About a month ago I gave my Izula a cosmetic make-over, inspired by Widerstand‘s similar mods to his Becker knives.
Originally the knife had a light tan powder coating on it, which protected the blade from rust and other wear, but did nothing for style. The first step I made in the modification process was to spend a couple hours with a piece of sandpaper, scraping off the coating until I was down to bare metal. That gave the knife a nice, raw look. But it also made it susceptible to rusting. The solution: a patina!
The last time I talked about patinas I achieved it with moldy potatoes and citrus fruit. This time around I went the easier route and dumped the Izula into a bowl of vinegar over night. I thought it looked great when it came out, and I was pleasantly surprised that I could still see the RAT logo and Izula ant. To finish off the coating I rubbed a little mustard on a few spots on either side of the blade.
The way the knife comes from the factory, the gimping is nice and rounded, providing a comfortable grip for the thumb. I almost never place my thumb on the back of the spine, so gimping doesn’t do much for me. And because it was rounded, it couldn’t throw any sparks off a ferro rod. To make the whole affair a bit more useful I took a Dremel tool and redid the gimping. It’s much more rough and sharp now, less ideal for thumbs but great for throwing sparks.
After that all that was left was to re-wrap the handle with a new piece of paracord – black this time – and the job was done. My favorite EDC knife: even better than before.
You may not notice much, but this blog has been completely rewritten.
I started developing in Django last winter and quickly became smitten with both the Django framework and the Python. Most of the coding I’ve done this year has been in Python. Naturally, I had thoughts of moving this website from Wordpress over to a Django-based blog.
For a while I did nothing about it. Then I had another project come up that required some basic blog functionality be added to a Django-based site. A blog is – or, at least, can be – a fairly simple affair, but before writing my own I decided to look around and see what else was out there. There’s a number of Django-based blogs floating around (Kevin Fricovsky has a list), but few of them jumped out at me. Most were not actively developed and depended on too many stale packages for my taste, or they just had a feature set that I didn’t like.
Out of all of them, two presented themselves as possibilities: Mingus (written by the previously mentioned Kevin) and Nathan Borror’s django-basic-apps. Mingus tries to be a full-featured blogging application and was much too complex for the simple project I was then working on. But the blog application in django-basic-apps (a fork of which provides Mingus with its core blog functionality) looked like it would fit the bill. As the name implies, it is meant to be a very basic blog. I dived in to the code I discovered that, with a few modifications, it would do what I needed.
So I finished that project. But now having messed with blogging in Django I was more motivated to get started on rewriting my own site. I took another look at Mingus. Although it was too complex for the previous project, the features it provides are very similar to the features I wanted for this website. I looked at and thought about Mingus for a time, repeatedly turning it down and then coming back to it. The question centered around the project’s staleness more than anything else. Currently, Mingus is built for Django 1.1. That’s an old version. As of this writing, the current version is 1.3. Many improvements have been made in Django since 1.1 and I was not too keen to forgo them and run an old piece of code. Mingus is under active development, and will be updated for Django 1.3, but it’s a hobby-project, so the work is understandably slow.
In the end, I decided that the best thing to do was go my own route, but take some pointers and inspiration from Mingus. I would make my own fork of django-basic-apps, using that blog as the basis, and build a system on top of that. I created my fork last month and have been steadily plodding away on it in my free time. Over the course of the development I created a fewsimpleapplications to complement the core blog, and contributed code to another project.
It’s not quite done – there’s still a few things I want to improve – but it’s good enough to launch. (If you notice any kinks, let me know.) I’m quite pleased with it.
This is a notable occasion. I’ve been using Wordpress since before it was Wordpress, but it is time to move on. (Wordpress is a fork of an old piece of code called b2/cafelog. My database tables have been rocking the b2 prefix since 2002.)
As you’ve no doubt noticed, the look of the site hasn’t changed much. I tweaked a few things here and there, but for the most part just recreated the same template as what I had written for Wordpress. I am planning on a redesign eventually. For now, I wanted to spend my time developing the actual blog rather than screwing with CSS.
So, there you have it. Everything is open source. Download it, fork it, hack it (and don’t forget to send your code changes back my way). Let me know what you think. Build your own blog with it! (There’s even a script to import data from Wordpress.) I think it’s pretty sweet. The only thing lacking is documentation, and that’s my next goal.
Disqus
The biggest change for the user is probably the comments, which are now powered by Disqus. Consider it a trial. I’ve seen Disqus popping up on a number of sites the past year or so. At first it annoyed me, mostly because I use NoScript and did not want to enable JavaScript for another domain just to comment on a site. But after I got over that I found that Disqus wasn’t too bad. As a user I found it to be on par with the standard comment systems provided by Wordpress, Blogger, and the like. The extra features don’t appeal to me. But as an administrator, Disqus appeals to me more because it means that I no longer have to manage comments myself! And as a developer, I’m attracted to some of the things that Disqus has done (they’re a Python shop, and run on top of Django) and their open source contributions.
So I’m giving it a shot. Disqus will happily export comments, so if I (or you) decide that I don’t like it, it will be easy to move to another system.
Markdown
One final note: I like Markdown. That might be an understatement.
I first starting using Markdown on GitHub, which I signed up for about the same time I started with Django and Python. After learning the syntax and playing with it for a few weeks, I discovered that I had a very hard time writing prose in anything else. In fact, the desire to write blog posts in Markdown was probably the biggest factor that influenced me to get off my butt and move away from Wordpress.
So, I incorporated Markdown into the blog. But rather than just making the blog Markdown-only, I took a hint from Mingus and included django-markup, which supports rendering in many lightweight markup languages.
Because I’m still new to Markdown and occasionally cannot remember the correct syntax, I wanted to include some version of WMD. WMD is a What You See Is What You Mean editor for Markdown, a sort of alternative to WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE. (It is my believe that WYSIWYG editors are one of the worst things to happen to the Internet.) All WMD consists of is a JavaScript library. The original was written by a guy named John Fraser, who was abducted by aliens some time in 2008. Since his disappearance from the interwebs, WMD has been forked countless times. I looked around at a few found a version that I was happy with (which happens to be a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork), and rolled it into a reusable app. While I was at it, I made some visual changes to the editing area for the post body. The result is an attractive post editing area that is simple to use and produces clean code. I think it is much better than what is offered by Wordpress.
Last week I noticed that the top right compression strap on my Triple Aught Design FAST Pack EDC had begun to rip off from the pack. This is the first failure I’ve experienced on the pack, which has been in regular use since Fall 2007.
I’m surprised that it was this particular strap that failed first. I don’t often carry heavy items in the Transporter Tail, so the strap does not have a lot of stress placed on it. Still, I feel better about sewing it back down than I would about repairing a load-bearing strap.
Now: A needle, a length of #69 nylon thread, and a bit of time.
I’ve toured Whidbey Island before by bus, car and foot, but never by bicycle. I decided to remedy that today. It was forecast to be warm and sunny (only the third day of the year I can say that about), so I woke up early to make the 9:00 AM ferry sailing.
Whidbey is a pleasant mixture of forest and pastoral farmland. I decided to confine my explorations to the south end of the island, as that’s the area I know least.
I logged about 45 miles in the saddle over a leisurely 6 hours, plus about 2 hours of breaks, including lunch in Langley.
Yesterday I felt that I was becoming too complacent on my runs. I needed something to increase the challenge. So, this morning I tossed 20 lbs. into the FAST Pack and strapped it on. That made things interesting.
For the past few years I have been using a cheap headlight from Cateye on the front of my bike. When turned on to the blink setting, it did an acceptable job of making me seen, but it did very little to light up the road. Last January I decided that I wanted to replace or supplement it with a better light.
I looked at the lights carried by various bike shops for a while, but none of them impressed me. The high end bike-specific lights are bright, to be sure, but they tend to be much more expensive than a hand-held light of comparable output.
I thought it would be neat if I could somehow attach a normal light to my handlebars. Not only would this be cheaper than purchasing the equivalent bike headlight, but the light would be multifunctional: appropriate either for my bike or my belt. None of my own hackish attempts to mount a normal light on the handlebars satisfied me, so it was with relief that I heard about a company called Twofish.
The Lockblock is a piece of rubber with perpendicular “U”s on either side. Each side fastens to an object with a small piece of hook-and-loop webbing. The Bikeblock is similar, but the two “U”s are parallel, and each side fastens to its respective object with a single continuous piece of hook-and-loop webbing. Lockblocks are to be used when you want to mount an object perpendicular to something else, such as a light on handlebars. Bikeblocks are appropriate when you want to mount the object parallel to something else, such as a pump to a frame. I bought three of each.
My first use of the Lockblock was to replace the Cateye headlight with my old Novatac 120T. The difference was immediately noticeable on my first night-ride. The 120T lights up the road, both bringing me to the attention of motorists and bringing potholes to the attention of me.
But I still thought it could be better. I wanted a second light.
Research showed that the Fenix LD20 was a popular choice to use in conjunction with Lockblocks. It blasts out a fair number of lumens and I liked that it ran on AA batteries rather than CR123s, so I picked one up.
The combination of the Fenix LD20 and Novatac 120T really light up the road. The Lockblocks hold both lights securely, and they make for a safe commute on long winter nights.
Although I was happy with this setup, I wanted to try using the parallel mount of the Bikeblock to add a helmet light into the mix. The Bikeblock fastens easily and securely across the vents of my Giro Stylus. Between my two lights, the shorter profile of the Novatac 120T made it more appropriate for a helmet mount.
I’ve been running the 120T on my helmet for about a week now. It’s nice to have the light point wherever I’m looking – and the ability to flash inattentive drivers is appreciated – but the light does add a noticeable weight. It’s annoying enough that I don’t keep the light on my helmet during the day, but so far I’ve been steadily putting it back after the sun sets. I haven’t decided if I’ll keep it up there, or if I’ll ditch the helmet light idea. I think that as winter turns to spring and the days lengthen, the Bikeblock will come off of my helmet.
I also use a Bikeblock for its intended purpose – to hold a pump to the bike frame. This is much more secure than my previous method, which consisted only of two pieces of hook-and-loop webbing.
Twofish’s mounts offer a serious challenge to the standard bike-light market. I’m pleased with both the Lockblock and Bikeblock and cannot see any reason to move back to a bicycle-specific headlight.
Lanolin is a kind of wax that sheep and other wool-bearing animals produce to protect their coats. It is, in fact, a waterproofing agent. Any lanolin that remains in the wool after shearing is generally stripped out during the process of turning the hair into clothing, thus reducing the wool’s ability to shed water.
Commercially, lanolin is often used as a skin treatment product for humans. Lansinoh, in particular, makes a pure-lanolin nipple cream for breast-feeding mothers.
I first learned about lanolin from a comment on my review of West German wool pants. Jenne, the commenter, recommended washing wool products using something called Eucalan. Eucalan is a natural wash that deposits lanolin in the wool. Rinsing isn’t necessary with Eucalan, so much of the hassle (and danger of felting) that is usually associated with washing wool can be avoided.
For an extra treatment, Jenne recommended dissolving a small amount of Lansinoh’s pure lanolin in hot water before adding the Eucalan.
I was intrigued by this method. The no-rinse aspect made it simpler than carefully washing wool with Dr. Bronner’s, which was my previous choice. And increasing the health and functionality of my wool by restoring the natural oils made good sense – the same thing must be done to leather. I bought both the Eucalan and the nipple cream.
Eucalan comes in a few different scents. I first bought the unscented version, which seemed most appropriate for outdoor wear. Later I bought a jug of the Eucalyptus version. Eucalyptus oil is a deterrent to moths and fleas, so Eucalan recommends using this version before storing wool garments for a while. (The eucalyptus scent is very subtle after the wool has been dried – you’re not going to go around smelling like flowers.)
I’ve since washed my West German wool pants, West German wool knickers, Italian wool knickers, and two Pendleton wool shirts – the majority of my non-merino wool clothing – in Eucalan with added Lansinoh and have been pleased with the results. I recommend giving it a shot if you wear wool in wilderness settings.
The Process
Dissolve a small amount (about one inch) of Lansinoh HPA Lanolin in hot water
Add enough room-temperature water to cover the garment to be washed
Add about two cap-fulls of Eucalan and mix it in
Add the wool to be washed
Let soak for 15 – 30 minutes
Pull out the wool, hold it up, and let the water drip out for a minute or two
Arriving at Rialto Beach just past 1:00 PM, I took a few minutes to stuff my food into the bear can I had borrowed from the Ranger Station on my way out. The cans are required to keep food secure not from bears, but from marauding raccoons. This was to be the third year I had hiked the Olympic Coast in Winter and, outside of the Sierra Nevada, these have been the only times I’ve carried a bear can. Still, thanks to the warmer temperatures along the coast, even with the can my pack feels light compared to what I must carry this time of year when high in the mountains.
High tide had been at 11:30 AM. It is still high enough to make beach-walking difficult. I opt to make my way through the thick trees and marsh instead of braving the beach. There are no cars in the parking lot when I leave, but I surprise two people panning for gold along a small creek. Neither are talkative. When I ask if they had found anything, the one only replies “a little”. I don’t know if that is the truth, or if he was just anxious to get me gone.
I spend an hour in the woods. The tide is low enough now that I can make my way down to the beach, exchanging thick trees for wet sand. Occasionally I have to run up the beach and jump on top of driftwood to escape from the occasional wave, but for the most part the way is easy going between Rialto and Hole-in-the-Wall.
The area is thick with Bald Eagles. Every 15 minutes or so I spot one in a tree, or landing on a sea stack, or one flying over the ocean. At one point I see two eagles eating on a large fish head that had washed up on the beach. (I don’t know what kind of fish, but the head was close to the size of a football.) The two are eating just on the other side of a large boulder. We don’t notice each other until I come around the rock, at which point they jump and fly off. At a distance of about 10 feet, that’s the closest I have ever been to an eagle.
At Hole-in-the-Wall, the sandy beach comes to an end for a good while. Now begins the obstacle course that defines a walk along the wild coast. Piles of driftwood, tide pools, slippery rocks, and tall headlands all present a much different challenge from the steady plodding that characterizes walking in the mountains. The various balancing tricks, pull ups and push ups that are required make one thankful for a well packed backpack.
After rounding one headland I come upon two deer, out looking for whatever seafood it is that deer fancy. They don’t seem too concerned about me, but eventually bound up the steep cliff as I close in.
Around the next headland there’s an octopus lying in the sand. It has been partially eaten by something.
The tide is out now. I walk blissfully along a rare sandy stretch of beach that doesn’t require much attention, and find myself surprised by a dark brown spot ahead of me. My first thought is Marmot, but they belong in the mountains, not the coast. Then I think Badger, but the tail is wrong and they also had no business on the coast. An Otter! I couldn’t identify it at first, as I had no experience to link it to. This was the first time I had seen an Otter – leastwise, on land and in the wild.
The Otter is slowly flopping down the beach, throwing his front arms forward and then pulling along the rest of his body. His legs wiggle a bit but are clearly useless on land. I approach slowly. He turns his head and looks at me, slows and then finally stops as I approach. I don’t know if he isn’t concerned by my presence, or if he is tired from inefficient land movement. Perhaps he thinks the best course of action is to play (sorta) dead.
I’m able to get within four feet of the Otter, where I stop to admire his fur and watch his whiskers twitch as he sniffs me. It would be easy to approach close enough to touch him – a tempting thought – but I don’t think he’ll appreciate that. Instead I try to make conversation. “Hey, you’re a mammal. I’m a mammal. We both have nipples.” At this the Otter’s concern seems to grow, so I leave him and continue around the next headland. I don’t want him to have to cut short his time on the beach on my account.
My tide chart has sunset scheduled for 5:00 PM, which is drawing near. I’m still in an area with the ocean on my left and sharp cliffs on my right. The map shows that it is a long way to the next suitable camp spot. I resign myself to hiking for a short while in the dark. At least the tide won’t be coming in till 7:00 PM.
I walk along, and watch the sun set over the edge of the world.
At 6:00 PM I come to an area where the cliffs on my right give way to a clump of trees. I make my way inside and find a spot to pitch the tarp. After dinner in the dark, I crawl into my bag and go to sleep. The roaring of the tide wakes me once around midnight, but, unlike the last time I spent the night out here, my camp tonight is well above the high tide mark.
The tide gives me trouble the next day. It is about an hour later than the day before, with high tide hitting at 12:30 PM. I was hoping to wake up early and log a few miles at low tide around 6:30 AM, but I end up not waking till 9 AM. At that point the tide is high enough that I could barely get anywhere before high tide, at which point I would be able to go nowhere at all. I decide not to make any move until after high tide, though that means a later start than yesterday, and so a longer hike into the night.
It is a gray morning. Rain steadily falls from the sky, coupling with the ocean mist to give all a good soaking. I lie about, enjoy a slow breakfast, read some and write some. By 1:00 PM my patience is gone and I decide to see if any progress can be made. After breaking camp I find that I can scale partway up the cliff that starts on the north edge of my clump of trees, and traverse along that a way. From there I’m able to hop along a few large boulders that stick up out of the ocean, but I can’t get far. Eventually I have to stop and sit out the tide atop a group of rocks. It always goes out slower when you’re waiting for it.
An hour passes and the tide has gone down far enough that there are occasional stretches of bare sand between waves. This allows me some progress. I watch the waves go up and down for a minute, try to get a feel for the timing, and dash along the briefly-bare beach, clambering up the next pile of driftwood or large boulder before the waves come. Sometimes I make it, sometimes the waves catch me. More than once I make it to the top of a rock, but the wave hits with enough force that the water bounces up and splashes me. I’m wet already from the rain, so in the end it makes little difference.
The gray morning turns into a gray afternoon, which passes without difference. I don’t notice it getting dark until only a few minutes before sunset. I’m no more than halfway to where I want to be, but why pack a headlamp if you’re not going to use it? The next two hours are spent along the usual obstacle course of driftwood, headlands, and barnacle covered rocks, made even more interesting due to the dark. But after I pass them, the last hour and a half is along another rare stretch of sandy beach. I make up for lost time by running stretches. With a pack on my back and soft sand underfoot, running is a challenge, but it keeps me warm. Still, I don’t arrive into camp till 8:30 PM.
The rain continues into the next morning. I breakfast on the westernmost point in the contiguous US, turn south, and retrace my steps for a couple days back to Rialto Beach.
"In the static mode an observer may unify the pieces of a puzzle, but only as a blueprint -- kinetics adds the third dimension of depth, and the fourth of history. The motion, however, must be on the human scale, which happens also to be that of birds, waves, and clouds. Were a bullet to be made sentient, it still would see or hear or smell or feel nothing in land or water or air except its target. So, too, with a passenger in any machine that goes faster than a Model A. As speed increases, reality thing and becomes at the pace of a jet airplane no more substantial than a computer readout."
- Harvey Manning, Walking the Beach to Bellingham
