Another Rodeo

Vintage bicycle projects

Various vehicle projects (that aren't bicycles)

1971 Eco fiberglass camper restoration Trying to put an egg (camper) back together again. Making a smart vintage camper My attempt to bring modern tech to a very old camper. Meet my new (to me) project truck: A 2000 Toyota 4Runner Restoring an old 4Runner: rugged, analog, and built to last.

Web Things

Selected writing

The Clyde

I know I still need to paint and finish the second Monark that's lingering around the workroom, but I haven't done it, and sometimes a new project just jumps out at you. Which is what Clyde here did. Apparently the Trek Clyde was an early 2000s klunker/cruiser thing Trek did. I'd never heard of one before this week, but it's sort of a 26"-wheeled precursor to the highly sought-after Trek Sawyer .…

3D printing a trailer hitch cover

On the 3rd generation 4Runner, the trailer hitch just kind of hangs out the back, awkwardly peeking out from the rear bumper like a toddler peeking out from behind their mother's skirt. An ugly toddler. In an effort to dress up this functional-but-homely state of affairs, I figured I'd throw a hitch cover on there. I could have just bought one for 12 bucks like a normal person, but I decided to…

The Artisanal Web

I've been on the web for a long time. Like, ever since paleolithic times. When I started doing this, Amazon was about to launch, Google was still several years away, and Zuckerberg was about to turn 10. Back then, we were building web sites with sticks and mud and hoping to discover fire. Sticks and mud were what we had. You opened a text editor, typed some HTML, uploaded it to a server, and you…

About this site

March 6, 2026 # A lot of fixes and updates: We now have a contact page! I changed the thumbnail image for this page, so I didn't have to look at that AI-generated "art" every time the page loaded. The image is from Model making; including workshop practice, design and construction of models, a practical treatise for the amateur and professional mechanic. (1919) Fixed some image resizing bugs.…

Designing and printing a bike mirror

Over the years, I've bought at least four of these Origin 8 handlebars . They're attractive, comfortable, versatile, and cheap. But they have an unusually small internal diameter, which makes finding mirrors that fit very difficult. Most all are made for bars with a larger inner diameter. And also, most bike mirrors are as ugly as homemade sin, or so I'm told. So, armed with my new Bambu printer,…

A leather toolroll

I've wanted to take up leather crafting for awhile. It's another one of those built-for-the-long-haul analog things that appeals when one spends their whole career in tech. Because I've started from zero and I have no idea what I'm doing, most of my early results are not great, but I'm enjoying it and learning. This is one of those early efforts: a place to put all the leather punches and such…

Leather keyfob cover

This was another early leather-crafting project: a leather cover for the Toyota's keyfob. I've also been doing a LOT more 3D printing lately, since I picked up a Bambu P2S to replace Creakity Max Neo I had before. This is a highly recommended upgrade. With the Creakity, just getting anything to print at all was a chore. With the Bambu, it's a pleasure. Anyways, I've been enjoying printing so much…

Salvaged leather Airtag holder

My son has a late 90s Jeep Cherokee (XJ) with a pretty rare leather interior option. Problem was, after 25+ years, his front seats were looking pretty tragic. So new leather upholstery for the Jeep was a Christmas present and on an unseasonably warm January day we put it in. As I looked at all the now-discarded leather, it occurred to me that surely I could salvage some of it and make something…

Feedback doesn't scale

When you're leading a team of five or 10 people, feedback is pretty easy. It's not even really "feedback”: you’re just talking . You may have hired everyone yourself. You might sit near them (or at least sit near them virtually). Maybe you have lunch with them regularly. You know their kids' names, their coffee preferences, and what they're reading. So when someone has a concern about the…

Thermostats

Bob blew up Slack before the standup even started. Notifications bounced and pinged. Channels filled with five-alarm emoji. “Urgent” flags multiplied like bad stickers across Outlook. Meetings popped up like mushrooms, each with the same headline: “EMERGENCY” and each with no agenda, but many demands. Bleary-eyed people scrambled to screens, paged teammates still asleep, spun up war rooms, and…

Meet my new (to me) project truck: A 2000 Toyota 4Runner

I’ve almost always had a project car. Most of my life, they weren't really "project cars", they were "the piece of junk I could afford and now needed to keep running." But I usually tried to make them interesting pieces of junk. My first car, when I was all of 15 years old, was a Triumph GT-6 that was already older than I was and didn't run. I got it running, and from there I went on to have two…

Failure to communicate

Everyone knows remote and distributed teams live and die by how well they manage communication and collaboration. Yet for such common knowledge, it's amazing to me how many remote and distributed teams remain stuck in poor communications modes. Before I get into that, let's clarify terms. "Remote" means there are no offices, everyone works from home. "Distributed" means there is an office (or…

This is where it all breaks

Let’s skip past the philosophical debate — there’s been plenty of that already (including some here). Whether or not you should , you did: you bought into AI. You committed your teams to building AI-driven solutions, and you’re starting to ship them. You are in it. Or rather, AI’s in it. And then things get complicated. Because, as usual, the hard part isn’t really the technology, or even…

Building DSCovery

I was asked today how I built DSCovery , the aggregator I put together awhile back to help people find jobs in civic tech. I wish it was a better story. The reality is that on a technical level it's a not-very complex Django app. I just love Django for this sort of thing. You can get from zero to something in no time at all. Rails has the same advantages, but I know Django much better, and the…

Backpacks

Everyone has a backpack, and everyone has stuff in their backpack. Sometimes your backpack has too much stuff in it, and you've got to get rid of something. Sometimes your backback may not have all that much in it, but that stuff is heavy and it's hard to carry around. Most of us are carrying some stones in our backpacks. These are heavy loads. Sometimes we carry those rocks for years. Some of us…

Skipped teeth and blockchains

So I recently bought an old bike -- nothing new for me -- but as I was poking around on it, I realized something was unusual: I'd bought a skiptooth bike. I had questions. So first, what is a "skiptooth" bike? Without getting too much into bike nerdery (I do that plenty elsewhere around here) the basics are this: Modern bike chains have 1/2" between their pins, but that wasn't always the case. Up…

Engineering velocity: Part 2

Last time we covered a lot of reasons why that once-fast team has slowed down . If you haven't read that part already, you should, but to give a quick recap, those were: They finished the fast part They're swimming in a bigger pond now They were successful They're still good, it's just the perceptions that have changed This time, we'll talk about what you might be able to do about it. They…

Engineering velocity

It's a question I've heard a lot over the years, from a lot of frustrated managers and stakeholders. They can't get past it. "Seriously, why are my engineering teams so much slower than they used to be?" I get it. The frustration is palpable. A team that used to cook along now appears to be stuck in molasses. They get slower and slower, and it's confounding to everyone waiting for the next major…

Another one?

Within days of finishing up the Monark/Road King resto-mod another rough and down-on-its-luck old cruiser popped up and I couldn't resist. I mean, for $25 it was this or a light lunch at Chipotle. So I bought the bike. As I found it. This one is also a Monark-made frame (a twin to the last one) but without any badges I don't know if it was originally another Road King, or maybe a Monark Rocket, or…

Road King

Let's start this story in the middle of the 20th century, when consumer confidence was high, unions were strong, and American factories were working overtime to satisfy consumer demand and new-found discretionary spending. Against that backdrop a strange sort of amalgamation of hardware/auto parts/durable goods store was common in even the smallest towns in America. Western Auto and Firestone may…

Tasks

The whole thing started on the Midwest Dev Chat Slack , when someone posted a screenshot from their work Slack that read: The fact that we only have "Herculean task" and "Sisyphean task" feels so limiting. So here's a few more tasks for your repertoire: Icarian Task: When you have a task you know is going to fail anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down.…

Trek 2100

It's been awhile since I've written about one of my bike projects, yet somehow the house keeps filling up with them. This one's been with me since last October and I'm just now getting around to writing it up. The backlog is real, y'all. Anyways, sometime last summer I got to thinking: I love these old steel bikes, but why not try something a bit newer? It might be nice to have a featherweight…

DSCovery

Over the past 10 years or so there's been something of a revolution in Civic Technology, as a whole bunch of firms have popped up promising to do better than traditional government contractors, who have an appalling record when it comes to building anything that works at all, let alone delivering it on time. The Digital Services Coalition followed closely behind, working to build a sense of…

We’ve got to make the damn websites work

When leaded gasoline was introduced in the early 1920s, it was a real innovation. Every engine suddenly ran better, performed better and lasted longer. Consumers rushed to it, and for decades leaded gas was the gold standard. Then we learned more about the harmful effects of lead and lead pollution. By the mid-1960s we knew it was terrible stuff, dangerous to the public health, and still it wasn’t…

On values

One crisp spring morning in May 1969, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered 41-year-old sat down in front of the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications and quietly took on the Nixon administration. Nixon wanted to gut funding for public television and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In his eyes, and in the eyes of many conservatives at the time, public TV was an expensive government…

The handcycle

This is one of those projects where I wish I'd kept better notes and photos, because it was pretty fascinating to me.... In spring 2001 a friend learned I'd been renovating old bikes and asked if I'd look at his daughter's bike. His daughter has some issues with mobility, so the bike in question was a handcycle. I'd never heard of a handcycle, let alone put a wrench to one, but was I going to let…

11ty Linkrolls

One of the things I've always loved about blogs were the linkrolls... that candy trail to more and more interesting things scattered around the web. I love to see folks sharing the interesting things they find. Social media is built on that sort of sharing, but they've also commoditized it and gamified it beyond recognition, and there's no persistence to it, either. I wanted an old-fashioned…

AI is boring and stupid and maybe that's OK

We’re now just a bit over two years into the AI revolution. The chorus of hype and promises — both empty and real — remains deafening. The capabilities of AI increase every day. Yet right now, the most impressive thing about AI may be how quickly we’ve trained our primitive monkey brains to recognize how incredibly boring it is. In months, really, we’ve retrained our brains. We've gone from being…

So you don't want to be a manager

I’ve heard it a thousand times from a thousand engineers: “I don’t want to be a manager.” A lot of senior engineers think this, but I’m not sure many of them understand what it will mean to them and their career. Here it is: This will be a long, hard and lonely journey. Your career progression will slow to a crawl. You'll watch your peers move up in the company before you. You'll wonder why. There…

Know your (documentation) audience

Many years ago, armed with little more than a crude word processor and a take-on-the-world attitude, I embarked on a quest to become A Great Journalist. Day after day I fell bleary-eyed into early-morning classes, seeking knowledge. My words were going to make a difference. In the end, I only became a Middling Journalist, but I did manage to pick up a few insights and aphorisms that have proven…

The Five Conditions for (Organizational) Improvement

Back in 2017 Roy Rapoport wrote “ The Five Conditions for Improvement ”, talking about the conditions necessary for an employee to fix a performance problem. I think he came up with a great framework for helping people improve, but what really keeps me coming back, over and over again, is how applicable it is in larger contexts. I think what Roy really described were the five conditions necessary…

Quicksand meetings

Lots of people dislike meetings, with good reason: Meetings interrupt. They take time. They steal focus.† For managers, though, meetings are a key part of the job. It’s how they brainstorm, balance efforts, build alignment, and broadcast knowledge. It’s how things get done when you’re a manager. Which makes it especially infuriating when managers schedule meetings that do just the opposite.…

Deploying

At one time, deployments were simply uploading files via FTP. When we weren't editing live files in production. We were but simple cavedwellers, and those were interesting times. Since then we've developed a lot more rigor in our deployments and have greatly improved their reliability, repeatability and security. We've also introduced a lot of extra steps, and where there are extra steps, there's…

Markitup (v2)

I've used a library called MarkitUp on different projects of mine for more than 15 years. Compared to most Rich Text Editors, I found it to be much lighter weight and gave users Just Enough help to format using markdown. On the server side, this also offered nice flexibilty: I could store markdown, HTML, or both. In short, for a lot of nerdy reasons I really liked MarkitUP. But time marches on in…

Not funny, Dad

About every other year or so I'm reminded that the U.S. Federal government has a site called Fatherhood.gov, and tucked away inside that tiny little backwater in the vast sea of government web sites there is a collection of dad jokes. Yes, the United States government keeps and hosts a collection of dad jokes, and because they are the work the US government, they are owned by and open to the…

Pear

In late 2020 or early 2021, for a number of different reasons I decided I wanted to get a better understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Python's Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Maybe it's vestiges of my career in journalism, but the idea of converting a mess of text into something the machine can understand and do something useful with appeals to me. I was also pretty interested…

The giant list of questions to ask employers

In May of 2021 I was working at 18F in a term-limited role, so I was actively interviewing. As I interviewed I realized that companies always asked me if I had any questions for them, and more often than not I completely froze and couldn't think of any questions at all in that moment. Not a great look. So I started compiling good questions. But the recovering journalist inside me knows: with any…

The Luxus folding bike restoration

I've never been overly cursed with good sense, especially when it comes to projects. If there is a lost cause, I'll find it. If there is a hopeless case, I'll take it on. I should have learned my lesson from the Peugeot rebuild and found a nice easy project. I should know to watch my local market and pay attention to what sells and what doesn't. Did I do either of those things? Nope. The Luxus, as…

Maturity Model Generator

Maturity Model Generator # In 2022 or so, it seemed like everywhere I turned there was either a maturity model popping up for something, or someone was calling for a maturity model. Something was in the air, and it seemed like we needed a maturity model for everything. Cheeseburgers were getting a maturity model. Naturally, half these maturity models were pretty much nonsense, full of big words to…

The electric Schwinn

I found myself interested in trying out an e-bike. That's how it often starts: idly wondering if something is as fun or interesting as people say it is. It's this idle wondering that will eventually get me to try pickleball. But on this day, it was e-bikes. And as my mind idly wandered -- and as I looked at the cost of factory e-bikes, I started thinking more and more about a conversion kit. It…

Making wine cork handlebar plugs

Making your own custom handlebar plugs from wine corks is a nice and easy way of recycling an old cork or two while showing some individuality. It's also an easy fix for handlebars that have a very small internal handlebar diameter, which can be hard to match with off-the-shelf plugs -- something that happens fairly often with cheaper aluminum bars. I've made handlebar plugs from wine corks for…

Trek 520

For a good chunk of the 80s, touring bikes were a big deal, and most every manufacturer was tripping over themselves trying to one up eveyrone else in the segment. Bike stores were glutted with high quality, supremely comfortable touring bikes with wildly wide-range gearing, high quality steel and mounts galore. It was a lot like today's gravel and endurance bike craze. At least until the bottom…

Peugeot mixte restoration

For awhile now I've been on the hunt for a nice step-through framed bike. My criteria weren't that tough: be pretty, and not terrible. Apparently in the world of step-through frames that seems to be a tall order. The fact is step-through frames -- even mixtes -- still have way too much of a "girl bike" stigma, and cycling in general has a tendency to treat women (and "girl bikes") as second-class…

Making a smart vintage camper

In early 2020, with my restoration of a 1971 fiberglass "egg" camper well underway I started thinking about how it could be fun to bring some modern technology to it. I mean, if you could bring modern automation, monitoring and entertainment to a 50-year-old travel trailer, how cool is that? All of the code for this project is in the pi-smarter-camper repo . As an Amazon Associate I earn from…

The bedraggled Raleigh

I've had an urge to take experience a classic British three-speed for awhile now. The laid-back geometry, relaxed, upright ride and smooth internally-geared hubs just speak to me. In the time of COVID, even ragged projects seem to be fetching an awful lot of money, and since I already had too many projects going anyway, I figured that would have to just remain a daydream for awhile. The Raleigh…

1971 Eco fiberglass camper restoration

The more or least restored trailer, ready for camping. 1971 Eco camper restoration # In 2019 I became convinced that we should have a camper. And not just any camper, we should have a fiberglass "egg" camper. Through a highly improbable coincidence, it turned out a friend had one and he was willing to sell it to me for "friend price." And so I lugged this little thing home. The pictures and story…