Category: Weblog

When I’m out riding my bicycle, I’m scanning the ground for anything that might be a hazard. As a result, I often spot things that are worth picking up. In my circle of friends, these items are referred to as ‘groundscore’.
On a recent ride up near Dodger Stadium, I spied a pair of needlenose pliers, circled back and picked them up.
When I got home and took a closer look, they were a bit beat up, but would be great if I cleaned them up a bit.

They had a little rust and grease on them, and the rubber grips were a bit torn up.
I cut off the grips with a knife and washed the pliers in dish soap to get as much grease and dirt off as I could. Michele told me I had toss the scrubbie I used since it was now “unacceptable” for use on our food dishes.

To get the rust off, I decided to get a little help from chemistry. I placed the pliers in a glass dish with vinegar and let the acetic acid do it’s thing.

Within minutes, the weak acid was attacking the rust and breaking it down. I left it in the vinegar for about two days.

After washing the pliers off from the vinegar bath, I went to work with steel wool to remove anything else that remained and generally polished up the pliers. I put a little WD-40 into the joint to make sure no water was lurking there.

Next step was putting on new grips. I decided to use Plasti Dip, which is a simple way to coat tools or anything with a rubberized coasting easily.
I strung up the pliers from above with enough room to put the Plasti Dip can under it and simply dipped the pliers handles into the can.

I put three coats on the handles, waiting about two hours between coats. I let it dry overnight before touching it.

Here is the final result. The look great IMHO. The grips aren’t as rubbery as the original ones, but they still look and feel great.
In the future, my eyes will be peeled for new groundscore tools to refurbish!

I tap my hand on The Gate, my ring connects, and the sound travels up the hillside.
Drinking from my bottle, I think about slowing down my heart, and look down the canyon, toward the city.
Cyclists find challenge in riding uphill. Sounds a little silly, but the tough work of riding up a steep hill is the goal for many in the quest to get better.
The Gate is at the end of a short route I’ve ridden over a hundred times. My friends and I call it Tour de Steve, in honor of our friend and coach, who loves to take people up it. Others know it as Paso Alto to Glen Oaks Dead End.
The route is about 2.5 miles at an average grade of ~5%. In cycling terms, it’s challenging, but not insane. “A good training climb” is how most people view it. The different parts have names in my mind that only I know. In my mind there’s the “veteran straight”, the “quick down”, the “hot bend”, and “not quite corner”.
I’ve ridden up in group, dragging new riders along, encouraging them upwards. I’ve ridden up when feeling full of energy and when my muscles are cramping. I’ve ridden up in the pouring rain, the blazing summer heat, enveloped in fog, and in the fading light of dusk. I’ve ridden up with my heart heavy from one of the inevitable gut punches that life can bring. I’ve ridden up after surgeries and broken bones.
Climbing up to the The Gate is part of many of my rides. It’s how I measure myself. With all the technology someone can use, nothing is more revealing than how you actually feel while testing yourself.
I rarely ride up with others. It’s a ride I do when alone. Sometimes for speed, sometimes as a warm-up to the rest of my day, sometimes simply to see if I’m healed enough make it. Sometimes it’s simple to see if I can will myself to do something hard instead of taking the easy road home.
The point is to ride it, regardless how I’m feeling. To push myself, even though no one else cares or is even watching. The climb is just about me, no one else.
Everyone needs a Gate to reach. A way to see how you are doing, without comparing yourself to others, or caring what others think. In today’s connected world, many are obsessed with sharing and comparing everything publicly. Looking at the relentless oversharing that make up much of our personal interactions, it seem to me that rarely do people have a private test. A truly personal way to check themselves.
In the end, it’s about how you feel about yourself, and not about anyone else and what they do or think. Getting to this is perhaps the toughest climb of all.

A while ago, I got an email out of the blue.

Many years ago, I started the geekcalendar.com site on a whim with my co-workers Travis and Yoshi. We messed around with the idea for a few months and promptly got bored. And so it sat for years on end, taking up space on my server.
When I first got the email, I thought, “I’m gunna be rich! This guy is already offering me money. He must really want it.”
And then I thought a bit more. And I remembered why this weblog is called Cruftbox and not Cruft.
Way back in 2001 when I decided I wanted a separate domain name for my weblog, different than my site using my last name as the URL. My first choice was cruft.com. I loved the word, ever since I heard it as a teen back in the early 80s. I quickly found that cruft.com, .net, and .org were all registered already by a guy named John Walker. There was nothing hosted at the domains, but he had them registered. John Walker is a smart guy and one of the founders of Autocad. I wrote him an email about the domain. We went back & forth a bit with him asking what I wanted to do with the domain and my explaination. In the end, he decided that he was saving it for “something important”.
I was a bit crushed, but started riffing on alternate names like boxofcruft.com, crufty.com, cruftlike, and others before finally settling on cruftbox.com. I registered the name and went on with my life.
For the record, Mr. Walker still has done nothing with the ‘important’ domain names of cruft.com, .net, and .org. They have been parked with Network Solutions for over a dozen years now, evidently waiting for an important use to come along. His own blog, fourmilab.ch, is good and I do check in with it from time to time.
It was that remembrance that helped me decide to give the domain to Chris and not charge him a silly amount for it. Trying to be true to the the geek spirit, I sent him this reply.


I would have loved to have seen his face as he read the letter.
After a bit of back and forth on specifics, he sent me a package and I transferred the domain registration to him.
Here is what I received.


I am happy that everything turned out so well. The Oreos have been eaten, the book has been read, and Watto graces my desk.
Chris now has the geekcalendar.com site up and running and I’m proud to have helped a little bit make something where there used to be nothing. Go take a look, it’s kinda neat.
So if you are someone sitting on a bunch of domain names, maybe instead of waiting for “something important” or a big payday to arrive, have some fun. Let go of the things you aren’t using and help something new appear.
As the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

You all might enjoy this. Last weekend I went out with my buddy Ken to ride the LA Marathon course before the runners started with a few thousand other cyclists. Kudos to Wolfpack Hustle for the organization.

I wrote this last year as a guest post for Byron at Bikehugger. I’m reposting it here as well. While I talk about cycling and injury here, I think you might be able to see how what I say applies to many things in life.

When you are a cyclist, life is often all about the goal. Sometimes the goal is the hill, the time, the stop sign, and for a lucky few, the podium.
Everyone is moving toward something. An objective that rolls around their brain pushing and pulling them past the comfort zone into the suffer.
A friend coaches athletes and his motto is “Train focused.” For a long time I thought it was some new-agey bullshit. Kind of like the motivational speeches I’ve heard from coaches all my life, a purely emotional tug to pull that last ounce of energy from deep inside. I have to admit, that kind of thing can work, but the effects are fleeting.
Recently, I learned what he was actually getting at.
My cycling goals have always been stuff like beating my time on a local hill, staying with the fast group on the club ride, completing a century, riding cyclocross, and similar things that you read about in magazines. Most cyclists have their list of goals and ideas that percolate in their mind when they pull a jersey over their head. Staying focused on the goals is key to completing them.
But sometimes life doesn’t go as planned. Recently, I crashed my bike. Hard. In a cycling trifecta, I broke my collarbone, wrist, and back. Leaving the hospital with both arms strapped to my body, pain shooting with every bump in the road, my wife’s eyes still red from tears, I couldn’t help but think about when I could ride again.
The first week I tried to do as much as possible, fantasizing about how to get back on a trainer or spin bike. And it was impossible. I literally could not feed myself and had to drink meals from a straw. Finally, my wife said, “Your job is to heal. That’s it. Leave the rest to us.”
At that moment I realized what Training Focused really meant. Knowing what you are trying to do and stop being distracted by all the crazy ideas. My job was to heal. My goal was to recover. Cycling could wait. And in reality, starting back too early would hurt my ‘goal’.
Once I accepted my real goal, I could get back into my athlete’s mindset and start focusing on doing what was needed to reach my goal. Getting enough sleep, eating right, ice, heat, taking pills on time, and even a little walking. Going in for the weekly x-ray became a event to be won, by focusing on my recovery.
Setting unrealistic plans of getting back on my bike too early, would have done nothing to help me with my real goal of healing. It’s easy to be lured into the false goal of trying to be a tough guy that can ride through injury, but in reality, it’s the worst thing someone can do.
Know what your goal is. Even when that goal is sitting in a chair wearing an ice pack. Work as hard to podium in the Doctor’s office as you would on the road.

Blogging
Last January 21th marked the first day of the 14th year of Cruftbox. I’ve been blogging for 13 years now. Clearly, I’m not on top of my day & date blogging lately.
I’ve talked a little about where my blogging has been in the past, and compared it to social media like Twitter and Facebook. But I’m going to talk about where I think blogging is going next.
First, let me define what I mean by blogging, since, like many terms, it means many things to many people.
Blogging is an individual’s thoughts and interpretations on a particular topic, presented in a unified way that creates a fuller picture of the person and their ideas.
Not a perfect description, but close enough for my purposes. Sure there are the occasional group blogs that might qualify, but most could be considered group sharing, not group blogging. Metafilter is a site for group sharing, not blogging. Comments are not blogging.
Many of the popular sites may have their origin in individual weblogs, but have morphed into online magazines, newsletter, and newspapers. Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and The Drudge Report are all newspapers, virtually indistinguishable from print originated newspapers. Even sites like Daily KOS, Redstate, Talking Points Memo, and Breitbart are almost exactly the same as supermarket tabloids. They focus on gathering information and reporting on the information to their particular narrative for commercial purposes.
Some may quibble about my distinction, but they are the types that quibble about everything in life, so we pay them no mind. 😉
Social Media and your Digital Life
One issue going forward with individual blogging is how it continues in relation to social media, most of which is ephemeral, with an exceedingly short life of relevance.
I enjoy the social services as much as anyone. It’s fun to get likes, retweets, and favorites. The majority of stuff posted there is OK to fade away. Your photo of a plate of pancakes captioned as “Noms!” is not going to be something your grandkids are going to frame and hang in the living room.
Social services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ aren’t going away anytime soon, but at some point they will essentially be gone, due to evolution of platforms, trends, and relevance. Don’t believe me? How are your usenet posts doing? Maybe your explanations in the AOL forums are still easily accessible? Or your witticisms on MySpace?
But there are things from the social feeds that are special, that you do want to keep, and are important to you. But you need to realize that those things will fade unless you are the one to store them away. And you need to store them somewhere where you have a modicum of control.
I think that part of the future of weblogs is as a scrapbook of sorts for your social media ‘moments’ that you want to capture and preserve within your own control and outside the remit of ever changing privacy and usage policies.
A few groups are toying around the edges of this, but I think it’s going to become more popular to exfiltrate your social media content to your own blog so you are not beholden to others. Thinkup is a start, but more focused on the analytics of social media feeds rather than sorting and storing the nuggets you feel strongly about.
The cost of storage and servers continue to plummet, in most cases far exceeding our ability to create content to fill what’s available. Also, the faith in ‘the cloud’ to store your content as a service you pay for, like you pay for gas, electric, broadband, and water. It would be fairly straightforward to offer a blogging platform that allows you to write traditional posts as well and store whatever you want from your social media feeds.
Talking about this with my friend Greg, he talked about assembling the individual ‘atoms’ of social media into the large ‘molecule’ of an event or experience. Being to save and store these molecule outside the volatile they exist now will become de rigueur.
My friend Eric Freeman used to talk about lifestreaming and how we’d end up with a way to keep track of our ‘digital life’. Today, most of us in the first world are living a digital life with bits and pieces scattered across the web and Internet. Time for people to take control of their digital life and bring it together in a way they like, rather than the way developers in Silicon Valley like.

A post by Sean Bonner has been bouncing around my head for a bit. In his post, he talks about looking around and thinking that everyone else has things figured out. That they had “cracked the code” or “have a pro account or something” on life in general.
I used to feel the same way. I’d wonder how I would ever get up to speed to what was going on around me in the world.
The truth dawned on me over time.
First, the group of guys I went to college with grew up and slowly started taking positions of power in the business and the military. We’d kept in touch since living in the fraternity house together. The same guys I watched do stupid, foolish, and occasionally felonious stunts, were now responsible for important things. Seeing a guy that put his motorcycle back together so poorly it literally caught fire was now flying a $25+ million fighter plan was a bit strange.
And then it dawned on me that maybe there weren’t a lot of people out there that did everything right in life and had life ‘scoped’ completely.
Once I moved up the corporate ladder, I started working with the people that decide what and how you see things on television and in the movie theater. Surely, these people must be no nonsense, super sharp, focused individuals. I mean, how else do you steer a Fortune 50 company correctly? It didn’t take me long to realize that the vast majority of people making the ‘big’ decisions in business weren’t all that different than you and me. Some liked facts, some liked numbers, some liked their gut, but none of them I saw ever take everything into account like you might read in an MBA textbook. A lot of the decisions I saw get made were because they were the ones that helped them avoid blame.
But because of their title, most viewed their decisions as ‘brilliant’. That is until they were ejected from the Company, upon which a new ‘brilliant’ individual would take their place.
My point is that you have it within you to be as good as anyone you admire. Even if you can’t see it, others can see your potential to do great things. The trick is looking at your strengths rather than looking at your weaknesses. I’m not saying you should ignore your weakness, just that you shouldn’t get caught up obsessing on how someone is better at something as you.
I guarantee you that you have a skill or ability that someone you admire is jealous of and wishes they could have.
I’ve only met a few people that were truly inspiring, innovative, and ‘game-changing’ in business and life for that matter. They all have the same basic characteristics.
Passion – They were driven by an ineffable passion to push forward. Not money, status, or reward, but by the prospect that they could move the needle in their field, even if only a little.
Openness – They wanted to hear what others thought. Not to refute or argue with them, but to listen to alternatives. They never lost sight of their goals, but were truly open to different paths to reach it.
Optimism – They are not cynical people. They see failure and problems as inevitable parts of the road forward. Rather than focusing on who is to blame for the tree that feel across the trail, they are busy climbing over it and leave a rope behind to help others get over it as well.
If there is anything we could all do to head toward having a ‘pro account’ in life, it is to follow our passions, listen to others with an open mind, and stay positive in the face of adversity.

Here are some concrete things you can do to to have a better 2013. No hand-wavy, touchy-feely resolutions. Just a few simple things to do that will make your life a little better.
Don’t sleep in the same room as your phone.

There’s no reason to be checking your phone first thing when you wake or last thing before you sleep. Let your mind rest a bit. Charge it in the other room when you sleep.

Send a gift to someone that doesn’t expect one for no reason other than they could use some love.

Why wait for holidays? People can use a little boost any time of the year. Receiving something out of the blue is a wonderful feeling. Knowing someone is thinking about you during a tough time is sometimes just what’s needed to get through. With internet shopping for pretty much anything you can conceive, there’s no excuse.

Go outside and exercise at least two times a week.

Exercising your body is the best possible thing you can do for yourself. Being outdoors and away from screens and into the sunlight is also great for your body and mind. If you don’t like to ride or run, even just walking during your lunch hour is great. Get outside, move your body, feel the sun on your skin and a breeze on your face.

Read book that is non-fiction, not self-help, and about a topic you don’t know well.

Getting outside of your normal zone of information is the only way to expand your perspective. Learning new things will help you make connections that you might normally miss. Our world is amazing, take some time to see it.

Listen/Read/Watch these things:

Bullseye – Podcast w/ Jesse Thorn interviewing people involved with popular culture from today and the past, shining a light on great things. Jesse’s interviewing is top notch, bringing people out from behind their standard PR answers and offering a glimpse of the person, not the persona.

Saga – Comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. The best written and most innovative comic book out there today. Romeo & Juliet meets True Romance meets Alice in Wonderland. Not for kids, it’s an comic for thinking adults.

What Technology Wants – Book by Kevin Kelly – A look at how technology affects and drives human society. Are we technology’s master, or are we doing it’s bidding? Well written and comprehensive.

The Diaz Brothers – Song by the Mountain Goats – My favorite song of the year. Simple, but with strange allusions to films and literature. A catchy tune that earwormed me for months.

The Great Hobini – Truly wonderful music mashups with a hip-hop touch.

Moonrise Kingdom – Movie by Wes Anderson – Finely crafted movie about an adventure in the world of 12 year old children. Touching, funny, and with enough commentary on adults to add a few layers of meaning.

Six weeks ago I crashed my bike. I’ve crashed before, but this by far was my worse. Since the crash I’ve learned a few things.
I was in a cyclocross race. Cyclocross is kind of like a steeplecross race for people on bikes. You ride over grass, dirt, sand, bumps and all kind of obstacles, occasionally jumping off the bike and carrying across barriers or up a hill. I’d wanted to do this for a while and had even built a bike up from the frame to ride.
Riding in my second race of the day, I was trying to make up some time on people ahead of me going over the flyover. A flyover is a big wooden ramp. This is what the flyover looked like. Here’s a video of much better riders coming down and making the turn.

I guess I came down too fast or made another mistake. When I hit the first bump after the flyover I lost control and crashed into the turn. They told me my tire popped on the bump and that was the cause, but I’ll never know for sure exactly what happened.
Over the handlebars I went, landing on my head and right shoulder. I tumbled a bit and landed on my back. I had heard a crunch and I knew I had hurt myself. I wiggled my hands and moved my feet, but couldn’t get up. A race official hopped over onto the course and crouched to shield me from other riders still going past. I just wanted to get up but he insisted I not move. He asked several questions to see if I was able to think straight. The ambulance crew came over, but they didn’t do much but put my arm in a sling in help me up. Everyone asked me if I wanted a ride to a hospital or other help.
Lucky for me, my buddy Ken was at the race too. He gave me a ride home. On the ride home I had to call Michele and tell her I had crashed and would need to go to the hospital. I hurt all over and had sharp pain in my shoulder, wrist and back. I realized this was not a trivial injury and my stomach sank.
Michele took me to the hospital where they cut off my cycling jersey to look at me and took a ton of x-rays.

After waiting the longest 15 minutes, the doctor came in and said, “You really banged yourself up today.” I had broken my right collarbone, left wrist, and cracked some bones in my lower back called the transverse processes. I’d have to see specialist to determine if surgery was needed. They strapped my right arm to my body and casted my entire left arm. I now couldn’t do pretty much anything for myself.
I’d had shoulder surgery before, but had always had my other arm free to do things why the injured arm was healing. Now I had neither.
I got a wrist cast on my left arm that allowed a little more movement and I stopped strapping my arm to my chest after 4-5 days. Over the next six weeks, I didn’t do much but stay home and heal. Doped up on the serious painkillers the first week, I stopped taking them the second and started to have more time to think. Currently, I’m through the worst of it and pretty functionally, but still limited on lifting things and hurt all the time.
What I learned:
I’m lucky – I landed on my head. My helmet cracked. I could have been injured in so many worse and permanent ways. Many are not so lucky and end up dealing with the consequences for the rest of their lives. I am truly, deeply grateful that I got off as easy as I did.
I’m not 25 anymore – When I was younger, accidents and injuries happened and usually were gone before a weekend was over. At 45, nothing heals fast. Even though I’m in good shape, eat healthy, and have great medical treatment, my recovery is measured in weeks and months and not days. Realizing exactly how long I’d be ‘down’ was a tough thing to come to grips with, considering the doctors still hadn’t ruled out a surgery on my collarbone. For all the wonderful things that age brings like wisdom, patience, and the long view, losing the ability to bounce back quickly really is a hard one to accept.
Cycling is mental exercise as much as physical – I love riding my bike. It’s my preferred solution to resolving every issue. Hit the road and everything fades back into the calm parts of my mind and I think about the color of the sky, the smell of summer as hot wind blows over a brown hillside, the hearing the sound my heartbeat roaring my ears, the feel of rain hitting my face, the taste of cold water on a hot day. Not being able to ride removed this way for me to deal with the everyday issues of the world. Cycling is as important to my mental health as to my physical health. I hadn’t imagine how much I’d miss this aspect and long to get away and feel the air on my face to help me process my feelings.
But the most important thing I’ve learned and need to continue to learn is this:
Humility – When I worked at Disney, I walked past a dedication plaque in front of the Frank G. Wells building regularly. On it was written “Humility is the final achievement.”

I pondered that quote literally for years. In the high stakes game of corporate politics, money, power and secrecy, humility was something that I rarely ran into. Humility seemed like a weakness.
Immediately after the injury I tried to figure out how to do things for myself and continue to keep my routine at home even though it was ridiculous. Michele and girls had to help feed me, wash me, remind me to take medicine, and even make me coffee. At first I felt bad about this, like I was a terrible burden constantly apologizing. Finally, Michele told me, “Stop apologizing. Accept this and let us help you. Your job is to sit still, rest, and get better.”
I’ve always viewed myself as someone who did the helping, not needing the help. I prided myself on being self-sufficient, stoic, and able to handle most things without needing help. But that wasn’t working here, I had to realize that asking and accepting the help of others, being grateful for their kindness, and seeing that I needed others was the only way forward. Once I accepted that it gave me a bit of peace. Accepting other’s making decisions for me, listening and accepting the advice of others based on faith in them not proof, and remaining positive during a tough time all helped me get through the first few weeks.
I hope that I can continue to find humility in my life going forward, not just in dealing with my injury, but in dealing with life on a day to day basis. I don’t think you ever ‘achieve’ humility, but like a bike ride, it’s a path you can take to help your mind and body.

My daughter’s friend, PJ, got an old frame and wanted to make it into a fixie. He needed help refinishing the frame. PJ got into cycling about a year ago and loves it. He joined the local club and has been out racing. He stops by every now and then for wrenching help and to talk cycling. I was excited to help in his project.
First, I completely disassembled the bike. It was an old Schwinn Free Spirit ten speed. It had an Ashtabula crank, which I had never seen before.
I kept all the components, just in case, but most of them were in bad shape.

At the hardware store, I asked what was the best paint remover to use. The paint specialist asked, “Safe and not so good, or dangerous and effective?” Obviously, I chose dangerous. We used Jasco to take off the paint. I can’t emphasize how strong the stuff is. Careful it eats right through nitrile gloves and pretty much anything else it touches. More than once I had to rub baking soda on my hands to stop the acid.
Be careful! You are warned.

The fork paint came off much easier than the frame. The frame took a ton of elbow grease with the wire brush to get loose.

I used wire brushes on the drill to complete the job. Doing it all by hand would have been impossible. It took hours to get every bit of rust and paint off. Wearing eye protection, a respirator, and protective clothing made it a hot, sweaty job, but better safe than sorry.

Kinda neat to see the welds/brazes.

Clean. Having the bike stand was invaluable during the cleaning process.

I made a paint rig from coat hangers and bungie cords. About as simple as it gets.

I used a collapsible shed as a paint booth. Here’s PJ putting on a coat of primer paint. I went with the Rustoleum white to help prevent rust in the future.

Primered.
Over the summer, we both got busy and the primered frame lingered in the garage for several months.

PJ wanted black & orange, the high school colors. So I went for a look with orange on the top, seat, and down tubes. I masked off for orange paint and built another quick hanger.

Painted orange.

I love this look, but PJ wanted black & orange.

I masked off the orange and sprayed on a couple coats of black.
Painting complete.

Decals applied for a retro appropriate look. I got the decals from VeloCals. I recommend them.
Lastly, I rehung the bike and applied three coats of clear coat for more protection.

PJ with his finished frame.
I had the fork headset pressed and put in a bottom bracket adapter to allow the use of standard cranks.
Yes, the bike isn’t finished. That’s up to PJ. His turn to step up and finish the job. I helped with the worst parts, but he can handle the rest and will continue to learn, which is the point of this whole effort.
I asked him for pictures when it’s done and will update here when I get them.