We are both trying to get into better shape. Jacki is doing the couch to 5k running program and riding her bike. I’m not that motivated and it kills my knees to run so I’m just doing the bike. We have played some tennis a couple of times in the last week and that really kicks our asses. Fun tho. :)

My bike. The Electra Townie 21D in black.

Notice the kicking dog backpack that got converted into panniers. :) Also the handlebar mount for my Droid phone. That way I can GPS track the rides and play music.

Jacki’s bike. The Electra Townie 7D in orange.

Haven’t gotten any extras for her bike yet. Hopefully we’ll get a basket for the front soon.

Too summarize. Bikes! WOOT!

More of me babbling, pictures and maps after the break….

Here is what you get if you use a Moto Droid with Google’s My Tracks to record a ride.

View Bike 13 (J8) in a larger map
Here is the data dump from the ride.

So that is pretty cool. I can also upload them strait from my phone to my Google maps. You can also get the raw gpx or kml files from it. I do that if I want to geotag pictures off of one of our digital cameras to the track.

Here is the phone mounted to the handlebars. My Tracks will also give you realtime data while your riding. Speed, distance and all the other stuff just as it’s happening.

So I’m loving the bike and GPS phone combo. We need to figure out something about lights for them so we can ride at night. I’ve looked at some lights that mount to the handlebars, but they want a lot for them. I just can’t see paying $45-$200 for basically a LED flashlight with a clamp. WTF?

Me with the Townie pre-bag.

Oh and the ride through Black Hand Gorge is awesome and very bumpy.

Here is a board I did with half bright white and half soft white….

Not asleep yet? More after the jump….

The little work area that I setup on the kitchen table.

Top of one of the PCBs. This one was all bright white. You can see where I cut the board in half on the left. It isn’t very pretty, but it was the first one cut. Now I know the best way is a hacksaw.

A look at the bottom of the board. You can see my not very good soldering and the little jumpers I made out of the metal that I cut off the LEDs bottoms.

An upskirt shot of the PCB mounted in the lamp….

And finally the finished lamp!

This is a much better solution than anything I have used in the past. I really like being able to do a little math, solder stuff up and it works great.

Alright, so Randy Garbin is free to hate the curtains and what we did with the slides. I could really give a shit. He’s even free to bitch in the comments. I can’t believe Jacki didn’t block him a long time ago. Then there is the copyright infringement. Now you are just being a total dick. This post was made without Jacki’s permission to use the image which is clearly marked all rights reserved in flickr. Copyright infringement! Stay classy, Randy Garbin.

It was only maybe an inch long, but still. I had no idea that there were lizards in Ohio. Let alone this late in the year. It is a nice day. About 67 out right now. Jacki got her giant quilt basted on the deck today. It looked like a major pain in the ass.

Here is the other reptile….

It’s a foam snake! Ok so it’s starsan (a sanitizer) foam coming out of the keg as the beer goes in. It just amused me that it followed the tubing up to the top of the carboy. Oh and that is a Rye Pale Ale going into keg there :)

Brewday in progress…

We are also going to see They Might Be Giants tonight in Cleavland. That will hopefully be fun.

In other new vacation was good and stuff. Check out the flickrs if you care for pictures. I think we took about 60gig worth of digital pics. So we’ll probably be putting up pictures for a while :)

This is the battery, charge controller, inverter, and LED lights from before I installed it in the camper.

If your still interested more after the jump….

Our nice fold up 15 watt solar panel. We got this and the charge controller off ebay.

This is basically the same setup I used to test the system out in the camper yesterday…

This is 3 different screens that you can get on the controller…

Then there was the building of the Frankenpanel. I had 2 of the little panels for keeping you battery on you car charged laying around that I had for a long time. So I decided to wire them up and see what happened. I knew they wouldn’t put out a lot of power, but every little bit helps. So that worked well and then I saw another 2 pack of the little panels at Costco for $15. Well why not? So I wired all four panels together and screwed them to some 2x4s. Pretty? NO. Works? Great! It puts out about half the power that the panels I bought does.

Then here is the controller mounted in the camper. The battery is under the seat in front of it. You can see Bela hanging out in here also :)

And finally the test. I’m not sure how well this will show up in the post, but if your really interested click on it and you can get a bigger version on Flickr. Oh and those are times all the way to the left.

So hopefully this will all work well for us on vacation. Colorado here we come!

We went on our 4th trip in the kayak today. It’s an Advanced Elements AdvancedFrame Convertible Inflatable Kayak. iz fun

There is us in the kayak. Picture taken by my Dad.

Check under the fold for more kayak stuff….

Here is the GPS track in Google Earth of our paddle trip today. This is Knox Lake. It’s just a little way north of us. Very shallow with lots of tree stumps in it.

Bela and I in the boat…

Bela is not so sure about this…

There is a little island that we paddled around that had a bunch of nesting Great Blue Herons.

So lots of fun even with the with the colder weather and threat of rain. WOOT!

Just hanging out at the hotel tonight. We’ve been here for a few days and have a couple days left. Fun vacation, but we are so sore we can’t move anymore. I can’t remember what it’s like for my feet not to throb. We have taken about 3 billion pictures. Too busy to mess with uploading right now. So here are the few we I have uploaded….

Random Bavarian (?) man was walking across the street and we were trying to get his picture when his son (or at least someone with him) told us to stand with him and he’d take our picture. So here you go….

Jacki and I by the FDR Memorial. That is the Tidal Basin behind us and then the Jefferson Memorial.

Just finishing things up with some creepy. At the FDR Memorial is a wall covered in this kind of stuff. I have no idea why. It’s defiantly creepy tho.

I’m sure Jacki will post a good accounting of our activities at some point….

I cut three holes in the side and that seems to be enough airflow.