Shimano 7 Speed Cassette

I have an old 21 speed hybrid bicycle. I was keeping my daughter company while she was out running at Rood Ridge Park a couple of weeks ago and the chain broke. It was an old bike and it hadn't seen much use lately. My younger son has taken an interest in bicycles lately, so I thought I would show him how to replace the chain.

Whenever you buy a new chain for a bike with a derailleur, you should replace the high speed sprocket (the smallest one) on the rear axle, as it tends to get the most wear (being the smallest). When it gets worn it likes to slip, which is annoying, and it also causes the chain to wear faster. I had a new sprocket and I bought a new chain and we set to work. Got the wheel off. Now to remove the special nut that holds the sprockets on. This requires a special wrench, but the wrench will only go into the recess about one sixteenth of an inch, and it will not hold. Try as I might I cannot get it to hold. Whenever I put pressure on it, it jumps out. Finally conclude that the wrench must be too worn to work, even though it has not been used more than half a dozen times. I am not sure what the deal is here. It has been a while, like five or ten years, since I did any work on my bikes, but I don't remember it being this difficult. Perhaps I didn't work on this one, perhaps it was my other bike and though it also has a seven cog cassette, perhaps it is made differently.

So today I went and bought a new wrench. I was afraid it was going to be $25 or so, but it was only $8. The local Bike 'N Hike had a whole selection of them, and more importantly, a guy who could tell which one I needed. Brought the new wrench home and attacked the sprockets once more. No better. What is going on? It now looks like it is not engaging even a sixteenth of an inch, it looks more like a thirty-second. Do we have to pull the axle out?!?!?! No other option at this point, so out it comes, and naturally the ball bearings start falling out on the floor. What a nuisance. But look! The wrench slides way in now, engaging perhaps a quarter of an inch. No problem now getting the old sprockets off. Check things out, put it back together. Do we have all the balls for the bearings? Pull the tool chest away from the wall to recover one errant one but that is all. Hmmm, we might be missing one. Put it back together anyway. Does not feel like there is one missing. We shall see.

Adjusting the bearing cones is a trick. There is a big rubber seal on one side that is blocking access to the cone. Deal with this by putting the wrench on the cone first and then tightening the lock nut with its' attendant seal. Once the bearing are adjusted and the lock nuts tightened, we can pull the cone wrench out, and seal seals up the hole.

Putting the chain on was a snap, literally. Used to be you needed a pin press to work with chains. This chain has a two piece master link that simply clicks together. The hardest part was threading the chain through the derailleur and then holding the two ends together while I installed the master link. Took it for a test ride and everything seems to be working okay. Except the handlebars, but that is going to have to wait for another time.

Plastic Drinking Glasses

We still have some glass drinking glasses in our house, but I hardly ever use them. Given a choice I will almost always use a plastic drinking glass, mostly because they are lighter. Also, you don't have to worry about them breaking if you drop one. You still have to clean up the spilled liquid, but you don't have to worry about picking up all the little shards of broken glass. A Correll cereal bowl broke in our house the other day. Correll ware is a practically unbreakable ceramic, but occasionally they do break, and when they do they shatter much like glass. I swept up the broken pieces, and then wiped up the area with a damp paper towel. Lastly I used my foot to sweep the floor to see if I could detect any little fragments. I heard a scraping noise, and when I checked the bottom of my foot I found a minute spec of broken ceramic. I did not feel it with my foot, but I was able to hear it being dragged across the vinyl floor. At this point I said good enough and left it.

Later on I come into the kitchen and there are series of red blotches on the floor. Looks like blood. Somebody found another piece of broken cereal bowl, but who? Gus, the cat, that's who. He had left little bloody paw prints across the kitchen and half way across the family room carpet. Bad kitty! It wasn't a bad cut. We checked to see if the shard was still stuck in his foot. It wasn't, so we banned him to the garage until he decided to quit bleeding.

But back to the plastics. They do have a couple of problems. We had some crystal clear plastic glasses that looked very nice for a couple of months, but then they started developing cracks. The cracks did not leak, but they proliferated and sort of detracted from their appearance. Now we have some softer, cloudier plastics and they have not changed their appearance at all.

The other problem has to do with dishwashers. Most glass glasses have a flat bottom. Most plastic glasses have a rim around the bottom edge. When they are washed in the dishwasher, the glass glasses drain dry, but the rim on the bottom of the plastic glasses holds a little pool of water. This means either: A) extra fooling around to get them dry, or B) putting them away wet, neither of which is really a satisfactory option.

I think the plastic glasses have this rim so they will not slide when you set them on the table. They are so light that even a small amount of water will enable them to slide. Glass glasses are heavy enough to penetrate a film of water. The rim on the plastic glasses enables them to penetrate the film of liquid to make contact with the table and not go sliding into your lap.

Hillary vs the GOP

I like Hillary. I am not sure why, perhaps subconsciously she reminds me of my mother. I am a little concerned that if she wins the Democratic nomination, she will not be able to win the election simply because she is a woman. I would vote for her, but I will vote for whoever the Democrats nominate. I am totally repulsed by the Republicans. But I do have to give them, or at least Karl Rove, credit for being able to seek out the lowest common denominator and get their candidate elected, or close enough that they could steal the election. I mean if a large part of the country hadn't been sold on George W. Bush, the piddling few thousand votes that they ended up squabbling over would not have made any difference.

I am really surprised to see Barack Obama even running as a candidate. I am glad he is. It shows this country has made some progress. He would not be able to win the election. Our country is still too racist for that.

Those are the only two candidates that have made any impression on me. I try to avoid the news, but I subscribe to the paper and I see the headlines in passing on my way to the comics, and I the see the television news in passing while I am flipping channels on my way to the next crime drama. Occasionally I will read something in a news magazine while I am waiting in a doctors office. So I am wondering what I am picking up on that causes me to notice these two? I suppose the novelty of someone who is not a white male is "newsworthy", so they are reported on more than the other candidates.

When I was in school my teachers used to exhort us to look into the issues, study up, read. And I used to try to do that. But I found that the more I read and studied, the murkier the issues got. So now I just pretty much go with whatever the Democrats are promoting. Their beliefs, such as they are, seem to align more with my ideals than the naked greed I see on the Republican side.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Full Size Car

When we flew to Chicago last month, we reserved a full size car at the rental agency. I was expecting something like a Ford or Chevy sedan. The biggest car they had was a Dodge Charger, and a Charger is no longer a full size car, at least not the way they measured full size cars thirty years ago. They had a little placemat-like chart on the counter to help you guesstimate how big a car you needed. A Charger, by their estimate would hold five people, which was enough, but it would only hold two bags. As we had seven bags, I could see that this was not going to work. The only vehicle they had that was any bigger was a Dodge Durango. I am thinking: "What? One of those behemoths?". But that's what we got, and it was tight fit. Bags packed to the ceiling, and a forty dollar a day surcharge. But what you gonna do? Got places to go, people to carry, so we load up and off we go.

Ugly vehicle to my way of thinking, big chrome headlight and taillight fixtures, but it is practically new, everything works, and it runs smoothly. Best feature was the automatic passenger window switch. Power windows on the drivers door often have a "one touch" automatic down feature. Press the down button once, and the window opens all the way. Up until now I had only seen it on the drivers window. Here they have it on the front passenger's window as well. Nice when you first get in the car after it has been sitting out in the sun for a while.

It turned out the forty dollar a day surcharge wasn't, or else the original rental was close to free. They did have more paperwork about insurance that was a nuisance, which caused me to walk around the car before I took off. I think this must be because of the scumbags who bang into things and try to claim "it was like that when I picked it up".

Tipping

I like to go out to eat. It is mostly a matter of convenience for me. I am not particularly interested in food or cooking, but I do enjoy a well prepared meal occasionally. Like the old song says: "after you've been eating steak for a long time, beans, beans taste fine". I go out to eat with friends twice a week, and we will get take-out at home about once a week, and go out for dinner maybe once a month.

When I do got out to eat, I enjoy being able to sit there for the entire meal without having to get up for anything. Everything is brought to me. For this I have the waiters to thank. (Is "waiters" a gender neutral term now? Like actor? Me, I still refer to female wait people as waitresses, but when writing, it is certainly easier to use a gender neutral term instead having to specify male and/or female subjects, that is unless you get diverted into a discussion like this one.) So I try to leave an adequate tip. If I leave cash, I think 15% is adequate. If I use a credit card, I try to leave 20%. Why the discrepancy? Because of the evil IRS. If I pay the tip in cash, I expect the waiter/waitress to put the money directly into their pocket and not to inform anyone about it. If I put the tip on a credit card, well, that goes through the bookkeeping system, and the feds will surely find out about it and tax it accordingly. Which means if you want the tip to have the same impact on the wait person, you need to leave enough to cover the taxes.

Wait people have a hard job and I appreciate it. Even if the service is not that great, I try to leave an adequate tip. If there is money to be made people will be drawn to it, and when you have more people to choose from, you can pick and choose which ones you want, and hopefully they will be the better ones.

The only problem I have with waiters is they don't bring my check soon enough. Oftentimes I am done with my meal and ready to go, but there is no check and no sign of the waiter. You would think I would learn to ask for the check when they deliver the food, but I have been going to restaurants for a long time and I hardly ever remember. But this does not happen very often. It happens most often in busy bars. I suppose that is understandable because people tend to linger in bars, so what's the big hurry on delivering the check?

Electrical Power Connections

I had a wire nut come loose once. It was in a box at the peak of the garage where the floodlight is mounted. At first I thought the bulb had blown, but after all the hassle entailed in changing it, I discovered, no, there was no problem with the bulb. So I got to climb up the ladder again and remove the light fixture from the box. It was not that high up, but when I haven't been up a ladder for a while, it is extremely nerve racking. I fell once and I don't want to do it again. Anyway, pulled the light fixture, pulled the Romex back inside the attic, hooked up the light and it worked fine. I could only conclude that the wire nut had worked loose, probably assisted by alternating extremes in temperature (such extremes we have here in Hillsboro).

When I worked at Del Monte in Oakland (thirty years ago, for one tomato season), the electrician there always used screws and nuts to connect wires to motors, and then wrapped the connections with layers of electrical tape. The motors operated in a very wet environment so he was constantly having to change out motors, bring them into his shop and dry them in the oven.

Space Elevator

I don't think we will see a space elevator any time soon. Too much material would have to put in orbit, and we don't have a frequent flyer to carry the load. We can put bits and pieces up there, but the space program has not been getting the funding it needs to step up to the task. But eventually, say in a hundred years or so, we may get around to it. Sooner if it looks like someone from Asia is close to acquiring the capability. That could be China, Japan or India.

When someone gets around to putting one up, I am thinking we might want to use multiple strands separated by feet or meters, and we would want to be constantly renewing them. Any strands connecting a satellite in geo-synchronous orbit to the earth would be under constant assault by orbital debris. I see no way of protecting these thin strands from impacts with bits of old spacecraft, so we are just going to have to deal with constant degradation and periodic failure.

I envision having multiple strands that loop around pulleys at the top and bottom. You might have ten, a hundred or even a thousand strands of carbon fiber ribbon. The pulleys would drive the elevator and would constantly be feeding new strands into the mix and pulling old degraded and/or broken strands out. Elevator cars would latch onto all of the strands going up and be hauled to orbit. If one strand out of 100 fails, it will be no big deal. When cars reach the station, the could release their grip on the upward bound strands, transfer their cargo and then latch onto the downward bound strands. Mechanical engineers will have a field day with this.

Ideally, we would be able to generate new ribbon strands at the same velocity that the elevator travels, maybe 200 mph. If we cannot do that, we will need to be generating several strands and then splicing them end to end. That is going to be a good trick.

Getting this whole thing started is going to be a project in and of itself, but we manage to get ocean going ships going. How much is a space elevator going to weigh? Say a carbon fiber ribbon weighs one gram per foot. Then a mile of ribbon will weigh about ten pounds (5,280 feet per mile divided by 454 grams per pound). 25,000 miles of ribbon would weigh 250,000 pounds or 125 tons (2,000 pounds per ton). I think some railroad locomotives weigh almost that much. Big trucks fully loaded weigh 40 tons. Of course I could be off on my weight estimate by an order of magnitude either way, but I think it is something we can deal with.