All posts by Benjamin Vulpes

Mini ramp update 2

Can’t say as I have any idea how I got out of Home Depot without pictures of the first haul of supplies for the skate ramp. Plenty of 2×6’s, and 3/4 inch plywood for the transition panels.

Apparently I failed to document the transition panel fabrication process as well, but I definitely ran the jigsaw way too hot, way too fast, and ended up with terrible cuts that I then needed to bring into symmetry.

Harmonization entailed buying a belt sander (oh no, more tools!), and screwing the transition panels together to ensure that each side of the pipe was sculpted identically. I started out attempting to do all 4 at the same time, but that really chewed through belts, and I was struggling to get good contact across all four at the same time anyways, so I went down to two pairs.

Long story short, I’ve assembled the skeleton of one of the transitions for the ramp, started laying out where I want the footings/foundation to all sit, and will be working on leveling everything up as we go.

Continue reading Mini ramp update 2

Mountain Bike Oregon

Went to Mountain Bike Oregon again this summer, but this time I brought my son Cedar with me! MBO (for the uninitiated) is a 3-ish day mountain bike festival in Oakridge, Oregon. We showed up on Thursday evening, in plenty of time to pitch tent, grab some burgers in town, and catch the happy hour at the campsite. Note to self: don’t optimize camping for morning shade, as it will be cold and the small child won’t want to get out of bed. Instead, optimize for early morning sun, as that will get everyone out of bed faster.

MBO is 3 days of shuttled rides in a mountain biking mecca called Oakridge. This year I did Alpine, Lawler, Hardesty, Dead Mountain and I think Lower Fork (although I was promised Heckletooth). These are all legendary trails, and I noticed that while my skills had definitely improved over last year, my physical ability was definitely short of where I was last year. Topic for another post, but the move to Bend has robbed me of all of my time to work out, what with all the work that Kara and I had to put into the house to get it back to the point where we could sell it.

Lunch before we drove out to Oakridge:

Views like this are typical, but my phone was off for pretty much the duration of the event, so I don’t have any more than this to share. However, typical!

I logged about 50 miles of downhill on this trip, which was a downright intense way to start the bike season.

We also got to see some epic lightning while picking up dinner the first night (credit: random cool chick who had her phone on slow-mo for this strike):

A simple XCTestCase question ChatGPT failed to answer tonight

It’s not a hard problem, it’s not even a complicated problem. It’s merely a “can you think things through” sort of problem.

Me: Great and glorious LLM, pray tell how I might alleviate suffering and woe in the QA wing of my house by implementing a setup method on an XCTestCase class that runs once before all tests in the class?

ChatGPT: My fine human, you seek to override class func setUp.

Me: Marvelous. My problem now is that I cannot call addUIInterruptionMonitorfrom a class method.

Continue reading A simple XCTestCase question ChatGPT failed to answer tonight

Wear parts

Wear parts, to be utterly useless, are the parts that wear. A clutch is a wear part, skate shoes are wear parts, to some degree skate trucks are also wear parts (although one goes through approximately ten times as many decks as trucks).

Binning possessions into wear vs. non-wear parts helps reduce the amount of thinking that goes into taking care of objects. “I want to be less precious about the cars”, I said recently, by which I mean I don’t want to be quaking in my boots over scratches or the paint job getting gummed up, or any of the million other things that could happen when romping the new truck through the wilds of the Oregon high desert.

Does this make the truck a wear part?

My sunglasses are wear parts. Some folks (lookin at my wife on this one) prefer to own 2 pairs of expensive sunnies, cycling back and forth, caring exquisitely for them, and losing track of where they are. Purse? Car? Children’s room? Dedicated sunglasses collection point at house ingress point? Me, I buy sunglasses in batches of 10, throw them in my backpack, in the truck, in the diplomat, in the wife’s car, in all of the totes dedicated to specific genres of adventure sports. And then I simply chuck them when they get too beat up.

Treating the sunglasses as wear parts gives me all the intellectual freedom in the world. Scratches don’t matter, losing them doesn’t matter, putting them in cases doesn’t matter, nothing matters! They’re wear parts! Their entire purpose is to be in reality, ablate over time, and ultimately be disposed of. They are born, mature, and die, just like anything else.

What about nice sunglasses though? More pertinently, what about really nice skiing googles? Googles can run into the hundreds of dollars (almost justifiably! For anti-fog, comfort, field of view, and fabrication quality in general), but if we treat them so very preciously, we’ll find ourselves doing dumb shit like changing stance while ripping through the trees in a (I contest) vain effort to keep them from getting scratched up, when at least for ski goggles, their entire purpose is to protect our eyes from foreign objects coming in faster than the biology can counter.

Everything wears, ultimately. You and I are wear parts in our species’ reproductive engine. The truck itself is a wear part over a long enough time horizon, and will eventually need replacing as well.

Best to not get bent out of shape over a few scratches on the brand new car. It too will die (or be covered in glitter paint by reckless 5-year old terrorists) just like everything else. Quit stressing over the petty shit and go enjoy your life. Channel that OCD into productive outlets.

Monster Jam PDX 2023

I took my son Cedar to Monster Jam this weekend. Impulse-splurged on some pretty good tickets, too! As soon as we walked in, my eyes started watering from the engine fumes. That’s how you know you’re going to have a good time!