So I took advantage of the nice weather and rode the motorcycle today. I started out headed for the forests north of Detroit Lakes, then changed my mind because the gravel and dirt roads were still muddy from recent precipitation. I decided to take the Otter Trail Scenic Byway which winds throughout Otter Tail county on paved county and state roads. I managed to ride the whole route except the Pelican Rapids / Dent/ Perham leg.


You can see my dithering about in this map. Go east on 34? Go north then east around Height-of-Land Lake? Ahh screw it let's go south.
18 October 2009 Motorcycle Ride - Segment 1

I stopped for gas at Ottertail. I didn't have to, but it ended up working out well because I then had enough fuel to complete the ride. From there it's pretty much the standard route to Fergus Falls. I did take a detour I'm not showing on the map to see Inspiration Point Bible Camp, about 5 miles from Inspiration Peak, since I spent a week there about 7 years ago and wondered if they were still around.
18 October 2009 Motorcycle Ride - Segment 2

At Fergus Falls I stopped for a while and read the displays that Otter Tail Power Company put in the windows of its old powerhouse on a dam in the middle of town. When I left the sun was still 45 minutes from setting and I decided to head over to Orwell Dam and continue my tour of engineered structures.

When I left Orwell Dam I realized how much more distance I had to cover. I thought I would have daylight all the way to Pelican Rapids, but in fact I was riding in the dark for the last 15 miles to there. After Pelican I just took roads I knew and that are paved.

18 October 2009 Motorcycle Ride - Segment 3

Since I probably am done setting personal motorcycle distance records for the year, I feel safe posting this.

Yellow pins are points reached from Fargo; blue, from Gwinner last year. (And Ortonville, in green, is a place I've reached from both.)

I took the day off on Friday and went riding. Details:

Fargo to Bemidji via Detroit Lakes, White Earth State Forest, Becida

I stopped for lunch at Detroit Lakes then wandered around the forest. I actually covered about 20 more miles than Google figures, here I mapped the most direct route that would go mostly where I went. The run down Buckboard Forest Road was epic, by the end I was sliding the tail around most corners.

At Zerkel I paused to decide how far north/east this ride was going to go... was I going to head for Lake Itasca and points more eastward like Leech Lake, or Bemidji and points more northward like Red Lake? I decided to go for Bemidji, since the last time I was there all I did was run up the US-71/US-2 quasi-freeway. When I got there I fueled up since I hadn't decided what my next direction would be. The extra 20 miles made the fuel run come out to about 180 miles and 4.5 gallons for 40 MPG. (Hooning around forest roads drops my MPG just a little bit.)

Bemidji to Crookston via Red Lake and Thief River Falls

Again I covered about 20 more miles than Google figures, mostly running around Bemidji trying to figure the place out. It was overcast and the city is laid out differently than I expected so I was never quite sure what direction I was headed till the sun started to come out. I stopped at a motorcycle shop and bought a pair of warmer gloves since my hands were getting cold (in August?!?) Weather: 58 degrees, cloudy, mist, occasional sprinkles. From what I now know, I wish I'd stayed to watch the 1st day of the Ojibwe Forests Rally. (Details on the 2nd day coming later!)

The sun started to come out as I was leaving Bemidji, and I decided to head for the Red Lakes. They're the last remaining body of water from Lake Agassiz that's entirely within the US, and they're the largest lake that is completely in Minnesota. For a long time I zipped along the south shore on Highway 1/89 wishing for an overlook, and finally found a boat landing at the SW corner that I had to make do with. From there I went to "Four Towns" which is actually not a town at all, thought about going north, decided I really didn't want to go all the way to Warroad, and kept going west.

Crookston to Fargo

Pretty self explanatory. At 206 miles on the odometer I fueled up at Crookston (4.5 gallons: 46 MPG), found a place to fuel myself, then hit Highway 75 as the sun was setting. Full darkness set in while I was transiting from Georgetown to Argusville, then I was reliant on my and other's headlights back to Fargo.

... these are growing on me.

They're SO HAPPY.

So the other day I was driving from Fargo to my family's farm on my usual every-2-to-3-week visit. Along the way I was playing with the radio. After I switched off AM 1100* since Mark Levin wasn't hosting his own show, I went to FM and was shocked that I was receiving my usual FM station, KFNW-FM**, well into South Dakota. They do have a good-sized tower, running at the maximum legal wattage, about 20 miles from Fargo, but usually I start losing them around Sisseton. Instead I was able to pick them up pretty well past Webster, in spots from Garden City all the way to Willow Lake, and even a good signal just after I turned from SD 28 onto the county road that goes by the farm (which can be explained possibly by the line of sight, 170 miles at this point, barely missing the most northwest part of the Coteau des Prairies.)

More impressive: when I was going across the rolling terrain along SD 25 near Garden City, on the north sides of hills I was picking up KFNW, and on the south sides I was receiving KSEZ out of Sioux City IA, something like a 180 mile line of sight. They're another 100kW station, but with a shorter tower than KFNW's (196 meters to KFNW's 485) and not enough elevation difference to make up for it. On Highway 28 near the end of my trip I was able to listen clearly to most of the Linkin Park song that's in the end credits of the new Transformers*** movie.

My best guess is that I was experiencing mild tropospheric propagation thanks to the atmospheric conditions at the time (extremely still and not particularly warm; possibly a temperature inversion.)


*,**,*** Yes, I have an odd combination of tastes. You may have noticed.

Start to 2nd fuel stop

2nd fuel stop to end

The 1st fuel stop was at Valley City, and I also filled up at Gwinner and Wheaton.

County visits:
ND: Cass, Barnes, Ransom, Sargent, Richland
SD: Marshall, Roberts
MN: Traverse, Big Stone, Grant, Wilkin

Overall Ride Route, 23 July 2009

As always Google Maps times are stupid. This took about 3 hours.

To prove it, here's a motorcycle ride route:

Outbound route, 11 July 2009



The return route was 120 miles of boring: from Lake Itasca east on MN-200 to US-71, 7 miles "north" (east) on US-71 to Hubbard County 4, down Hubbard 4 to Park Rapids, then MN-34 to Detroit Lakes, US-10 to MN-336, MN-336 to I-94, through Moorhead and home. The only noteworthy thing was that I was following a semi through the hilly woods country that actually was not only keeping up with traffic, but was about the fastest thing on the road. Guy wanted to go 75 if he had the chance. That and I had a Suburban riding my butt while I was behind the semi, and that same Suburban managed to be all of 1/4 mile ahead of me at the I-94 entrance ramp 60 miles later.

Edit: And why do I go ride out there? Because it looks like this:



And the topo map looks like this.

As you know I work for an engineering consulting firm which had a number of people on-site at a customer here in town. That customer asked us to move our people off-site as part of its internal efforts to save money in the recession.

In theory this should be workable. Other than meetings and prototype builds, most of our work is based on the computer anyway, in the Pro/Engineer CAD package, the customer's customized drawing viewer and bill-of-material management programs, and the customer's PDM system (Product Data Management: the business function within product lifecycle management that is responsible for the creation, management and publication of product data, per Wikipedia.) So in theory we should be able to work in Pro/Engineer most of the workday without being connected to the customer's systems, and use a VPN for the internal Web applications and the PDM system as needed.

In practice, it hasn't worked so far. Our Pro/Engineer and PDM installations are based on our internal LAN, in the same configuration as the customer's but on our own server. When we connect to the VPN we lose our connections to the internal network, causing Pro/E to crash from losing its internal-network-based license, and PDM to just not run. We either had the data we needed to work with but no connection to the customer's computers, or the connection to the customer's computers but no data to work with. Everyone's called the customer's IT helpdesk to report the issue, and the helpdesk has had us adjust various settings in the VPN software but nothing has worked so far.

I figured there had to be a way to make this work. Obviously I still have a physical connection to my company's network since I have to go through that network, and though its gateway in order to see anything outside it.

I got sick of the issue and started searching. That led me to the concept of a split tunnel, where traffic meant for the VPN is sent that way, and traffic not meant for the VPN (i.e. general internet and local LAN) go through normally. Then I went to the VPN software's web site to verify if it supported split tunneling, and found that there is a server-side setting which manages whether a split tunnel is permitted, or it can be configured to simply trust local LANs (which would be necessary even if we simply wanted to print drawings to our networked printer.)

We sent this off to the customer's IT personnel, and now we finally have progress... but why did I have to research the problem myself? Why didn't someone in the 1st tier at the helpdesk pass it along to the 2nd tier people who actually are familiar with the software?

Outbound route, 7 June
Return route, 7 June

The outbound is basically the same as the 2 May ride, except I took Buckboard Forest Road at the end of Height-of-Land road, and went to Lake Itasca. The return is quite different.

New county visits:
MN: Hubbard

Things I did not know:
-The Mississippi is just a tiny little thing where it leaves Lake Itasca. We're talking 7 feet wide and a foot deep tiny.
-Itasca State Park does random open house days when you don't have to have a vehicle permit, I happened to come along on one of those days. Score!
-People actually still do the walking across the rock covered dam at the outlet of Itasca. (Mostly kids.)
-The rock dam is manmade, someone in the 1930's didn't like how this major river got its start in a slough and decided to 'improve' the river's beginning.
-Rivers aren't necessarily defined as running all the way from the highest tributary at the headwaters. The Mississippi starts at the outlet of Itasca even though there are higher waterways flowing into Itasca.
-There is a town in Minnesota named "Zerkel". Zerkel is a fun word.
-Mississippi is a very fun word to type.
-It's easy to get your internal compass turned around with overcast skies on roads that aren't on a grid pattern. On the return trip near Round Lake, I turned north from Becker County #143 on to Becker County #35 thinking I was going to be going west. I realized my mistake when I got to the little settlement about a half mile in and thought 'this sure looks familiar' (since that site had been on my route around Elbow Lake on the way out).

This was my first big ride in a while; from the 5th of May till the 27th I was without a project at work, so my hours were cut back to 30/week, so I was taking long weekends and helping on the farm.