting on the twilight of his career, he recently wrote: "Every time I race, I will race so fiercely my legs cry, and when I can’t do that anymore, that’s when I will know it’s time for myself to shut up and leave."

There is a word used in climbing, cycling, even in the military to describe that rare individual who never even thinks to quit, never shirks, never even thinks about the pain. That word is "Hardman". I only personally know a few guys who I would call "Hardman" - most were Marines -- but Jens defines the word. When I'm climbing on the bike or run out on a steep pitch and feel that first flicker of doubt, I think of Jens and and say "Shut-up legs" and push on knowing that whatever I'm doing, Jens is doing more.