Randy’s Blog

The weather here has been fairly typical for this time of year. Short bursts of beautiful 70+ degree days, followed by a week or more of 50's and low 60's. In other words, agonizing. Yesterday one of the long stretches of colder weather began. At the very least, I have managed to go on one bike ride around the neighborhood on a 70-degree day.

So, to pass the time, and to remind myself of what fun lies ahead, here's a breakdown of the bike gear I've accumulated over the past few years. I don't make any claims that these are the best products out there, I just claim that they're the things I use.

Giant Sedona Bikes

I remember when we bought these in March 2012. A few days later the temperatures spiked to 80-degrees. In March! So that was really good timing.

In February of this year, I took them to the bike shop for tune-ups, since they had a special discount going on. It was probably good I did; the mechanic said both bikes needed a new chain and new front gears. The bikes are also super clean now, too. Most of the trails we ride on are dirt paths, so the bikes had gotten quite dusty.

Allen Trunk Bike Rack

This is a standard trunk-mount bike rack, with straps that hook to the edges of the trunk. I bought it from Amazon here. It holds two bikes, although it's a bit tricky to get them both on without getting the pedals tangled up with the other bike's spokes. It usually takes me once or twice in the spring to remember the best way to fit them both on. I also keep a couple bungee cords in the car, which I use to secure the front wheel of each bike, so they're not bouncing around during the drive.

Sigma 1609 Bike Computer

This was a birthday gift from Wendy. I mainly use it to keep track of mileage and riding time. At the start of each spring, I reset the odometer so I can keep a running total for the year. And each time I start a bike ride I reset the trip odometer so I can track mileage for just that ride. It also tracks current, average, and maximum speed. I think the fastest I've ever gone on the bike is somewhere around 25-30 mph, when going down a steep hill. That's scary enough. I cannot imagine the professional riders who hit 60 mph when going down a mountain.

It's a really useful gadget. I'm glad to have it.

Giro Indicator Bike Helmet

Safety first! I always wear this when going out on the trails. Not much to say about it.

Nishiki Saddle Bag

This is a basic bag that hooks underneath the saddle. I bought it from Dick's Sporting Goods. It's been fine, although one of the seams is starting to come undone, so I should probably get a new one at some point. I usually keep snacks, loose change, a bike tool, kleenex, and a map in here. There's not much space, so those things usually fill it pretty full.

At some point I may opt for a larger bag that fits over the rear wheel. Then I could take an actual lunch, not just a snack bar.

Camelbak Hydration Backpack

I am enormously pleased with my Camelbak. It was my 10-year anniversary gift at work, which I wrote about here. It stores a huge amount of water. I love it.

Polar Insulated Water Bottle

If I know it's going to be a short trip, I take one of these instead my Camelbak. They were a birthday gift from Wendy. I am impressed with their powers of insulation: even on hot days, ice water stays icy for a surprisingly long time.

Cargo Mountain Bike Shorts

These are two shorts in one: spandex shorts covered by cargo shorts. But the best part is the extra padding in the seat, which helps a lot during long rides. You won't be surprised to learn these were a birthday gift from Wendy.

Double Dry Fit Socks

When I bought these, I wasn't intending them as biking socks. I just wanted short socks. But then I wore them on a bike ride, and the socks were so short and so breathable that I could feel air flowing around my feet, keeping them cool on a really hot day. So now they're biking socks. And my feet are happy.

That's my list of biking gear. As I type this, the temperature outside is 44 degrees, with a 10 mph wind from the north, making it feel like 39. And it's raining. But some day, eventually, I will get to use all of these items on a bright, sunny and warm day.

It was a tough loss yesterday for the Sooners in their first Final Four in 14 years. Difficult to stomach. I think this headline sums it up well:

Sooners' dream season ends with a nightmare finish

Last week, though, in the lead up to the Final Four, my hopes and dreams were still in tact. Reality had not yet crushed them so cruelly and callously. So last week I dove head first into the mass of media coverage.

I decided that my Big 12 River wasn't big enough. It only had regional stories. It was time to go national. So I went to Google News, did a search for oklahoma sooners basketball, and created a Google alert to notify me whenever it found a new story with those keywords. Over the course of the week, I read nearly every story it found. Here's a bit of what I read.

It wasn't just a tough final game for the Sooners, it was a tough 3 weeks of the tournament:

• The first week of the tournament, backup center Akolda Manyang learned his brother committed suicide. He left the team to be with his family and didn't return.
• The second week freshman Christian James learned two of his friends, and his high school girlfriend, were killed in a car accident.
• The third week starting center Khadeem Lattin's grandmother died.

It's almost unreal that all of that happened to one team during March Madness.

In more cheerful news, if you read only one story about Buddy Hield, read this one. It is absolutely charming.

ESPN The Magazine has an excellent article, A Beautiful Burden, about Khadeem Lattin and his grandfather, and the racism both have encountered during their playing careers.

The Sooners have been making it to the Final Four in 14-year spans. 2016. 2002. 1988. There's a basketball athletic trainer at OU who's been there 29 years, so this was his third Final Four with the Sooners.

There's a lot of love out there for head coach Lon Kruger. He's coached at K-State, Florida, Illinois, UNLV, and now Oklahoma. I came across several articles from newspapers in Las Vegas and Florida that praised the job Kruger did in rebuilding their programs. He's still fondly remembered at both places. Florida especially, because he took them to the Final Four in 1994. "Lon is the guy who made Florida basketball," says one analyst.

Rolling Stone had a great article interviewing some of Kruger's former players. My favorite story was from a former Florida player who remembered his team falling behind 12-0 early in a game, when Kruger called timeout. The player expected to be chewed out big time in the huddle, but instead Kruger took out the dry-erase board, drew a big smiley face, and told the players to take a deep breath and relax. They would be fine.

David Boren, the president at OU, absolutely loves Lon Kruger. He enthusiastically told a group of people that Kruger is one of the greatest hires ever at Oklahoma, and then spent 4 minutes explaining why that was a fact, and not an opinion. It all boils down to making students better people, not just better basketball players.

Here's to better days for the Sooners.

The Oklahoma Sooners are headed to the Final Four! The past several days Wendy and I have been reading, sharing, and discussing lots of sports articles with each other. There are several great story lines.

The best article was from ESPN about how head coach Lon Kruger is the nicest guy in college basketball. According to an assistant coach, his biggest vice is vanilla ice cream, and the one thing that annoys him most is selfish play. I was especially stunned at how athletic Kruger was. After playing basketball and baseball at K-State in the early 70's, he was drafted by the NBA's Atlanta Hawks, the MLB's St. Louis Cardinals, and was invited to the NFL's Dallas Cowboys rookie camp!!

And then there's Buddy Hield, who grew up in the Bahamas, and, after deciding to come back for his senior year, has become the best and most exciting player in college basketball. Buddy himself wrote an article, More Than Enough, about growing up poor in the Bahamas and having to make his own basketball goals out of milk crates and bicycle tire rims. It's another must read article. When the next NBA season starts, I'm totally buying NBA League Pass so I can watch whatever team Buddy goes to.

Then there's Buddy's mom, who gets too nervous to watch his games, so she wanders the hallways of the arena during the last few minutes of each game.

The best story line, in my opinion, (and the reason I really, really wanted OU to make the Final Four) is of Khadeem Lattin, a sophomore forward for OU, and his grandfather David "Big Daddy" Lattin. 50 years ago, the grandfather played for Texas Western, which won the NCAA tournament. That was a landmark win, because they were the first team with an all-black starting lineup to win the tournament. They beat an all-white Kentucky team. Disney even made a movie about it in 2006 called Glory Road. Now, 50 years later, that team will be honored at this years Final Four. So the grandfather will be there for the ceremony, and now his grandson will be there playing in his own Final Four! Such a great story. This article has more info.

And then there's the tragic story of Akolda Manyang, a junior center for OU. Two weeks ago, shortly after OU's first-round win against Cal-State Bakersfield, Manyang learned his older brother had died unexpectedly. He left the team to be with his family and has been with them ever since. Last I heard, there was a chance he would rejoin the team for the Final Four, but given how much time off he's had, it's uncertain if he would play. The team dedicated their second-round win to him, and want to keep winning so he can return to the team.

Whew! It's been so much fun watching this team play. Four of the five starters have started over 100 games together at OU, which is a rare feat. As this article mentions, just making the Final Four is a heroic feat, and whenever this team plays its last game, it will mark the end of an era for Oklahoma basketball.

Nautilus is a bi-monthly magazine featuring science-related articles, interviews, book excerpts, short fiction, and more. It also has really cool artwork to go with the stories. Wendy gave me a gift subscription to it for my birthday last year, and so far, I really dig it.

We took a couple of trips late last year, and the Nautilus issues I brought along made for excellent reading at the airport and on the plane. For example, in the Nov/Dec issue from last year, there's a brief article about events in Japan called Rui-Katsu, which are "tear-seeking" events, where people gather to watch a series of really sad short films designed to make them cry. It's a socially acceptable way to release emotions. But, the article points out, crying events really aren't anything new. That's basically what the movie Godzilla was when it was released in 1954. The Japanese associated Godzilla with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but since it was considered inappropriate to talk about those events, people went to see the movie and cried violently as the monster destroyed Tokyo. Godzilla, basically, was a form of therapy for Japan.

This was such a revelation to me! I had never connected the dots between Godzilla and the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan in WWII. But now it makes so much sense.

Another article from the same issue talked about the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, and it altered weather patterns around the world. The following year, 1816, was called "The Year Without a Summer", or (my favorite) "Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death". The extreme weather triggered by the explosion led to crop failures and massive starvation. For the 3 years following the explosion, "to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry."

Parts of Europe were especially hard hit with violent weather. One observer in Switzerland wrote that the tremendous thunder during one storm had a "bodily impact" like that of a heart attack.

Amidst all of this chaos, Frankenstein and Dracula were born. Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and a few friends spent the bizarre summer in Switzerland, staying warm by the fire, having a ghost story competition, and (possibly) smoking opium. Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, and John Polidori, one of their companions, wrote The Vampyre, which later inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The article referenced a movie from the 1980's recreating that summer through the eyes of Mary Shelley, but, annoyingly, it didn't mention the movie's name! After a bit of research, I found there were actually two such movies in the 80's. I was able to get a copy of both through the library system in our area. The movie the article referred to was Gothic, directed by Ken Russell. It's a horror movie and unless you really, really enjoy horror movies, I don't recommend it. Stay away. The other was Haunted Summer, directed by Ivan Passer. It's a drama and was much more enjoyable. Neither movie really addresses the effects of Tambora, though, which was a little disappointing.

Yesterday I finally sat down and created the cherry cordial program that I wrote about here. It will run twice a week and email me if any Little Debbie cherry cordials are in stock nearby. The code itself is rather boring to look at; most of it involves error checking. If anything goes wrong at any point, it has to alert me, otherwise it could break and I would never know. To run the program, I type something like this:

./snackfinder --product='Cherry Cordials' --zip=12345 --radius=10

As of today, there are no cherry cordials near me. I expect that to be the case for the next 8-9 months.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was also a programmer. In the book Last Chance to See he says:

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Ha! That's pretty much how I feel about my snack finder. It was 3-4 hours of work, and it's saving me only a few seconds of effort, but I am extremely pleased with it, nonetheless!

College football is over, and has been for a while, so I've had a chance to catch up on TV shows I've missed. That includes resuming my Star Trek: TNG watching duties! I finished up season 6 recently and started season 7. The final season! Only 20+ episodes to go.

I'm also starting to get excited about watching Deep Space Nine after I finish with The Next Generation. I watched very little of it when it aired, so it will be almost all new to me. From what I recall, it's much darker and more plot driven, as opposed to TNG, which is more character driven.

Finally, in other Star Trek news, check out this awesome shirt I got for Christmas from Joy & Cory:

It's Data's poem! About his cat, Spot! It's from the Schisms episode in season 6, which I wrote about here. This was a super-cool gift; I was excited to get it. Now I want to go to a Star Trek convention, so I can wear this and get mad respect from all the Trekkies.

Recently I learned that we get a PBS channel devoted entirely to Native American/Indigenous programming. Cool! It's called First Nations Experience.

I discovered it a couple of weeks ago while flipping through the TV guide. I noticed a show called "Indians + Aliens". That sounded right up my alley, so I took a look. It's a 6 episode series that follows Ernest Webb, a Cree Indian living in northern Quebec, who investigates UFO sightings reported by members of his tribe. In one episode he shows an impressive tattoo on his shoulder of an alien head wearing an Indian headdress. "These are your kind of people!" said Wendy. I've watched 3 of the 6 episodes so far. They're pretty good. I've been really impressed by the special effects used to recreate the UFO sightings.

Also relevant to my interests was an episode of "Indigenous Focus". From what I can tell, the show features short films and interviews with indigenous people. One interview was with Russell Bates, a science fiction writer from Oklahoma, who's written for Star Trek! They showed him writing in his office, which had an OU sticker on the wall near his monitor. He spent much of his career in Los Angeles, where he did some acting, but mostly writing. He wrote an episode for "Star Trek: The Animated Series", which aired in the mid-1970s. The episode was called "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth", and he won an Emmy for it! It was the first Emmy won by any Star Trek series.

I found the episode on Amazon Prime and was able to watch it for free. It's good. The Enterprise encounters a winged-serpent alien who had visited Earth long ago. He was the basis of the Mayan god Kukulkan, and the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

All of this got me wondering what other PBS channels we get, so I did some research last night. We get at least 8 different PBS channels from 2 Chicago stations and 1 Milwaukee station:

WTTW: Window to the World (Chicago) has 4 channels

• WTTW
• WTTW Prime
• WTTW World
• WTTW V-me (Spanish programming)

WYCC: We're Your City Colleges (Chicago) has 3 channels

• WYCC
• FNX (First Nations Experience)
• MHz Worldwide (International programming)

MPTV: Milwaukee Public Television has 1 channel

This is such a different world from the 1 PBS channel that existed when I was a kid. But I like it!

Little Debbie makes these cherry cordials, and they're delicious. I love them. 

But they're a seasonal product, only available during Christmas and Valentine's Day. I used to get them at the local Meijer store, but they haven't carried them in years, which is sad. That means I haven't had any in years. I always look at other grocery stores but without any luck. I even used the Little Debbie snack finder on their website to locate stores that carry them, but I could never find them in those stores. Bummer.

Then last night happened. After I got home from work, Wendy lamented that we had no lettuce for our burrito bowls. So I volunteered to go to the store to get lettuce, since it would give me another shot at finding Little Debbie Cherry Cordials. I went to Jewel, a store I'd checked out before, hoping this time they might be in stock. After I got the lettuce, I headed to the snack aisle, found the Little Debbie section, and, as usual, they weren't there. So I walked around the perimeter of the aisles, checking the end caps. Nothing. Then I walked down a middle section that cuts through all the aisles, and I found them! For some crazy reason, the Cherry Cordials were in a special display stand down the frozen food aisle. I have no earthly idea why they put them there. Why wouldn't they put them with all the other Little Debbie snacks? But that does not matter now; what matters is that I found them!

So I bought two boxes, went home, declared victory to Wendy, and ate some cherry cordials (a modest amount). Today I went back and bought another box, just to stock up.

And now that I know I've been looking in the wrong place all these years, a thought occurred to me. I spend my days writing computer programs. I could write a program that checks the Little Debbie snack finder once a week, and notifies me when a nearby store has started carrying them! I think I'm a genius.

About a month ago I read the article "Don't be a Sval (or a Bard)" on The Arctic Journal. It's about a new website which released a series of 10 animated videos educating tourists about the rules and regulations in Svalbard. The videos use stop-motion animation to depict two trolls, named Sval and Bard, who visit the island and have all sorts of misadventures as they manage to break every rule.

I watched the videos as they were released every few days over the past month. The last one was posted on Monday. They're pretty good. And they're short, only 2 or 3 minutes each. These were my favorite:

• Episode 4: "It is prohibited to lure, pursue or otherwise seek out polar bears"
• Episode 8: "For the sake of the environment and yourself, we recommend organized tour arrangements"
  

You can find all the episodes here.

I finished reading North to the Night by Alvah Simon, which I mentioned a few posts ago. With his boat trapped in the ice, the author spent a beautiful and terrifying winter alone in the Arctic. He wasn't completely alone, though: he had a cat to keep him company. At one point during the long and lonely polar night, he penned this poem about his cat, named Halifax:

Halifax, my cat, was furry and fat.

Oh, a finer companion could not be.

I was trapped in the Arctic,

My life was so stark it

Had no other warm company.

And so side by side,

the dark months we did bide,

Huddled as bleak blizzards blew.

And when the food ran out,

At eight pounds thereabout,

she made a fine and filling meat stew.

Ha! The ending is pretty good, but overall I still like Data's poem better. Don't worry, though, he didn't really eat the cat.

The cat, in fact, saved him from being eaten by a polar bear on numerous occasions. Whenever he wanted to leave his boat, Halifax "would sit on the top companionway step for up to a half hour just listening. She would turn her little head steadily like a radar interpreting signals too subtle for my muted human senses. If she returned to the bottom of the sleeping bag, then so would I. The next day I would find signs of the bear's ambush site next to the boat."

I spent a few minutes searching the web for the latest news on the author. I learned that in 2009, nearly 15 years after the Arctic adventure, Halifax the cat passed away. The author wrote a touching good-bye article here.

The book was fascinating. I recommend it.