I've Been Tired

There's something about not feeling busy or productive that just makes you feel downer. I've been feeling that way lately. Maybe it was due to eating too much at lunch time (treated to Tucanos by Mike and Kitye with their free birthday coupons), being bored at work, or it was the fact that we watched a couple hours of TV and a movie last night. I'm getting pretty grossed out by TV most of the time. The commercial breaks, the loud obnoxious commercials, the forced breaks in the plot for commercials. Your brain goes crazy waiting and jerked around by so many different things. Let me either watch the movie, or watch just commercials.

So I wake up feeling miserable and down. I even contemplated for a second going back to sleep. But, I ate some applesauce and milk for breakfast while reading the inspirational thoughts from President Hinckley in this month's Ensign.

I enjoyed the enthusiasm and optimism he has for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Most of the thoughts centered on the atonement of the Savior and our relationship to him. It helped me out a great deal, and by the time I was done, I'd been caused to reflect on what's crucial and I was feeling great!

For those who didn't see the email I sent out the other day, here's a cool article done by the Washington Post about taking the time to appreciate and watch out for beauty. Maybe that's what I needed today, a moment to reflect on what's good and beautiful.

Vamos

When Emily and I first got married, with our first tax return, we bought bicycles. A little over two years later, and we'd hardly put many miles on them (or at least, on mine). I've been able to ride it since May (thanks for bringing it back up Mom and Dad) and I've had a great time. The problem is that with it sitting for so long, I'm afraid of how much work it needed to get it into prime riding condition. It squeaked like a couple parakeets and there were little grinding noises. The dérailleurs caused the chain to jump back and forth between gears. And then this summer, something happened to form a small bulge in the rim wall of my rear tire.

So yesterday, I took it to Mad Dog Cycles in Provo and had the guy look it over. I'd already tweaked with the derailleurs and got them working, but the rest of it I wasn't sure. So he recommends some new lubricant and tells me how to clean the chain and lube it all up. Its amazing stuff.
Here's a quick lesson on lubricating a bicycle:
1. Use dish soap, water, and a toothbrush to scrub the chain down real good.
2. Try it again but with Simple Green or PineSol.
3. Use a sock or rag and wipe it clean, let the chain airdry.
4. While the chain is drying, wipe down the rest of your bike real well with a damp paper towel.
5. Use the Dumonde Tech lubricant real sparingly, you don't even have to squeeze, just run it along the the chain links. Wipe off any extra.
6. Lubricate the pulley discs near the back wheel (they make the parrot noises), the brake levers (NOT THE PADS), the cabels near the sheathing, and any other moving parts, go small, a little of the stuff goes a LONG way.
7. Go for a little spin after the lube has soaked for a minute and enjoy the smoothness and silence of the ride.
8. Reapply when you start hearing noises from the chain.

I was absolutely amazed at the noise not coming from my bike. It was like stealth mode. Spy Hunter. I had such a good time enjoying my nice newish bike, Zack (Emily's cousin) and I dinked around the parking lot trying to pop wheelies and do bunny hops for about 20 minutes. This morning as I rode to work, something was funny about my back wheel, it's tweaked crooked. Doh!

Break My Body

For those who don't know what a glutton for punishment Emily is, let me brag a bit. I traced the path below on GoogleEarth that Emily will do on her bicycle a couple times a week WHILE TOWING GRACE IN THE TRAILER!!!!!! This path is only about 5.5 miles but it weaves in and out, up and down the foothill neighborhoods of Provo. STEEP STREETS! Our car has a hard time with many of them (not saying much, but STILL!) And she's not content to ride up once, rest a bit and ride down, she'll ride up a street, then down the next, and back up the next street. It keeps her busy for about an hour.

The other week, she was up at the top of the ride (can't get any higher in Provo on pavement) when a wheel to the trailer came off. Crrrrrkkkkkk. She looked around for 20 minutes but could not figure out where the wheel went. Her dad picked her up and took her home. On my lunch break I decided I needed some exercise so I rode up to go look for it. Woooof.

After 20 minutes of scrounging yards and bushes and trees, I found it just around the corner from where she lost it. Good thing it didn't roll itself all the way down the street, it has like a 12% grade or something. Imagine the speed and air it would have caught if it had made it even halfway down the street before launching off a bump or curb. Wahoooo!! It would've been cool to watch.

So I did the awesomely unnerdy thing and strapped the wheel to my back with my belt through the spokes and rode down like a scared little girl clutching the brakes on my bike. I rode up and down from the Y trailhead today with a bit more confidence.

Here's the bike Emily rides (except its a few years older and the paint job is gray and no flowers. A Trek 7000 . Emily got it brand new a few months ago even as a 2005. Trine has the same bike from 2006. In case anyone sees Emily and thinks she looks amazing like I do, this is why. She wants to try for a 100mi bike ride in September when the weather's a little cooler.

Here's the trailer, not the smallest or lightest, but its solid and tough. The KidaRooz Bike Trailer. Not the most professionally built, but we've been very pleased with it and it was worth the money. Real smooth and easy to use. The biggest downfall we've had with it is that the clamp doesn't like my bike frame much because too much jostling and it detaches (we've put the safety strap to good use). Emily doesn't have the same problem. (And the wheel falling off might have been a user issue :-)

Something Against You

I did it, I finally created an official blog. Maybe its because I'm bored at work, maybe because I do like the attention and hope to get more of it, or maybe just because I'm at work at computer support surrounded by technology and it fulfills an innate desire to tinker and experiment. (My old crappy version of a blog was a pain)

The past few days I've been playing with Microsoft's free Virtual PC software. I set up my own little station here at work and having fun messing with it to get it the way I like. I tried three different times to put Linux on this machine. I like using the popular Linux OSes but they still have so many kinks to work out, that I don't feel it's worth my time. I tried Ubuntu but I'm not a big fan of the look and scheming of it. In response I tried Kubuntu which is Ubuntu with a different desktop package. (Ubuntu uses one called Gnome, and Kubuntu uses KDE). Here's a shot of Kubuntu inside Virtual PC.

First, trouble with the mouse, but found fixes for it here. Then trouble with the sound, but found no fix for that yet. I discovered that if I used an older version, both problems are solved. This came after using this to get the graphics to work inside Virtual PC. I'm no linux or anything guru, so beyond these was just not happening. Even getting a chat client that works with GoogleTalk is a chore. I checked into other linuxes but got lazy about trying them.

The one thing I really enjoy but have a hard time satisfying myself with are great desktop pictures. This one is awesome. It has amazing clarity and detail, a lot to look at, but not so distracting as to be hard on the eyes.

After all this, here I am, I'll try to keep this up with at least small posts regularly.

Where Is My Mind

July 30, 2007

I've decided two things, Googlepages isn't much good unless you're going to create your own web page from scratch and upload it to their servers, and that this will just be an online journal for when I'm bored at work, which has been ALL THE TIME for the past week. I'm not out to hide it, nor am I out to broadcast it. The only place I've noted it is on my little Facebook page I made last week, just for kicks (not like I have much else to do). I enjoy reading The Odyssey, but I procrastinate picking it up because it is tough reading, like walking through the knee-deep mud to enjoy the scenery.
Part of the beef I have with blogs and things like this is that I would spend so much time on them while journals and scrapbooks go untouched. If I'm going to write the little I feel like from time to time, I'd like to be able to keep a copy of what I write without the "copy and paste" stuff. This page is simple enough I could print it off as is without losing much of the contextual feel. I could also save it as a simple web page and keep a digital copy of it for the future. I do not mind anybody reading anything I write, but I would personally feel a little bit narcisstic asking or advertising it to be read, since this more of a journal than edutainment. This is mostly for me, but all are welcome to it.

Subbacultcha

July 26, 2007

Here's the joke, last week, as many of you might know, the new Harry Potter book leaked out onto the internet in a set of four PDF files where the copyright infringer took digital pictures of each page as he held it open with his hand. The files were on various web pages for about one half hour before they got taken down. After that, the only way to get them was using bittorrent (which isn't hard, but we can't do it easily from campus). But because we're all techno-geeks here, we read Digg all morning long and a fellow employee spotted it and alerted it. We managed to grab three of the files before they disappeared. One of us started reading it (despite the blurry text, he just guessed at some of the words). 20 minutes later, our supervisor comes in and says "Did you guys hear that Harry Potter got leaked?" We reply, "Yeah but we only got 3 of the 4 files." His quick response, "I got all of 'em. I'll pass them over." So 4 of the 6 employees here finished the story before the book was officially released. Since one of them had pre-ordered it as well, he let me borrow his copy on Monday and I finished it yesterday.
Fun stuff. I didn't think it could be done. I thought the author set herself up for doom with too much complexity and twists and surprises. It was done masterfully.
If it had been anything else, done in any other matter, I don't think anyone here would have cared, but it was pop-culture being violated by the underground. Just a less-dangerous way of fighting the man while becoming a little more cool for having read it around the time of the big craze (Give it a month or two and no one will be talking about it much, in fact you'll be uncool for having read it so late).
And thanks to Cristin for the tip on getting found by search engines. Supposed to add this link, and it should come up. We'll see Technorati Profile . We'll have to see if this works. By the way, I have the lassensurf@gmail.com or our usual twolassens@gmail.com account if you wanna drop a line. I haven't figured out how to add comments to this thing yet.

There Goes My Gun

Orig: July 23, 2007

Just chilling in our cave. I've gained 5 pounds since everyone moved out of the HFAC. Anybody who is still here on campus is across campus, so we've started remoting into their computers with Crossloop or Apple Remote Desktop to fix whatever is wrong. Mostly all we're doing lately is setting up new faculty computers. Once in a while I get an excuse to run up and down the stairs a few times, but other than that, I'm just sitting here from 8-4 everyday. For some exercise, on Saturday, after filling in nail holes and painting shelves up at the Robbins' house for a few hours, Emily dropped me off at the Y Trailhead at about 7:05pm. I got to the top of the Y in less than 30 min. I didn't think I was going that fast, but I sure felt it by the time I got up there. I went up the mountain into Slide Canyon for another 20 minutes, but didn't get very far. Never having hiked the trail before, and having a darkening limit on time, I decided not to press my luck.
When I started, there was one car in the lot, and I met the two guys on their way down as I was headed up. By the time I got back to the parking lot at 8:45, it was almost full. It's more popular up there on Saturday nights than I thought.
This morning, I finished Motherload, a fun little flash game that took about 10 hours of playing spread out over several days. You dig around for ore which you can sell, then upgrade your pod, all the while receiving the occasional eerie message of foreboding and terror from other miners and your boss. To spoil the ending, dig too deep and it turns out your boss is the devil and he tries to kill you for not heeding his warnings and being too greedy. So, use your explosives and kill him twice, get a bunch of artifacts off his body for cash and the game starts over except that in your inventory you have 1xSatan's Head. Fun stuff. This is what happens when you're suddenly out of things to do (don't have to study for the DAT or fill out secondary dental school apps for now).
So, as for plans of things to do, I should contact the Outdoor Club and make up a proposal to ask for sponsors to buy paddling/rowing equipment for the club. I also started Homer's The Odyssey, but everyone at work has read and finished the new Harry Potter so maybe I'll borrow a copy and read it too.

The Happening

Orig: June 26, 2007

I'm kinda happened out. I guess this is what happens when you sit in the library for several hours. I studied for the DAT for about 4 hours, and have been chilling for the past 45 min, checking out paddleboards for sale online new and used. Also looked for a digital camera for under $150 (although we probably can't afford that right now.

After all that, read the latest from family blogs and thought about creating my own, except I don't wanna be too trendy or anything. That's why I'm doing it on googlepages, my own way (sort of). If only I could figure out how to get this page to show up in search engines like it says it's supposed to (they say it takes a few hours, mine hasn't been picked up in a few months).

I walked to school cuz somehow a big hole appeared in the side of my bicycle tire, like a little tank inside the tube shot a hole out from the inside. Go figure. Funny enough, I checked out Amazon.com for bikes and they have a bunch of cheap road bikes (low end quality, but cheap nonetheless...).

At work, they've closed down the HFAC for electrical renovations and everyone has moved out for the summer. Yesterday we had to go back in to move out a few more computers and got to use headlamps to do it in the dark. We've relocated ourselves into our secret clubhouse in the Museum of Art, with the Dean's Office in the gallery just outside. So, I gotta go crawl into our cave for the next few hours.