Aaron's blog

This morning I woke up in spider paradise, but at least they were all outside my tent. The campground provided coffee so I didn't have to drink mediocre instant coffee, and I did some laundry. On the road by 10:30, my destination was Oak Ridge. Yes I drove through there yesterday, but I had priorities then!

In Oak Ridge I spent about 3 hours in the American Museum of Science and Energy. A lot of it was about how the whole city of 75,000 people then was constructed to support the workers refining uranium for the Manhattan Project--pretty cool stuff. The rest was well put together exhibits about atomic energy and atoms but I cruised through that since I already knew it all. :)

Just down the road I found some Mexican food (very similar to El Sombrero in Dickinson actually) and left at 3:00 to make some progress towards Charlotte. It was 240 miles away and I only had 5 hours of daylight so I hopped on the interstate. This interstate was not like others. It was an exciting ride through the mountains, with trucks thankfully banished from the left lane.

Then I saw an exit "Lake Junaluska Hot Springs" and thought that a nice warm soak would feel pretty good. So I pulled into the gas station at the exit and found that Hot Springs was a town about 30 miles away. I found a campground there that looked pretty legitimate so I headed north.

It turns out that the road leading there has a nickname too--The Rattlesnake. There was a sign bragging 200+ turns in 24 miles. Compared to Tail of the Dragon, it has wider turns, is over twice as long, and had a glorious 55 mph speed limit (your own fear of death will limit you to an average of probably 35 but having the headroom is nice) versus the Dragon's 30 mph. It was a beautiful drive carving down the side of one mountain and up the side of another. In the last two days it seems like any road I take is amazing. I guess that's what happens when your land isn't flat and isn't divided up into square-mile blocks.

In Hot Springs I setup my tent and then figured out the hot spring deal for later tonight. Since everything is within walking distance I parked the bike and am now chilling in a bar with some live guitar music. This is the first time I have had working Wi-Fi so I got to type this on my Surface instead of the phone. Simple luxuries! I tried some golden lager from nearby Asheville and a Yuengling (some people will appreciate that I tried different beer since I usually just turn to trusty defaults).

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I sat in a hot tub filled with hot spring water in a private shack with a rushing river in the background for an hour. It was very romantic. Pretty sure 99% of the people that go there do it with their significant other and get all cuddly in their shacks so I was definitely raising the weird level but I enjoyed it and have no regrets.

I've been cooking oatmeal every morning using a small backpacking burner and this morning I burned the bottom so it didn't taste very good.

I cruised through Oak Ridge and was at the Tail of the Dragon by 12:30. Unfortunately so was a rainstorm. My first run started out with some drizzle and then a downpour for the last five minutes. This left me soaked from the waist down but since there was no easy fix for that and the rest of me was dry I popped inside the store at that end, bought a mug, and went back the way I came. There was some thunder and lightning, a few minutes of heavy rain, and mostly drizzle again on that run. I turned around and did it one more time, and the rain was done for the rest of the day.

I still enjoyed the road, even though it was wet. Bike tires have more traction in the wet than most people assume, and the tires I have are widely reviewed to be the best you can get for rain. So given that and that I don't ever corner close to the limits anyways, I did not feel held back by the weather.

But, I did find all the tight switchbacks, poor visibility around corners, and a decent amount of oncoming traffic to be stressful. I just don't really enjoy corners at 10-20 mph as the bike is much less stable. So I had a lot more fun on other roads in the area for the rest of the afternoon. The Cherohala Skyway was one I especially enjoyed. It is 50 miles of sweeping turns up and down and around--big elevation changes, good visibility, and almost no traffic.

After that I tried to find a campground. My phone showed me this which looked pretty cool so I took off, GPS directions chattering in my ear. The roads I turned onto kept getting smaller until it was just some crappy gravel mess, and what I'm guessing used to be the sign had been painted solid white. I had to see what the deal was so in I went. I found the office but it looked dis-used. Down the hill was a gravel cul-de-sac so I walked down to talk to a guy (the only guy) who had an RV and tent setup. He was throwing logs around (weird) and had some grouchy dogs. "I guess so" he answered when I asked if this was a campground, "Mark--the owner--will be back in a while." I said I wanted laundry facilities for the night (true, but also a convenient reason to leave) and fled. A KOA twenty miles away did the trick for tonight.

I had fried okra as part of supper and it was pretty good. Overheard at dinner was a discussion about whether "grits 'er good."

The heat hit me hard today although I don't think the temperatures were actually quite as high as yesterday. Slower speeds in the plentiful construction zones were definitely part of the problem. I stayed well-hydrated but as I was experiencing heat chills I took more breaks to try and stay cool. 500 miles for the day puts me just south of Somerset, KY.

Traffic on the interstates in Indianapolis and Louisville was crazy with trucks. South of Louisville I switched off the highway toggle on my GPS app and took quite delightful curvy country roads to Somerset. Now that I have reached what I consider to be my area of interest I will be leaving that switched off. While I love hauling along on the interstates in ND, it will be a relief to not deal with all the trucks that are on them here. Plus, fun roads!

Did you know the cement trucks here dump out of the cab end? It looks so funny to see a cement truck driving down the road "backwards." Saw the first example just east of Minneapolis actually.

I put in 700 mikes today and have my tent pitched just outside of El Paso, IL. It started out pretty cold (and foggy) so I had my handwarmers on, but around Madison and Chicago it was a toasty 95 degrees. I liked the terrain around Eau Claire the most--very pronounced hills.

A week ago I bought some new lead (graphite) for my mechanical pencil.  Looking at the rack of refills, I realized my choice would not be simple.  There are different hardness ratings, in addition to the sizes.  I use 0.5mm.  Summoning memories from my 8th-grade art class, I selected 4H as it was one of the harder options.

This selection of mechanical pencil refills has completely revolutionized my note-taking and homework-completing lives.

• This lead writes much crisper lines.
• I have yet to snap the end of the lead off (used to happen frequently).
• I’m still using the first lead.  It probably lasts twice as long as regular lead
  • I have to click the end of my pencil less.
• It does not leave dust on the paper, which used to cause smudges.
• I don’t need to rotate my pencil as much because the edge stays sharp longer.
• Erasing marks made with this lead leaves virtually no traces of the marks and consumes less of the eraser.

The message is clear: I love this 4H lead so much that next time I buy a mechanical pencil I will throw away the *** lead that comes with it and buy some sweet 4H lead refills.

After pounding my head at this off-and-on over the last five weeks (previously thwarted), I have mashed enough VBScript skills into it (my head) that I figured out how to script the pinning of items to the taskbar.

 

Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace("C:\")
Set objApp = objFolder.ParseName("Notepad.lnk")
For Each verb in objApp.Verbs()
If verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar" Then verb.DoIt
Next

For this to work, you need to have a valid shortcut Notepad.lnk in C:\.  To do a pin to the start menu, replace “Pin to Tas&kbar” with “Pin to Start Men&u”.  Yes, you need the ampersands, they are there as keyboard shortcuts.  Right-click on a shortcut and push K and it will pin that to the taskbar.

I encountered an issue at work when we wanted to add some gadgets to the Vista Sidebar.  Upon opening the Add Gadget panel, all of the available gadgets briefly appeared and then faded out, leaving a blank window.

This can be resolved by resetting the user’s Settings.ini file for the Sidebar.  This is located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar.  Just rename Settings.ini to something else after you close Sidebar (must be closed from system tray too), and then re-launch Sidebar.  A new Settings.ini will be created.  All of the user’s Sidebar settings will be reset, but at least they are now able to add gadgets.

I have been annoyed by needing to setup my taskbar pinned items every time I set up a new Windows 7 install, so really wanted to find out where they are stored.  They are buried pretty deep: C:\Users\**Username**\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

So now I will be able to keep a copy of a bunch of shortcuts handy and just copy them in there.  I'm thinking cmd, Notepad, Calculator, several Office apps, Irfanview, and Paint will be priorities for now.

Windows 7 is shaping up to be a pretty perfomant operating system.  I've been ripping CDs in the background, which easily maxes out the processor on my 1.83GHz Pentium M.  All the while I've been playing songs and browsing websites with no performance problems.  Only just now when I added installing Acrobat Reader on to the top of all that did I notice some slow-downs (slight glitches in music playback).

Now you might say that this is no big deal, an OS should be able to do all of those things.  But this is with 512MB of RAM, the afore-mentioned processor, and a crappy laptop HDD.  So far I would say the performance is way closer to XP than Vista was on this machine.  But the features are way better than XP.  I'll try not to get too optimistic, but from what I've seen in the last few hours Windows 7 is going to be a hot item.

Sun's VirtualBox really irked me off, so here I am whining.

• Unable to change mounted CD-ROM while the machine is running.
• Huge delete button.  How often do you delete a virtual machine?
• Crappy virtual disk manager.  Why do I want to manage my ISOs, I already have them in folders just let me mount one.
• Unable to hard power-off a virtual machine.
• Unable to send shut down signal to virtual machine.
• Unable to send reset signal to virtual machine.
• Unable to do any sort of power-off input.
• I find it hard to believe that these features aren't there at all, but they shouldn't be hidden so well if they are there.  I should be able to right-click on the machine in the manager and knock it dead.