Thanks to chemistry I’m not punching random people in the face

Seriously, if I wasn’t taking antidepressants I would probably be in jail this weekend. I ran into one of those H8 preachers on the train back from the RPG session, and it was all I could do to not smash him in the face. And the biggest thing encouraging these people is our new POTUS declaring various groups of people as “criminals” and “rapists” or “terrorists” damning an entire religion or race based on nothing more than his personal prejudices. And my particular H8 preacher was hitting all of them, Black people (N-word), Hispanics (Messkins), and all non-Christians (not enough room). As a member of one of those groups (I leave which one to your imagination) I was personally offended. Offended to the point that I almost forgot my manners to not wear out my cane on his head and face. Fortunately with the help of my meds the preacher left the train with his face and dental work undamaged.

I’m not lying here, this was one of the more stressful things I have experienced lately. Not on the same scale as getting killed, or getting my head bashed with a baseball bat in a stairway, or having bullets fly over my head because someone didn’t clear their background when they started burning ammo with their new machine gun, but pretty stressful. And I’m pretty sure H8r got off just in time because I wasn’t the only target for his bile. There were brown people of all shades riding with me and some of them were starting to look unhappy with the H8 preacher right as he left. I didn’t mess him up but neither did anyone else. I guess I wasn’t the only one taking his meds.

Also today was the last morning service at Sacred Journey as part of a 2 part service with the second part being the last evening service. Next week we start our first afternoon service at 1300 which was our compromise between morning people not wanting to “waste” the day, and night-owls unable to rise before the crack of noon. Lately I fall into the latter category kinda by default as I’m having problems getting my brain to shut down before 0500, when I need to get up by 0900 to get to church on time. I have been getting to sleep usually about 0600 or a little earlier, so 0900 would be like getting up at 0300 if you went to sleep at midnight, or Mrs. the Poet getting up at midnight and staying awake the rest of the day. Yes Mrs. the Poet is one of those morning people (shudder).

I’m still working on the mid-Bucket, but I’m not making much progress. The scanner program I downloaded will probably let me get the engine started, but I don’t know if it will let me drive the car as some of the missing inputs are considered safety hazards and may disable the transmission from going into gear, like the ABS, airbag, and seatbelt sensors. But eventually I will be able to start the engine after I have a long heart to heart with the PCM (Chrysler nomenclature for their engine computer and ancillary controls).

Well it’s late and I have a date to take a walk tomorrow later today.

Opus the Unkillable

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My Warlock died yesterday and more on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Yep, my poor Warlock was severely killed (along with my apprentice NPC Bard) in the kinky D&D game yesterday. I was down to 6 HP when I got hit by a 34 HP attack centered on me and my apprentice because we were not in the room in an earlier attack that made the entire rest of the party magically pregnant with the half-siblings of a half-dragon daughter of a Green Dragon. She was pissed at us for not being there to get pregnant during that attack. I managed to get off a few good shots but a 5th level Warlock going up against even a half-dragon just ain’t gonna work. And so, I died.

Fortunately in the party loot was a clear bottle with a lead stopper filled with orange smoke and flashing lights, a “bottle of djinn”. This djinn was fairly powerful in that he had enough moxie to do two resurrections and bring both me and my apprentice back to full life with no loss of levels or XP. The senior member of the party then ordered the djinn to be free, much like the climactic scene in Disney’s Aladdin. We did this because we only had control over the djinn for 24 hours and if he was powerful enough to bring two characters through a full resurrection he was more than powerful enough to do a TPK in a single attack. So, “bring my friends back to life, and be free” seemed like a good choice.

On the Sprint Cup race today Martin Truax finally got a win this season after practically pounding the door down all season long with the Furniture Row Racing team. They won simply by virtue of having the stronger car pretty much all race long, and were able to outrun Happy Harvick at the end. This puts him in for the Championship Chase at the end of the season. I have liked Truax as a driver since his days with Michael Waltrip Racing, and was highly disappointed when MWR let him go at sponsor request, even after winning races. Well now he won driving for a single-car team with a tiny fraction of the resources of the big name teams. I mean until now had you ever heard of Furniture Row Racing?

With the parts that arrived last week detail design work on the Sprint-T progressed a little further as now I know how big the things holding the rear axle from moving relative to the frame are. Knowing this I know how much leeway I have to provide to keep them out of the bodywork and frame, and where they have to connect to the rear axle so that the coilovers don’t hit that. Having the actual items in my hands to measure makes things that much easier to draw. The issue I’m now facing is that I need the instant center for the rear suspension to be above the rear control arms slightly so that the rear axle doesn’t chatter under heavy braking, and when you throw that in with the “don’t hit the body” during suspension travel, or violate the “nothing lower than the main frame rail or the rims” parameter that is one of my basic rules for building a street vehicle it kinda boxes you in.You might have noticed that there was a bit of a bow in the control arm in the picture last week to accommodate the mount for the coilover unit.
This means I can’t just run the part between the rear end and the frame or it will run below the frame rail as this is a dual-use part. Not only does it locate the axle fore and aft, it also controls the up-and-down motion by mounting the rear springs, and the anti-roll bar bolts to the bottom to control roll (obviously, part of the name of the part). Why let a part do only one thing when you can use it to do three jobs at no increase in weight? I think it was Colin Chapman (founder and first designer for Lotus Cars) who said that, but he might have been quoting an earlier engineer.

I just returned from evening service where Mrs. the Poet was installed to the board of the church as a member-at-large for 2 years. It was quite moving. It was also rather frightening on one level, as the oath of office was basically in invitation for your gods to hunt you down and kill you in the most painful way possible if you screw up. I don’t know if that was the intent of the oath of office, but that’s surely the way it came out. I guess that is an effective way to ensure that screw-ups will be unintentional.

And I should let this end here as I have already gone a bit over my planned word count. And I’m having trouble putting the abstract concepts into concrete words.

PSA, Opus the Poet

The case of the missing boots on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Tonight’s evening service was in honor of the Veritan archetype Trickster, and the archetype was definitely in play. One of the female congregants took her boots off because her feet were hurting, and because this is a normal behaviour for my church. The person sitting behind her moved her boots to a hidden location, then another person moved them while the first person was looking away, somewhere along the way the house ghosts got in on the act and the location of the boots was lost to everyone for a while, then they were found (but not by the owner). Finally the boots were placed in the passenger seat of the owner’s ride home, which I was not able to witness… And which I will relate next week after I hear the results.

Something else I have been watching on the idiot box this weekend was the Long Beach round of Formula E. While I’m heavily biased towards liking this kind of contest, I’m conflicted. One thing was there were two drivers that had to switch to their second car way early and even though the race was very short neither was able to finish, even with substantially reducing speed and acceleration from the rest of the cars. The race was over a distance of only about 80 km which is only 50 miles +/-, and they did not use the full Long Beach street course with the long curving “straights” and two tight hairpin turns, which they said on the pre-race were judged to be too harsh a test of the battery system because of the high speed of the straight. That was what triggered me, race cars that couldn’t race at top speed are not race cars. I think the culprit is a combination of the controller and the battery that just sucks the energy out of the system.

And this has been a long day, so I’m packing up and going to bed.

PSA, Opus

Still getting sidetracked by outside distractions, and the Feed

And by “outside distractions” I mean little things like making sure the account we use to pay our taxes actually has money in it, which takes a bit of time and somehow wound up taking up most of the day. I think that the big reason why transferring money from one account to another took more time than yesterday’s trek to find Blue was today I used DART and yesterday I was given a ride by one of the tenants renting a room here. The bad thing about DART is the low frequency of the busses out here in the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell. It took about an hour and a half of transit time to get 3.1 miles from the house and back. One of the reasons I’m looking forward to getting Blue back is drastically cutting that time down when I have to go downtown or to church, especially church. When I go to evening services I have to depend on there being someone who can take me home after because the last bus leaves the station about 20 minutes after evening services begin. When I ride my bike I already have a ride home.

Up first today is another bit of schadenfreude over a killer driver finally getting a sentence commensurate with the serious nature of what they did. Unlicensed, intoxicated driver who killed 2 cyclists during bike ride gets 15 to 40 years I was afraid this would end up being another gentle caress on the wrist like I have seen so many times, but this judge seemed to get the message that as many people are killed with cars as with guns so the punishments for killing with a car should be similar to killing with a gun.

I was invited to this event over on FB, I guess because I’m an internationally known bicycle safety “expert”. Vigil and ‘die in’ held to mark the death of cyclist Stephanie Turner and Hundreds stage ‘die-in’ protest over cyclist killed in Stamford Hill

I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to ride a bike when there are people who want to kill you just for being out on public. Egyptian female cyclists pedal for acceptance

Our Daily Ted. Morning Links: Bikes could sway the race in LA’s CD4; WeHo candidates debate banning sidewalk riders

I was sent this link as a FB message, so I have to include it somehow… Eleven geeky tips that will ever-so-slightly improve your bike life Besides, this guy is a Real Geek, you can tell from the name of the company. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, well it isn’t that important for you to know. It’s just a little “thing” between geeks so that we can exclude those not in the know.

A little infrastructure news from NYC. NYPD: 1,399 Pedestrians and Cyclists Injured, 10 Killed in December The only bright spot in the report was the 0 in the death column next to bicyclists. The rest of it was very depressing. It once again shows the most vulnerable mode of traffic in NYC is walking, followed very closely by cycling.

Sin City is having an infrastructure problem. Lamb cyclist accidents prompt road review With as many cyclists as have been hit in the last few years on this road it is patently obvious that many cyclists cannot avoid this road if they want to get places, but that it is not safe for them to be there. It needs to be redesigned and rebuilt with either slower motor vehicle traffic or physically segregated bicycle infrastructure.

A reaction to that link from yesterday about the new tram tracks causing cyclists to crash in droves because they put the trams in the freaking bike lanes. Cyclists need to toughen up

More UK infrastructure, as they put in actual infrastructure instead of just putting down advisory blue paint that cars are not required to stay out of. Boris Johnson gives go-ahead for ‘Crossrail’ cycle superhighway through central London Boris, please stop painting grandiose names on your bike projects. They range from criminal in planning and execution to just bad, and putting a name like “superhighway” or “Crossrail” on them is worse than putting lipstick on a pig. At least lipstick on a pig doesn’t get anyone killed. The same can’t be said about “cycling superhighways” in London.

South Africa struggles with wanting to be a bicycle superpower, and not having the physical or legal infrastructure to support the aspirations. Will more cyclists make the sport safer in 2015?

And that’s all I have today.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet