BBQ Season

Actually, it is coming close to vacation season. How do I know? Everywhere you turn there are advertisements (with unusually deep discounts this year) to book your vacation now. However, I've always preferred to assemble my own "vacation packages", frankly on a scale well below what the ads portray.

So influenced by Madison Avenue and armed with the false confidence that precedes any trip planning, I wondered what would be a good (great?) vacation to plan. Then I remembered The NC Barbecue Society Historic Trail. Some families retrace historical events from times in the nation's history, so why not do the same on the state level - with some great food thrown in as a bonus?

The Society makes them all sound good, although there are obviously going to be a lot of favorites left off any "best of" list. Additionally there were restrictions such as only two sites per town. I can personally vouch for Hurshey's, Lexington #1 and Bridges. Especially Bridges.

If you're just a little curious, I've mapped the whole tour (less Cobb & Son, which I couldn't find) via Google maps - all 15 hours of driving. Will we really turn vacation season into BBQ season this year? I doubt it, but it was fun to plan.

Now maybe if we can get school credit for the trip, hmmm...

"Merci" or "Mercy"?

If you've got 8 minutes of your life that you're not doing anything with, check out the downhill run these two mountain bikers make in the French Alps.

Mondial Du VTT Descente de Venosc caméra embarquée
by 103TuRtLe

Its not as much of a roller coaster effect as you might expect, but look at the drop off in the switch backs, just waiting for a rider to enter with too much speed. Also, don't miss the thin rope on the right side of the trail on some of the really steep slopes.

I couldn't tell though, as they passed slower riders (especially the last time - while in the air) if they were saying the French word for "thanks" or asking God for mercy on their descent. You decide.

It is an amazing run to watch. Definitely for a much higher caliber rider than I ever was. The local single track along the Catawba is more than enough for me.

My $0.028

In 2007, Congress directed the Mint to produce four new commemorative designs for the Lincoln penny to be rotated throughout 2009, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. I'd forgotten about it until just a few days ago, when a link to a newspaper site reminded me. While not a coin collector myself, there was something generally fun in the 10 year schedule of the state quarter program, even if it was only the minor curiousity of what you might have just got back in change.

The timing of this years release of the Lincoln penny is a curiousity of sorts also. In the year we choose to redesign our smallest monetary unit, we are going to create our largest ever national debt. The irony of the government's actions is probably lost in Washington though.

It would be nice if politicians had a better sense of history. FDR's New Deal program is often cited as support for the current "stimulus package" but FDR's own treasury secretary is quoted as saying "...I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot." This isn't unique to the United States. The Heritage Foundation reports on a similar initiative in Japan, from which it concludes "...the Japanese government imple­mented such a program during the 1990s, and the consequence was two decades of economic stagnation."

What is the real solution? It seems clear that it has to be one built on real free market demand that creates sustainable jobs. Not one that it artificially supported by the government. The best way to do that? Let wage earners keep and therefore direct more of the money they earn. There are politicians that recognize this, such as Texas congressman Lou Gohmert, who proposed his own alternative plan. That is all academic now though, as the spending has begun.

One final economic thought as a footnote - due to increases in copper and zinc values it apparently now costs around 1.4 cents to make a penny. So I guess that makes this my $0.028.

Doing More With Less

So you say visiting a blog is too much trouble? Already have enough things to read, do and keep track of? You wish blog authors would simply go back to mass emails? RSS can help. You'll still have to decide what is worth reading, but RSS is one of the few things that really enables you to do "more with less". In four easy and free steps that should take less than 10 minutes. Here is how:

1. Sign up for a Google account and login. If you've already got a gmail account, just login. Even if you never intend to send a single email via gmail, get an account anyway.
2. Visit a blog site that has RSS enabled (like this one!) and click the RSS icon in the address bar
   
3. Choose the "Subscribe to 'Entropy By Design - RSS" choice in the dropdown that appears
4. Click the "Add to Google Reader" button on the page loads next

Thats it. In the future, instead of remembering a list of sites you want to visit or managing a set of bookmarks, just visit http://www.google.com/reader Any sites you've subscribed to that have new content will be shown. No need to try and determine what news and articles are new, the tool does it for you. There is plenty of online help, such as keyboard shortcuts like "J", "K" and "V", but at this point you've learned all you need to know. Seriously.

To find additional sites, just click the "Add A Subscription" button while in Google Reader. Use any natural language terms ("Fox News", "CNN Money", etc.) to find things of interest to you. You can view and subscribe, all for free. Once subscribed the Reader will allow rapid navigation ("J") between article summaries, so you can select only the ones that interest you to view ("V"). A massive time savings over web browsing, print media and don't even get me started about television!

RSS allows you to read more, in less time, with less effort than you can imagine. Take control. Give it a try.

Banning Books

Well, sort of. Not directly in the way that the phrase usually makes people think. However, there is a cause for concern and depending on your viewpoint - action.

The CPSC's ban on the sale of children's books printed prior to 1985 went into effect on Feb 10th. On the surface this has an admirable goal - keeping children from being exposed to lead. A side effect is that many children's classics that are out of print can no longer legally be sold in used book stores, thrift shops or any retail establishment. Public libraries also seem required to comply.

There don't seem to be any documented cases of lead poisoning via books on the web. The CDC doesn't even list books as a source of lead exposure on their web site. So how did books get included? They don't flake off edible chips like the old lead paint. They aren't "tasted" in the same manner or frequency as toys manufactured in developing nations can be. Its difficult to say. There is plenty of room for conspiracy theories, but I'm not interested in going there.

There are some efforts underway to modify (but not eliminate) the problems this will cause. The American Library Association, which raised an early warning on this issue, is staking out a position that "distribution" applies only to sales. Senator Jim DeMint has stated his intent to reform the CPSIA. There may be other efforts to mitigate the effect of this act, but in the meantime the danger to many classics is real as shop owners can't afford to risk the penalties they might face. Some might feel compelled to destroy the books rather than be fined.

So if you want to preserve classic children's books, many with a decidedly different religious, social, political value than those being produced today, you may want to consider purchasing a few of your old favorites while you still can. When and if you do, please don't treat them as museum pieces, loan them to others. They only have value if they're read.

It Just Didn't Seem Right

One of the projects that I'd planned over doing over the long President's Day weekend was repairing my Airdyne. The offset pin holding one of the pedal arms sheared a couple of weeks ago and needed to be replaced. After locating a parts supplier, I thought it would be a relatively straight forward repair after extracting the sheared pin.

However, once the nut was off on the pedal arm, the assembly below - inside the pedal arm - was revealed.








As an added distraction, the part shows an offset between entry and exit to to the arm.





Soooo.....the question is - how do you remove a threaded on one end, smooth on the other, offset "bolt"?

The answer is you realize it isn't a bolt, but rather a wedge pin. Its way too tight to be pulled out by the non threaded end or simply tapped out from the other. The only solution is to put the nut partially back on to increase the surface area while protecting the threads - and give it a good hearty blow with a hammer. Once removed, it looks like this:




Like everything, its easy once you know how to do it. However, getting there took more than a little thinking, experimentation and in the end web searching that found an exploded parts diagram.




Until then though, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Hitting a threaded part with a hammer just didn't seem right.

Somethings Gotta Be First

This blog has been created for a while and yet there have been no posts. It could be that I was crafting the perfect initial post, or keeping true to the masthead and setting expectations low or maybe I'm overall just more interested in reading than writing. Could be some of each, it will have to be an exercise left to the reader - if there are any.

That having been said, something has to be first and so this post is it. Other than stating the obvious above, the only real purpose is to share the picture above, found on the pilgrim in a foreign land blog, which was in a list of sites recommended to me by a friend.

Which ever side of the political fence you lean to, I hope you found it at least slightly amusing. If not, you probably didn't make it this far anyway.

Disappointed? Oh, well - somethings gotta be first.