pedscapades | nat

New kicks, no wheels, actually, just tires.

nat — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 03:47:22 +0000

Gosh how long has is been, I have almost forgotten the existence of my virtual self here. Number of things have been happening, travels, bike trips etc., in the midst of regular commutes. Don’t wait up, the documentation will happen at its own volition.

When I started cycling, I figured there are things I would change frequently, like break pads, bar tapes, tubes, tires, and some more infrequently like chains etc… But once one starts riding, it hits home that the bike is a pretty efficient machine and requires less than a casual, hose down and grease up to keep it chugging along. The only thing I have had to change (also less than frequently) on my bikes are break pads. The rest of the additions / upgrades that have happened is less due to necessity and more due to want or vanity. Until recently.

I have been commuting on my Trek XO in the recent months and I enjoy the zippy feel that the skinny tires provide. The trouble with skinny tires is that I have to be careful pumping the tires to high pressures regularly and also look out actively for potholes and ruts on the streets. But it is zippy. Being the bum I can be, I ride under low tire pressures and also stay careless on maintenance, and it was a matter of time when the tires start to show signs of wear.

The first was a classic ‘snake-bite’ that I had to fix late night in the red-light district (A whole another story). The patch was not perfect and was followed by a re-patch in better circumstances the very next day. After a couple of weeks, the tubes started to leak slowly and messed up my return commute. After this happened a couple of times, I realized that I have actually, ridden enough for the tires to start feeling like tissue. Not bad, I have ridden my bikes enough to necessitate a real update.

So it happened this evening, I had run out of patches and my tires were flat. Pumping air did not solve the problem for more than a 100m. The last straw was drawn when I had to push the bike a couple of Km to get to a bike shop. I figured its about time I switched on to a new pair of tires and as it happened, it is a mildly hipster joint and had funky colored Schwalbe Duranos. A bit of funk is not a bad thing and I ended up with a pair of brown’s that nicely match the Brooks Honey I sit on. Schwalbe says it has good speed (?) and is extremely durable. I don’t know about the speed part, it rides well for now. But I hope they are correct with the durability.

Oh, in other news, I have been doing regular 400-500 Km commutes these months.

Jan stats

nat — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 02:57:16 +0000

It is a real bummer that the gaps between posts are just getting longer and longer. 6 weeks since the last post is not something I like to see. But there it is. I think I will be posting a few more stories from my recent travel to keep the blog a bit busy here.

But firstly, my commute stats. Jan was a good month, I wanted to make it a 500 Km month, but I chose to relax at the right times instead of pushing too hard and also lost a couple of days at the end of the month for some travels. After all the dust settled, I have a pretty good 470 Km during the month on the saddle. The distance is exclusively commute and the average speed hovers in the 22 Km mark (slower than the usual but thats what comes of pushing for distance )

Vacations have a strange way of tiring one when they get back, Must be the strain of flying long distances I guess. But in my case, though I was tired and a bit jet-lagged, I was revived into action after a crisp commute on my bike on a gloomy Monday morning. I guess all said and done, time on the saddle can really be therapeutic. With heart pumping, fresh blood, adrenalin pumping through the veins and music pumping through the ears, it is a joy to be out and about biking. Even though the destination is a dreary day at work, lol.

Cycling in December

nat — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 06:29:51 +0000

It is a great month to be out and about in Singapore. The weather is excellent with really cool mornings, rainy afternoons and pleasant evenings. There is the risk of a wet ride once in a while, but that adds to more fun in the commute.

The thing about riding in Singapore is that if you ride more than 6 Km and you work in an office, one needs to have a change of clothes at the destination regardless of weather. Summer invites strong perspiration and the monsoon always threatens a wet ride. It is nice to have facilities like the bike boutique to shower and change before heading into work… If I have not mentioned it before, I used to have access to a nice shower room at work which was yanked out of usage in the pretext of security (I call it “jock-strap security”). I have been using the lodging facilities from the Bike Boutique and been enjoying the services. It is not a money minter but I am sure a few more parking services in town can easily survive.

I have been having an enjoyable ride generally devoid of any incidents. But, due to a marathon participation in the early part of the month and the holiday season in the later, this has been a low mileage month. About 350Km at last count. Speeds are hovering at 24KmpH which is around average for me, it seems.

Get off my Road

nat — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:14:00 +0000

Before I get into the story proper, I should address the patient audience reg. the hiatus. Well, I have nothing much to offer in terms of juicy details, I have been commuting regularly on the bike and that’s about it. It has become so commonplace, I find it rote to write about the events of my commute. For those interested, Nov was a 500km month with average ride speeds of 24kmph. Nothing to write home about, but there it is anyway.

So something happened yesterday that gives me fodder to write. two separate incidents of road rage made me a bit miffed.

First case was in the morning, I was in my regular route which has 2 nasty road diversions. It is not a big deal but requires that I do an orchestrated jig to make sure I am visible to the drivers and I get my right of passage through the traffic signals. I was into the jig mid way, taking the lane, waving my hands, making myself look big, When I realized there was this white subaru (not the cops, they tend to use white subaru’s too) tailgating me, and sticking to my wheel like he wanted to pass me on a slip stream. It is one of those with the nearly illegal dark windshields and nearly black windows. It could have been a ninja but there is a higher probability of it being a beng (Note wiki shows a certain racist slur in here, but really, there is a beng in every social setup and a beng is a beng regardless of race).

What do you do when tailgated? Well, stick to your lane, and be predictable. Nothing works better. The downside is that once in a while you will get some ass like the one this morning, who passionately dole out their ignorance. He did it in abundance when he eventually passed me, unwound his windows and shouted that I had no right to be on the road. Sigh, man, I wonder how do these fellers get their licenses when they don’t seem to know the basic idea of who can and cannot use the roads.

The case 2 in point happened in the evening. I was heading back and almost home when a lorry passed inches away from me, I could feel the wind when the rear view mirror passed literally an inch from my ears. I usually am alright when people pass me close by but when 2 lanes are empty and the lorry rides inches past me at 50 kmph, I would like to voice out my opinion in the matter. I did with a Loud ‘oye’. Technically, it is just to vent the frustration and to relax the adrenalin glands and it does nothing else as the driver is oblivious listening to loud music in the cocoon of his car. Tonight was different, teh lorry was riding with windows down and he got my opinion loud and clear. He immediately stopped a few meters in front and waited for me to pass by for a confrontation.

Note, he was not in a hurry, so there is lesser reason for him to ride like a maniac.

Since I was near home, I figured I can take the opportunity to educate the feller. The conversation, however, went like this:

Me: Yo, can you make sure you give me space.

Him: You, you, why do you shout.

Me: Damn it man, you were an inch away from me, I have to get your attention. Now that I have survived, make sure you give others space while on the road.

Him (getting angrier): Why, Why did you shout. I did not hit you…

Me (flabbergasted, thinking WTF): …

How can I make an argument with some one whose case is that Since he did not physically injure me, he should not be subjected to criticism. Yikes. I hope these guys get their licenses revoked.

On a separate incident, I saw this lady drove into my lane like it was her Granny’s road. She did not bother signalling or slowing down, but she had a nice sticker on the rear window that screamed:

“Lady Driver – Please be considerate”

I don’t know, may be she thought that sticker was a license for her to behave like an idiot and get away with it. May be I should have a sticker on my back and then people will behave better. Who knows. stranger things have happened.

Photo Gallery – Chinese Opera

nat — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 14:32:52 +0000

Well it was unplanned, happenstance and I did not have a decent camera either… But some pictures none the less.

To HDR or not to HDR

nat — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:17:34 +0000

Ok, after the recent announcement from apple on HDR photography, alien subspecies in small planets near Betelgeuse have an awareness of HDR and are probably shooting exclusively in HDR. Probably there is a revolt somewhere that the professional camera makers are not including it along with the kitchen sink in their cameras.

Well, I am pretty excited to be able to expand the Dynamic range of the iPhone by cool software tricks and to me HDR it is a welcome feature. It is really impressive that the iphone is able to capture multiple frames in a really short burst and process them in mere seconds. This is really mind boggling. But the trick with photography has always been the ability to understand and use the camera as a tool and HDR is not an exclusion. One needs to understand there is a time and place for using it and it should be used with care (and understanding). Here is a sample image I shot, hoping HDR will help me get some details in the shadows, Here are the results.

You can click through to see reasonable sized images in new window.

First off, the HDR version (full image) has indeed ‘brightened’ the shadow areas. Look particularly at the front wall of the church and the flowers in the foreground. But I do not particularly like the ‘processing’ the camera has captured very little details to begin with and the HDR algorithm seems to have eaten a lot more of the details. It should be noted that the processing of HDR is kind of arty-farty right now and it requires a quite a bit of judgement to merge the images to make them look natural. It is no wonder that decent HDR packages cost upwards of 100$. I am sure there will be a lot of research on improving the standard algo and in time the merging will get a lot better, but I do not like what I see now

In the second row, I picked a crop of the clouds along with a church steeple. You can see there is a little more discernable details in the clouds in the HDR. That is nice and the blues in the sky were a bit darker too. but it seems that there is a bit of visible noise introduced in the image. You might also notice a bit of ghosting in the steeple in the HDR. This is because to capture HDR, they shoot 3 images in sequence with different exposures and merge them. Now the 3 images are shot sequentially and quickly but they are different exposures. This means that a bit of hand shake, moving objects etc will confuse the algorithm and the merging will have to guess what to keep or to average (or dodge or multiply or whatever else) the local perturbation. The result is ghosting. I found this pretty bad with people moving around. Now it is not a deficiency of the algo, I am just saying that one has to take care of this issue.

You will notice the issue pretty pronounced in the clock crop. The strong contrast seems to have messed up the internals of the HDR algo. *Geek* I am guessing there is a global translation / rotation transform that is applied at the point of merging. I can think of a slightly more process intensive solution, by applying a sequence of local corrections.. But it would take more processing time and one has to balance time with quality *Geek*. As you can see the Standard version actually preserved a lot more of the details. I am also guessing that the lens is of a standard aperture and the camera captures 3 images at the same shutter speed but different ISO which might explain the pronounced noise in the HDR image…

Lastly, the centre crop is what I shot the HDR for: A bit more details of the inside of the church. As you can see the exposure adjustment is probably not very pronounced, there is very little details brought out in the shadow. The Mid-tones have been pretty strongly influenced but the shadows are not touched at all. It is a bummer, but an understandable tradeoff, pulling a lot out of the shadows will make things more difficult for the algo to work with and the results will be very unnatural too. But when I look at the loss of details in the flowers, I regret shooting this in HDR. ugh…

I guess my point is this. HDR is a cool idea but it is not a cure all for thinking about the scene before shooting. I will use the feature but am going to switch on the ‘settings’ for keeping the standard image. Now that iPhone has implemented this, I expect every phone camera to update their software and some geeky app will allow you to tweak a lot of parameters too. The algorithm will improve a lot over time, thats for sure. But it is going to be just another tool in a decent photographers kit.

No related posts.

Photo Gallery – Sunset @ Endau Rompin, Malaysia

nat — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:33:54 +0000

A short weekend road trip to Endau Rompin. It rained on my hiking plans but still I enjoy being on the east coast of the peninsula. Who wouldn’t with stunning visuals on display

Photo Gallery – Bike trip, road trip et al, USofA 2010.

nat — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:08:53 +0000

Recently, I was in the Pacific NW riding the bike and having a generally merry time. Not sure I have anything to intrest the audience here but for a start, here is a photo gallery. I will look for stories to write when inspiration strikes

In the meantime, enjoy!

Photo Gallery – Fuji Rock Festival

nat — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:42:42 +0000

Here is an experimental gallery I am working on to keep track of my experimental hobby, photography. If you are interested, pop by there and have a look

Hope you enjoy the images. More galleries will be added in due course and the site design is in flux at this time. I am figuring out the right layout to keep the clutter down, keep the navigation consistent with the blog here and the page loads fast. Let me know if it works and more appreciation will be due if you let me know if something does not work

Hachinohe – peace at last

nat — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:54:56 +0000

I was pretty much stoned out when I hopped on the train. Pretty crowded but comfortable as usual and I went in and out of consciousness. How I wished I was on a overnighter like the Baikal 007 and get some really good shut eye. The longest Shinkansen from Tokyo was a short 2:30 hr ride but the rest I got was worth every minute.

Arrived at Hachinohe on time and the motel we found is literally connected to the station. We were here at 10:30 and the check in does not start till 3 pm. What a bummer. But we being the good sport we are, decided to creatively while the time away. What do you do in japan wan you are stinking and got a couple of hours? Hit a Onsen. Heh…

It is unusual for me to be in a public bath let alone among dozens of buck naked men of all ages parading around and jumping in hot and cold pool. It was a, um relaxing experience. I probably had the longest bath ever and i didn’t realize a bath can be pretty relaxing. It was always a mundane chore that I would avoid if I could but I can now totally understand people obsessed with long baths heh… After a while one tends to forget all the naked people. Would have been a different affair if it was a mixed-sex bath I think

The good people at the motel let us check in early and also gave us pointers on what to do. The last time I was in this region, I took a scenic train ride around rice fields and the coast. It is not in the cards this time but I took a train to a coastal town called Tanesashi. This is a quaint little town with a brilliant coast line. The beach was very clean and I should say unique. It has a combination of sandy beach, really soft grass land and a rocky outcrop. Seems to be a pretty favorite hangout for family picnics. Luckily there was very little crowd and the weather was excellent. The train ride was very peaceful and the gentle wind and rocking waves were the perfect accompaniment. I cooed have spent many more hours but 2 was good enough to de-stress. We topped it with an excellent meal of rice and noodles prepared by local chef who accommodated the strange vegetarian request.

August is a time for parades and celebration in Aomori, and When I head into town, the revelry was starting. Large floats paraded the streets and seems like the entire town turned up to join in the fun. Japan is strange, it is a place where you find punks and traditionalists side by side and today was no different. Tons of girls in kimono’s and many more in mini skirts graced the streets and there are few better ways to spend an evening sipping coffee and watching people flock by… I guess a perfect day to top up the rather rough few days.

Tomorrow is a 4 hr train ride back to the airport, but now I am just about knocking off with some mindless entertainment on TV. Believe me, 100 Dalmatians is a lot more fun in Japanese