Дневник Сумасшедшего

Goodbye, New York; hello, new life

2008-02-14T03:07:30Z

(Special Valentine's Day announcement)

I haven't posted anything here in a good while, but I figured it would be a good way to very publicly announce and record something that I kept a very private matter for a long, long time:

Four days ago, Marie (damndirtydyke) and I went to the top of Haleakala to watch the sun rise. Of course, even in Maui, it's very, very cold at an elevation of 10,000 feet before sunup, but we came prepared. In addition to bundling up against the cold, we folded the back seat of her Jeep down flat and converted the whole back section in to a big comfy bed, complete with a big fluffy comforter, so that after the drive up in the wee small hours, we could take a warm nap while waiting for the sun to get ready to come out, instead of standing around outside and shivering with everybody else who made it up the mountain.

Right on schedule, at 6:53 local time, the sun came up, throwing splashes of light and color across the sky and the clouds (which, at that elevation, were several thousand feet below us) before threatening to blind us with its bare disk and flooding Haleakala Crater with light. After the sun had risen a couple of degrees of arc above the horizon, and the sky had taken a more uniform color, we walked back to the car for another nap, both of us tired from the reduced amount of sleep, and cold from standing outside. Then, as we curled up, holding each other under the comforter, I asked Marie to marry me.

Now might be a good time to fill in with a little bit of background information. For the past four years, Marie has been my partner in life, love, and friendship. The romantic part of our relationship might be described as "on again, off again", but the love deep in the core of our relationship had always bonded us strongly together as best friends after our initial aborted attempt at romance. When Marie moved to Maui at the end of the summer, we stayed closely in touch, and came to realize how much we still needed each other. For the past few months, we have been discussing and planning our future together, and so well before the trip up the mountain that Sunday morning, both of us knew quite well that eventually one of us would propose marriage to the other, but there was just something about the words "Will you marry me?" coming out of my mouth, and her lack of hesitation in answering, and just the general magic of the moment that came together so perfectly.

Marie has no plans to return as a permanent resident of NYC just yet, nor does she plan on staying on Maui, and so for us to spend the rest of our lives together, we both must leave to live somewhere else. I have my own fair share of obligations here, which I have given myself until the beginning of September to wrap up. At that time, my current lease expires, and some time shortly before or after I move out of that apartment, Marie will come join me in NYC for a few months. We will most likely live with my parents for a few months, to wait out the winter and hang on to my a little bit longer to save some more money before we pack up and go, because after leaving New York, there will be a period of time where neither of us is tied down to anything in particular, and we will go on a long vacation together in Europe at some point in the spring of 2009, before we start our new life together in Portland, OR.

The wedding will take place in or near NYC, either immediately before the trip, or some time after we move to Portland (we will return to NYC for the wedding). You'll all be invited, but we need to figure out the specifics first.

Another one bites the dust.

2007-03-06T05:19:58Z

It sucks when you open your e-mail inbox, see a message with someone's name as the subject, and your first thought is: "Shit, he's dead."

It sucks more when you're right.

Goodbye, Chris.

Fuck.

Please, for fuck's sake, don't drink and drive.

2006-12-02T20:37:09Z

Eric Ng was killed last night by a drunk driver near Houston Street on the West Side Greenway. The driver somehow managed to drive on the greenway and mowed him down.

Kids These Days...

2006-10-30T06:45:01Z

So a guy brings in a PowerBook. He says that every time he starts up the computer, the icon of his hard drive ends up in the corner on the lower right, instead of the upper right. He can move it to the upper right, and it will stay there until he restarts again. I take a quick look, and sure enough, it's just as he says. It smelled like a corrupted .DS_Store file in his Desktop folder to me, so naturally, I fire up Terminal.app to delete the offending file, as that's the quickest way I could think of to delete an invisible file.

The guy's kid, who couldn't be more than 8 or 10 years old, is watching everything I'm doing with much interest, and faster than I could type "rm ~/Desktop/.DS_Store", he starts shouting:

"zOMG! Wow, dad! Check it out! The computer store guy is hax0ring your computer! Loook! He's in the terminal bash! That's so cool! The terminal bash!"

The dad seems almost embarrassed to ask his son, "What's the 'terminal bash'?"

"C'mon, get with the program, dad! The terminal bash; it's for hax0ring. It's..." (at this point, the kid starts rattling off some numbers, which didn't seem to make any sense to me. No doubt something to do with the "terminal bash"... "... Seriously, dad. Get with the program!"

Anyway, after deleting the .DS_Store file, I moved his HD icon back to where he wanted it, restarted, and sure enough, it stayed put. Ph33r my 1337 hax0ring 5ki11z!!!!!!!!!!11

Why is your mother bored?

2006-10-20T13:33:56Z

Scene: squittycat, jsoltren, and jsoltren's mom are standing around a table, looking at a motherboard.

Mom: (Pointing at a heatsink) Hey, it looks like a little building!
Jose: Yes, mom. It's a little building. With lots of angry heat-transfering workers inside.
Mom: (Now pointing at PCI slots) ...and those look like trains. Are they trains?
Daniel and Jose, simultaneously: No; they're actually more like buses.

GROAAAAAANNNNNN bad computer humor.

I cleaned my room.

2006-10-15T18:04:29Z

Those of you who have seen my room know I'm a total slob. Well, I'm proud to report that today I'm trying to make a dent in my slobitude, and it's going pretty well so far.

It all started when my boss decided to get rid of a dresser that he bought a long time ago that had basically been taking up space:

I don't have a dresser in my room, so I keep all of my clothes on the floor:

One thing I don't like about dressers is having to open and close drawers. Fortunately, all my clothes fit into the big compartment with the swingy doors! (Except for my dress clothes, which actually live in a closet.) I'll probably keep the doors open for easy access. Cycling-specific clothing on top; non-cycling-specific clothing on bottom. (Non-cycling-specific clothing can also be used for cycling.) I will probably use the small drawer on top for socks, because that's the one thing I can never find when I want to. It will probably be open most of the time, also.

Oh, and here's what the floor looks like after all the clothing items were cleared away. Still a bit of work to do, but getting there...

On "Vegetarianism"

2006-10-14T05:27:50Z

I know that facebook is going to import this as a note, and it's not going to respect the "lj-cut" tag, so please note that this entry originally appeared with the disclaimer, "Please don't read this if you don't eat meat (for ethical reasons), but do eat dairy and/or eggs, and are easily offended." If this applies to you, please click the "back" or "close" button on your web browser right now, because if you truly believe that dairy and eggs are OK for the animals, I don't want this to sound like a personal attack against you. It isn't. I respect your choice, even though I personally disagree with it. This entry is pretty much about why I disagree, and it can be a bit harsh in places. Keep in mind that I am in no way telling you that what you believe is wrong, and that you must change now, because what you believe is not wrong; it's just different from what I believe, which isn't necessarily right. Anyway, if you think you can take it, read on.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I believe, very strongly, that the word "vegetarian" should refer to a vegan diet. The word "vegan", while appropriate to describe the diet, really should have more to do with abstinence from animal products in general than the diet in particular, for which "vegetarian" is a fine word. Of course, not being a prescriptivist, I would never insist that people follow my particular definitions of "vegetarian" and "vegan", though I will make a point of using them myself; for example, I may say "he doesn't eat meat" in cases where many would say "he's a vegetarian."

Anyway, more to the point, so-called "vegetarians" who drink milk and eat eggs are anything but "vegetarians". I will spare the details, because going into them will just make me more upset, and it will probably upset anyone reading this too, but the fact is that life as a farm animal is rough, whether or not the animal is being raised for meat. One of my pet peeves is when people pose stupid bullshit contrived hypothetical situations, such as, "if you were stranded on a desert island and the only thing to eat were wild boars, what would you do?", "if you saw a chicken and a human baby drowning, and you could save only one, which one would you save?", "if someone told you that you had to eat a hamburger, or he would kill 47,000 cows, what would you do?", "would you eat meat for $xxx?", "would you buy a duck from a foie gras farmer to save the duck's life?", or "if you were forced to eat either a cheese omelette or turkey and lettuce on rye, what would you eat?"

Why people feel the need to ask these questions, I will never understand. Carol Adams, author of "Living with Vegetarians" (also "The Sexual Politics of Meat") has a theory that everyone who isn't a vegetarian is a "repressed vegetarian", and that when people play games like asking a "desert island" question, they are really just grasping at straws, trying to defend their non-vegetarianism. Whatever the reason, I loathe dignifying these stupid excuses for questions with responses, but I do it anyway. If you'd like to hear my answers for the first four, they will appear at the end of this entry*. More to the point of this entry, I will answer the last one now:

Getting past the part where somehow I have absolutely no choice in the world but to eat one of these two food items, (in other words, this situation could never exist), I suppose that which I would eat would depend on my motivation for making the choice. From a taste point of view, I would choose the omelette, because I never was much a fan of the turkey. From an ethical point of view, I would eat the turkey sandwich.

"Why?", you ask. "That means you just killed a turkey, when you could have just had the eggs and cheese and all the animals would have lived!"

First of all, cows that give milk and hens that lay eggs get killed for their meat eventually. They don't go into retirement somewhere, where they live the rest of their lives happily grazing and pecking. Of course, one could argue that a cow will produce much more milk in her life, and a hen will lay many more eggs in her life, than either would give in meat, so at face value, at this point in the game, it looks like eating dairy and eggs is still ethically better than eating meat. Well, please allow me to go on as to why I think dairy and eggs is not only no better than eating meat, but actually a bit worse:

Again, I stress the point that these animals are killed for their meat anyway, but perhaps you've already accepted that, and figure, as long as they haven't been killed yet, might as well use what they give us, right? We're looking at the long-term picture, and the gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk a cow gives us during her life somehow mitigate the fact that at the end of it all, she gets killed. OK, let's accept that for now, but first let's go back to the part where we get those gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of sweet, delicious milk out of her. Once again, I will omit precise details, as I'm trying to keep the "gross-out" part of this issue out of the discussion as much as possible, but suffice it to say, it's not a pretty picture in cow-ville.

Animals in farms today are pushed to their limits and often well beyond. I'm going to take a quick break from my embargo on details for a moment to mention that egg-laying hens live crammed together in tiny cages, and many of them rot to a horribly painful death covered in their own excrement. Milk cows, who naturally give a small amount of milk each day to feed their young, are forced to give many times the natural amount several times a day, to the point that most of them develop swollen udders that drag on the floor and get infected. Cow milk is for baby cows, not adult people. The sad part is, the baby cows only get a few drops of their mothers' milk, because we drink most of it. What happens to the baby cows, anyway, you ask?

One word: veal. The meat that even some meat eaters will refuse to eat, because it's so cruel. Babies are an unfortunate byproduct of the dairy industry, which must continually impregnate dairy cows to keep them giving milk. As soon as a calf is born, he is taken away from his mother, where he will be locked in a box too small to allow movement, and fed a nutrient-deprived diet, to produce that pale, tender, delicious veal. Of course, not all calves that are a result of dairy-related impregnation go to veal; the female ones usually end up growing up into dairy cows themselves, but the fact of the matter is, if you drink milk, you might as well eat the occasional veal cutlet, too. For now, I'm going to gloss over the issue of rennet, which is actually what prompted me personally to stop eating dairy products. If you don't know about rennet, look it up.

OK. I hope we at least have eggs and dairy at the "no better than meat" phase by now. I maintain that I think that eggs and dairy are ethically worse than meat, and the reason why has something to do with my thoughts on euthanasia. For the record, I support a person's right to choose to end her own life, rather than to continue living in a state of suffering. (Incidentally, I personally believe that abortion is, to put it bluntly, "killing babies", but I refuse to interfere with a woman's right to choose. In other words, I'm both pro-life, and pro-choice. I also don't believe in the death penalty, because it's not reversible, should someone turn out to be innocent, and I don't think the possibility of execution is much more of a deterrent to potential criminals who commit crimes worthy of the death penalty than a life prison sentence. I have a few thoughts on prisons as well, but I've gotten far enough off track already.) Going back to stupid hypothetical situations for a moment, if I personally had a choice between living life as a meat cow or living life as a dairy cow, I would choose life as a meat cow, hands down. I think that most sane people, if put into an analagous situation to that which egg-laying hens and milk-giving cows go through day in and day out, and given a choice and the means to live in those conditions for a few years, then get killed, or be killed now, would go with the latter.

And that's why I'd pick the turkey. Not vegetarian, no, but neither is the cheese omelette.

(In case you're wondering what prompted this post, on the subway this morning a woman sitting next to me was eating a sausage and cheese breakfast sandwich on what looked like an english muffin, and I found myself more disturbed by the cheese than by the sausage.)

----

*Answers to "questions":

Wild boars on desert island: I suppose the boars are all eat meat, and the animals they eat all eat meat, and so on and so on. Nonsense. There has got to be some sort of edible plant life supporting this hypothetical ecosystem with boars (or chickens, or whatever) in it, and if you know anything about biomass, you'd know that there has got to be a hell of a lot more plant life than animal life. Aquatic ecosystems are a bit different, but assuming that someone is stuck in the middle of the ocean with a fishing net and nothing else, this person would probably die of dehydration long before starving. The point is that you could never be stuck on a desert island with only animals to eat, and even if somehow you were, I'd like to think that I would let myself starve before eating an animal. This has never been put to the test, and I've never been in any situation remotely coming close to putting it to the test, and I highly doubt I ever will be in any such situation, because I live in the USA, and food is fucking everywhere.

Chicken or Baby: What a load of horse shit. Please tell me exactly why it is that I can't try to save both. Perhaps I am in the middle of the water, and I see the chicken 10 meters to my left, and the baby 10 meters to my right? I don't get this at all, because this situation would never happen. If it did happen, I would make my best effort to save both of them. This is about the time where the person asking the question prods me, "well you can't save both of them, that's the point." No, the point is that you're really getting on my nerves now, so fine; I'll play your game. If they both seemed to have a roughly equal chance of survival, and it didn't look like I'd have time to do both, I'd probably go for the baby. "Aha! So you think humans are more important than non-human animals!" Well, personally I think humans are scum, that there's too many of us, and that we could do with fewer humans in the world. However, I do find it easier to identify humans, if only for the reason that I am one. If you want my honest opinion, I'm not really sure on where I stand on whether a human life is "worth more" than the life of a non-human animal. "Worth more" in terms of ecological footprint? Certainly, but that's a bad thing, when you consider what we as a species do with that bigger footprint.. Putting value on a life is a tricky thing to do. At any rate, regardless of whether or not I think the human baby's life is "worth more" than that of the chicken, that doesn't mean that I can't still think that killing the chicken is wrong. Please shut the fuck up now.

Hamburger or kill 47,000 cows: Who on earth would ever do this? Why? It makes no sense, other than to antagonize a poor vegetarian. Anyway, I suppose it would depend on other details of the situation. Are these cows farm cows that were going to be killed anyway, and after this person kills them, they're going to get eaten by other people, just the same as it was? In that case, I would not eat the hamburger; however, on the extremely off chance that this wild and crazy scenario actually played out, and there really was some crazy person who would kill 47,000 random cows, for no reason, other than that I didn't eat the hamburger, and somehow the meat from those 47,000 cows would just go to waste and nobody would use it, and there was really nothing I could do to stop this person from killing the cows, other than eating the hamburger, then yes, I would probably eat the hamburger. What about you? Would you rather eat a manburger, or watch me kill 47,000 people? Thought so.

$$$ for meat: Fuck no. Money is just money. You can't put a price on life. I know that some people would say, "but you could take that money and use it to help animals in much bigger ways than you would have by refusing to eat meat that one particular time." I suppose this is true, but this question is usually asked to try and see whether a person has "a price". Anyone who would actually do this sort of thing is a total ass, and will look like even more of an ass when the huge amounts of money go straight to helping animals. The vegetarian involved may face some humiliation, but it is what it is, and nobody sane would ever make an offer big enough to matter, anyway.

Buy a duck: No. The farmer raises the ducks for profit, and she would not sell the duck to me, or anyone else, unless she stood to make more profit that way than by what she was planning to do with the duck in the first place (force-feed too much food, sell bloated liver at high prices.) If I buy this duck, then I am supporting a business which I want to have nothing to do with. Besides, animals are not property. They are not ours to be bought and sold, any more than people are. The law and society may disagree with me on this, but regardless, I refuse to buy an animal. Period.

Please do not ask me any more hypothetical questions. Your situation is bound to be set up in a way that's extremely unlikely to actually happen in the real world. I won't answer it, anyway.

One man's trash...

2006-10-13T05:09:12Z

So for the past couple of days, my neighbor(s) two doors down the hall has had an old computer tower outside of his/her/their door. Generic whitebox computer, two optical drives, onboard video and LAN, no HD, RAM, or gfx card, other than onboard. It seemed to be abandoned, but not being 100% sure, I figured, "well maybe that's just a convenient place to store it for a while" and left it well alone. It didn't go anywhere for a while.

Last night, on my way into the building, I noticed it had been moved to the entry foyer. OK, definitely abandoned. I bring it upstairs, plug it into power and a monitor, and flip the switch. I didn't expect it to do much, as it didn't have a hard drive or RAM, and indeed, all I got was some fans spinning up, some LEDs turning on, and a single beep that repeats every five seconds. I figure, power supply works; it's probably beeping because no RAM.

I bring it to work today, and plug in some RAM. No dice. Reset CMOS. Still nothing. I think it's either the mobo or the processor, but I'm not sure. I went to MLB manufacturer's website and Read TFM, but nothing about error tones and what they mean. I e-mailed MLB manufacturer with the symptoms, and what I had tried, and they were less than helpful. I hope to figure this out without having to buy another MLB or CPU and having it possibly be the other component, because if I buy both, I might as well start a build from scratch, considering that what else is left isn't that great.

The board is a fairy decent (by my standards, and my computer standards are pretty low-ish) microATX board with 3 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 slots for DDR 333 RAM, pins for a buttload of front-mount USB ports, the previously mentioned on-board video (nVidia GeForce 4MX), LAN, audio i/o, and all sorts of other goodies. It has a Socket A socket (hehe... "a Socket A socket"...) which houses a 2 GHz Athlon. It's probably about three years old, which means it's probably out of warranty... whichever part happens to be the problem.

So, uh... anybody with a spare Socket A CPU or MLB that I can test with? I can't promise that my potentially bad part won't fry your good part, so I understand if you're reluctant. :)

If I am to go any further than where I am right now in building this up, I want to build it into the case of a dead PowerMac G4. That would be pretty funny.

The pleasure isn't always, but it's always a pleasure.

2006-10-12T02:54:09Z

Hello.

Lately, I've been randomly running into all sorts of strange and wonderful people from my distant and not-too-distant past. It's strange, and wonderful.

On Saturday, I non-randomly ran into a whole mess of people from my semi-distant past at the Stuyvesant High Class of '01 5th-year reunion. It was full of top quality awkwardness, most especially those couple of times that it took me minutes... minutes to recognize somebody, because people there had changed in all manner of ways, whether they lost weight, gained weight, grew their hair out, cut their hair short, lost all their hair, changed sex, etc. OK, I'm not aware of anybody who had a sex reassignment, but hey.

At any rate, despite the awkwardness, and in some cases because of it, I had a great time with plenty of quality people with whom, for various reasons, I've lost touch over the years, even if I did spin a couple of tall tales. OK, one tall tale. Djimi and I were catching up in a hallway, when my estranged husband, Mark, shows up and asks us how we're doing. Keep in mind that none of us had seen each other since high school. Anyway, I guess at this point Djimi decides that Mark would make a good mark, and tells him, "Yeah, Dan and I actually work for the same company."

Intrigued, I let Djimi continue as he tells Mark we're developing computer monitors for the blind. I pitch in with a couple of details of my own, and we take turns adding to the story, occasionally contradicting previously given details. Our company, Second Site Ltd., is based out of Pittsburgh, and our monitors are based on a revolutionary new technology that allows it to interface with existing software and hardware without modification. We have several working prototypes and are hoping to begin production soon. "Djimi is working with the drivers," I say.

"Yeah, I get in the car and tell them where to go. If they get hungry, or thirsty, I bring them food or drink," adds Djimi, deadpan.

Mark nods, then asks more questions about our upcoming product as we feed him more fake details. Then comes the kicker: as our discussion begins to wind down, Mark reMarks, "Hey, that's awesome. So you guys drove over from Pittsburgh together?"

Djimi replies without hesitation, "Nah. We didn't realize that we worked for the same company, until we met here at the reunion!"

"Yeah, Djimi's in West Campus, because that's where all the driver work takes place."

"Yeah, I said, 'So Dan, what are you up to these days?' and he said, 'I work for Second Site.' I was like, 'No way! I work for Second Site too!'"

"Yeah, we're pretty big for a startup."

Later, we tell Mark that we made up the whole thing, but he seemed confused for a while about how much of it was made up. There may have been one or two more people we tried our new bit out on, and it's possible that somebody out there actually thinks we're working on something that will turn the world of Braille readers on its head. Of course, "Second Site" wasn't the only tall tale we spun; did you know that Djimi's brother was the unfortunate victim of a practical joke gone horribly, horribly wrong?

Anyway, there was an open bar (I waited and waited and waited in line to get a glass of cranberry juice, then when it was gone decided it wasn't worth doing that again) and music that was too loud, and other people spinning other tall tales, ensuing in hilarity, and a good time was had by all.

Anyway, that's all for now. (P.S. I've started using Debian again. More on that later.)

我很丟臉。我沒有吃 Fruity Oaty Bar。

2006-09-27T04:20:50Z

Word!

Best news in a long time: babble's hard drive (see earlier post) mounts! I had tried it in a bunch of different FW enclosures, and in a G4 tower, but it wouldn't mount; it would just spin up and make lots of noise, which worried me. Then today, I was working on an older model G3, and figured, "what the hell, let me stick that drive in and see what happens." At first, I got a flashing question mark, so I figured it was dead, but then when I was about to take the drive out, I noticed that I hadn't plugged in the drive's power cable (d'oh!), and sure enough, the computer booted to the login screen that I always used to never see. (babble ran headless)

I guess it just needed to be plugged into an older ATA bus, or something. Anyway, I was able to get all my files off, and I will be restoring service to dadap.net, becauseyes.com, and xgerine.homeip.net "real soon now". I'm glad to know that all my old diary entries didn't just vanish into that great bit-bucket in the sky.

Went to Boston a couple of weekends ago. Hung out with jsoltren + Jane, and bingsding, and made some headway on construction of CF-D11 (official announcement coming soon, by the way.)

OK, official announcement now:This information is FINAL, and subject to change at any time. :)

CF-D11 will be named Columbia. It's just been too long since the Enterprise to bring in another bike with her name, especially considering all the differences between the two bikes. The bicycle will be matte clear powdercoated, as originally planned, but I will put a coat of yellow rattlecan paint on top, which will probably flake off, but that's what the base coat is for. Details will be masked off, allowing the steel to still show through underneath.

Friday night I went down to Pratt to see my cousin Sal perform my dad's song cycle ("Mga Awit ng Pag-ibig at Pangarap") which apparently has just been choreographed by Max Luna. When I got back to my apartment, I sat down at the keyboard to attempt to begin work on something I've been meaning to do for a while, which is my own recording of the whole cycle, with myself performing all the parts: piano, voice, and trombone instead of cello. However, the keyboard and I struggled for a while, and eventually came to a mutual agreement that it's been far too long since I've played piano. Even No. 3, "Walang Paalam", which I think has the easiest piano part of the five pieces (actually, maybe No. 2, "Paano Mahal Ko" is a bit easier), was difficult to play in a non-sloppy fashion. I need to fix this. This will probably take time.

Oh, and I received a response to my "not guilty" plea to the ticket today. I have a court date at the end of October. In Staten Island. Boo.

Cryptic, when stripped of context

2006-09-13T05:11:50Z

From: 	chitayu@idon'tgetawholelotofspamonthisaddress.ru
Subject: 	bacon and eggs for breakfast
Date: 	September 12, 2006 10:18:56 PM EDT
To: 	  hermes@hedoesgetawholelotofspamonthisaddress.com

i picked up the new hulk today.

Rode the NYC Century on Sunday with Kuya Chris. It was his first century, and we both had a great time, except for one mishap: a couple of miles from my parents' house in Queens, the route took us onto Jewel Ave at the Van Wyck Crossing. When I realized that they intended us to get onto the bike path into Flushing Meadows/Corona Park, I started moving to the right to get on the sidewalk, but Chris was following a bit too closely and we crossed wheels, taking him down. Fortunately, we were not moving very fast at the time, and the car behind us stopped. We turned back on Jewel Ave and headed to the house, where we assessed the situation and Chris took some acetaminophen for his bumped shoulder, then rejoined the route to finish. Saw a couple of familiar faces on the ride, including Nicky at the Astoria rest stop. As I was taking leave of him, Nicky turned to the friend he was riding with and said, "Now it's time for me to show off." Later, as I was snacking on an apple, I saw him pulling off, and holding for a good amount of time, a no-handed, one-foot trackstand. Impressive.

Besides my folks' place, we passed within a few blocks of damndirtydyke's apartment, but I didn't call/visit because it was early in the morning and she was almost definitely still asleep. Then, towards the end of the ride, we passed directly in front of revamerika's house. I called him when we were getting onto his street, and he stood up on his roof to take a picture of us. It was actually kind of neat.

Randomly ran into Sr. Diaz on the way back from a job yesterday. Some years ago, almost immediately after the Voyager was first built up, I visited Stuy and nearly ran Sr. Diaz down. This time, Sr. Diaz passed by pretty close to me on a green Dahon. I called out to him, and he turned around to say hi before continuing on to his yoga class.

On the agenda: Boston this weekend. For real this time. Probably.

On an unrelated note, I'm shocked that Apple actually demoed pre-production hardware at today's "Showtime" event. Specifically, the "We don't have or are not willing to share with you the final shipping name of this product, so let's just call it 'iTV' for now, not to be confused with ElGato's 'EyeTV'" which is the long-rumored Front-Row-from-your-Mac-to-your-TV-over-LAN-box. My guess is that they're throwing out this teaser as an extra incentive for non-Disney studios to sign onto the iTunes Store. Of course, the question remains, why not release it outright. Perhaps they're waiting until they begin deploying faster wireless LAN in Macs, or perhaps they're waiting until they can make HD content available on iTunes. (If the thing doesn't do HD, then why does it have HDMI and component out?) Or perhaps development is simply taking longer than they'd like. Whatever the reason, it smells like iTV, or whatever it will actually be called, was originally scheduled for release now, along with the announcement of movie sales on iTunes; otherwise, why show it at all? Showing pre-production hardware is so very un-Apple. I guess the "seduce the other studios" angle still makes sense.

Ramble in the Bronx

2006-09-06T02:24:00Z

Recently:

- I went to the Uptown Juice Bar (the original one on 125th Street, not the one on Chambers Street which I used to frequent in high school, and which is now closed) for the first time in years last week, and discovered their homemade ginger beer. It's got some kick to it! It's too bad I never knew about it in high school, although I didn't know about ginger beer at all until Jo-Dan introduced it to me. ("Dan! You should drink ginger beer. It's the most awful beverage ever invented — and I think you'll love it.")

- I needed to use Illustrator, which I don't have installed on my home computer. I was going to grab a copy from work, but forgot, so instead I snuck into revamerika's house and used his computer for a while. (revamerika's computer, incidentally, is #$&%*#$% fast.) The next day, revamerika forwarded me a post that appeared on Missed Connections: Boy on fixed gear - w4m - 26 (Inwood / Washington Heights). The post mentioned a time (23:00) and location (Broadway and Dyckman), and seeing as I passed by that exact intersection at pretty much that exact time, revamerika figured that I was the aforementioned "boy on fixed gear". What he didn't know, however, was that I was riding the São Paolo that night, so it couldn't have been me. :) When I clicked on the link to view the original post, it had been deleted. I wonder: did she find the "boy on fixed gear" (Missed Connections success story?), or did she have a change of heart? I guess we'll never know.

- Went on a bike ride with Kuya Chris. We met up at the Broadway Bridge, and figured we'd take the greenway through Van Cortlandt Park, down the Mosholu, and across the Pelham, a path we roughly managed to follow, getting lost only every fifteen minutes or so. Somewhere near Van Cortlandt Park, I heard a voice yelling "Daniel! Daniel! Daniel! Daniel!" with increasing urgency, and a hint of Doppler effect. I was trying to figure out who in the Bronx would know my name, and as soon as I turned around I saw Mike and Rebecca's car closing in. How random. Chris and I explored the Bronx a bit more, hooking up with the NYC Century / TdBx routes from time to time, and getting lost every chance we got. Eventually we decided to head back to Leyla's place so Chris could shower and get to work on time. We headed west on E Tremont most of the way, then went down 3rd Ave, west on 161st, past Yankee Stadium (there was a game going on), across the 155th Street bridge, up the Harlem River path, and back into the Bronx. Hours of fun for the whole family!

- After the bike ride, I walked down the block (literally) to satyadasa's place, and no sooner did I walk out of the door to head back to my place than Steve shows up, making his way along with his new fancy Ti hip, to visit his folks (who live in satyadasa's building), so I stuck around to catch up with Steve for a while, seeing as I never even knew that he had gotten a new hip.

- One of the locks at work broke, and we couldn't get into the store. Mike bought a pair of 24" bolt cutters, but they were barely able to make a nick in the hardened steel shackle. Went to the hardware store down the block, but he didn't have any power tools. He suggested trying a hacksaw with a carbide rod blade, but he only had 10" blades and 12" hacksaws, so we ended up getting an angle grinder at a different hardware store, which cut through the lock in under 45 seconds. It was fun.

- Now have Skype, per jsoltren's suggestion. User name: govoryu. I was surprised it wasn't already taken.

I close with Brian's reaction to a bad joke earlier today:

Joke on a computer screen: "— What kind of bees make milk? — Boo-bees!"
B-Dizzo: Hehehe... boobies.

Several minutes later, reading the joke again…

B-Dizzo: Wait, I still don't get it. What does "boo" have to do with milk?
Daniel: Are you serious?
B-Dizzo: Yeah, I don't get it.
Daniel: Boo-bees? Boobies?
B-Dizzo: Yeah, and?

Daniel grabs Brian's "boo-bees".

B-Dizzo: Yeah, I know, it sounds like "boobies"…

Silence

B-Dizzo: Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh!!! Smacks own head on scanner boxes, repeatedly.

Apparently, he realized right away that "boo-bees" sounded like "boobies", but didn't make the biological connection between boobies and milk, so instead he tried to draw some semantic connection between "boo" and "milk". :)

Snippet? But I hardly even know it!

2006-08-30T06:27:19Z

squittycat: Ok, well [kwɪk] works, and it's the best candidate that I can think of, but judging from your previous reaction…
revamerika: …well, then you obviously weren't paying attention when I said "yes" the first time.
squittycat: Oh?
revamerika: I think you need to work on "reading" people's "reactions" better.

Ticket? But I hardly even know it!

2006-08-27T03:06:51Z

FYI, I got another ticket at Critical Mass last night. There is an important difference this time, however, as last month I commited an actual violation (making a left turn at a signed "no left turn" intersection), whereas this month they nabbed me for the made up violation "Failure to keep right". Last month's ticket was turning left from Park Ave onto 34th Street; this month it was heading west on 17th Street right near Union Square Park, at the very beginning of the ride.

This is roughly how it went down:

Some Guy: RED LIGHT!!! (Meaning everybody should slow down and stop so nobody gets ticketed for running a red light.)
Daniel stops at the crosswalk, like a good, law abiding citizen.
Officer Cancilla, NYPD: You — get off the bike and step aside.
Daniel does as told.
Officer: Identification, please.
Daniel: (handing ID to officer) OK, but would you mind telling me what I've done wrong?
Officer: You're not in the bike lane.
Daniel: (looking back and pointing) There's no bike lane on this street.
Officer: Exactly; you're not allowed to be on this street.
Daniel: That's ridiculous.
Officer: Well, I don't make up the rules.
Police Captain: (To all the scooter cops writing tickets) OK, everybody; this is "Failure to keep right" 4-12(p)(3). That's 4-12, P as in "Paul", 3. This is the 13th Precinct. 4-12, P as in "Paul", 3.
Officer writes "412 B3" on ticket and hands it to Daniel.
Officer: Here you go.
Daniel: Alright, but FYI this is not a violation. New York City law says that bicyclists don't have to keep right. (I later found out that the very law I was supposedly violating, 34 RCNY 4-12(p)(3), says that cyclists can ride on either side of the road, which is exactly the right I was exercising by riding on the left side.)
Officer: Hey, nothing personal; if you want to take it to court, you can take it to court. I'm not the judge, and I don't make up the rules.
Daniel: Nothing personal against you either; just letting you know that I did not violate any law, and that you're writing a fake ticket.
Officer: OK, have a good night.
Daniel: Good night to you too; just don't give me another one.

I headed down 5th Ave and found a couple of other scattered riders. We rode around the West Village a little bit, and amusingly had a squad car tailing the five of us around every crazy turn that we had to make in that crazy neighborhood for about ten minutes. We found a pretty large group over on 2nd Ave at 10th Street and stuck with them until the cops broke up the ride again at around 1st Ave and the upper 30s. (We were heading towards Grand Central Station, where there were allegedly some free vegan donuts, which I unfortunately missed out on.) I stuck with a small group that had splintered off from the latest split-up, with Jacob and Jesse Singer, but when it became apparent that they were heading back to Brooklyn, I turned around and headed home.

Today: my first real down time in a while, and a brief attempt at housekeeping. I had been toying with the idea of coming up to Boston to work on the Columbia, but need to spend some time with bingsding tomorrow before she goes back, ironically, to Boston.

Backin up is hard to do

2006-08-25T05:37:34Z

Doo doo doo down, doobie doo down down,
My hard drive is down, doobie doo down down,
And my data's gone, goobie goo gone gone,
Backin up is hard toooooo do.

Don't take my files away from me;
Don't mess up my i-nodes or B-Tree;
It's all gone, and I'm so blue,
'Cause backin up is hard to do.

Remember when I used to write,
Stayin up to type all through the night?
Think I lost some photos too,
Yes backin up is hard to do.

They say that backin up is hard to do,
But I know that just isn't true.
I've lost some data my friend,
And had I backed it up, then I could simply call it up again.

I beg of you, my old hard drive:
Do you think you could come back alive?
Just a couple hours should do,
'Cause backin up is hard to do.

Uhh... with proper apologies to Neil Sedaka.

Anyway, I went back to Queens for hangout tyme with the fam. and also to investigate the disappearance of dadap.net. I checked the "server room" (my old bedroom) and found babble ("The Tower of Babble", so named because it's a tower, and its primary use for a long time was as a chat server) powered off. I checked the connections (power, ethernet) and tried turning it on again, but no dice. The power supply probably went at some point. "No probem", I figured... should be a simple enough matter to pull the drives, so I pulled them, and the drive that I don't need still seems to work fine, but the drive with all the stuff on it just made a buch of noise and won't mount. (Doesn't even register as a device...)

What was on the drive? All the web stuff on xgerine.homeip.net, dadap.net, and becauseyes.com. Bummer. I have all the photos somewhere, and I have a backup of all my old "Herr Dano's Hideaway" posts somewhere, but I'm afraid I stupidly never backed up becauseyes.com. There are some scattered posts here or there that archive.org captured, but for the most part I'm afraid that I've lost about two years of worthless ramblings. (Not just my own: remember that becauseyes.com was a community journal.)

Needless to say, this loss is a bit upsetting, and it's not the only recent event that has affected me emotionally, though I'm only going to hint vaguely about anything else. Uhmm... yeah. I suppose I'm a bit of a hypocrite for always telling people that they should back up everything, all the time. It's not like it's a difficult thing to do. How hard would it have been for me to scp -R dan@becauseyes.com:/Library/WebServer/Documents ~/webbackup once in a while? (Answer: not at all.) It's not like I never thought about backing it up, either; in fact, there were several times just in the past couple of months when I thought to myself, "You know, I really should make a copy of all the web stuff on babble", only to be too lazy to do it.

I have lost drives in the past, but because I usually work on stuff from more than one place, there is only a small amount of files of which I've lost the only copy. A couple of DV captures, random homework assignments, that sort of thing. Also, embarrasingly enough, some Burning Zone fan fiction. I would be lying if I said that becauseyes.com didn't mean a lot to me, and that I feel like a huge idiot for never backing it up. (OK, I backed it up once, when I merged the old Hideaway entries into becauseyes, but there were probably two dozen becauseyes entries at the time. Besides, it was only one copy burned onto some random CD, which I'd be surprised if I even labeled.)

So, the moral of the story is: don't be an idiot. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

Other than that, stuff has been pretty OK. Swung by jsoltren's on Saturday on the occasion of his return from Bike & Build. Kreggeri made an appearance. Dinner at Caravan with the 250 kids on the occasion of damndirtydyke's and robarchangel's birthdays last night. Ran into Canek on the bridge tonight on my way back into Manhattan (I had an on-site job in Williamsburg); he was heading back to Bed-Stuy because he grabbed the wrong movie for the Times Up! movie night, which I decided to drop in on, running into a bunch of people along the way.

A Bike by Any Other Name

2006-08-21T02:30:58Z

So, lest any of you think I've forgotten all about "number eleven", construction is set to resume shortly. It's been a while since CF-D11 has come up in conversation, so it's probably worth mentioning some design changes:

1. A rack is now spec'd. All the more convenient to haul the occasional crap/change of clothes/whatever.
2. I'm considering painting the frame yellow, partly as an homage to the original Enterprise, and partly because Илья managed to find me a couple of rolls of Cinelli Lux handlebar tape: one blue, which has replaced the destroyed tape on the Yamato, and one yellow, which will probably go onto CF-D11. Clear powdercoat, as originally spec'd, is still on option, however.
3. In addition to the already planned "decorative" downtube shifters, I've thought up another decorative element for the bike, albeit a somewhat more functional one. All I'm going to say at this point is that it involves painting or decaling a logarithmic scale on my top tube. :)
4. You may have noticed that I have been refering to the bike as "CF-D11" instead of "Enterprise-A". This is because I am considering dropping the "Enterprise-A" name. The original reason for naming the bike after the Enterprise, aside from the fact that it is built as a replacement for the Enterprise and pretty much from the same measurements, and because the bike is also to feature elements that were in the original design for the Enterprise which never made it onto the finished bike, is because the Enterprise was always intended to be my flagship commuter bike, to be replaced with another Enterprise should it be lost or retired. I'm sorry for that long sentence. However, it's been nearly three years since the original Enterprise was destroyed, and bringing in the Enterprise-A now just seems kind of silly. I may yet name CF-D11 Enterprise-A, but at the moment, I'm leaning more towards Columbia.

Speaking of names, I've been debating internally as to what to name CF-D12 and CF-D13 for some time, and have finally settled upon Defiant and São Paolo, respectively.

The Defiant is the bike I bought in Anchorage after the destruction of the Intrepid. OMaR, knowing full well about my naming scheme for bicycles, suggested the name "Defiant", but I wasn't sure at the time. If I hadn't run out of names of Intrepid class ships, I would have used one of those. Instead, the "contextual" link between the names Intrepid and Defiant is that they are both Constitution class ships which were lost in the original Star Trek. Oh, and "Defiant" rhymes with "Giant".

The São Paolo is basically the Intrepid parts transplanted onto the Orbea Mitis frame that Илья ordered to get the SRAM Force group for his bike. The joke here is that the São Paolo is the Defiant (that is, the Defiant that OMaR most likely meant when he suggested the name.) The São Paolo is a temporary member of the fleet, and will be retired out of service after the Intrepid frame has been repaired and I can move all the parts back to the Intrepid. Then again, the Yamato was supposed to be temporary, and I've been riding her for over two years now. This, however, is mainly because it's taken me so long to get my act together enough to even coming close to starting work on CF-D11.

Pictures of the Defiant and the São Paolo later. I might go up to Boston next weekend to resume work on CF-D11, but I'm not sure yet.

Current fleet status (dadap.net is down, down, down... Probably unplugged again. I have to go to Queens and fix it.)

CF-D0: operational; active duty
CF-D1: stolen in Fresh Meadows, NY
CF-D2: destroyed in Long Beach, NY
CF-D3: stolen in Fresh Meadows, NY
CF-D4 Horizon: mothballed in Fresh Meadows, NY
CF-D5 Galileo: operational in Sheepshead Bay, NY; on loan to Илья; resuming active duty, pending return
CF-D6 Voyager: stolen in Berkley, CA
CF-D7 Enterprise: destroyed in New York, NY
CF-D8 Yamato: operational in New York, NY; active duty
CF-D9 Bellerophon: stolen in San Francisco, CA
CF-D10 Intrepid: destroyed near Anchorage, AK; pending refit
CF-D11 Enterprise-A / Columbia: drawing board; pending construction in Cambridge, MA
CF-D12 Defiant: mothballed in New York, NY; pending refit and transfer (fixing it up to give to my parents)
CF-D13 São Paolo: operational in New York, NY; active duty

looking for par'mach in all the wrong places

2006-08-19T15:03:52Z

(yes, i know it's actually pronounced [parmaq], but if you know enough to know that [par?matS] isn't a phonologically possible word, then you know why i spelled it that way.)

so one of the reasons i didn't write terribly much in my last entry here is because i was suffering a bit of (non-permanent, thankfully) nerve damage to my left wrist that made typing... uncomfortable. i suspect it happened while i was lugging a bob-containing box around, putting undue pressure on the wrist that became a little sensitive after the anchorage crash.

anyway, so stuff has happened since i've come back from alaska. it seems that lately i have been getting back in touch with people from other times and other places. mostly high school. i went to prospect park to check out a concert/movie with lee butterman, which got rained out, but on the way out we ran into about 47 (ok, it was more like 2 or 3) people who were in the symphonic band with us. i've been to a couple of (mildly awful, but don't tell anyone) concerts with boris zilberman, and recently i paid a visit to bensonhurst to see most of the old xg crew (karen and adam moved into a new place; belcantin, granger, ian, sandy, and a bunch of people i only vaguely know were also there), which was nice. popped down to dc to see some bike and builders (two fifths of whom i had just seen in alaska), and randomly ran into luomo at the store when he came in to get nick's keyboard fixed. and of course, i've been up to no good with the usual 250 kids.

yesterday was the one month anniversary of my sourdough starter, which i began cultivating shortly after my return from alaska. i've only baked with it four or five times now, but each time i'm learning a little bit more about the sourdough, and of course, the flavor of the sourdough keeps getting better with time. i've also made some sourdough hotcakes, which worked out pretty well, and take a lot less time to prepare than the bread. my favorite part about the sourdough, though, is maintaining it with the occasional addition of fresh flour and water to keep the yeast and bacteria going. it's sort of like having a mouth to feed around here that isn't my own.

little arkady called last night asking for advice on buying tempeh. not really knowing what he meant, i answered somwhat uselessly with something along the lines of "my advice is to buy it." apparently, little arkady took it upon himself to bring back veggie sushi nights, since none of us from 250 ever got around to it, with a test run in queens (at somebody's place, presumably) last night. i'll have to check with him later to find out how it went. as for me, i popped over to bed-stuy to eat some csa veggies with canek (maffew, sadly, remains in oregon), and some other quality folk. jsoltren hopped on the horizon and tagged along. we stopped briefly at habitat to say hei to heidi. canek lent me a primer on tsotsil, which is quite possibly the find of the month for me. i'm actually pretty excited about thumbing through it and learning a language i'll never have a chance to use, except maybe for rubbing elbows with costello, should our paths ever cross again.

anyway, stay tuned for some speculation on cf-d11. i'd best be getting ready to head over to jsoltren's.

I'll write when I'm not lazy.

2006-08-02T01:34:46Z

I'm back...

2006-07-20T04:57:10Z

...in the land of skyscrapers and newspapers,
subway trains and fast lanes,
city blocks and crosswalks,
concrete slabs and yellow cabs,
cell phones and orange cones,
door-locking and jaywalking...

it's good to be back, but i do miss the "midnight sun".

i took about 4,747 photos of mountains, which all start to kind of look the same, so it was hard to pick any mountainy photos to put here. here's a bunch of photos that aren't of mountains:

Alaskan sun"set". Local time: 23:18. This is about two and a half weeks after solstice, which is why the sun is actually setting at all. This is also about as dark as it ever got. Seriously.

(presented in no particular order...)

My derailer fell off on the Denali Highway. The hanger cracked and was being held on by only the quick-release skewer. It was a simple enough matter to put it back on the way it was and ride the rest of the way back to Fairbanks like that.

I ran into a bunch of other cyclists on Leg 2. (Interestingly, we only met one other cyclist during all of leg 1.) These four are French Canadians from Montréal. Four riders, two bikes. About as good a reason to get married as any, I suppose.

Dinner's up!

Sweet, glorious, oil. Unfortunately, I forgot to put my ear up to the pipeline to see if I could hear anything.

The actual start of the Denali Highway.

If you get this joke, I'm really, really, truly sorry.

This one should be a bit more obvious.

McLaren river. In the distance, the McLaren Glacier that feeds it... At least, it will keep feeding as long as it's not completely destroyed by global warming...

There's a native word for this sort of rain, which never hits the ground. I forget what it is.

Visiting Santa.

Flags. It was the 4th of July.

I crashed a block party! Those celery stalk/peanut butter dealies were awesome.

The skeeters didn't get quite that big (I should have posed with this statue biting my butt for scale...) but I did see them get pretty big. -"Hey, check out the dragonfly." -"Uhh.... that's no dragonfly..."

There was a little bit of a forest fire.

What's for sale: the house, or the owner?

The world (in)famous "Skinny Dick's Halfway Inn"

All we want to do is PUMP... you up!

Riding in the back of a pickup truck, because the highway crew said so. When I came back at the end of Leg 2, they had finished whatever work they were doing in that area. The pavement was so glassy smooth!

One of these days, when I'm not lazy, I'l photoshop this picture and anagnam it... "Daniel National Park", anyone?

I'll welcome you!!!

At the start of the trip...

more photos at my fotki.

Avast!

2006-07-04T17:34:39Z

I'm planning to start heading due east in a couple of hours. Not sure at this point exactly where I'll be heading, but I plan to be at Delta Junction in a couple of days, at which point I'll make some more concrete decisions about where to go. I'm thinking of heading over to Dawson City, and arranging for a water taxi or some other form of river transport back over to Circle, AK via the Yukon, then taking the Steese back into FBX, but it doesn't seem like there's anyone who really takes people along that route. Another option is swinging down to Paxson and over to Cantwell via the Denali Highway, and making a loop over the Parks again, with a possible stop in Denali National Park (since we skipped over it pretty much the first time around). There's something sort of exciting about the idea of heading out and not really knowing where I'll be going, other than that I need to be back in Fairbanks on the 15th. (The airline wanted too much money for me to fly out of Anchorage instead of Fairbanks, so I've nixed the plan to head back to Anchorage.)

Today's the 4th of July, and in celebration (of the number four, but what else?) here's four photos:

After the accident

Everybody standing on top of some rock

Pulling into "Skinny Dick's Halfway Inn", about 30 miles from Fairbanks

We're in Fairbanks. Cheers!

Fairbanks

2006-07-02T05:05:45Z

Hi all!

Sorry for the lack of promised info updates. We've been in FBX for the past couple few days. I got a bike in Anchortown which made it up here alright except for some pretty much destroyed brake pads, which have been replaced. It looks like the Dalton Highway part of the trip isn't happening: OMaR killed his ankle on the last day into Fairbanks, and Andrea &. co. only have a three day window during which they are able to ride, which would be pretty rough to work out logistically. So, no Artic Ocean. The current plan is to use up my remaining couple of weeks here in AK by gearing up again and riding out (solo) due southeast towards Tok, and possibly onto the Canadian border if I have time, then heading back down to Anchorage and flying out of there instead of Fairbanks. It should be pretty fun; I'll let you all know how it goes in a couple of weeks.

Besides Mike's ankle, we all made it up in one piece. Greg hurt his hip on a hike while here in Fairbanks but not too bad I think. Not too many equipment problems on the trip, at least nothing as serious as a trashed frame. Three flat tires total (Oline: 1; Greg: 1; Johanna: 1), one broken chain (OMaR; we just shortened it a couple links and it was a'ight), and one broken spoke (Johanna, rear wheel, drive side. She didn't have any extras, but one of mine fit alright, even if it was about 1mm too long.) Ryan's front QR stopped staying tight somwhere towards the end of the trip, but he DIDN'T TELL ANYONE and instead just rode around with a loose front wheel. Thank goodness for gravity, fat tires, and lawyer tabs.

Johanna and Ryan flew out a couple of days ago, we just dropped Greg off at the Airport, and OMaR is catsitting at the Machs'. I'm at Oline's place until I get back on the road, which should be right soon now.

As for the trip itself, it's been absolutely amazing. The Parks Highway (AK 3) is without a doubt one of the most beautiful roads to drive on in the country. The weather was pretty foul (it rained on us basically every day) but we still had a great time. More on that, and definitely at least a thousand photos (which should be worth at least a million words) later.

AKUS Day 1 Update

2006-06-21T00:31:40Z

We started riding out today from Anchorage. At the moment, I am back in Anchorage. About 25 miles out (let's say 22.47) we were on a downhill section of a bike path with a bunch of loose sand in a few patches. The downgrade meant we all picked up a bit of speed, which I did my best to control with the brakes, but the extra load, combined with all the sand, made this tricky. Eventually, the bike started to fishtail, and started violently swinging left and right. There was probably some sort of positive feedback involved, as the sway got stronger until the point where I was no longer in control of the bike. A combination of too much speed, the different steering characteristics of a loaded bike with trailer, the sand, and a concrete divider took me down. I escaped missing only a few pieces of skin and a few ounces of blood, but the Intrepid frame was a total loss, having buckled in the top tube and down tube near the front of the bike (typical destruction for a front-ender crash). Components seem OK, except for the rear derailer which was sheared off of the hanger. The trailer was no worse for the wear, except for a patchable hole in the dry sak. I am going to needa new helmet (skidded on the helmet for a few feet and cracked it).

I'm going to have to figure out what to do from here on. I still have a whole month here; I could probably rent, borrow, or buy a bike and finish the trip. The rest of the group is heading on and will be camping out in Wasilla tonight. If I can line up some new wheels soon, I can meet them and continue on.

An interesting plot development, but what was he doing in the Army Reserve in the first place?

2006-06-17T12:32:54Z

Oh, neglect of the Live-Journal.

Last post for a while: I'm leaving the continental US for sunny Alaska for a month.

Recent highlights:

- Cat-sat for revamerika for a couple of weeks. I think I mentioned this already. I managed to leave the keys to his place at work one of the nights that I was still giving her pills, so I had to break in. I'll spare the details on how I got in, in case anybody gets the idea to try and duplicate my efforts. Suffice it to say it was a pretty MacGyver moment. Chesterfield was a total sweetheart, and forgave me for giving her those awful pills. Spending time with her, and the usual summer business of seeing lots of little kids getting taken around by their parents everywhere, has made me really want to someday become a parent [of human children]. More than usual. Of course, I still stand firmly in my refusal to add to the human population, so the kid or kids would have to be adopted.

- Went grocery shopping w/ damndirtydyke in Chinatown and stopped at May Wah and got 4.7 billion different kinds of fake meat, including fake pork bellies, which I thought was the most exciting thing ever, but still haven't had a chance to try out.

- Since that first time that I rode up the little bendy thing going up on the Hudson River Greenway, I've pedaled up it on the Yamato on more or less a daily basis to get home. It's pretty amazing how not-impossible it is, when it feels so impossibly steep on the lowest gear of the Intrepid. It's pretty great. As soon as I get a bike with brakes, I'll start riding down as well. Saw little Arkady, and he confirmed that it's not impossible to get up the bend on a fixie. The path has been treating me pretty well, and I've started taking advantage of the general openness of it all to belt out the crazy tunes at the top of my lungs while riding home. It's pretty great.

- Briefly saw brizmus who stopped in for a bit from the farthest reaches of Canadia and brunched at The Organic Grill, then took her to see my favorite piece of graffiti in the world. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let me know, so that I can go take you there to see it yourself. She warned me not to be surprised if similar graffiti started appearing in random places in Montréal.

- Dibs and I cooked up the idea to have a spring-roll rolling party at my place. It was called "Goodbye spring; roll in the summer." The usual crowd, damndirtydyke and robarchangel showed up (revamerika was in San Francisco at the time) and Becky was in too, as well as my kuya Chris and Leyla. We made a whole bunch of spring rolls, and it was pretty great. It was sort of like a spring roll factory probably is like, with a mildly-organized assembly line going. So that spring rolls didn't end up being the only thing we all ate, I also made some pansit (I prefer to spell it the non-Spanishified-orthography way, because really, there is no letter 'c') and damndirtydyke came up with the crazy idea of using the pansit as a filling to make pansit na lumpia (or is it lumpiang pansit... help me, tisoi!) It actually ended up being pretty tasty.

- Cohen randomly called last week and asked if I wanted to go watch fireworks from the Brooklyn Bridge. I met up with him on MacDougal Street (and, in the process, basically tripped over Roxanne and "Yoshi"), where michiru223, Allison, and Mark were with him, eating فلافل, and Heather met up with us shortly afterwards. The fireworks were pretty sweet, and they had some pretty crazy shapes going on. Afterwards, we went walking around in downtown Manhattan a bit, then those kids ducked into a bar in the Financial District and I, being without a bicycle lock or a wish to drink alcohol, found the start of the Hudson River Greenway, and started on my way home. I decided to ride to revamerika's house, which is past the other start of the Greenway, and ride the path end-to-end, "just because"; however, I had forgotten that I had decided to do that by the time I reached the turnoff onto the overpass to get to 181st Street, and ended up going home instead. Oh, habit.

- Last week of work was pretty action-packed. I worked the same number of hours, but spent probably only 7 or 8 hours actually in the store the whole week. I have to say that I much prefer working on-site than in-store... it's a lot less stressful. I spent most of the work week tying up some loose ends, although I do still have a couple left untied... oh well.

- Minor fiasco with the rear wheel which I took to Sheepshead ages ago to get re-rimmed. The new rim came in, but then when they put it on and started tightening the spokes, it started cracking too. This was a couple of weeks ago. Илья donated an Open Pro that he had kicking around, and I bought new spokes, and that got put on, but then they lost my cassette, and jsoltren's (he is on Bike and Build P2S at the moment, by the way, and I have been a bad Bike and Build alumnus and not mail-dropping him anything, so you guys have to pick up the slack for me) lockring and QR skewer. D'oh. They overnighted a cassette into the shop and it (presumably) got in yesterday. I was going to stop in to pick up the completed wheel, but I didn't realize that Thursday is the only day the shop closes at 8PM. (I called a little bit before 7 to make sure that they got the cassette in before I headed down there, but they were already closed.) It's lucky that the shop is not too far from JFK Int'l...

- Hey, did I mention that I'm outta here? Goodbye, 48 touching-states! See you crazy kids in a month, provided I don't get eaten by a bear.

raining cats and pills

2006-05-27T03:19:41Z

Hello friends!

It has been some time since my last update. Things have been going fairly decently recently. (ooh, rhyme!) I'm at revamerika's place right now waiting for Chesterfield to come out of hiding so that I can administer her antibiotics. It's also raining something pretty fierce right now. Between having to wait for Chesterfield, and the sky falling and all, it may be some time before I'm able to return to my own apartment (so as to eat food). I suppose I could raid revamerika's fridge, as anything left in there is liable to go bad anyway.

Rather than try and catch up with the past several weeks, I'll just do a quick rundown of events today:

I woke up this morning about three hours later than I had intended to. The plan was to head up to Inwood so as to learn the ropes of getting Chesterfield to swallow a pill, but that ended up not happening. The plan was also to have been en route to Sheepshead Bay by then, so as to help my cousin Christopher with getting a bicycle (a 2005 Specialized Roubaix Elite), which did happen, though a bit behind schedule. Chris overslept too, so it ended up being alright. I grabbed Il'ya's trainer and jsoltren's rear wheel to bring to the shop... the wheel is getting a new rim because it is starting to split at the seam. I rode the Montauk Century (from the tippy-top of Manhattan, to the tippy-tip of Long Island) on that rim after I had noticed the crack and didn't have any problems, but I'd prefer not to take my chances during the Alaska trip, because having the rear wheel explode in the middle of nowhere would suck bigtime.

Later, back to Manhattan for work (my business cards came in today!), then Critical Mass. This month's Mass was a bit more arresty and tickety than others in recent memory, which was unfortunate. I left the group at 59th Street and 5th Ave so I could go up and give Chesterfield her medicine, but she's been pretty reluctant. I decided to ride up the stupid steep incline around the bend on the bike path near 181st street, since i had to go up to Bean's place anyway. (I usually ride up that incline when I'm on my road bike, since I have a triple on that bike; however, on the track bike, I had, up until now, gotten out earlier (around 130th street) and taken Broadway up, which stretches out the gain in elevation to a more manageable grade.) It actually ended up being nowhere near as difficult as I had imagined, and I felt really great at the top! It should be even more doable when I gear down to 47/19 (the currently planned gearing for the Enterprise-A).

Somewhere near the GWB, it started to drizzle, which was actually mildly refreshing. It started to get a little more serious when I got to the house, and a few minutes after I had settled in and started poking around to find Chesterfield, it really opened up and started thundering. It's laid off a bit now, though Chesterfield is still nowhere to be seen. Hmm.

Other recent cool things (in vaguely chronological order, but other than that, no particular order):

Played trombone at the Discovery concert at Tully. It was a pretty sweet program, and I totally dig the Tchaik V.
A customer gave me a cool book! I had helped him with (I don't remember what), then he came in a couple weeks later, asked me if I read books, then what I was into, and handed me a neat book on child language acquisition.
Paintball with kids from work.
Montauk! (I think I mentioned this, but it was so sweet it deserves to be mentioned again)
Went totally Flip and made Munggo w/ Malunggay in coconut milk w/ Casaba... also, Lumpia.
Discovered TextWrangler. It's free (as in beer, not speech), and it will open/save files directly from/to FTP servers. What more could one ask for?
Used aforementioned text editor to write a contact form (and accompanying CGI script) for the digsoc website.
Watched Breaking Away again! (Heidi said Times Up! was playing "some bike movie from the '80s"... nevermind that Breaking Away was actually filmed in the '70s...)
While searching for lyrics for [song listed under "Music" for this entry], found a Russian translation
Rode up the steep bend on the bike path (Like Montauk, already mentioned... but worthy of repeat mention)

Upcoming cool things:

ALASKA!!!

There's a bunch of stuff in this entry that I could and should hyperlink, but I'm lazy.

We can increase that capability on the order of one to the fourth power.

2006-05-06T06:28:08Z

I have internet access now. The wireless I had been stealing/borrowing went away. Got a cable modem installed today/yesterday. Apologies for my extended absence. I haven't been reading my friends page in the meanwhile — hope I haven't missed much.

Agenda for tomorrow/today: (in no particular order)

- PRACTICE
- Hang out with B+Bers in Central Park
- Chill with my sister
- Possibly meet up w/ Cohen + Co. at some bar
- Make a pizza
- Not be late for rehearsal

In the meantime, tell me what's new with you!