Restoring my faith in youtube

If you search "paintball" on youtube you get 42,200 results. 42,000 of them are of some kid demonstrating his setup and how fast it can shoot and how cool the green accents he put on there look. I don't know what possessed me to click on a link to "Autococker 15bps (balls per second)," but I did. Just a glutton for punishment I guess. This time, however, I struck gold.

PSA - Bike Fenders

Well this space is fast becoming a documentary of me acting like a know-it-all snob, but there are some things I just can't stand. People misusing things in stupid and less effective ways is chief among them.

This is your bike fender. You spent $15 on it so you don't end up with the freshman racing stripe painted on your ass when there are puddles on the ground. Congratulations, I applaud your purchase, and your resolve (or lack of automobile) that keeps you riding through inclement weather. Now let's go over how to use this thing:

Your back tire is kicking up mud and water. You would like it to not hit you in the back. You install a 3 inch wide piece of plastic between you and the tire. The tire is 2 inches wide and your back is 14 inches. Well, my back is, and I don't really care how muddy you get.

If you place the 3" fender right next to your back, all you've done is protect a 3" wide strip of your back, leaving an impressive 11" inches of you spattered in mud and leaving people behind you wondering who that skunk kid is. This would classify as a poor use of 15 bones, in my book.

On the other hand, lets say you put the fender closer to the tire instead of close to you. The downside to this is that you no longer look like you're sporting a hefty radio antenna on your ride. The upside is that mud isn't going to hit you. period. Here, I drew a diagram. It's all about cutting down the angle that mud can fly off the tire at.

Granted, the majority of crap will fly off the tire in the same plane as the wheel, since the wheel is spinning on a fixed horizontal axis. Go search centripetal force on wikipedia, I don't feel the need to explain it. However, there are other forces at play here, and unless your fender is placed in an idiot-proof spot, you will be branded an idiot. Until you wash your clothes, at least.

Ok, that was a lot of words. Now here are a lot of pretty pictures for you visual learners:

Good Fender

OK Fender

Overkill Fender

Stupid Fender

What happened, couldn't kick down for an entire fender?


I just plain don't get this one. Maybe some sort of winglet for aerodynamic stabilization?

Dear Friends....

If I get shot in the grill and end up with orange paint up my nose, it is your responsibility to tell me so when we get back to the cars. It was there for four hours and nobody said anything. It actually dried during that time. Thanks guys.

-me

PSA - your fancy umbrella

The stormy season is obviously upon us, and greets us with the open arms that are rain and wind. Fortunately us humans are a handy bunch, and we came up with these brilliant little tarps on a stick to keep the rain off of us. Then we way overthought the problem and figured out how to make our tarps break regularly.

I'm not here to judge how your umbrella looks. I'm not saying that a giant watermelon looking thing above your head won't get you hit, maybe by me, maybe by a total stranger, who's to say. But more than that, I'm saying nobody will need to hit you when your rig collapses and pokes you in the eye.

Take your basic umbrella. It's a 3 foot long stick with folding rods, and nylon stretched between them. A little collar on the umbrella neck slides toward the point and pushes the main vanes out using smaller little connecting arms. It took three lines to describe that, and they get more complicated from there. You have the ones that telescope, you have the ones that telescope and are spring-loaded (mostly awesome for poking your friends with minimal effort. Otherwise not that novel), you have the compact folding ones that bend in three places per vane, and then you have the super compact ones that either bend 21 times or are so small when open that you get to pick which shoulder you'd like to be dry.

Basically my gripe is this: unnecessarily complicated things are way more prone to breakage. We could probably even go back a step - things with lots of moving parts made of stamped and folded metal to questionable tolerances and of unknown material and origin are prone to breakage. The more parts, the greater the chance that you're umbrella is going to be doing its best imitation of a drawer of forks after an earthquake (and we all know what that looks like, sure...). I mean, the umbrella-frame antenna in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure didn't even last, and they had the knowledge and budget of the entire future world backing them.

The strongest thing I could dream up is basically a rigid, permanently open umbrella with maybe a rigid outer ring and some tension cables leading from the vanes to the stem to keep it from flipping inside out. Practicality, however, rears its ugly head. For those of you who actually want to carry an umbrella around, get the biggest thing you'll actually carry. Generally bigger = fewer folding parts. If you don't want the rigid-pole old-school kind, see if you'd haul a one foot long semi-compact. If you get caught with a busted umbrella that folds down to 4 inches, somebody might telescope it out and club you with it. Maybe me, maybe a total stranger, who's to say?

PSA: WD-40

In the spirit of the holidays, I bring you this PSA regarding WD-40.

"There are only two tools you need. Duct tape and WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, WD-40."

This has been bugging me lately. Maybe its because its the time of year when people feel obliged to buy gifts for, among others, the rough and tumble manly men who adhere strictly to the duct tape and WD-40 regimen. (adhere!) Don't get me wrong, duct tape and WD-40 are both terrific in their own rights. As far as I'm concerned WD-40 is the master of its game for what it's supposed to do. The trouble starts when people start declaring it universally helpful and applying it where it shouldn't be used. At this point you have a pile of guys thinking they've got it under control, maybe grunting a bit, and ultimately using a terrific invention to break shit further. For shame.

Let’s start at the start. WD-40 stands for “water displacement attempt number 40.” Forty was just the time that it happened to work. The job of WD-40 is to get rid of water. Along with this goes getting rid of rust and gunk, as well as preventing the same. If properly used it’s slick as hell. When it comes to these tasks, you’ve got the magic bullet. And it smells pretty good.

What WD-40 isn’t is a long lasting all-purpose lubricant. For that, you want grease, oil, graphite, Teflon, something not this. The thing about WD-40 is that it doesn’t really have staying power. It dries up, blows off, runs away, I have no idea what it’s actually doing, but after a while it just ain’t there no mo. The other (and significantly worse) thing about WD-40 is that it eats petroleum based things like some kinds of plastic and rubber. Like I said, it’s a bit of a solvent and it kills water. It’s not really meant to grease everything under the sun, tough guy. So before you douse your [whatever] with the yellow and blue can, remember that in two days your orings, seals, and plastic bushings may have turned to gum.

So what to do...how about this: If you own a hammer, a pipe wrench, and a tape measure and try to get everything done using only those tools, go ahead and WD-40 this hell out of everything. It's not really going to make it worse. If you own calipers, torx wrenches, a torque wrench, or gaskets of any sort, consult the goddam manual.

Gratuitous video of guy smashing WD-40 can:

2008: Resolutions

Usually around this time of year I try to figure out what I resolved to do last year and reflect upon how quickly I not only failed to do so, but completely forgot what I resolved. 2007 was different. I don't think I even got around to resolving anything. That pretty much set the tone for the year.

2008 has a resolution, at least. I figured everybody's doing it, might as well. The thing is, all I could come up with was "Get to it." Feeling pretty good about it though- if by this time next year, I can look back and say, "Man, 2008. I really got to it." ...well yeah, that'd be cool.

...aaand we're back

After a not-very-well-earned sabbatical, we now return you to your very nearly regularly scheduled attempts at humor and insight. Sorry.

The christmas season came and went. The season kicked off as usual, with me and my dad getting into the holiday spirit by swearing a lot. I feel no remorse about this - there's always something wrong with the fucking christmas lights. You get all the way done and discover that one of the strings died while you were putting it up. You take that one down and replace it with another string containing an equal number of lights, only to find that this string is 3 feet shorter than the last. I will never understand why 70 lights at 4 inch spacing does not consistently result in 280 inches. Then you accordion everything downstream of that over 3 feet to match, and you end up not making it around the last window. So you add another string, and now you have an extra 20 feet of lights that you have to hide in the bushes. This cycle would go on and on forever without a) better planning or b) an eventual "eh, that's good enough" attitude. Guess which we usually end up on. Once I achieve this frame of mind, I usually have about three-and-a-half weeks to let it fester before last minute panic forces me to shop for gifts. If the mall is crowded, you're all getting extension cords.

At the moment it's storming like a righteous mofo. Blowing so hard that whole trees are coming uprooted! Actually it's kind of awesome. If the weather is going to be crappy, it might as well do it in style. Get interesting for a bit, then get done so we can go outside and have a picnic or something. Maybe not quite Katrina interesting, but there are falling sticks to dodge and random crap strewn in designated no strewing places. Why yes, that is a SodexHo food cart in the hedge. Thank you for noticing.