We’re now deep into the first week of our national “social distancing” experiment. Anne took to it pretty well, and I think that, except for the obsessive hand-washing, I was born for this. We’ve been finding things to do while staying in, and getting out for some avoid-other-people walks and bike rides. I’m not sure how long this will last or what the end game might be, but we at least are doing OK, so far.
-
-
Pale Rider with Crown
I just re-read World War Z for the umpteenth time, and now I’m re-reading Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy, a small book (a monograph?) from a historical demographics elective I took in college. Not sure why these are my reading choices right now, must be something in the air… Both books are interesting, WWZ for its pass-the-popcorn tale of an apocalyptic pandemic (especially the early denial, and then panic, phases), and the plague book for its look at public health measures and policy, once the unthinkable becomes the new normal — by the 1650’s, plague had been endemic in northern Italy for two centuries. The comparisons, from each book, with our own situation are very insightful.
In other news, I was down visiting my parents for a few days, to help out while my mom got a procedure done. I went down Thursday night and came home Sunday, and I brought just about everything I could think of: some books, the laptop, a scanning printer, and the bike.
The procedure was a success, though it took longer and involved more waiting than I would have liked; it didn’t help that I disliked the book I brought (Rama II by Arthur C. Clark “with” someone else; I should have spotted this as a red flag). It was so annoying I couldn’t even hate-read it… I spent other time down there hanging with my parents, helping my mom with some IT issues, and scanning old photographs. (I was going to post some here, but I’m not really happy with the scan quality. I may have to re-do them.)
I tried riding Allaire Sunday morning, it’s not far from my parents’ house, but realized (once I got there) that I’d left my cycling shoes back at their place — D’OH! Oh well, I got in a decent towpath ride yesterday, down to Riegelsville for lunch, for a round-trip total of 40 miles.
-
Tired of the Flats
So I got the Iguana’s rear flat fixed pretty quickly, it seemed like probably just a puncture or pinch from the towpath. I also took the time to do some deferred maintenance; now the bike is looking good and performing well.
I then took off the Cannondale’s front wheel, removed the tire, and found what I suspected but couldn’t originally spot: there was a tear in the sidewall. Luckily I had a spare tire waiting, so I put that on with the new tube, and — BANG! That tube popped as well. I was done for the day…
I looked at it a few days later and the most likely cause seemed to be “operator error” when installing the tube, no other problems or defects were visible so I replaced the tube and gingerly pumped the tire, with many stops for bead inspections etc… everything was fine. I let it sit for a few days, but heard no sudden gunshots in the basement, so I took the bike for a short ride Monday. All is good.
-
Season Opener
I went out yesterday for a road ride, for the first time this season. I’ve been riding (MTB and commuter bike) all winter, and I even managed to get in three towpath rides last week, so my fitness is not totally gone — I’m not starting from zero there.
The road bike itself was a different story. I rode down to the Moravian Quarter, then up Main to Market, with a vague plan of checking out Riverside Drive in Freemansburg. (This road leads to one of my favorite climbs, but had been closed by a landslide several years ago. It remained closed for quite a while, and I was wondering if they ever got around to fixing it.) I cruised through town, then as I continued out Market Street past Stefko I heard a sound like the brakes were rubbing. I stopped off the brakes but the sound was still there — then the tire blew out, with a bang like a gun went off.
I pulled over and checked it out: the tube had exploded like it came through a hole in the tire, but the tire had no cuts or slashes I could find. I replaced the tube, in the meantime discovering that my new pump is more of a low-pressure MTB pump and can’t get the tire up to roadie pressure… I decided that, all things considered, I couldn’t really trust my wheel, so I limped back home (I’d only gone about two miles), then switched to the Santa Cruz for another towpath ride.
I now have two bikes with flats — the Iguana has a slow leak — so I have some basement time scheduled today, exorcising early season equipment bugs.
Other Things
We saw Pennsylvania Sinfonia’s “Vienna Afternoon” on Sunday, with Anne’s mom in Allentown. It was beautiful as always, and a pleasure to watch and hear real professionals play. They also had a young woman — she looked young to us, anyway — singing, and she was awesome.
We went out afterwards, and I managed to eat too much. I should have accepted the leftovers box, but I toughed it out, and then had trouble sleeping I was so full. We’d done BBQ at Grumpy’s on Friday night (with John and Renee), and more BBQ on Saturday in Lambertville (at More Than Q, with Joe and Laura), so by Monday the scale and I didn’t have much to say to each other.
Also last week: we saw ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro at SteelStacks. What an amazing show!
-
Some Fun New Things
I’m not entirely a creature of habit, but I do get in a rut sometimes. Last week was not one of those times as I did some things outside my habitual comfort zone…
One Thing
Last Thursday I went to the local WordPress group’s monthly meeting. I’d been seeing the meetings posted on the WordPress news feed for years now without any real interest, but the topic for this meeting (security) caught my eye, and since the meeting place is within walking distance — and they’d have free pizza — I decided to check it out.
There was some networking/social time before and after the presentation. I knew no one there, but they seemed like a pretty good bunch, split pretty evenly between young and old, male and female, and was a mix of hardcore techies and “I use WP in my web-design business” types. The presentation was likewise a mix of very technical information, and not-so-technical good practices that I found easy to implement here. It was a really pleasant and informative evening.
And Another
Saturday night we had a party, and later in the evening the discussion turned to old railroad rights-of-way. We all pulled out our phones and consulted our maps to look at the railroad in question — it was the line that crosses the Monocacy Trail just south of Burnside Plantation, something once called the Lehigh & New England. The evening ended not long afterward, but I guess we were still curious the next morning because Anne and I decided to do a little hike to check it out, and we got a text from Scott who wanted to do the same.
We met Scott at the trailhead near Union Boulevard, walked down the trail, and headed west when we reached the tracks. It was like being in another world: we walked through homeless encampments and past industrial sites both current and ancient, all in a little corner of town less than a mile from home. The tracks were in good shape for the most part, with rails still in place, but past Eighth Avenue it started to get overgrown with sticker bushes. We eventually cut through a truck yard to get back on regular roads, walked across an overpass, and suddenly we were back in the normal part of town, on a residential street only a few blocks from home.
-
Just a test
Messing with a few things here…
-
And Just Like That…
…winter was half over!
I don’t have much to say about that (winter, that is), it’s been pretty lame as far as winter sports or activities go, mostly snow-free and unseasonably warm. Oh well, we’ll have to plan a trip north I guess, if we want to do any skiing or skating.
Meantime, Groundhog Day has come and gone, and so has the Superbowl, and so has the Superbowl of Chili in Easton. Of course I went, as did John R, Eric, George and Doug & Lori. Good times, we were through the door early and got our chili on, including maybe a little on our clothes. D&L took off after that, and the rest of us went for coffee at Easton Market, followed by drinks at Two Rivers, where George’s girlfriend Jessica met us. We were all stuffed, but she was hungry and got food while we drank, then she gave us all a lift home. Another one in the books!
By the way, here’s what I wrote about it in 2004, and here’s what I wrote in 2005. Lotta chili under those bridges.
-
The Iron Bridge
Although it probably won’t rise to the level of my Calypso Island obsession, I’ve been intrigued by a story I ran across, about a nearby railroad bridge and a fire there that smoldered for 20 years…
I ran across this while doing some futzing around with OpenStreetMap, where someone had left notes on the map — “notes” are meant for marking items where corrections need to be made, but these notes were just interesting bits of historic trivia about certain places. (This, by the way, is a pet peeve of mine.) One note described an iron railroad bridge (on Iron Bridge Road) that had been covered by fill. There is a railroad that crosses Jordan Creek, and Iron Bridge Road which runs parallel to the creek, but the road and creek crossed under the railroad via tunnels, and the note in any case was nowhere near this particular spot on the road. Does the note indicate a different RR crossing, now gone?
I did some research, and discovered that there was no other railroad crossing, the existing railroad was indeed the location of the iron bridge. This was part of a rail line build jointly by the Crane and Thomas Iron Companies, from Catasauqa out to local ore fields. It was originally a plank road when local roads proved inadequate for heavy traffic, and was converted into a railroad, complete with huge wooden trestle bridge across Jordan Creek, when the plank road proved inadequate.
As time went on and trains got heavier, the wooden bridge was replaced with an iron trestle bridge, which was an engineering marvel for its time but was, in its turn, also discovered to be inadequate… So about 1916, the railroad build a set of concrete tunnels under the bridge (for the creek and the road to go through), then started dumping slag, “factory ash” and other industrial waste, building up an escarpment around and over the bridge. They dumped about 300,000 tons of fill between 1916 and 1919, and created the hill that’s there now.
So far so good, and a moderately interesting piece of industrial history, but what caught my eye was a newspaper story from about 1942, lamenting the inaccessible iron now buried under the hill, which could have been salvaged for the war effort. Unfortunately (the article continued), the escarpment, which was basically a mountain of industrial waste, caught fire in 1917; it burned underground, melting the buried iron so it sometimes leaked out of the hill, and occasionally catching the railroad ties on fire, for the next twenty years.
Twenty years! I thought that a twenty-year fire, complete with molten iron running from the ground, was just crazy, a story on the order of Centralia that locals would still be talking about, but I found almost nothing about it. Just another part of Pennsylvania’s Mordor-industrial history. OpenStreetmap correctly shows the current conditions on the ground (RR on escarpment, with road and creek passing under in tunnels), so I made no changes and closed the note.
-
More Fun with Routing
I’m not sure why I did it, but I installed PHP and Apache on my new computer, then moved a bunch of my “internal website” stuff over from storage. Everything seemed to work pretty well, so I tried the commuter routing program — I got errors, natch.
I looked at the error messages and realized that the pgRouting routines had changed, so my database routing functions were out of date — that led to me discover that even the newer version of PgAdmin3 doesn’t work well with my newer Postgresql version, especially when it comes to functions. So, I installed phpPgAdmin — which was also borked, and in the same way, but I was able to fix the source code. Even working properly it couldn’t do what I needed though, which was to modify my old function. I tried writing a new function through phpPgAdmin, which was extremely laborious, and basically re-wrote the original, broken function, so now I had two useless functions that I couldn’t modify. Ugggh, time for bed.
I woke up this morning and got it done old-school, writing a SQL script to define the function and running that from the command line. Presto, now I have a working function, and a working commuter routing program. Bonus: the new version of pgRouting is much faster (though that could be the new computer), and some routing errors are now fixed. Wish you could see it!
-
Fun With Alice And Bob
I moved my SSH and PGP certificates to my new machine, and setting them up meant visiting a few cryptographic sites (to remember how to do it, and also just because). That means I spent a lot of time in that world, where “Alice” and “Bob” (and so on, alphabetically) are the main actors in usage scenarios: Alice sends a message to Bob, but maybe Clara intercepted it, how does Bob know the message is secure? Well, Alice encrypts her message and signs it with… Tedious, tedious, but now it’s done, and I can securely access my online accounts as well as send/receive encrypted email, which is sort of like being the only person with a phone — who can you call? — but still: I once thought it was cool, and now I have it back.
Auld Acquaintance
This past weekend was sort of the end of the holiday season for us: we saw friends we’d missed during the holidays. Friday night we did some bar-hopping with Doug & Lori, then Saturday was a “Festivus party” at Eric & Kris’s place (where we saw D&L again) lots of catching up and the usual merriment, it was a really nice night.
Movie Night
We saw “Uncut Gems” the other night. I don’t recommend it: the acting and the cinematography were all good, but the characters (especially the protagonist) were annoying and unsympathetic, and the plot, as Anne put it, was “a 2-hour panic attack.” Ugh.