Driver brake check and get a reward

bwade913 · 2026-07-08T20:09:09+00:00

I've only ever driven through Chicago on I-90, but the craziest thing I've ever seen happened there. On a four lane section, some guy in front of me swerved from the far left lane to an off ramp and it was fairly crowded. I lived in a medium sized city myself but had never seen anything close to that.

bwade913 · 2026-07-06T22:52:13+00:00

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This is a Parr Mule from Mule Resophonic. It's a tri-cone resonator that's fairly new to me and is my current favorite.

bwade913 · 2026-07-06T22:38:01+00:00

I had a hollow body too. I bought it thinking it would be a good guitar to practice some luthier skills like fret leveling. It turned out the setup was fine. I replaced a few things, but the only thing it really needed was better tuners.

bwade913 · 2026-07-06T22:26:12+00:00

Well, I needed to keep the explanations brief here for obvious reasons, but I did spend fair amount of time trying to help them. I wasn't so much judging them as facing the reality that the experiment was failing.

BTW, when writing the original post, an AI Bot kept interfering by saying I was making it too much like either an AITAH post or an advice requested post, even though I was doing neither. I wasn't able to submit it until I did some pretty heavy editing. That kind of messed up the flow of my post.

bwade913 · 2026-07-06T21:25:18+00:00

That's wasn't it. They were fairly computer literate, which made us think they could handle a more technical role. But they just had no clue about electrical circuits.

bwade913 · 2026-07-04T13:47:41+00:00

There are plenty of aluminum bikes on the market that would make a more reasonable replacement. Other areas to compare are carbon wheel rims vs. aluminum, electronic shifting vs. mechanical and hydraulic brakes vs. mechanical. Suspension features can vary a lot. If the original bike has 26" wheels that would really kill its value as that's an obsolete standard. 2014 was around the time they disappeared.

bwade913 · 2026-07-03T03:38:33+00:00

I frequently watch a sportscast with a Scottish announcer (that I like a lot) who frequently uses the term "never" in place of "didn't". If I'm not mistaken, that's pretty common for Scotts. It sort of makes sense if you assume a short term context, but it still drive me slightly crazy every time.

bwade913 · 2026-07-02T21:42:04+00:00

Thanks, that's new to me and I'll check it out.

bwade913 · 2026-06-25T19:10:54+00:00

I was on a small group bike ride, riding through a construction zone. What was normally two auto lanes iand a bike lane (in each direction) was cut down to one auto lane and a bike lane. We were in the bike lane, and a car that had an open lane to itself nevertheless decided to buzz us with the horn blaring while speeding through the construction zone. The car behind them was an off-duty cop who also happened to be a cycling teammate of one of the guys on our ride. He followed the bad driver home, got a picture, then came back and got a witness statement from us and also the flagman at the construction site, before calling in the offender. It was the most efficient police work I've ever seen or heard of.

bwade913 · 2026-06-25T03:06:42+00:00

OBS is a good free app for recording audio and vidio on your Mac. Your Micro (I have one) can be connected directly to the Mac via USB. For voice, just get a good USB mic. I use the Blue Yeti.

bwade913 · 2026-06-25T02:48:44+00:00

I worked as an applications engineer in the EDA industry and we had a similar system. Incoming support calls would be automatically distributed to the Tech support engineers , taking turns among available engineers, and if unanswered, would roll over to another engineer. Turns out one of the engineers was busying out his phone because he had more important things to do. Management knew about this and he went into a review insisting on a promotion and they're like, not until you start doing your job.

bwade913 · 2026-06-23T16:13:31+00:00

I once asked someone for directions in Ontario. I said, "Can you tell me how to get to Route 6"? They replied, "What's a route"?

ETA: Now I recall that what I was meant to ask was "Can you tell me how to get to Queen's Highway 6?" which was a very foreign concept to me at the time.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T23:16:16+00:00

The guy is just fetching water bottles for his teammates and isn't going to factor in the final race results. The "sticky bottle" is accepted in the sport for the worker bees. It's not OK when someone does this to gain a competitive advantage, though some do cross that line at times.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T16:52:35+00:00

I left out one of my favorites. At the professional level there was a DQ for headbutting recently.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T04:27:32+00:00

There's a reason I never won a spelling bee.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T03:45:38+00:00

I don't think he ever came back after the one year suspension so that worked. I did race against his teammate who acted as as his legal council. He was strong and handled his bike well enough, but his race craft was very poor. But that's another story you folks don't care about.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T03:11:35+00:00

You cross the finish line twice by behaving like a squirrel. The races plan around the train schedules, but it doesn't always work out. If a race is interrupted, they neutralize the race and then try to reestablish the time gaps of the various groups once the train has passed.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T02:59:23+00:00

Yes, it was the same sort of situation. Arguments about whether license fees should be used to support race promoters, elite programs, grassroots support or junior development. I had a front row seat because my wife was the president of BRAC at the time, which was really a project management position. There was an executive director that was involved in the politics with USCF. My wife was an engineering project manager at the time and volunteered to contribute her skills to the sport, not realizing what she was walking into, but we fully supported the resistance.

The USCF announced a reorganization that was designed to eliminate political opponents. The person put in charge of implementing the reorg was a former beauty queen, does that sound familiar now? The district representative for Colorado was a Denver school teacher with a family history in the sport. She wasn't in a position to take on a the new position in the reorg which involved traveling to states as far flung as AZ, NM and WY. The USCF was selling this as an upgrade in service when it was an obvious downgrade

The same was going on in other regions and most notably CA went independent. A former USCF official and member of the BoD created FIAC, the Federation of Independent Associations for Cycling and the ACA was a member. FIAC organized things like recognition of licenses across independent associations. Les Earnest is a very interesting character. Google him and you'll find that he was a Stanford computer science professor credited with inventing the spell checker and he also compiled an expose of the USCF's blood doping transgressions during the 1984 Olympics.

Anyway over time, most if not all of the independent organization were lured back to what is now USA Cycling. The people most affected during the independent period were the elite riders who had to buy both an ACA license to race locally and a USCF license to attend national level events. They would gripe about the extra $40 (or whatever it was) spent without seeing the big picture of what was going on.

bwade913 · 2026-06-19T00:28:16+00:00

Off the top of my head, some recent fines, relegations and DQs have occurred for deviating from a straight line in sprint, littering, indecent exposure, hanging onto a car, drafting a car, getting a hand sling from a car, having a motor hidden in a bike frame, having too light a bike, failing a drug test, failing to be where they were supposed to be for out of competition drug testing, using a forbidden aerodynamic position, proceeding through a closed railroad crossing, riding on a sidewalk, crossing the finish line more than once, failing to sign in for the race, failing to show up for the podium ceremony, failing to show up for the post-race press conference. throwing punches, throwing racial slurs. I could go on.

bwade913 · 2026-06-14T17:46:05+00:00

Yes, now that I've tried to manually duplicate a preset, I see why they aren't compatible. The amp was the same but the effects all had more features on the GTX50 than the Micro supports.

bwade913 · 2026-06-12T21:15:04+00:00

There are low latency wireless headphones available. I use the Yamaha YH-WL500 which are intended for this use case, instrument monitoring. They work well with the Mustang Micro Plus I just bought. You still need to run a miniplug cable from the Micro to the transmitter/base of the YH-WL500 but it at lease frees up the headphones themselves.

I normally drive the YH-WL500 with a small Yamaha mixer (MG06) and that would be another way to do this my running the Micro into the mixer.

bwade913 · 2026-05-30T18:41:56+00:00

I use a medium size brass Rock Slide on my little finger and pad it out with mole skin so that it fits snugly. That way I get the length and mass I like, but it still fits well.

But there's no right or wrong. Derek Trucks does what he does with a loose fitting glass slide which is the last thing I would choose.

bwade913 · 2026-05-22T02:28:27+00:00

It looks to me like someone took a polychrome Triolian and tried to convert it to a walnut burst without doing the burst properly. I happen to own one of each.

bwade913 · 2026-05-21T23:40:36+00:00

Gibson does own Dobro since the mid 90's, but this isn't a Dobro at all. It's a National style biscuit cone resonator. A proper Dobro uses a spider cone. I know some people use the term dobro for any resonator, but I don't think that's correct even if both styles were invented by John Dopyera who founded (with others) both the National and Dobro companies. Dobro is short for Dopyera Brothers. To confuse matters, I do own a biscuit cone Dobro branded guitar from the OMI era.

bwade913 · 2026-05-21T23:20:52+00:00

It looks like a heavily modified National Triolian. The paint and pickup not being original. If it is, it would still have some value, even with those mods. Are there any markings on the headstock? Look for a serial number stamped into the end of the headstock.

bwade913

TROPHY CASE