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June 20, 2006
The Electric Bike Needs Maintenance
Well, I've been riding my electric bike to work for about 5 years now, riding it about 90% of the time (only drive my pickup if I've got to get over to Salem or if it's raining HARD). The tires were needing a little more air, but when they were inflated the back tire developed a huge bubble because the fibers just wore out. I'm guessing there are about 3-4,000 miles on the bike now, so can't complain about a tire wearing out. Anyway, the tire and rim are at a bike shop in McMinnville where a good family friend is working this Summer. Not only am I getting a new tire, but they are going to replace some of the gears as well. They're going to put "higher" gears on it, so that hopefully I'll get a bit more speed out of the bike. The way it came, it only does 20 mph tops - this is a legal requirement, not a performance requirement. Hardly ever do you use anything but high gear, maybe shifting down one or two gears at a stop sign. Also, theyre going to lube it all up good and replace the chain. Total estimated cost is about $85. I'll let you know how it finally totals out.
One thing - I feel like it's such a waste driving a whole pickup just to get me to work! For a short commute in a moderate climate like ours, the electric bike really is an excellent choice - far better than a car or pickup. No insurance or licensing fees, plus it uses about $1-2.00 per YEAR in electricity.
Posted by rossm at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
I'm Back and Working on Oracle Enterprise Manager
Last Thursday Dale and I continued with our staff improvement project of Oracle database tuning, and learning other DBA type tasks. We are working with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) - standalone console. In working through the OEM we are finding out some very interesting things about the Aero database. For example, Aero has been set up with a number of different tablespaces, each of which is managed by the database. Wilb had very few tablespaces, which resulted in nearly everyone's objects and data being kept in one huge tablespace. If one user of that tablespace had problems, then you could not take it offline to fix them without affecting everyone else. The design of Aero is much better in this respect, but Dale and I found that many of the tablespaces were WAY over-allocated with disk space. It was common for a tablespace to have been allocated 400 MB or 600 MB of disk space and only be using less than 10 MB. So, Dale and I used OEM to reduce the data file space allocation for those tablespaces to a more reasonable amount. We also found a couple tablespaces which had used up a major amount of their allocated space so we increased the space allocation for those. There are a bunch more tablespaces to modify, so we'll do that next Thursday.
Posted by rossm at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)