Albert

I have no problem at all with the ones on Rim and really enjoy them (in both directions)! Just that one specific g-out on AoC has me being conservative.

I suspect I know where SN's Roller Coaster is, and that is indeed a ton of fun. I have no idea what "Xtal Falls' Pleasure Loop" is, but I would like to find out. And Bob Ross is really well done, much prefer that to the original Up and Over trail. That last g-out on Attack of the Clones, though, is special. 😄

Great, thanks for confirming. Yeah, if I watched some others do it and the line(s) they choose, I might be brave enough. But I could just see my fork bottoming out and my slamming into the rocks face first. Will have to look at it moire carefully next time I'm out there. Which won't be this week!!!

Is that when you get to the end of Rim and can go either up the hill to the left or to the right and either down to Dave's Ditch (bypassing the slippery rocks) or stay right and go along the parallel trail to Rim that eventually reconnects to the main Rim trail? That is fun, and that is what I rode on Monday, but that last dip I haven't been brave enough to ride.

Having slipped and fallen on my ass on those rollers when they've been wet, I'm happy to avoid them unless they are completely dry. I could have avoided them and ridden the rest of Dave's Ditch (dumping me right near Snail, and avoiding more of the BCRT), but given how wet Mulligan was, I figured there'd be a lot of water in there as well.

Up to that point everything was nice, but the big puddles under the Parmer bridges (near the BCRT, where you enter after riding Peddlers to head towards Mulligan) should have clued me in. Is there any way these can be fixed, given their consistently wet nature for some time after it rains?

They were certainly great yesterday! Except for Mulligan, lots of water in the low areas near the end (before that small, rocky climb and then all the dips that follow). I didn't try riding Dave's Ditch as I assumed that would be wet. Also some water at the beginning of Gumdrop, but that's not unusual.

Got out to Brushy Creek yesterday for the first time in quite a while. Rode 20 miles and had a ton of fun! Here's the route I rode: Candyland (Gumdrop, Snow White, Gnargasm, then back around to Snow White via trail above Gnargasm). Peddler's Pass Mulligan Picnic East to West (entire length) Bob Ross Rim Job out and back Snail trails (went up three times three different ways, coming down on 2, 5, and YMCA) Bob Ross in reverse Picnic West to East to 1/4 Notch bailout 1/4 Notch West to East (reverse) Back to car at Champion Park (via singletrack where I could). Was nice to see all the cedar fences inside Peddler's Pass to prevent people from cutting across trails, well done! The new Bob Ross trail is great and flows well in both directions (although certainly more climbing west to east). And you can now climb out of the trail at the end (near the Double Down exit), which I didn't even attempt previously. Remarkable to see all the work that's been done in Snail. I first rode up the cement along 183A, got to the top, and was amused at the 1-6 signs. I rode down 5 first, and at the bottom saw that there's a new "Climbing" trail, so I rode that up. Not bad at all. I then went down the YMCA trail and then rode the trail at the bottom of that back up to the clearing. Then rode 2 back to the bottom and even that trail has changed a bit. I'm not someone who does jumps at all, but it's very cool to see what's out there, and I still enjoy the climbing and then descending the trails that don't have crazy features I cannot avoid. 🙂

Great, thanks! Want to get out today before the weather takes a turn for the worse this week.

How's Brushy today? I finally have a new mountain bike after breaking mine over a year ago at Lake Georgetown! Want to take it out to Brushy for the first time and hit everything out there, including the new stuff I keep reading about. Have already ridden all the new stuff in Suburban Ninja. 🙂

Nice, maybe I'll head down there this weekend. Did you take it home and wash it off?

Funny, that's actually one of two different parallel cards I bought, trying to get them to work. Ultimately had to buy a machine with a built-in parallel port. Amusingly after I got the second machine working with the built-in port, I was able to install this very card and get the second parallel port working through the VM, so now I can have two different devices connected full-time, without having to use a parallel port switcher.

Those generally don't work very well with anything beyond printers. In this case, I am using older parallel-based chip programmers, and it's difficult to get them to work with anything but built-in parallel ports. I ended up buying two machines on eBay -- the first one didn't actually have a built-in parallel port (the machine pictured in the auction did, so I was peeved about that), and two different parallel cards I bought would not work, either. Ended up buying a second machine that did arrive with a built-in parallel port, and I was able to get the devices to work on that one, using a Windows 2000 VM (one of the devices does not have software that will work on anything newer!) inside Windows 7 and an older version of VMWare Player. Took a lot of work, but now I can program some older devices I wasn't able to program previously. ..Al

Yeah, that really sucks. After one cable came free from its anchor not too long ago, and another cable simply snapped, it was deemed too dangerous to repair. So this was the inevitable result. They were hoping to deconstruct it gracefully and not lose everything. Even the three towers snapped. I'm hoping it can be rebuilt anew once this is cleaned up, but that's not something I expect to happen quickly. ..Al

Great! 😄

Here's the SpaceX stream I'm watching: Was there three years ago for a crew resupply launch as part of a #NASASocial, for two full days at NASA with access to scientists flying missions to the ISS, talks from various people involved with the program (including the then NASA administrator), got to see the pad with the Falcon 9, and much more. And of course got to see the launch from the closest we could legally get. Was an amazing experience! I think I have a thousand photos and videos from that trip. 😄 These photos are from this January when I was out there again: Bonus, we got to see them unloading a Falcon 9 booster from the drone ship after boarding a cruise ship at Port Canaveral:

No, I have not, but thanks for the tip. I did look at some local marketplace groups on Facebook as well as on Craigslist and found a few good candidates, and hopefully I can buy one of them today. If that doesn't work out, I'll take a look to see what Discount Electronics has.

I need an older PC that has an integrated parallel port. Preferably one that can run XP (I can install it if need be if it has something newer installed like Windows 7). I need to use some old device (chip) programmers that need to be connected to the computer via parallel port. If you have one and you're interested in selling it, please send me a PM. Thanks!

Yeah, that's why I want to install it to an external drive (fast Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD). However, I discovered that Catalina will not allow me to boot from an external drive for security reasons, so you have to first boot into the Recovery partition(holding Cmd-R while booting) and then change that setting. But for some reason I cannot even boot into the recovery partition, it simply doesn't work. And this is a machine (newer Mac mini) I bought earlier this year, so it was partitioned and setup with Catalina from the factory. Really unimpressed with all the mistakes Apple has been making in hardware and software the last five years. I don't have time right now to really mess with it too much further until things slow down for me. Curious what you think about Big Sur once you've had a chance to play around with it a bit. I looked at this thread on MacRumors to verify that all the apps I use on a regular basis work fine (or mostly fine) in Big Sur, so I should be good to go once I can get it installed. Those new Apple Silicon processors look quite slick and are damn fast. Waiting to see what they do for the higher-end machines (to-end Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro, 16" MacBook Pro).

I was going to install Big Sur on an external drive and play with it, but yesterday was a bit of a disaster in terms of people having problems downloading and/or installing it, plus many cases where it just borked someone's machine and they have to reinstall Catalina from scratch. I'll hold off until at least an 11.1 release. It even slowed down launching of apps for people not using Big Sur, as their notary service (that apparently attempts to validate apps every time you launch them) went down. I was having problems yesterday just launching apps, where they'd bounce in the dock for 30+ seconds, at which point they'd either fail to launch or eventually launch. A bit of a clusterfuck.

It does look pretty damn good. I may have to try this out with my three 27" 4K monitor setup. 🙂

Love that photo! 😄

That thunderstorm woke me up this morning around 6am and it was pouring for quite some time, then still rained for a while after that.

Welp, I will be content to just watch people do that drop.. The sound of him hitting the tree, ouch!

Thanks! It's been a while since I've ridden that, glad to know it's still rideable.