Posts from — December 2005

It’s sad, but this excites me:

Today I got access to a dual processor Radiance machine, and finally got to try out a newish feature of rpict, the -N switch. Using this option, rpict will send multiple renderings to multiple CPUs if your machine has them. If I had four CPUs, rpict could render four images in parallel. In the image above, you can see that two rpict processes are getting 99% of a CPUs resources. Trust me, this is cool.

A moment of silence please, for Bil. It’s a year today.

What a day! After some snow on Tuesday, and horrendously cold air Wednesday & Thursday, things finally warmed up again on Friday. By the weekend a lot of the snow had melted from bike paths, and it was finally time, at long last, for Brenda to get a chance to try out her new bike and join me for a ride through Boulder.

I bought Brenda a sweet Bianchi Milano on eBay, but it arrived exactly a day after she headed back to NJ for her last freelance gig in November. So I was really glad to see ma nature cooperating this weekend, her first full weekend back in Boulder.

I feel like I’ve been pushing the bike thing with her, but she was the one who was raring to go this morning. We rolled out, joined the Bear Creek Path which runs right behind our development, and moments later joined up with the Boulder Creek Path, tracing the banks of Boulder Creek as we rolled into town. We ended up at the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, where we had breakfast, and then rode over a few blocks to the Pearl Street shopping district. We locked up, and strolled along the pedestrian-only mall, picking up presents all along the way.

Pressing my old messenger bag and Brenda’s handlebar basket into service, we loaded our booty and re-traced our steps home. It was a great day and I’m glad I got to share it with Brenda, outside, via bicycle.

The other day I had another brilliant idea. I’m going to design and build my own bicycle frameset. Yet another hobby. Excellent.

The idea came upon me suddenly, and for the last week or two I have been doing a lot of research on the topic. But it’s not as though this is a new thing for me. I have always wanted to build a frameset for myself; when I was working in bike shops fifteen years ago, it bothered me that I could basically assemble everything on a bicycle, I could take a hub, rim and a handful of spokes and build a strong wheel, but the one thing on the bike I couldn’t assemble from scratch was the frame. I also have a lot of personal biases toward various design elements in bike frames, and it would be fun to combine them all into one frameset. Take the flat “track-style” fork crown that Richard Sachs does, and roll it in with the beautiful fluted seatstay design of Tom Kellogg’s Spectrum Cycles, and a few other touches, and paint “guglielmetti” on the downtube. But the thing is, back in the day I was living in an apartment and the whole thing was simply not feasible. Now that I have a big garage, I’ve been thinking that this framebuilding thing is less of a pipe dream.

So, I’ve since discovered that there’s an active mailing list dedicated to matters of framebuilding, and lots of folks rolling their own frames. This woman’s site was the final inspiration for me, and I have since re-read my old copy of “Designing and Building your own Frameset”, which I bought many years ago when I first thought about doing this.

Look for updates here, eventually. For now it’s still in the planning stages, but I think this is definitely something that’s gonna happen. Maybe this will be the first step towards my ultimate homebuilding goal, which is to build an airplane.