So, I don’t drive a rad Jeep.  I don’t accept challenges involving sandwiches the size of my head.  I don’t play the bagpipes.

I just sew stuff.  Less “cool” and more Martha Stewart, I know.  But since I know how u guys dig strigiformes, I thought I would share my latest creation, Sleepytime Owl.

Ya Rly.

Man V. Food
Next Up: Kansas City
Wednesday, August 11, at 9 E/P

Adam Richman travels to Kansas City, MO, for the Ultimate Destroyer Challenge at Papa Bob’s Bar-B-Que.

There’s a preview of the episode on Youtube. His reaction to those godforsaken hamburger patties was the same as mine. They’re practically inedible. I can’t wait to see how he fares

Now I call this a trip, particularly not a vacation, because it was much more than that just an escape from work for the sake of relaxation.  As a matter of fact, much of the trip was not relaxing at all, but simply breathtaking.  I’ll show you why.

Since I expect that the readers of this blog are more tech-savvy than most, I will assume that everyone at least has an idea of what suspension is on a vehicle.  Most cars have either a solid axle, where there are two sets of joined wheels, or they have "independent suspension", meaning that the wheels can all move up and down seperately.  The subject of independent suspension is incredibly complex and I could really care less about it now that I no longer own one of these:

and now I have one of these:

If you can’t tell from these sweet wikipedia pictures, the top vehicle has independent suspension and the bottom one has solid axles.  I will now explain why I care about suspension beyond simple ground clearance.

When off-roading, or "wheeling" as the Jeep community likes to call it, it is rarely entertaining to move along flat terrain.  There’s not really a lot of excitement in trucking along across some land that is pretty much just glorified road without pavement,  so we tend to make it a little interesting by making our "roads" lead up to obstacles.  Now, with any luck, the body of the vehicle will be at a 20 degree angle to the ground and some equipment in the back will be straining in its tie-down straps, trying to fall all over the vehicle and cause a raucous.

In an out-of-the-box Jeep, this means that one or more wheels are probably not touching the ground.  While this is an excellent photo opportunity, it does not bode well for actually getting anywhere, as the amount of traction you have is now equal to 4x – yx, where x is the amount of traction per tire, and y is the number of tires that are in the air waving at onlookers.

Instead, what we really want is for all four tires to be touching the ground to maximize total traction, and there is only one way to accomplish this:  Flex.

No, not that kind of flex you cheeky bugger, this kind:

In the above picture, you can see that the two axles are clearly not parallel anymore.  This is the general off-road qualification of flex.  It is as simple as "how far can one wheel on an axle be up on top of something while the other one is still touching the ground."  While this Jeep is highly modified, the same principle applies to stock vehicles as well.

This is an image of standard Five-Link Suspension for trucks with solid axles.  There are four control arms (two uppers, in orange, and two lowers, in yellow), that act to keep the axle at a proper distance from the rest of the drivetrain so that the driveshaft doesn’t have to expand and contract as much.  The green arm, called the trackbar, serves to center the axle under the vehicle.  Without it, the axle would shift from side to side causing all kinds of problems.

The five-link is fine if the front and rear axles are always occupying the same plane, however, when one of the axles needs to rotate in order for a tire to move over a rock, the five links cause a lot of resistance, and will ultimately bind.  Here you can see a variation of this geometry, called a Triangulated Four-Link Suspension.  First notice that there is no trackbar.  “Well how does the axle stay centered under the vehicle, dear Shannon”  you may ask.  Well, also notice that the upper arms meet at the differential housing instead of far apart on the axle tube.  From fundamental physics, we know that this creates a triangle, which cannot shift laterally as a parallelogram can.  The lower control arms are constructed similarly, meeting closer together at the frame side.  These two triangles work together to center the axle, and they do a very good job of it.

This kind of suspension allows you to do crazy stuff like this:

That’s all I have right now.  So next time you are looking at building a rock crawler by putting 1-Ton solid axles into a Jeep, you know that you want a Triangulated 4-link suspension design.

Picture sources:

Wikipedia

Automotive.com

JeepForum

Here I’m going to drag an image into the writer:

Excellent!  What an inquisitive owl!

Good test.

AnonFriend: Dude I am SO EXCITED about this technology we’re getting at work in the next year or so.
Shannon: do tell.
AnonFriend: We’re getting this nifty software in a couple of weeks that will make the Union entirely paperless. All of our important documents will be sorted by this software called ImageNow.
Shannon: lol
AnonFriend: And instead of having to walk purchase orders up to accounting, I’ll just press a button and they’ll zip right up there. When they’re done with them, they’ll send the documents right back to me! And then I can archive them.
Nifty.
Shannon: Babe, you’re teasing me, right?
AnonFriend: No!
Shannon: You know that’s where I work.
AnonFriend: Seriously?????
Shannon: Yeah.
AnonFriend: lol
Shannon: Perceptive Software
AnonFriend: That’s awesome!!!
I’m so excited to begin using your product.

The moral of the story: Work at Perceptive Software, and your friends will admire you.

I feel like with this in my yard, I can really kick off the new year in properly geeky manner.

So when someone told me to celebrate each new day, I took him or her quite literally, and decided to find a calendar of all the obscure holidays generally and not-so-generally observed in the U.S. and abroad. So I did the typical thing and asked the googles for an answer. Much to my surprise, there was no public google calendar of obscure holidays out there on the internets. Therefore, being the entrepreneurial glutton for punishment I am, I decided to create my own.

Because I only had a vague idea of how to programmatically import events, rather than create them all one by one, I again asked the internets, who told me I could create an Excel spreadsheet that uses the following headings, and then save it as a .csv which could be imported and would populate the events in the Google calendar automatically.

Armed and dangerous, it was time to collect my list of obscure holidays. This was the part that took the better part of a year, off and on. I created a .csv file for each month of the year, in case some disaster occurred, leaving me only to recreate one month’s worth of data, instead of 12. I got my list of obscure holidays and the dates from several sites. Before you deign to venture into one of said sites, beware as they are all guilty of gratuitous comic sans use and lack the use of a .css.

• www.holidayinsights.com
• www.brownielocks.com
• www.zanyholidays.com

After I entered all the obscure holidays I could find, it was time to create the Google calendar and import my .csv files of events. Luckily, Google Calendar has this tasty little Import Calendar feature on the Add menu, which let me browse to my .csv files and import them into the newly-created “Obscure Holidays” calendar.

So then, 12 .csv files and 1,368 events later, I had a complete Obscure Holidays calendar. (Click to enlarge.)

And the events translate from the .csv like so (I’ll pick a holiday that looks interesting to me):

Now If I could just figure out how to programmatically set the “Repeats” flag to “Yearly” and get Google to accept the spelling of “mandle” and “mantyhose”. If not, I’ll just have to repeat this import task once a year. What a chore!

If you’re interested in adding the Obscure Holidays calendar to your googpertoire, it’s a public calendar. I’m not really sure how to link to it, and the embed option doesn’t work like it really should, so enjoying it may not be as programmatic as its creation, but it will certainly take less time. Now you can truly celebrate each day. Enjoy, and Happy King Tut Day!

The Crystal Method: Vegas

This is far and away The Crystal Method’s best all-around album. It’s got just the right mix of sexy, funky, and power.

So you’re having one of those days where you have to get something done, and maybe it’s something that requires far more brain power than you’ve got. There’s something really complicated that you really need to focus on, but your mind just keeps wandering and it’s only been 3 minutes since you last looked down at the task bar to see what time it is.

Well, prepare to be more in the zone than you’ve ever been. Anytime I’ve got a complex problem to solve, Vegas is there for me. In fact, it makes me almost TOO productive. It would also be a great choice if your profession just happens to be grand theft auto, but I’ll just say it’s great for Java coding as well. If you’re a pizza delivery dude – this album will get you to your destination in less time than you’ve ever imagined. Just look out for the cops.

Lemon Jelly – Lost Horizons

This album is way up there in my top 5. It’s such a beautiful album filled with rich imagery.

So you’re having the kind of day where you’re so swamped you find yourself grinding your teeth, holding your breath inadvertently, and putting off bathroom breaks until the last possible second. And you just opened up a folder or a browser window – 2 seconds ago – and can’t remember why. It’s time to chill out without having to go off to Hawaii or something.

Slap this thang on, and it will immediately slow your racing mind down and let you organize everything you need get done in your mind in a logical fashion. The very first track forces you into a soothing state of mind without lulling you to sleep. And the talk of the elements forces you to focus “on the art of the possible”: something that will really make your managers happy.

Radiohead – Kid A

Let me start by saying I’m incredibly biased. Yeah, OK Computer is the one everyone likes, and won all the awards, but if you ask me, Kid A is a far superior album. And I guarantee you it’s much better for a hard workday.

This is the album you listen to on the days when everyone just kinda seems to be throwing you under the bus. It’s got everything – the melancholy good-to-feel-bad tracks (like How to Disappear Completely – great for those kind of days), the eff-it-all songs (like Idioteque – which is what the office can feel like some days when every customer seems to be having problems, when your PC stalls in the middle of an update), and everything in between.

Including the phrase that we all need to learn how to say more often: “I’d really like to help you, man…”

Honorable mentions: Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled album, Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here, and Ratatat’s self-titled album.

In Round 1, “I’ve played D&D for 36 straight hours” narrowly defeated “I wrote an MFC application that times the brewing of my tea.”

In Round 2, 36-hour-D&D was soundly thrashed by “I name my online game characters after amino acids and nucleotides”

Round 3 pits Amino-Acid-WoW against challenger “I once spent $200 on dry ice to make a music video for an 80s song (I can’t remember the song, so don’t ask).” Will 80s-song-dry-ice have what it takes to upset the defending champion?  How could this get any geekier??

Stay tuned…