mike's web log

I have an electric ukulele, which has a jack on the side:

At some point I noticed that the jack had come loose — the nut that holds the jack tight had come off and disappeared and the jack had fallen back into the body of the ukulele.

Well, I thought, I'll go get a replacement nut to hold the jack in place. The first thing I had to figure out was what exactly I was looking for. The nut that holds the jack tight is called a jack nut (reasonably) or a switch nut (because it's used in electronics to hold switches tight):

At that point I decided that I should contact the company I'd gotten the uke from, a small firm that I think (?) is in Oregon. After some back and forth I managed to convey what the issue was. They were then happy to send me a replacement nut. But … it didn't fit. Given how hard it had been to try to get sizing info for the nut, I wasn't sure that going back and forth with them was going to be fruitful.

Ok, I decided, time to go to the real pros: Tacoma Screw Products. This is the kind of place you can go and say (as I did back in my motorcycle days) "I need a galvanized 12-millimeter bolt that's 3-1/2 inches long and has a 1.5 thread pitch" and they'll be all like "coming right up, boss".

I took the uke in and showed it to the guy at the counter. He got out a ruler and a pitch gauge, then said "Let me see what we have". He went in the back and came out with a selection of nuts that we tried. But once again, nothing quite fit. A second counter guy came over — nothing like a little fit problem to pique the interest of a bolt professional — and he had a look, too.

We were sort of stumped at that point, but then the second guy asked "Have you tried American Music?" It turns out that there's a music store not far from TSP that has a full-service repair shop. Huh. Well, I had nothing to lose, right?

So I took my problem to them. There were four of us hunched over looking at the uke, and the guitar tech asked if he could take the uke in the back. You bet. After a bit of time, he came back out and said "Got it!" He'd rooted around in a box of loose jack nuts that they had on a shelf, and lo and behold, he found one that fit. Perfect. I offered to pay for the part and/or for their time, but they wouldn't hear of it.

There were some lessons here for me. One, of course, was to not let the jack nut come loose, whoops. Then I learned about jack/switch nuts and that there is surprising variation in their sizes. Then I learned that if you have an instrument-repair issue, take it to an instrument-repair shop. (My final stop would probably have been an electronics store like Vetco, where they surely have switch nuts?)

Something I already knew but that was reinforced is the value of patronizing stores that are staffed by experts — people who know their stuff and who are pleased to help. So a shout-out again to McLendon['s] Hardware and Dunn Lumber, to Tacoma Screw Products and to American Music, all staffed by super-helpful, knowledgeable folks.

__________

[1] Nearly universally called "McLendon's" with that nice possessive s, including in the URL of the company itself (www.mclendons.com).

As a fun walking project, I walked around Lake Washington. Not at all at once, of course — it's possible to walk the lake in one day, but that takes a special kind of person.[1]

I ended up walking around 65 miles. (I didn't track my mileage closely, but I walked between 7 and 15 miles for each segment.) I mostly followed the Lake Washington Loop, a well-known route for bicyclists, which is 50 miles. But I also deviated from the Loop in order to stay close to the lake and to, you know, check stuff out and to wander through neighborhoods that I don't really know.

I did the walk in six segments over a couple of weeks. I used public transport to get to and from the endpoints for each leg.

• The 6 segments
• Map
• Photos
• Randon observations

The 6 segments

1. North Seattle to Bothell (Lake City–Lake Forest Park–Kenmore–Bothell)
2. Bothell to south Kirkland (Bothell–Juanita–Kirkland)
3. Kirkland to south Bellevue (Clyde Hill–Bellevue–Beaux Arts Village)
4. Bellevue to south Seattle (Bellevue–Newcastle–Kennydale–Renton–Bryn Mawr–Rainier Beach)
5. South Seattle to UW (Rainier Beach–Seward Park–Madrona–Madison Park–Arboretum–UW)
6. UW to North Seattle (UW–Laurelhurst–Windermere–Magnuson Park–Lake City)

If you know the Seattle area, you might recognize that I got more ambitious with each leg.

Map

Here are some maps (taallll, sorry about that, but that's Lake Washington).

The numbers indicate photos. I don't have a detailed map of the route, oh well.

Lake Washington north

Lake Washington south

Photos

The corresponding photos. (I took a lot more photos than this, but I reckoned there was an upper limit to how many times anyone needs to see my mug.)

1. Log Boom Park, Kenmore

Kenmore has invested in providing attractive public spaces, this park being one of them. While sitting at the park you can watch Kenmore Air seaplanes taking off and landing.

2. Juanita Bay Park

This is a beautiful natural area that gives you a sense of what the lakeshore must have been like before it was densely settled.[2]

3. Doris Cooper Houghton Beach Park, Kirkland

The city of Kirkland has a series of parks along the water and has carved out little public shore access points.

4. Chesterfield Beach Park, Bellevue

I took a little detour through the Beaux Arts Village neighborhood of Bellevue with the idea that there might be vistas of the lake. There weren't many, but there was this tiny park. (Many steps down and then back up, oof.)

5. Mercer Slough, Bellevue

A wonderful natural area that's only a tiny bit marred (ahem) by having a freeway running over it. That said, you can follow trails from South Bellevue Station all the way to Renton.

6. Eastrail Corridor

I loved this trail; it was a highlight of the walk. For some reason the Google Maps walking route guides you away from it, but ignore them — it runs uninterrupted to Renton. Among other landmarks is the Seattle Seahawks training facility.

7. Gene Coulon Memorial Beach Park, Renton

A gorgeous park and surprisingly (to me) big.

Some of the local denizens.

8. Cedar River, Renton; Renton Municipal Airport

The Cedar River runs through Renton (under the library!) and emerges into Lake Washington after going through the Boeing 737 plant. But you can still get close to bits of the river.

Renton Municipal Airport takes up the southwestmost part of the lakeshore. It's where new and refurbished 737s take off to be distributed to airlines all over the world.

9. Rainier Beach

The swing around the south end of the lake is the least picturesque part of the loop, imo. The Boeing 737 plant and the Renton Municipal Airport sit on the lakeshore, and even once you're past those, it's a long-ish walk up Rainier Ave S to Rainier Beach. I was surprised that there was a sidewalk, albeit sometimes overgrown, the whole length of Rainier Ave S.

10. Mount Baker Park

The trail along Lake Washington Blvd S going north from Seward Park is mere feet from the shore. It's no wonder that they film car commercials along there.

11. Madison Park

I wanted to stay close to the shore so I aimed at Madison Park. It's a slight detour — to keep going north, you have to juke west a bit up E Madison St to get around Broadmoor. But then you get to go through the Arboretum, and that's nice.

About to step onto the Arboretum Loop Trail.

12. Montlake over 520

The recent Montlake improvements are great for pedestrians and bicyclists.

13. Laurelhurst

I've lived in Seattle for 45+ years and I'd never once set foot in Laurelhurst, so another detour. The photo is at a pocket park whose official name apparently is NE 31st St Public Shore (East) Street End Park.

14. Windermere entrance to Magnuson Park

As with Laurelhurst, I decided to take a little detour through Windermere. There's a trail from there to Magnuson Park.

15. Matthews Beach Park

After walking through Magnuson Park, I ran out of real shoreline, so I went up the Burke-Gilman Trail to Matthews Beach. And from there I made my way back to Lake City.

Random observations

• For a fair bit of the walk, you can go on dedicated trails, but parts of the route are along city streets.
• When I'm walking, the Burke-Gilman trail just feels iffy to me, given how fast some bicyclists ride.
• Nice neighborhoods mostly have sidewalks, but not always! Corollary: as a walker, I've become extremely interested in how safe a street is for pedestrians.
• Nice neighborhoods often have (open) bathrooms in their parks. Backups are community centers, libraries, and indoor malls. I have to plan accordingly.
• You can stay fairly close to the lake, but there are a few substantial impediments that force you off, such as the Renton Boeing plant, Husky Stadium, and various communities like Broadmoor.

I did amuse myself thinking about how many alerts I might have set off on Ring cameras and on the Nextdoor app while I was walking through different neighborhoods. :)

__________

[1] From the Seattle Times: Here's what it's like to walk around Lake Washington in a single day.

[2] I am reminded that the lakeshore looked considerably different before it was densely settled because the lake was also almost 9 feet higher. In 1909, the Corps of Engineers made the Montlake Cut that connected Lake Washington with Portage Bay and Lake Union without locks. This drained Lake Washington so much that it was significantly lowered. This was "good" for commerce but was environmentally egregious, ruining salmon runs on which local tribes subsisted and who knows what other habitats.

Some little while ago—a year? 9 months?—a rainbow of brightly colored bicycles sprouted in Seattle. All of a sudden dockless bike sharing had arrived. There were three vendors and three colors: Ofo (yellow), Spin (orange), and Lime (green, duh):

Dockless was a new thing. Seattle had had a flirtation with docked bikes (company name Pronto!), but that didn’t work out. Part of the reason, surely, was that docked bikes could be picked up and dropped off only at certain points in Seattle, and those were concentrated downtown. Dockless bikes, on the other hand, can be practically anywhere. There’s no stand or station. Using an app on your phone, you locate a bike close to you (they’re all GPS tracked). When you find a bike, you unlock it with the app, hop on, and ride wherever you want. When you’re done, you get off, lock the bike, and walk away.

A key point is that it’s literally wherever. People take these bikes onto the light rail and presumably leave them in far-flung neighborhoods. The companies hope that you will leave the bike well parked in a convenient location, but they can't enforce this, so bikes show up all over the place.

Another appeal of the dockless bikes is that they're cheap to rent: you can ride for one dollar. (More on that in a moment.) This makes dockless bikes great for a kind of impulse ride—you want go for a ride, or you need to get someplace, and hey, here’s one of those bike right there. One dollar and 30 seconds later you’re riding.

Initial experience

I have a two-part commute. Normally I ride the train (light rail) from our apartment to downtown Seattle. From there I take a bus to Fremont, the neighborhood where our office is. At some point, however, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to get off the train downtown; the train goes to the University of Washington, which is about 2-1/2 miles from our office. I can then take a bus from the U for my second leg. Or, as it occurred to me, I could ride a bike.

So I gave it a try. I installed the app, and after getting off the train at the U, I used the app to locate a bike. I found one, unlocked it, somewhat awkwardly got on, and pedaled away.

Well. My very first lesson is that these bikes are extremely … sturdy. 42 pounds, oof. As I also quickly learned, they have 8 gears, but they’re geared pretty low. (You shift by twisting the handle—easy!) Even on level ground, and even in the highest gear, you are working to move that bike. This is particularly evident if you’re riding on a bike trail, because people on sleeker bikes are constantly whizzing past you.

This is understandable, of course. Both parts, I mean. For the sturdy part, if you’re designing a bike to withstand both the elements and people’s inevitably casual use, you favor something that can take some knocks. And for the gearing part, you need low gears so that people can just get the danged thing moving. Plus you’re accommodating a wide range of riders (weight, strength, skill), and you want a pretty low common denominator.[1]

Safety not first

The spontaneous nature of grabbing a dockless bike does have a downside—namely, that you’re unlikely to have thought to bring a helmet. Seattle ordinance requires a helmet, but the bike-share companies don’t provide. This is an interesting dilemma for me. I could carry a helmet around, but I use these bikes comparatively rarely, so that would mostly be dragging around the helmet for no reason. My approach for the time being is that when I do use a dockless bike, I don’t ride on city streets at all; I ride only on bike paths that are separate from the road.

The jalopy bike

The first ride was a learning experience. The second was as well, but in a different way—the gears slipped if I pedaled too hard, making for an unpleasant and even more laborious ride. And this I suppose underscores a different problem of these bikes, which is that people don’t treat them well. They’re rentals, after all, so people ride them hard, and let them fall, or worse:

I tried a few more times, but had one more incident of a slippy gear and a couple of bikes where the seat was loose or there was some other problem. My experience overall seems to have been typical—the Seattle Times did a test and concluded that only about 64% of Lime bikes were ridable. So between the crapshoot of a getting a bike that had problems and the more general prospect of having to work so hard to bike 3 miles, I didn't really embrace the whole idea, and I sort of forgot about Lime.

Chapter 2: Electronics to the Rescue

Somewhere along the line, Lime (only, afaik) introduced ebikes, which have an electronic assist to your pedaling. This makes sense in Seattle, which has a lot of hills. (It makes sense everywhere, but there are certain popular routes in Seattle that just don’t seem feasible with the normal Lime tank-bikes.) This re-piqued my interest in using a Lime bike for a leg of my commute, so I gave it a shot.

Oh. My. God. As soon as you step on a pedal the bike practically lunges off. It isn’t effortless, but the assist does a lot to overcome the inertia of the heavy bike, so it’s a very welcome improvement.

But there are some issues. One is that ebikes are extremely popular, so it can be a challenge, unlike the all-manual bikes, to find one nearby. A complicating factor is that the ebikes lose their charge, and Lime won’t unlock a bike that has less than 20% charge. Another issue, at least theoretically, is that local rules say you're not allowed to ride an ebike on a sidewalk or bike path, which means that you're legally only allowed to ride them on city street. Yeah, that's not going to happen. (As with the helmet laws, it remains to be seen whether the city will try to enforce this rule.)

And then I learned about the cost. As I noted, you can ride a manual bike for a dollar. The price for ebikes is one dollar plus 15 cents per minute from the moment you unlock. It had never occurred to me that the price would be different until I got notification from Lime that one my rides had cost me $3.40. Only then did I go back and check their pricing page, which does not even mention ebikes; I had to poke around to get the details on ebike pricing. This rather more substantial cost has given me pause. I mean, it's not like taking an Uber or anything, but I do have to ask myself just how much value I put on being able to pedal myself, albeit with electronic assist, to or from the train. At the moment, I'm riding a dockless bike maybe, dunno, every other week? Still cheaper than an unused gym membership, I suppose.

It's the future

Dockless bikes appear to be doing well in Seattle. There are currently about 10,000 bikes in Seattle, and for the months of May and June (which were clement), they were ridden an average of 7,000 times a day. The city of Bellevue, our cross-lake suburban sister city, is beginning its own experiment with dockless bikes. Just recently, Seattle expanded the charter for dockless bike companies, and we could have up to 20,000 of the bikes circulating through the city. (That's 4 companies times 5,000 bikes each, assuming the companies want to pay the fees that Seattle is asking.)

In the meantime, Lime is experimenting with new form factors. They have manual bikes and ebikes now; they're adding electric scooters, which we'll be seeing soon in Seattle:

Given my lack of balance, this does not seem like a vehicle I should be piloting. But who knows—maybe the lure of an inexpensive way to try one out will get me careering down the Burke-Gilman trail on a scooter. I'll let you know.

[1] I would be amused, tho not surprised, to see some sort of derby or race in which riders all use Lime bikes.

1. None: 9196
2. Inattention: 2386
3. Other: 2163
4. Did not Grant Right of Way to Vehicle: 1570
5. Unknown Driver Distraction: 1265
6. Driver Not Distracted: 910
7. Following Too Closely: 597

During the Korean War, Congress had put an "excess profits tax" in effect, intended to prevent military companies from making out too well because of increased demand during the war. As it happened, the law essentially defined "excess profits" as anything above what a company had made during the peacetime period of 1946 to 1949.

Bill Allen the tax lawyer looked at the numbers and saw a golden opportunity. It worked like this: Because nearly all of its 1951 war-related earnings were considered "excess," the Boeing company would wind up owing eight-two cents of every dollar of profit to Uncle Sam. [...] What Bill Allen clearly saw was that now was the perfect time to plow a huge amount of company money into an audacious new development project. Why not? All of it would be a legitimate business expense, reducing the "profits" for the coming years, but so what? That was all money that would have gone to the government.

Dash-80 rollout, May 15, 1954

The twin-tailed siren isn’t from a “marine book” at all. She’s from an early German printed book, Das Buch von einer Frawen genant Melusina, a translation of Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Melusine. Melusine tells the story of how the first male of the Lusignan line, Raimondin, met a beautiful woman at an enchanted fountain in the forest. After extracting a promise that he never try to find her on a Saturday, this woman, Melusine, gave him all her love and great wealth as well, promptly married him, and later bore him eleven sons. Naturally, Raimondin couldn’t leave well enough alone, tracked her down on Saturday and found her back at the magic fountain where she had reverted to her true form, a twin-tailed siren or serpent-lady.

If medieval studies teach us anything, it’s to be extra cautious with origin stories. Just as there was almost certainly no conveniently named Trojan refugee Brutus who founded Britain (nor Turkus Turkey, nor Francus France), no sword in the stone that elected a Welshman the king of all England, no Donation given by Emperor Constantine of all his earthly power to the Catholic Pope, and no shape-changing serpent lady Melusine to sleep with the Count of Anjou, there was almost certainly no “sixteenth-century Norse woodcut” floating around Seattle in 1971. It’s far more likely that three businessmen and coffee afficianados searching for a symbol for their new coffee shop in Pike Place Market turned to the American edition of The Dictionary of Symbols — which, incidentally, was first published in that same year, 1971. But the urge to clean things up and make them more inspiring than they were is simply irresistible where one’s origins are concerned.

• Send as few emails as possible.
  
• Keep them as short as possible.
  
• Use small letters.

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried disharmony to new heights, lurching from crisis to crisis. There have been allegations of vandalism aimed at players, including a dented French horn and a razor blade planted in a mailbox; a players’ survey that condemned the conductor only to be deep-sixed by management; and lawsuits filed by players accusing the conductor of mental if not physical abuse.

It is a cautionary tale of how the relationship between performers and a long-term leader can go awry and how, in an artistic hothouse, a tangle of emotion and politics can veer out of control and take on a life of its own.