Jamis Commuter 4.0 review

Some of you in the South Bay and Santa Cruz have seen me riding this Jamis Commuter 4.0 around this past month. I hope you like my milk carton kickstand.



I reviewed the Jamis Commuter 4.0 for Road Bike Review. Note that this is the 2008 model. There are a couple of substantial additions in the 2009 model: a rear rack and dynamo hub with LED headlight are now standard on the Commuter 4.0 bicycle.

I'll have a follow up review in a week or two, so if you have questions or additional observations, please leave a comment over at Road Bike Review and I'll be happy to incorporate them. Thank you!

Santa Cruz County and Stimulus Transportation Funding

The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission meets Thursday, March 5 to discuss how to allocate the Santa Cruz County share of the transportation funds authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA -- the Federal stimulus funding act signed into law in February). The Transportation Commission will meet in the Santa Cruz County Supervisor Chambers at 701 Ocean Street in Santa Cruz, California.

Santa Cruz County will receive at least $5.8 million in Highway Infrastructure Funds and may get up to $11 to $12 million depending on how the state of California and the California Transportation Commission allocates funds under state control. Transportation Commission staff will present these funding recommendations at the board meeting tomorrow.

• $180,000 to the Freeway Service Patrol (provides free towing for disabled vehicles on Highway 17).
  
• $125,000 to UC Santa Cruz for paratransit vehicle replacement.
  
• $208,000 to Capitola for 41st Avenue surface rehab
  
• $1.2 million to the city of Santa Cruz for road repairs
  
• $1.1 million to Watsonville for road repairs
  
• $242,000 to Scotts Valley for a sidewalk

The good news is that the Santa Cruz Transportation Commission voted in February to essentially add a "Complete Streets" requirement to any road projects using ARRA funds. Any project using stimulus funds in Santa Cruz County must add bicycle lanes, cross-walk striping, curb cuts, and other accessibility improvements "where appropriate and feasible."

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Transit Capital Assistance

Santa Cruz County will also receive about $5.3 million in Transit Capital Assistance funds. Transit Capital Assistance may be used for bus, rail, and related capital assistance. About $3.4 million will be allocated for the Santa Cruz metro area, $1.6 million goes to Watsonville, and about $267,000 is allocated to the rest of Santa Cruz County. At the time I'm writing this, SCCRTC did not have a breakdown available of how they propose to spend ARRA money for transit projects.

DWR Care

DWR stands for Durable Water Repellent and is the coating used on breathable but waterproof outerwear. All of my raingear is a few years old. If you're riding in the rain like I am this week, you may be discovering that your DWR raingear is not has durable or repellent as it used to be.

DWR coatings don't last through too many washings unless you use cleaners specifically designed for use on DWR fabrics. It eventually wears out.

Some DWR coatings can be 'refreshed' by simply tossing it into the dryer. The heat of the dryer reactivates the water repellent property of the fabric. After a while, though, you must reapply a new coating.

Factory DWR surfaces are probably a fluoropolymer coating of some kind. Replacement fluoropolymer sprays are products like Scotchguard and Granger's Spray On Waterproofing. This stuff works well but some fluoropolymer's have the unfortunate property of breaking down into suspected carcinogens. I don't personally use these products.

The easiest waterproofing, in my opinion, are silicone sprays like Kiwi Camp Dry. Silicone sprays work very well, in my opinion. Unfortunately, with silicone waterproofing you loose some of fabric's original breathability.

The brand favored by outdoor enthusiasts is Nikwax, and it's what I sprayed on my pants, jacket, shoes and backpack tonight. Nikwax is a wax-based polymer. I sprayed Tent and Gear Proof on my backpack and *ahem* on my shoes, and I used Nikwax Spray on my jacket, rainpants, hat and gloves. The biggest problem with Nikwax: Some of the sprays stink like strong vinegar, and the odor persists for several weeks after application. Nikwax also has wash-in repellents but I've never tried those.

HOWTO Network install VMware ESXi from a PXE server

This is a cycling blog, but several people have asked how to rip an ESXi ISO so you can install it from a PXE server so I figure this is as good a place as any to dump the information.

ESXi Installable is VMware's "thin hypervisor." There's no Linux, no Red Hat Anaconda scripting, and not much in the way of configuration or install options. You can modify the files in the ISO (I enable ssh, for example), but I won't go into that in this document.

This document assumes familiarity with Linux and that a PXE boot server is already set up on a Linux machine.

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1. Create a workspace for yourself where you'll copy the ISO file and rip the contents. For example:

cd ~
mkdir esxi-sandbox

2. Grab the ESXi install ISO image from VMware and copy it to your workspace.

3. 3. Mount the ISO image, for example, if the name of the file is _esxi_installable.iso_:

mkdir /mnt/esxiso
mount -o loop ~/esxi-sandbox/esxi-installable.iso /mnt/esxiso

4. On your PXE server, make a space for your ESXi install files, for example (and this will vary depending on your specific environment):

mkdir /data/share/pxeboot/vmware/esxi/

5. Go to the mounted ISO directory and copy the files to your PXE directory. Using the example directory and mount point used before:

cp /mnt/esxiso/* /data/share/pxeboot/vmware/esxi/

All you really need are *.c32, vmkernel.gz, and *.tgz, but the other files are small if you're lazy/sloppy and don't want to delete them.

6. Modify your PXE configuration file so your PXE process can find the ESXi install files. In my installation, I have a file called vmware.conf to which I add a new label like so:

label esx3i
kernel vmware/esxi/mboot.c32
append vmware/esxi/vmkernel.gz --- vmware/esxi/binmod.tgz --- vmware/esxi/ienviron.tgz --- vmware/esxi/cim.tgz --- vmware/esxi/oem.tgz --- vmware/esxi/license.tgz --- vmware/esxi/install.tgz

Note that your "append" directive must include all of the *.tgz files that are in your ISO distribution. Apparently, these can sometimes change between different releases of ESXi so be careful.

7. Boot from your PXE server to test and it should all work out! Celebrate if you succeed, debug and retry if you don't. Good luck!

Jon Winston of Bikescape

More bike blogging people: Say hello to Jon Winston of the Bikescape Cycling Podcast.



Jon lives in San Francisco and mostly covers urban issues, transportation and how they relate to cycling. You can see him carrying portable recording equipment to record his podcasts on the fly. Go find some good stuff at his blog.

Caltrain meeting NOT Wednesday (it's on Thursday)

Bah, the Caltrain meeting is this Thursday, in San Carlos. Not Wednesday in San Mateo. There's a reason my wife handles my appointments.

I'll I will not be at the Caltrain Joint Powers Board meeting tomorrow in San Mateo Thursday in San Carlos. While the Caltrain Bikes on Board program isn't directly on the agenda other than a rubberstamp approval to accept ARRA/stimulus money from the Federal government, a few other bike people will be there and it's important to keep the Caltrain Board updated on how the users of their system are faring.

Update: I changed my mind -- I won't be at this meeting. I'll be at the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission meeting instead, where they'll discuss how to spend the ARRA "stimulus" funds on transportation projects.

In February, the Caltrain board accepted a resolution to add more bike space to existing bike cars. About three weeks ago, a Gallery "old style" bike car appeared with 4 seats removed and two bike racks added. You'll see the extra racks toward the back of the car.



See also that these racks are shorter than the existing racks. According to Caltrain's Mark Simon, the shorter racks are to enable access to the emergency exit windows.



There's some concern that the shorter racks won't secure the bikes as well and may scratch the bike frames, though any bike on Caltrain will get scratched and dented no matter what. I've only seen the racks once (I got to the station early one morning and boarded four different trains looking for the modified gallery car) so I can't comment on how well these shorter racks work.

What are your thoughts on these experimental shorter racks?

California AB 652 to allow for more bike capacity on buses

Currently in California, buses are restricted to bike racks that extend no more than 36 inches from the front of the bus. Bike handlebars may not extend more than 40 inches from the front of the bus.

It turns out those Sportworks Trilogy bike racks that hold three bikes extend just a little too far to be legal in California, and some transit agencies have stopped adoption of the higher capacity racks because of current law.



Assembly member Nancy Skinner from the East Bay introduced AB 652 last week to increase the allowed length of bike racks to 40 inches, and the maximum handlebar distance to 46 inches.

This is a fairly innocuous bill and should pass routinely, but our California Governator has vetoed similarly innocuous bills before. The CABO forum people are talking about whether it's best to let this one slide through on the sly, or should we bring attention to this bill to our legislators?