Category: Misc

Posted on

Goodbye Bike

Almost a year after the accident, I finally sold the motorcycle. To an Apple employee, no less (WebObjects team). Cool guy. At least I know it’s going to a good home. Not sure why it took me so long. It’s been out of the shop for ages. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it, even though I had already agreed that I wouldn’t be riding it anymore. The guy came to check it out last night, test drove. Offered me a fair price, money for the housing fund. Tonight after work I drove it into SF for him (he was a bit nervous).

But when I got on the bike I realized it was just 35 miles shy of turning 10k miles. No way could that opportunity slip through the fingers. Warm summer evening. The final hurrah. Headed the opposite direction from the highway, up into the Oakland/Berkeley hills, straight for the Grizzly Peak ride. Taking it easy at first, hadn’t done any serious riding in a year, slowly building back up toward the old speeds. But not pushing it. Once bitten and all that. Just felt so good, that time of the day when the light is all golden, everyone is inside eating dinner and watching jeapordy and the hills are on fire with sunset light, smell of pines and eucalyptus, distant ocean smell, the twisties all to myself.

Got really contemplative about it. Of course a big part of me wants to keep the bike and enjoy summer on two wheels. And this other part of me, this new part, that knows so viscerally what happens when you blow it once for a split second, and this other part that’s like genetic programming, self preservation for the sake of the kid (the kid is, after all, the rhetoric I used to sell the bike – “gotta do the dad thing.”) Anyway, I made my peace then and there, leaning into a left hander. Enjoy it this once more, and say goodbye. I feel okay with this. It’s fine.

Gassed up for the buyer and timed it just right – 10,000 miles rolled over on the Bay Bridge heading west into the dusk, the sea all purple on either side, summer night sky coming down, getting cooler. Patted the tank and thanked the bike for the life lessons we took in together, and for all the fun. Got kind of choked up. It was good.

Posted on

A.V. Club

Re: credibility of the Tom Waits interview below – theonionavclub doesn’t appear to be satirical at all – rather an offshoot of theonion. My theory is that they’re just expanding on the brand – reaching for the same audience with more than just humor. Seems like a pretty good site. Smaht kiddies.

Posted on

Momovelo

Came across the most unusual bicycle shop today – a little hole in the wall in a hallway mall that connects Bancroft and Channing. Outside was a bright orange road bike with that really “straightforward” style like the bikes in Holland. Turns out it was Swedish – Europeans right now are apparently going nuts over mid-century bicycles, or resurrections of them. Next to that bike was a grayish purple Japanese road bike – again super “normal” looking, but also really clean in a form follows function sort of way.

Turns out the proprietor had this vision of filling Berkeley with thousands of used Japanese and European road bicycles. The bikes have really long lifespans, but most Europeans and Japanese want to replace their bike every couple of years just for the hell of it, like computer upgrades. So zillions of these things sit around in landfills, available so cheap they’re almost free.

The guy had a good job at IBM and had saved up a bunch of money. He didn’t need any more money. He needed to see Berkeley have access to good bikes for cheap. So he started up this business importing used road bikes and selling them for less than it cost to import them. What a cool guy – his name is Kai, the place is called Momovelo. Wish there were more Kais in the world.

Posted on

Head Cold

A small sub-group split off one of my mailing lists recently — half a dozen people talking about music. Within a few hours we found this chemistry between us. By the end of the first day we had generated more than 100 messages between us. On the second day there were even more. It turned into this flood of rants on music, culture, collections, old girlfriends, having kids, lives of obscure musicians, computing arcana, server configuration…. Can’t stop reading or writing. Don’t have time to, but can’t pull myself away. It can’t go on like this. It’s like an explosion of words from all of us simultaneously – we just struck a vein with each other for some reason. Exhausting.

Almost finished with the SKSM database. Need to wrap up the final freelance obligations in the next month or so so we can start prepping the baba’s room. Also wrapping up the Alumni database at work – has been on the back burner for a long time, but making huge headway lately. Feels good. And finally got Cecilia’s Win2K install squared away (though I missed the SF Documentary Film Fest last night because of it).

Hilarious: Things my girlfriend and I have argued about. The thing that occurred to me after reading this for a while is the fact that the two of them are actually very much in love. It’s a screwed up dysfunctional kind of love, but I really don’t think they hate each other. Note: Amy and I argue like anyone, but we are *not* like this couple.

Birdhouse just got a really favorable mention in the Utne Reader’s Web Watch.

Surprise May rainstorms over the past couple of days – kind of nice.

Uh oh – feeling the beginnings of a head cold this morning.

Posted on

Propaganda

Some Apple reps came to campus to talk to departments about OSX rollouts over the summer. Looks like Jaguar is going to make a lot of the things we want to do a lot easier (e.g. integration with active directory, windows file sharing, etc.). But it’s also probably going to come later than we want/need — we want to start our OSX upgrade in the next few weeks, but Jaguar probably won’t be ready until the students are almost back. They didn’t give exact dates – just floating hints.

Watched the QuickTime stream of Job’s introduction of Xserve for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe it’s just as well that I got strong-armed into hosting the jschool site on a Windows box six months ago. Now if the topic ever comes up again I can lobby to do it on an Xserver.

Nothing like shooting an entire afternoon guzzling the sweet nectar of apple propaganda ;)

Posted on

Mesh

To add a unique password to every record in a 2,000 row database:

– generate list of random passwords (posted about that a few weeks ago)

Write short script that:

– reads every ID in database into an array
– reads every row in the password list into an array
– for every item in the ID array, do a SQL UPDATE with a corresponding element in the password array

The gears of two tables mesh like clockwork. Two thousand rows update in less than a second. I smile and go home.

Posted on

tshirts

Recently discovered that my original Meat Puppets tshirt from around 82 or 83 is still intact. Too tight to wear now, but that’s okay. Guess I’ll just have to keep it around forever ;)

I only have two of the shacker tshirts. Should probably have more.

Some pretty interesting / inspiring words on gumptionology.

Spending a lot of time helping out students with their final web projects over the past few days. End of semester panic mode. I’m actually enjoying that.

Posted on

Paranoia, Stupidity and Greed

Very good article by SiliconValley.com’s Dan Glimor on how the information and entertainment industries are trying to control the ways in which the public consumes content. Note to stupid dinosaurs: fighting with your customers is generally not considered a good business model.

Posted on

Tiannemen

So there’s this professor here with a bad back. As in *really* bad. He lectures laying down on a mattress, and walks really slowly and stiffly. I always assumed it was a more or less temporary thing he was working through. Today I got to talking to him and discovered that he was nearly beaten to death by Chinese cops in ’89 for trying to cover the 3rd anniversary of the Tiannemen Square riots. It was a small piece he was preparing – 10 seconds of video for the evening news. And he was brutalized for being there with a camera.

No matter what my complaints about America are sometimes, I am grateful not to live in so many places in this world.