I Had To Post This

Seen in a Lifehacker post

Stabilize the Debt: Interactive App

I ran into this site today:

Stabilize the Debt: An Exercise In Hard Choices

It's pretty cool -- it's basically a big menu of federal budgeting options (some positively affecting debt, others negatively affecting it), with explanations and associated dollar value impacts.  The 'goal' in the 'game' is to make choices that would result in a debt of 60% of GDP in 2018.

The numbers associated with the choices make clear how minor the impact of some supposedly horribly expensive things are.  For example, you see lots of news coverage on how the F-22's production run has been capped at 1/3rd of the original slate.  Cancelling all of the proposed defense programs slated for killing (F-22 is just one of several such programs) only saves $30B.  There are individual, much narrower-sounding tax choices on entitlements that have impacts an order of magnitude greater.

Lil' J Has New Wheels

Jen now has a road bike too!  It's a Trek Madone 4.7 WSD, with compact gearing (SRAM Rival).  Because she's Lil' J, it's a 50cm.

How Cool Are These?

Love & Matt Zubiller sent these as a wedding gift. The twist: they bought them several years ago, when they still lived in London. I guess this was pretty obviously a good gift for me:

Wedding Photos

The stellar Mary Sledd has posted our wedding gallery: Corbett & Jennifer's Wedding.

Zurich

I meant to write this while still in Zurich, but it didn't get done.  I left Austin on 4/4 (Sunday), and went Austin -> Dulles -> Frankfurt -> Zurich, arriving mid-afternoon on Monday (Zurich time, 7 hours ahead of Austin).  I was able to roam around a bit some on Monday afternoon, as my coworkers (inbound from Munich) weren't arriving until Tuesday.  The hotel seemed to be pretty well located, right next to the opera house, and just a block or two from the lake.

View Larger Map

While roaming that afternoon, I took a few pictures.  This was my first out of town trip with my new Canon 7D.  I had hoped to bring along the EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 lens that I bought along with the camera, thinking that the wide angle would be useful the many architectural and landscape shots I would take.  The lens that came with my original order had some sort of contamination on the lens (like a translucent, sticky drop of something), so I had to return it.  Given that Adorama was closed from 3/29 - 4/4 for Passover, there was no shot of getting the replacement in time.  I made do with the 28-135 mm f/3.5-5.5 kit lens.  I would have brought it anyway, as the nicer lens wouldn't have the range to zoom in on some building details.  Here are a few pictures taken that first afternoon:

The lovely balcony from the room

View down the street, from the balcony...

The promenade along the lakeside, about 2 blocks from the hotel

I just thought the sailboat looked cool

The promenade from afar, Alps in the background

The Grossmünster, a 12th century church nearby

There are a ton more such pictures at my Zurich Gallery.  Some of the night ones are a bit iffy, but there are a few worthwhile nighttime photos.  All of the pictures taken on my last evening in town are in the linked gallery.

The 'Stealth Hitch' Really Is Stealthy

When I donated the SAAB, I took off the Yakima roof rack and sold it on Craigslist.  I really like the rack when I used it, but it wasn't really too often that I did actually use it: if it was just me, I would fold down the back seat and put the whole bike inside the car (safer than locked to the roof rack, and protected from the elements).  I usually used the rack if Jen and I were going mountain biking, allowing me to easily throw both bikes on the roof.  Sometimes I'd throw my own bike on the roof by itself if the back of the car was full for some reason.

With the 335, I don't have a fold down back seat.  The car is available with a fold down back seat as an option...but the one I purchased doesn't have it (one of the few things that still bugs me about it; everything else has been pretty great).  Without the ability to put the bike inside the car, I definitely need some sort of external rack.  At first, I thought I'd get one of the ubiquitous Saris Bones 2 or 3 bike racks:

Saris released a new one, the Bones RS, that is a bit more secure than the basic one:

With both of these, though...I am pretty paranoid about where it touches with the car.  The Yakima rack didn't do anything bad to the roof of the SAAB, as its touch points were clamped in place, totally fixed.  When I took the rack off, after almost 10 years on there...there was zero damage to the roof (once I cleaned off some goo from the blackened decay of the rubber pads where the rack met the roof).  Looking at the Saris' touch pads where it meets the car...I was a bit leery of it damaging the paint.  Unlike the roof rack, there would be a little bit of movement with a rack like this (probably less so with the Bones RS, as it ratchets down a bit more securely).

I don't know anyone who personally has reported any paint damage from a Bones (but then again, I don't know all that many people with trunk racks), but more than a handful of people reporting that in online reviews ended up being enough to drive me to a hitch rack.  Hitches are all over the place on trucks here, but it's not too common to find them on passenger cars, and even less so on sportier ones.  Searching around, I found a hitch manufacturer, Valley Industries, that makes a hitch specifically targeted at the 2009 335: the Stealth Hitch Receiver.

It's pretty sweet: it has a vertical down tube that is pretty much flush with the underside of the bumper:  There is a separate receiver adapter that mates with the down tube when you actually want to hook up something:

This way, it's not even visible that the car has a hitch when nothing is hooked up.  This is the car from behind, after the hitch was installed:

Getting up close and underneath a bit, the vertical tube can be seen:

To actually hook something up, the adapter would be slotted in (and yes, it's upside down):

I had all of this done at Spillar Hitches' SoCo location.  I'm glad I had them do it in the shop there: it took probably 1.5 hours, and requires dropping the exhaust and trimming the inside of the bumper fascia a bit...not exactly something I would have had much luck with at home.  Now I just need to figure out what rack to mate with it.  I think the varieties that do avoid contact with the frame and clamp onto the wheels would allow super fast and easy loading, while avoiding any danger of paint damage (of particular worry with the overly-delicate paint on my Trek..it has several spots of bare carbon now).