• We’re a little more than halfway through March and I’ve been updating my 101 Things in 1001 Days entry for the month. Two items I’ve checked off turned out to take much longer than I anticipated (I’ve been at them both for months) — one turned out to be pretty worthwhile, and the other scared me away from a whole field of literature on a probably-permanent basis. I’m going to try to scramble through a few more of the tasks in the next two weeks. It’d be nice to knock a total of 4-5 items off the list, even if it’s unlikely.

• Big day today! Buying the torch, tips, regulators, and hoses for my workshop, and ordering a bunch of workbench stuff from Enco. I’m very excited to be getting this project underway (finally). By mid-April I should be in a position where I can do some of my fabricatin’ at home. Also on the topic of framebuilding, yesday I sent out a trio of price quotes. Exciting stuff! P.S. I also ordered a bunch of tubing blocks from Paragon Machineworks, if you didn’t see my previous mention on Twitter/The Book of Faces.

• Stopping off at Peacock Groove today to chit-chat with Noren and get some opinions on a few things. Love hanging out with that dude — we have completely different ideas in design aesthetic, but we’ve got the same interests, same sense of humor, and so on. Should be a good time.

• Happy’s vet bill is going to set us back over $900, as the little goober has to have a couple of teeth pulled. I am, of course, fretting about his safety (anaesthetic + older cat = never a great combo). He’s an important part of our little family and there’d be a big hole in the “us” if anything happened to him.

• Anyone have any big weekend plans? All I’ve got is my first Saturday shift at the bike shop and a Sunday stint in the workshop. Going to try to wrap Paul’s road frame up, and get Fang’s 29er functionally complete (except for fillet finishing).

This.

As I’m sure a small contingent of you may have noticed, this site (and my others) have been throwing Type 500 errors and not giving you any love lately. As it would turn out, I got PWNED, and hard, through an installation of Mediawiki, which I was using to run Bike612. It would appear that the base install of said software contains holes in it large enough to fly a Boeing Dreamliner through.

So there were a bunch of files scattered throughout my server, including a whole fucking Zend package, that was spawning Perl and PHP processes and bringing Ye Olde Webserver to its fucking knees.

I have since cleared out all those files and killed all the processes, which should result in a restoration to the usual levels of operation. I hope I’m not speaking too soon.

So the weekend was pretty awesome.

It began on Friday around 1pm, when I blew out of the office and headed up to Princeton to get my hands dirty in the workshop. The big task of the night was getting the seatstays for Paul’s road bike mitered and attached. I started with a plan to tuck them under the binder bolt on the seat lug, but did not like the way it was looking, so I mitered them down and made fastbacks out of them. That sucked up a majority of my time and I did get them tacked on before I left for home.

Saturday I slept in the latest I have since the honeymoon (was that really six months ago?), not in celebration of the sixmonthiversary or anything, but just because I needed some rest for once. I read, I lounged, and then I ran errands. Haircut, carwash, etc.

Sunday, I woke up and did some housework — primarily the litterboxes — before heading up to the workshop again. Got there, got settled in, and began to kick some serious ass. I accomplished the following:

• Got serious headway on finishing the fillets on the front triangle of Justin’s 26er. Also got his chainstays tinned.
• Got Paul’s road frame complete, except for fillet clean-up on the fastback seatstays and the cable stops (which I forgot to order).
• Got the fillets built-up on the front triangle of Fang’s 29er.
• Did some minor touch-up work with silver on my personal commuter frame.

All in all, great progress. Very excited about that.

The drive home from the workshop took about 40 minutes longer than usual — it was horribly slick and snowing at a good clip, so I took my time and was cautious. I did nearly get creamed by a Blazer who slid through an intersection sideways while I was sitting at a red light. His back end missed my mirror by inches, which means his rear bumper probably missed my passenger door by millimeters. I also stopped at Target to get shit to treat my burns with as the pain was getting to me and made it difficult to grasp the steering wheel with my left hand.

I’m kinda at a loss for topics lately. What would you like me to write about?

Friday:

• office
• workshop
• finish this lugged road frame

Saturday:

• gym
• laundry
• haircut
• clean bike room
• final clean-up of road frame, before paint
• trip to Home Depot for lumber and duct tape

Sunday:

• build a “fillet saw” — http://www.flickr.com/photos/44613580@N03/5445681413/
• massive progress on 26er
• chainstays on 29er

Monday:

• deliver road frame to paint?

I’m sure there’s more that should be listed here, but I can’t think of what that would be.

• Tired.
• I am considering switching hosting services.
• Should have stayed home and slept.
• Thinking about not using a font for PA and developing a new logotype instead.
• Seriously thinking about switching the PA site from WordPress to MODX.
• Tired.

So Bike612 has some sort of vulnerability in it that’s allowing people to WGET like mad and it was bogging down the server, and thus, the account suspension. My apologies. I’ve take Bike612 offline while I work to get the sumbitch locked-down and secured so I don’t need to deal with this shit anymore. Hoping to have it back up and running within a week.

In the meantime, Kate’s home from her long weekend in Omaha, work is work, and life is good. I’ve got a few things I’ve been dwelling on that I’ll be posting about here.

Priority One, Fang’s 29er:
• complete Fang’s front triangle
• miter and prep chainstays

Priority Two, Paul’s Road Bike:
• bottle cage mounts
• cable stops
• chainstay gouge clean-up
• lug points clean-up

Priority Three, Justin’s 26er:
• finish fillets
• miter and prep chainstays and dropouts

Priority Four, My Trackie:
• remove twist
• build BB/ST/DT fillet
• tack and tin TT

So as you’re probably aware, the financial situation here in the United States, when charted on the Oh Shit Scale, lands firmly between a.) having to run through a gasoline factory with a flaming ball of shit on your back, and b.) being pulverized by an asteroid. It’s pretty bad.

One of the big things that’s breaking us right now is Social Security — the program is basically bankrupt, so much so that it is essentially a Ponzi scheme. My Social Security taxes are paying current benefits, rather than my future ones. And with birthrates declining, we cannot afford to continue the system as it is currently structured.

My plan has two prongs:

1. Announce a cut-off date for Social Security. Anyone born on or after year X will not receive Social Security benefits. Year X can be past, present, or future. Ideally, you’d set this up so that people who have yet to enter the job market are the group impacted by this. As part of the cessation of this, however, a few things have to be done — those include adding school programs to cover (throughly) investment and savings strategies. (And some tighter regulation on banks will be required to ensure that savings and CDs and the like are better-protected.) This isn’t the big focus of my plan however. That would be…

2. Allow people to opt out of Social Security. For those of us that are not affected by the cut-off date, we should be allowed to opt out of receiving Social Security benefits. Those of us that opt out should then be exempt from paying Social Security taxes out of our wages. This would have the benefit of reducing the future rolls of those who would be collecting benefits, and it would free up more money in each paycheck that we get.

For example, in 2009, I paid — roughly — six thousand dollars in Social Security tax. Given the current state of the system, I find it highly unlikely that I will ever see a dime of that money. At this point, we (and the government) should realize that the system has become untenable, and that my investing that six thousand dollars (especially in 2009 when the market was still in the doldrums) would be better for the economy, better for me, and better for the long-term financial viability of the U.S. government than just giving it away.

Look, I self-identify as a liberal. I know there are liberals out there who read this and wring their hands and wonder who will take care of the old people and retirees and so on — which is why I proposed the phase-out of the system. People who are capable of opting out (such as myself) will. People who are currently retired and receiving benefits won’t be impacted. And those who have no choice will be prepared for the situation before they enter the workforce and will be able to prepare accordingly.

It sucks, but unfortunately, we’re in a tough, tough position, and we need to make some tough choices about where we want to be in the next couple of decades. Do we want to be financially viable? Or do we want to be broke?