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Moving Ubuntu to a New Hard Drive
Well, I guess it had to happen some time… the system disk on my home Ubuntu server started going south recently. Just a few errors here and there, but once it starts, it only gets worse. So I thought I’d write down the steps I took to move my system to a new disk, partly…
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’93 Rockhopper Rebuild
My first “good” bike was a ’93 Specialized Rockhopper, which saw lots of mountain biking action in the ’90s, but has been largely neglected ever since. It has an old front suspension fork with a blown seal. I’ve decided to fix the bike up and use it for winter commuting, and maybe some occasional single…
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Long Sleeves
Not much noteworthy about today’s ride, except that I wore a long sleeve jersey, for the first time since probably May. As hot as this summer has been, I didn’t think this day would ever arrive. Won’t be long, and I’ll be griping about how cold it is and how I wish I could get…
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Mid-life crisis?
My latest kick these days is getting rid of stuff. The junk accumulation phase of my life is over, and it’s time to downsize. My new best friends are the recycle bin, the dump, the paper shredder, eBay, and the Salvation Army. I’d like the house to eventually be neat and organized. I’d like us…
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Grind.
I slogged up Ilchester Rd. again today. It went a little more smoothly than last time. Hill-climbing rule no. 1: If you know you’re going to need the granny gear, shift into it while still seated, before it gets too hard to pedal. If you wait ’till you’re standing up, your derailleur will pick that…
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Rite of Passage
School has started, both at UMBC and in the surrounding counties. That means more traffic to deal with, particularly during my morning rides. The first week is always the worst, after which things start to improve as people fall into a routine. I’m not crazy about this time of year, but it does have one…
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Final Summer Fling
It’s the last week of summer vacation for Howard and Baltimore counties, with students returning to school on Monday 8/30. That means this is the last week I get to enjoy relatively light traffic on my morning rides, before the roads get clogged with buses and other school traffic. This week I’m enjoying a few…
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Canceling Mortgage Escrow Account
A couple years ago, I wrote about how my mortgage company consistently mis-calculated my monthly escrow payment, arriving at figures that were either too high or too low, depending on the time of year the escrow analysis was done. Well, this past summer, the mortgage company ran another analysis and again came up with a…
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Dog Days
Yet another morning riding in the August soup. The beginning of the week was hot-and-sunny soup, and the past 2 days have been damp-and-cloudy soup with the requisite messy storms mixed in. I biked to work 4 days out of 5, shrewdly taking off on Tuesday, which was the hottest day of the week. This…
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July finally over
Well.. a truly miserable July, the hottest in recent memory, is finally over. Let’s see what August has in store. I finished July up with roughly 15 rides. I say “roughly” because I’ve gotten kinda lazy with keeping ride stats lately, and sort of forgot to record any of my rides after July 14. So…