jerryjackson.net

I have some thoughts about what it takes to force decision making in business - and some day I will write at considerable length about it. The short version is simply this: “Pain is the only driving force behind business decisions”. Quite often the motivator is the desire to avoid or stop pain. In this case, I was experiencing enough physical discomfort to act upon it.

More than 10 years ago, I purchased a large (72 x 36 inches) well built desk from a used furniture dealer. It is, by far, the sturdiest and heaviest desk I have ever seen. The guy had dozens of them - all identical models - ranging in price from $50 to $200. The cheaper ones had varying levels of cosmetic damage while the $200 ones looked nearly new. I purchased the $50 variety (slight water damage on the bottom and lots of nicks and scratches on the sides) and have kicked myself on many occasions since then for not buying several of them.

As nice as it is, it is a plain rectangular shape, while I greatly prefer to sit in the L of an L-shaped desk such that I can support my elbows on the desk - which increases my comfort level substantially. For me, this translates into increased productivity.

Lately, I have been toying with the idea of building myself an entirely new, custom-designed, L-shaped desk. This would have easily consumed 2 full weekends of my time and around $300 in materials. Time I don’t have right now, and money I’d rather not spend given that my existing desk is otherwise perfect. Many months ago I built a super-custom L-shaped work area into a corner of my daughters bedroom - and have been jealous ever since that she’s sitting up there in total elbow resting comfort while I’m down here “suffering”

Finally, last night, I couldn’t take it any more. Time to head out to the garage to look through what materials I have on hand to use in building an “extension” onto my desk:

• 3/4 inch oak plywood - check
• enough angle iron with which to fabricate brackets to hold the desktop extension in place - check
• various wood screws - check
• skinny jig-saw blade for cutting the curves - check
• fresh belt for the belt sander - check
• could I actually FIND my 1/4 inch roundover router bit - check
• water-based poly sealer to waterproof the plywood - check

Two hours later the result is:

Reason for the odd shape is that I can swivel my chair 30 degrees to the left and comfortably use my laptop and still have a place for both arms to rest.

The brackets underneath:

These brackets are fabricated as a sliding piece connected to the wooden extension which slides into a channel attached to the desk such that I can slide the assembly out of there in 2 seconds to return to the orignal configuration.

Even though it is wide enough to partially block access to the top drawers, I can still somewhat use them without much trouble. If needed I can slide the extension out of the channels in 2 seconds and have full drawer access.

Here I sit - in total comfort!

Thankfully, I won’t need to see this for much longer:

Whenever pair-programming with one of my co-workers, we see this one very often. I am sure their apology is sincere. My favorite part is the “No information has been lost” - when in fact we have seen plenty of instances where there WAS information lost when he couldn’t hit the CTRL-S keys quickly enough. There have been many other strange observations during my recent adventures with the .NET platform.

Soon I will be starting at a new gig where I’ll be using old familiar friends (and some new ones) like:

• Linux (no more Windows!)
• Java
• JBoss related projects such as:
  • Seam
  • Hibernate
  • Tools
  • and probably even JBoss Developer Studio
• GWT and GWT-Ext and Ext GWT
• MySQL
• Vim
• Eclipse
• Subversion or maybe I’ll use Git instead
• plus anything else I need to get the job done, which is very likely to include:
  • C++ - done properly or not at all
  • Ruby and/or JRuby
  • PHP
  • Ant, Maven, buildr as needed to automate and simplify the build/test/deploy processes.
    • while on the subject of automation, the .NET developers out there should take a look at NAnt if you’re suffering with inconsistent and error-prone building and deployment issues. There’s plenty of info on using NAnt with Visual Studio.
  • among others

Of course, this means I’ll probably start writing about the new set of challenges and problems instead of these old ones

Today’s 0800 breakfast at Robinson Restaurant was attended by:

• Rick (Honda Hawk)
• Nancy (Honda Hawk)
• Gil (BMW K75)
• Don (BMW R1200RS)
• Mike (Yamaha FZ1)
• Dave (Honda F2 600)
• Me (Suzuki GSXR1000)

Nancy went home after breakfast and missed out on all the fun (and lots of sand in the corners). We decided to ride the “west loop” again this week (after last week’s little mishap caused us to convert the ride into a “central north loop” ride).

We made the obligatory stop at the top of the “mountain”:

And, of course, we did as much of this as we could - given the fact we’re in central Florida and most of the curves still have sand left by the recent storms. Local riders will immediately recognize this as the famous curve on Laws Rd. This video shows the “easy” direction (heading west) for the curve. MANY riders have been surprised by it going the other direction (heading east) because that east-bound left hander is, as you can see on the google map, a double-apex curve. It is also off-camber - which means by the time you’ve blasted through the right-hander and you’re starting to have fun - the left-hander sucks you in - then all the sudden you have NO MORE available lean angle and will soon be meeting the spectators (cows) out in the pasture to the right. A better name for the road would be “Laws of Physics Rd”.

One more short video snippet:

Made it home in one piece with 178 miles logged for the day!

Met up with Kyle and Steve (coworkers), plus Rick, Tom, and Mike at Robinson Restaurant in Apopka at 0800. The plan was for us to ride our traditional “west loop” starting at the north end of Binion Rd. It was a good plan.

Little did I know that Steve was going to test the off-road capabilities of his Suzuki C50 only a few minutes into the ride. At least he picked the perfect spot to do it (right here, going south around this left-hand curve) where there was plenty of tall, wet, soft grass for him and his bike to slide in. Thankfully, Steve ended up with only very minor abrasions - though I am certain he will not come out of the bed like a spring in the morning.

I was riding behind him when this happened which meant I could evaluate the off-road characteristics as an observer. The BIG surprise for me was how well the big Suzuki handled the TWO end-overs - with nowhere near the amount of damage I expected to see! It only took me 30 seconds to have the bike back in “rideable” condition - well enough that he was able to ride it more than an hour back to his dealership for repairs.

Oh yeah - almost forgot - my on-board VIDEO camera was running at the time:

Seriously though, I believe this was a classic case of “Target Fixation“. Once his front tire got into the wet grass, it was done. It could have ended up a million different ways today - most of them much worse than what happened. MORE IMPORTANTLY, this can AND DOES happen all the time - even with very experienced riders - and it’s easy to avoid. NEVER EVER lose track of exactly where the ROAD AHEAD of you is at - as in following the curve with your eyes. Like all the articles ever written about this say, your bike goes where you are looking.

Here’s another way of thinking about it: If you find yourself on a bad trajectory in the middle of a curve (either because you went in too hot or because your attention drifted for a brief moment or because you had to avoid something in the road or any other reason), THERE IS NO TIME to think about whether or not the bike is capable of making the turn. At that point, one of two things WILL happen:

1. You will look at the thing you don’t want to crash into (such as the road shoulder or a guard rail or an oncoming vehicle) and you WILL crash into it.
2. You will FOCUS on the road ahead all the way through the curve and NOT THINK ABOUT how far leaned over the bike already is and provide enough steering input to force the bike to go where you are LOOKING - at which point, 99.9% of the time, the bike will do what you asked and the tire’s grip on the pavement will not fail you.

I have been riding for more than 30 years and target fixation STILL tries to sneak up on me - and I suspect NO rider is immune to it.

I am 100% certain today’s incident will make Steve (along with the rest of us) a better rider!

After Steve and Kyle headed back toward Kissimmee, the remaining four of us continued the ride and arrived at the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain (the second-highest point of elevation in Florida) for a short break. This is a really nice area of Florida that, like so many others, is being overrun with housing construction. Perhaps the housing market woes will at least slow it down a little bit. Our group rides all over central Florida and beyond nearly every weekend and I am completely at a loss to understand how the magnitude of construction projects we see is being supported.

From the top of the “mountain” it is sometimes possible to see the Orlando skyline out over Lake Apopka (full size image is here) if the atmospheric haze isn’t too thick - as was the case today:

The new video camera mount worked better today, however, I still had one of the dreaded camera freeze-up issues as I was accelerating hard while hitting bumps. Overall, it is working much better than before.

On the way home, I stopped at a little store to put away the camera and came to the conclusion that bad luck is plentiful today. This poor guy’s boating trip evidently didn’t go as planned either.

A few more sessions of this and I’ll have the situation corrected:

The pile is slowly growing. I finished up the day with around 2000 shiny new cast boolits. I would normally do a run of 5000+ but didn’t have time for that today.

These were made from recycled wheel-weights using this Lee 6-cavity mold poured from my Lee 20 pound bottom-pour pot.

Today’s ride was all about making sure Camera Mount - Version 2.0 would work properly. In a nutshell, it didn’t dampen the vibration enough. It worked much better than my original version, but still transmitted enough vibration to the camera to cause the same temporary malfunctions I observed during the initial test run - just less frequently than before.

It did, however, work well enough to capture this video of me following Rick as we carefully navigated a stretch of pavement we thought would have a lot of sand in the corners left by the recent rain - but today there was no sand:

Note: the photos and videos in this blog post were all taken with the little Casio EX-Z80 which is proving to be a fantastic $150 camera.

Time for enhancements to the camera mount - more vibration isolators:

Now it’s a “double stack” with two separate layers of isolation:

Crude? Yes. Of course! This setup provides a considerable amount of vibration reduction while at the same time holding the camera steady enough to capture good video. The road test that followed this modification has me convinced that the problem may be permanently fixed.

This little bit of spirited acceleration would consistently cause the camera to malfunction previously, however, now it seems to be working fine:

Oh yeah - the ride report. We (Tom, Rick, Nancy, Mike, and I) met at the Osteen Diner at 0800. We did the “east loop” which includes the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge and some other good (top-secret) areas out there. It was a nice relaxing ride with moderate temperatures and good weather.

This really reveals some of the dynamic range of this most excellent Yamaha S700 Grand Piano sample I’ve loaded into my XS8. It really is reason enough, by itself, to get one of these Yamaha keyboards! I’ve embedded it here for the sake of the higher quality audio and video as opposed to what you see and hear on my Youtube.com page.

Being a previous owner of the S90es qualifed me to participate in a “Loyalty Program” which entitled me to receive the same awesome S700 samples I had in the S90es (although I think there’s other ways to get it).

I can’t seem to find any good information on the history of the Yamaha S700 Grand Piano, but I did find one reference suggesting it was a 7′ 6″ model they sold in 1991.

In my last Sunday Ride Report I mentioned vibration induced camera malfunctions while out on the initial test ride with the new camera mounting bracket.

This evening I fabricated an additional vibration isolating bracket. Here’s the finished parts pile:

Top-down view of the lower section of the new bracket. Those upright pieces of angle steel will serve as a slot into which I will be sliding a tight-fitting piece of clear 0.220 inch thick clear Lexan plastic.

I purchased these little vibration isolators at Skycraft Parts and Surplus:

Here’s how the base of the bracket attaches to the upper vibration-isolated piece:

Top-down view with the camera attached:

Rear view:

Front view. With the clear Lexan plastic in place, the camera will be well protected from wind, bugs, and rocks. The whole thing is held in my original bracket with the wing nut.

In my last post about Youtube, I was exploring various ways to create and upload the best quality files to the Youtube service, however, I was still embedding the lousy low-quality video with monophonic sound into my web pages.

Now that I’ve discovered an easier way to embed the better quality versions of Youtube content using the Smart Youtube plug-in for WordPress, check these out:

This one is me goofing around with my Yamaha XS8 on a slow-n-easy jazz/funk beat (complete with mistakes!). Compare the video and stereo audio on this page to what you see and hear on the Youtube page.

Here’s another comparison with just a classic 12-string guitar sound you can compare to the one on the Youtube page.

Yes, it can sound like a piano too (this is the S700 Piano Sample) - compare to the Youtube page version:

Ok - enough of my feeble attempts at making a keyboard sound like a guitar - watch this (high quality with stereo whereas the Youtube page itself is nowhere near as good) to see how a true master does it - Steve Vai playing Tender Surrender:

UPDATE: Camera Mount - Version 2.0Â

Tom arrived at my place at 0700 as planned. We arrived at Robinson Restaurant in Apopka at 0756 where we met up with Rick, Nancy, Dave, and Don.

Today’s breakfast was good and inexpensive as usual. Nothing unusual to report about the ride itself - we did what we normally refer to as the “north loop” which takes us as far north as hwy 40 east of Ocala (including my most favorite road in all of Florida).

For me, today’s ride was a test of my new pocket sized Casio EX-Z80 camera and the mount I fabricated for it yesterday. After some minor bending of the top tab on the bracket, I had the camera pretty well aligned with the motorcycle and captured a bunch of short videos during today’s ride.

Here’s a video of me following Rick on Emeralda Island Rd:

This was a 55MB .mov file (straight from the camera at 640x480x30fps) which I uploaded to Youtube. The original actually looks MUCH better than you’re seeing served up here from Youtube (they reprocess whatever you upload to a limited bit rate such that it almost never looks as good as the original). If you’re a WordPress user like me, you may be interested in knowing about the “Smart Youtube” plug-in for WordPress. I used it here to embed this high-quality video which is displayed at 480x355 instead of the Youtube default of 425x344.

However, there were some technical problems along the way which I no doubt caused.

On one occasion, the camera spontaneously froze with a bunch of vertical lines on the screen. On two other occasions, it simply turned itself off. When this happened, I had to remove the battery to get the camera to reboot itself. There was one thing in common during all these failures - they happened when I was riding the GSXR-1000 in a VERY spirited manner. This left me suspecting one of three possible reasons for the camera problems - a very significant increase in:

1. the wind pressure on the front of the camera, and/or
2. the bumps in the road being amplified by my somewhat elevated speed, and/or
3. the more intense high-frequency vibration from the engine.

Therefore, I am planning a bit of re-engineering for the camera mount. In a nutshell, the revised mount will have the following new features:

• Instead of the camera being directly attached to the upright of the mounting bracket, I will add vibration isolators between the camera and mounting bracket such that the engine vibration and shock loads from bumps in the road will be mostly absorbed by the isolators.
• An easily replaceable Lexan shield will be mounted in front of the camera and will be rigidly attached to the upright of the bracket such that only the camera is using the vibration isolators. This should provide four benfits:
  • Wind pressure to the front of the camera will be eliminated.
  • The annoying wind noise will be mostly eliminated such that it can pick up more of the engine noise.
  • I won’t need to worry about bugs and debris hitting the camera.
  • I will carry plenty of spare pieces of Lexan which can slide into place in the event they get damaged to the point where video quality is being negatively affected.

I am certain these camera issues are totally my fault as it was never intended to perform in this role. At this point I am 100% satisfied with the Casio EX-Z80 because it takes great still photos and videos AND most importantly I can very easily transfer the videos to my computers without suffering through the hassle of capturing digital video from an “old-school” camera which uses digital tapes.

Stay tuned for a follow-up posting about version 2.0 of the camera mount.