Flutterby™! From 2006-08-02 to 2006-08-31

I have a rental property - apparently not in the best part of town although the tenants are nice...

Today I walked around the building in the grass - I looked down and saw a Ruger P85 MKII sitting there. Not loaded - no magazine. (9 millimeter semi automatic. Made around 1992)

Now, I picked it up not wanting to let it rust, or even have some kid in the area pick it up - and I was so proud I found such a nice gun..

Except I later realized: 1) Was it stolen? 2) Was it used in a crime?

So then I realized my fingerprints were all over it. My friend wanted to buy it from me to resell into the ghetto.

I kept it. I called the police station: How can I find out if this is stolen without you guys keeping it? The lady sent me to the 'property' department. They take this stuff a little less seriously than I do in Mayberry I guess. He said I should bring it to him. I think he wanted it. He really had no answer.

I am wondering what to do. Take it to them for checking? I can not find a method to verify if its stolen. What if I keep it and later they findout I kept a stolen pistola! What if it was used in a crime?

Only my vanity and joy at my good fortune keeps me from just turning it in.

Ziffle, perplexed, in Mayberry.

[ related topics: Ziffle Interactive Drama Law Enforcement Guns ]

PDF is the FAX of the '00s. Just as back in the '90s the people who actually had it together were using email and the clueless salesdorks were using FAXes, we're seeing similar things today. If I want to use paper, I'll print it out, but we're thirty years after the introduction of personal computers, and paper is mostly just an annoyance.

You can't search the damned things, at least not efficiently. You can't copy and paste from them. You can't sort lists or deal with tabular data in them in any meaningful way. They're just the suckiest suck that ever sucked.

And Adobe's PDF to Text converter... well... I gave it simple 4 page file, one font, just some lists of people and roles, this morning it still claims to be cranking away. And of course the Mac didn't have anything on it that seemed helpful. Luckily my Ubuntu machine had pdf2text on it, which didn't do a great job, all of the tables in the document came out garbled, but some time with Emacs and I managed to get it under control.

PDF is good for one thing: An intermediate format where you can't talk directly to the printer. You know, kind of what PostScript was supposed to be. Please don't use it for anything else.

[ related topics: Macintosh Typography Graphic Design Linux ]

Lily from FemmeDomme wrote to say that she'd received a cease and desist letter from the folks who make Bardex® brand catheters for all your kinky sex play needs. You may remember that Debra over at Pursed Lips had some troubles with them back in 2002, and we took up the ball, so I think it's time to help 'em out with a little more free advertising: Remember, when you think kinky sex, think Bardex® brand catheters

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Consumerism and advertising ]

A Modest Proposal: C++ Resyntaxed by Ben Werther & Damian Conway

Sony has a cute little GPS receiver designed specifically for georeferencing your photographs. I guess I could write my own app using my Garmin V - but this guy is quite a bit smaller!

[ related topics: Photography Current Events Maps and Mapping ]

A view of the truth: Spinoza's faith in reason:

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life - he died in 1677 at the age of 44 - studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.

[ related topics: Religion Philosophy ]

Rebecca Blood had to an article asking if organic fruit and veggies were worth the cost, which mentioned a study that found that:

Children eating non-organic foods were switched for five days to an organic diet and pesticide levels were measured in their urine before and after the change. The study -- published this past fall -- found that some pesticides disappeared from the children's urine after going organic.

The study is Organophosphorus Pesticide Exposure of Urban and Suburban Preschool Children with Organic and Conventional Diets, and sure enough that's exactly what it says. I'd always thought that organic was good because there was less issue with the secondary effects, overspray, pesticides in the water supplies, that sort of thing, but while there's no evidence that the pesticides and associated compounds that are making it through to the urine are having an impact on the humans, the fact that detectable levels are making it that far through the food chain suggests that it may not just be secondary exposures that we should be concerned about.

Very interesting.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Food ]

While meuon is having fun in Flash-land, I'm getting deeper and deeper into Java. Everytime I learn a new language, I find myself trashing about a little harder. Going from C to Perl was quite a fright as I had to change the way I looked at information (C handles things byte by byte amazingly well whereas Perl likes to look at things as collections or strings). In Java, I'm finding that I have to do everything as an object even when I just want to sneak in a smidgen of procedural code. I mean, what if I want to do a similar operation on two integer values stored as private members of two different class? I have to create a separate method for each class! And data structures have my head spinning... In C you start with simple types and you build your STRUCTs and go from there. Want an array? Just declare it! In Java, to get an array of objects, you have to declare the array[], use new to instance the array AND use new to instance each element in the array... But wait, that's not all! There is java.util.Arrays that implements things like ArrayList, a generic, automatically resizable array that you can throw any object into.

Don't get me wrong... I feel that once I get a little further up the learning curve, I'll become a Java convert. I like it when crazy things are taken care of for me... For instance, once I got my array converted to an ArrayList, I was able to sort it by simply implementing a comparator for the class I'm storing in the ArrayList and calling Arrays.sort on it!

I guess the real problem is that I'm a grey-haired C coder who's copy of K&R says "Based on the Proposed ANSI C Standard" across the top (note the Proposed). I'm not used to so much hand-holding by the language. But I will say, Java beats the heck out of VisualAbysmal BASIC!

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Software Engineering Java ]

So I came across this guy's page where he's doling out invites to beta test Google's Gsheet and Writely. After receiving my login for Writely, I uploaded an abstract I've recently been working on. Being just an abstract, it's just a few hundred words of text with no real formatting. Even in this simple test, I found the paradigm of a web-based word processor to be lacking. A quick glance through the formatting options told me that I wouldn't be doing any footnoting with Writely (unless I did it typewriter style by changing hard-writing superscript). But - I can see a future where I can keep a personal bibliography in Google Scholar that I can use for footnoting in Writely and import figures from Picasa and store it all in my "GDrive"... And I can share it all with collaborators and not have to carry my laptop in to work on my bike!

[ related topics: Coyote Grits Writing Work, productivity and environment Bicycling ]

Mike to Nancy: "I love you just the way you are." Nancy to Mike: "I love you just the way you could be, with a little tweaking."

Pretty much sums up the whole man/woman relationship thing. Laughing.. Crying.. Laughing..

The Silver Comet Trail is my destination for the next couple of days. The goal: Ride out of Atlanta until I ain't go any farther, or it's too dark.. which hopefully will include a few miles on the Chief Ladiga in Alabama which almost joins the Silver Comet in Georgia. Then turn around and come back. While theoretically it's a 211 total round trip, I'm not pushing for it. My max single day so far has been a tad over 40 miles.. but I'm thinking 10-14mph is "all-day-cruising" speed on my bike so it could be a nice couple of days.

[ related topics: Astronomy ]

One of the cool things about helping out with the 2006 Marin Century / Mt. Tam Double is that with so many of my volunteer efforts I'm helping out people who aren't as on the ball as I am, whereas on this project the other folks putting this on are really sharp.

But... one of my other projects... A friend of a friend is doing a web page for the friend's business, and friend of a friend has called me a few times for assistance. So a few days ago we went through the process of using PuTTY's pscp to upload the site to a server, and she took fantastic notes, but one thing on her Windows box wasn't configured well. So yesterday we re-convene, go back through the process, and at one point she's reading off what she's doing from her notes and I realize that...

When she wrote down the thing to type in, she'd used an underscore to note that there had to be a space there. Now, when she typed it back in, she was typing in the underscores.

However, once we got over that, things went swimmingly.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Holy cow. I now know what a $10k CostCo run looks like. I should have thought to take a camera and get a picture of carts lined up two wide at the exit, waiting for the receipt to catch up with us so that the guys doing the double-checking would let us out.

And, really, that was a $5k run, 'cause half of it was loaded on pallets from the back. Next year it all gets loaded on pallets, but we're learning.

A lot of "what on earth?" questions, but when you're provisioning for 2,200 people who'll be burning a few thousand calories... And this wasn't even the big food bill.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Want to raise your own "free lawn" chickens? Ann (a friend) wants to and is considering 1 or 2 Chicken Tractors as a way to make this practical in the not-quite rural backyard. A few quick Googles show lots of interesting ways to do very limited chicken farming this way.

[ related topics: Food Birds ]

Charlene and I were up at 4:00 AM, the team for the Pine Mountain rest stop assembled at 5:00 atop Azalea Hill, and the first double-century riders came through before 6. After serving nearly two hundred and fifty riders, replenishing water, taking their lights and jackets for delivery to stops later in the day, we tore down, only to discover that there were still two riders on the course. So Charlene and I followed them back up the hill, gave them what they needed, and headed back to base at Vallecito School.

First notes:

• Four tables, not three, with two devoted to drop bags. Also, rework drop bag work flow so that it's a little more linear.
• Provide better "where should my gear go" signage. Feedback from playing safety to the double riders late at night later: Be more aggressive about telling them when they should get their lights, and get some info from various experienced riders so that we can say "if you can ride a 9k' century in 7 hours, you should ship your lights to Nicasio."
• See about flow rates from 2.5 gal water bottles versus coolers, it might be better to just go from the water bottles.

Back at base things were under control, so we drove a drop box to Nicasio, in the process taking a pedal off of my bike to loan to a poor guy doing the 50k, who'd only had his bike for a few weeks, and who was having a bad day. You don't have bad days on my watch, damn it, so we fixed his problem. He later called my cell phone to say he'd dropped the pedal back at base, I haven't retrieved it yet, but that's okay, much like the claim that you can return snow tires to Nordstrom, I want the tales of sag support from Marin Cyclists to be legendary.

Went home and rested for a bit. Headed back over to base, did some sagging on the way back over, including stopping for someone who'd wiped out coming down Lucas Valley Road eastbound and someone who'd gotten road rash turning from Lucas Valley on to Las Gallinas, and picking up someone from the century who'd just had his second flat, 4 miles from the finish, and wanted off the course. Had lunch, damn we put on a good spread. Helped out around there for a bit, but realized we were staffed up, so I grabbed a sag kit and the drop bags for Petaluma and we drove up there, in the process seeing yet another person down on the Lucas Valley descent. We'd had some concerns about the staffing levels up there, but the AIDS Lifecycle folks came through with really competent people.

Headed back to Nicasio, where Carsten said he hadn't yet found anyone to warn people for the descent, so we went back up to Big Rock and spent until late into the night hollering "beware left turns, loose gravel and deer".

Recommendations:

• It would be really nice to have that staffed all day.
• We need to deploy our signs more effectively, and work on better signage. The guy we sagged off gave us the "watch for the sharp left turn" line. Sign deployment means another morning volunteer, and folks to check on it. Need to work on how to institutionalize this.
• It's quite fun hanging out and talking to cyclists.

More as I work through notes and such, but Charlene and I are both stoked for volunteering next year, hard work, but a lot of fun!

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Bikely is a place to share bike rides. In Opera I've got some weird mouse offset issue that's giving me problems when trying to create a new route, but it looks like an interesting resource.

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Maps & Mapping Bicycling ]

Dave tagged me with yet another book meme:

One book that changed your life?

Since Dave started out with The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology, I'll start with something that direction: The Boy Mechanic(available from Project Gutenberg). I think I got this at too young an age, because I had a whole lot of "started but never finished" projects out of it, but it opened up a tremendous world of possibility. My dad had a hardcover version that I beat the living daylights out of, but it was always near the surface. I have dead trees versions of 'em now, although none of the boys and young men I know are into manipulating the physical world in that way, so they mostly sit on my shelf.

One book you have read more than once?

We watched The Game last night, which brought up memories of a weekend a little over fifteen years ago that dramatically changed me, and on the way to that weekend I'd picked up The Magus by John Fowles in an airport bookstore. The Magus is a lot like The Game, except with a lost 20something rather than a 48 year old investment banker, but both play with themes of manipulated reality and exorcising personal demons. So, yeah, I've read that a few times. But this is a pretty long list, I've read most of Robertson Davies over, Ayn Rand, heck, even Terry Pratchett.

One book you would want on a desert island?

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies. Discovered, interestingly enough, about the same time as The Magus, it's a great novel with some wonderfully plumbable depths. But since it's a desert island, maybe one of Edward Abbey's books on the desert and solitude.

One book that made you laugh?

Even though I thought Terry Pratchett's Thud rather missed the mark, most any of Pratchett's Discworld books works for me. Forced to pick one I'd probably settle on Thief of Time.

One book that made you cry?

As maudlin as it seems, especially with all of the accusations that have been thrown at the author, Forrest Carter, I'd have to settle on The Education of Littletree.

One book you wish had been written?

There's something at the intersection of Atlas Shrugged and Edward Abbey that I'd like to read, but if I knew what it was I'd write it.

One book you wish had never been written?

There are all sorts of rambles in bad philosophy that have sucked ideas out of the commons and confused and misdirected people. Although I have some issues with pure reason, Kant comes immediately to mind. And there are the various big genocides of the 20^th century, all of which have seminal books associated with them. But, much like the Bible, I'm not sure that the documents are attached to the evils of the movements as strongly as we'd like to think.

One book you are currently reading?

Principia by Isaac Newton, the edition edited by Stephen Hawking.

Tag five people:

Last time I singled people out I missed a bunch of 'em, so if you're reading this, fire away. If you put 'em on your own site, link to 'em in the comments.

[ related topics: Objectivism Books Dan's Life Movies Nature and environment Philosophy ]

Susie Bright writes about gender bias in weblogging, in which she asks:

Why don't straight men include sexuality in their blog writing— aside from the resolutely anonymous few that sex-blog professionally?

Well, despite the fact that sometimes I go out of my way to be ambiguous about my sexuality, and I've tried a number of kinks, my sexual tastes end up being pretty plain. I guess I could adopt the "straight" moniker. I don't know if the Erotic and Sexual Culture topics here count as including sexuality, but if I get much more explicit I'm starting to violate some privacies of people who haven't necessarily signed on to be exposed to the world.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dan's Life Weblogs Sociology Writing ]

We'll just willy-nilly steal three from crasch:

• This entry points to a claim that athletic men have more sex (or at least more partners), but apparently it's not just men, as the Student athletes claim to have more sexual partners than other students paper abstract says:

Both male and female students who compete in sports reportedsignificantly higher numbers of partners than other students, and within the athletes, higher levels of performance predicted more partners.

• This entry points to an unscientific article on the abuse that a Glock can take (possibly of interest to Ziffle).
• And this entry went "wee wee wee all..."... uh... no... actually it points to another weblog entry which describes the Showtime movie Reversal of Fortune, a documentary about what happened when the film makers gave a homeless man $100k.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Sociology Guns ]

Read about AOL giving away the search requests for millions of requests, and downloaded a sample. O boy - 500 MB of compressed searches. Who knew? Is this the end of privacy - I think so.

Upon decompressing a sample, I looked for - drum roll - 'flutterby' and here is what we found buoys and gulls.

The flutterby.com at the end of the line means they clicked on the flutterby link. What suprises me is the muffinmonster and albino deer pics - flutterby does have some weirdos!

Ziffle of Mayberry where the police station closes at night. (raw content moved to comment)

[ related topics: Ziffle Music Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture moron Nudity Law Enforcement Gambling ]

Arg. Ya know what? I'm about done with the freakin' Mac. I went to install some Catalyst modules, and somehow its CPAN config has gotten mucked up. The filesystem isn't case sensitive. It uses funky names for stuff ("/Users" rather than "/home"). You never know where development libraries got installed to, and it's rarely as simple as adding "-l libname to your gcc command line. Copy and paste between X apps and native apps is annoying. Its terminal and xterm both consistently get the delete key mapping wrong. The stupid dock and the menu bar are just topping on the cake.

Windows has its own set of problems, but I really really really hope that at some point fairly soon we get started on the Linux port, 'cause this just isn't up to contemporary professional standards.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Perl Open Source Macintosh ]

A few Random Musings about the connected lifestyle:

I'm entering this from a Panera Bread shop, using their free Wi-Fi. If I were at Starbuck's I'd have to pay T-Mobile some money for a one-day connection. Why is free OK for Panera but not for Starbuck? For 2 buck's worth of coffee I can work here for hours. Is this economical for Panera? It does increase their traffic in the non-lunch hours, while my impression is that Starbucks has a steady level of business throuout the day. Is there a better business plan, or two unrelated ones?

Now for a higher case: I was in Dallas over the weekend, staying at a nice Westin Hotel. Westin heavily advertises their amenities, such as a really nice mattress and shower heads that actually get you wet. The rooms are more spacious than at Red Roof Inn or Motel 6, and the furniture more comfortable. The room also costs more than double the cheap motel's rates.

However, while local calls are free at Red Roof, they cost $1.50 each at Westin!! But, for about 15 bucks a day Westin will give you unlimited local calls and high speed internet in your room. Red Roof is going to the T-Mobile solution for web access. So, I'm a business type whose company is paying for a nice room, but getting dinged on local calls. Seems to me that enough people would get pissed off by this stinginess to cancel out the delight over the nice mattress. In the long run, will this work for Westin, or does wide use of cell phones and free-standing connections make the issue moot?

I guess we are just witnessing another experimental era, where different ideas are being tried out. Just like banner ads became a glut on the market, but targeted ads based on search terms have been a success. Wireless awaits the Gillette moment: give away the razor but make it up on selling blades.

[ related topics: Wireless Work, productivity and environment Travel Net Culture Economics ]

Somehow, this Homeland Security press release scares me. Why is DHS urging people to patch their Windowas. Does MS06-040 also include a new improved Big Brother BackDoor? I'm liking my Ubuntu laptop more and more..

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Regarding Joe "rape victims can walk to another hospital and the Constitution is for wimps" Leiberman's well deserved kicking to the curb: My Left Wing: The DLC Couldn't Beat my Dead Great-Grandmother, about yet another failure of the Democratic "Leadership" Council:

America underestimates just how far we've been sold down the river by these incompetent DLC clowns. Let me repeat this again:

A three-time Senator, former vice-presidential candidate, visible party statesman, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, the other popular CT senator Dodd, most of Organized Labor, the women's groups and the environmental groups, most of traditional Democratic party support, the slick ad money, the top DLC consultants, lobbyist support, armies of paid GOTV staff, and a 3 to 1 budget gap couldn't beat a freaking County Selectman and his unpaid volunteers.

(Via Medley)

And, Barbara Boxer who happens to be my senator and to whom I've previously written a nasty letter about supporting a dweeb like Lieberman, Joe's now threatening to leave the party, split the vote, and cost the Democrats a seat. Happy now?

I'm not a Democrat. Distinctly not a Democrat. But the Republicans have largely gone off the deep end on personal liberties, on economics, on pretty much everything, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. However Democrats at the national level seem to be so freakin' incompetent, and so stuck on funneling campaign funds to their friends in ad agencies at a scale that's only bested by Cheney's ability to funnel dollars to Halliburton, that they don't really make much of an ally.

[ related topics: Politics moron Clowns ]

Bruce Schneier on Doping in Professional Sports:

In the end, doping is all about economics. Athletes will continue to dope because the Prisoner's Dilemma forces them to do so. Sports authorities will either improve their detection capabilities or continue to pretend to do so -- depending on their fans and their revenues. And as technology continues to improve, professional athletes will become more like deliberately designed racing cars.

I'd also add that as nutrition gets pushed further and further towards the wall, athletics will become a game about genetics. Athletes will, at some point, be required to consume a certifying authority's diet; pushing the body by tweaking diet will either cause results that are indistinguishable from drug use, or will be banned because it has the same sorts of side-effects. The limiting difference will become training, but similar restrictions will soon come into play on training, because there will be short-term versus long-term ramifications of training strategies.

After a while it'll be all about either genetics, or what you did growing up in some period prior to what changes could be measured in your body as a professional athlete. And sports will lose all meaning.

[ related topics: Games Health Sports Economics ]

This one's for Nathan: Making a bacon fat mayonnaise for the ultimate BLT:

Don't choose a lean bacon for this dish. That's like taking the cherry off your banana split to cut calories. Just enjoy your sandwich and then go hop on an exercise bike for an hour. Or five.

[ related topics: Food Food - Bacon ]

This article bemoaning the fact that "home-grown" terrorist cells are sophisticated is just a place to hang some rambling about the decline of the state in human movements.

Trends among geeks lead the world, but sometimes it's hard to map how the social changes that exhibit themselves one way among the technologically inclined will show up in the broader culture. The distributed development model of open source, and the cheap networks which enabled that, has mirrored and been mirrored by the manufacturing trends of cheap shipping. International boundaries are just minor cost factors in the process of bringing goods or software to the world, and thus there's less reason for a company, or even an individual, to claim a specific country. "Russian" businessmen live in Northern California, "Swedish" programmers live in New Zealand, "United States" animators live in Thailand.

So as ideas flow freely around the world, why should those who are happy to use violence to accomplish their ideological goals be any different?

This is some of what John Robb has been saying over at Global Guerillas: Movements have been divorced from nations, that has made some of those movements incredibly powerful, and it's time that we stop thinking that way.

Remember back in high school history when you learned that the marching organized ranks of British soldiers were destroyed by the guerilla tactics of the colonists? We're in a similar phase now, and we need to catch up.

[ related topics: Sociology ]

A heart-breaking must-read: Why I helped my wife to kill herself:

I don't regret what we did, but I am very angry about the way it had to be done. It seems crazy to me that you must either risk jail or go to Switzerland to do something you should be able to do provided you do it yourself and nobody else is involved. It seems wrong that while suicide is no longer an offence, finding a way to achieve it is. Surely it is a right, like any other human right, to dispose of your life as you see fit?

[ related topics: Health Sociology Law ]

Allegre 2006 the Human Powered Vehicle Championships - Gotta dig into this site more.. some really neat looking vehicles and amazing people that power them.

How many clicks from the United States Postal Service Home Page does it take you to figure out how much a standard letter costs to mail?

A few weeks ago I linked to an excerpt from Code Name Ginger, "The Story Behind SEGWAY and Dean Kamen's Quest to Invent a New World". That prompted me to track down the book and read it.

Review: Code Name Ginger is my take on the book.

[ related topics: Books New Economy Invention and Design Segway/Ginger/IT ]

Congrats to Dori and Tom for shipping JavaScript and Ajax for the Web, Sixth Edition, Visual QuickStart Guide. There goes more of my book budget...

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

I have got to work on how I photograph. At any rate, the beard trimmer came out again, and I don't think I'm happy with it. First shot has a moustache, which just felt tacky, so I removed that, too.

Think I'm going to go back to the goatee.

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

The Marin Century/Mt. Tam Double is over for this year, and one of the promises made was that we'd have a volunteer's ride this Saturday. Well, the event's over, everyone's off to their own things, and I see an email which... well... I took as a call to action, 'cause if I didn't do it...

No worries, I fire up the Perl and send email to the 150 or so volunteers asking them what's up, and within 12 hours I have over 30 responses back saying "can't do it then".

Ya know, if I could consistently get 20% response rate from a mass mailing, even if it's "not right now", I'd be overjoyed. But I've also gotten more people saying that they'd be happy to volunteer to support the ride than wanting to ride it. Hmmm...

[ related topics: Dan's Life Perl Bay Area Bicycling ]

We want to order some books from Nolo Press, we get to put 'em in our "shopping cart", we go to checkout, and get "internal server error". Huh, kinda weird, but not unheard of, so we wait a day, try again. Same thing. So we wait longer, and try from several different machines. Same thing.

I'm not sure what they're doing wrong, but they're making it hard to buy their product. Charlene just called their phone number to do it the old fashioned way.

[ related topics: Web development Books ]

It's a bit strange that we are still arguing over World War 2 some 60 years after its conclusion. The recent controversies over Gunter Grass's SS service and Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to a war cemetery seem to become more vociferous even as the number of actual participants dwindles.

I found an interesting case here, where a painting once owned by a wealthy family of German Jews has been returned to them. We have seen many such cases recently, but this one does have questions. Was the ownership extorted from the owners due to their status as Jews, or did they sell it because they were ruined by the Crash of '29? When the painting was sold the family was already safe in Britain and the painting in the hands of a dealer in Switzerland, and the buyer was not a Nazi official. So, was it stolen? An intriguing intersection of law and guilt.

[ related topics: History Law ]

Logarithmic Maps of the Universe. Very cool!

[ related topics: Astronomy Maps and Mapping ]

Wrong on so many levels: Baby Rock Records. Warning, web page plays audio, but that's kind of the point, like these lullaby like baby friendly versions of Dark Side of the Moon... now you too can have flashbacks and sweet dreams while tucking in your little one. (Via SE)

[ related topics: Humor Music Bizarre ]

Just some rambling on some recent bike woes so that I have something to refer back to.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bicycling ]

September 9^th is the Carrera de San Rafael bike race, hosted by ZteaM. The ZteaM website has some cool photos if you want to see what biking in my neck of the woods is like (and, yes, on a weekend out in west Marin or up in Sonoma you really are likely to be passed by a paceline of that many people in matching jerseys). My riding schedule has been erratic enough and I'm still figuring out how to maneuver in crowds, so I won't be racing.

[ related topics: Photography Bay Area Sports Bicycling ]

Rafe points out that the Brits have allegedly been tracking these latest terrorism suspects for about a year, the U.S. has known about them for three months, but the restrictions on liquid are new:

Only upon the arrests do transportation officials impose radical new security measures for airline passengers? Why now? Is the threat of attack via liquid explosives suddenly higher now that the active cell working on such an attack has been neutralized? Why not impose these measures months ago when the cell members had not yet been captured and such an attack was thought to be in the offing? I guess I don't get the point.

Now the Brits are backpedaling a bit while they struggle to convince a judge that they really have reason to keep the suspects in jail:

Home Secretary John Reid, Britain's chief law-and-order official, acknowledged that some of the suspects would likely not be charged with major criminal offenses...

Why is this absurd? From what we the public know, what would it take to make a liquid bomb on an airplane?

You also need quite a bit of organic peroxides made by this route in order to be sure of taking down a plane. I doubt that just a few grams is going to do it -- though of course the first couple of grams you are likely to go off before you make any more. The possibility of doing all this in an airplane lav or by some miracle at your seat seems really unlikely. Perhaps I'm just ignorant here -- it is possible that a clever person could do it. I can't see an easy way though.

It only takes a moment to contact your congressweasel or senator and tell them that if we're going to make flying more annoying than it already is we should be doing something that's actually going to make us safer, rather than more theater that's tangential to actual security.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Aviation moron ]

Computing desire of the moment: All of my applications should have groupable permissions and settings on the use of sound. I should be able to say "blink the icon when my web browser wants to play sound, let me silence and unsilence my chat program, but let through my calender app". And all of this should be from the sound control panel.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Do you own software you buy? This has been a prime question since the invention of shrinkwrap. Infoworld has a three part blog on the latest and strangest invocation of this problem. The LA Sherriffs Department bought ~3000 licenses to a terminal emulation program, then proceeded to ghost it down to 6000 PCs. Sounds like a violation, but the sherrif points out that only 3000 or so machines have the authority to access the mainframe the emulator is used on. Then the judge says the EULA supercedes federal copyright law, and that evidence to the contrary might be confusing to the jury! More to come on this one.

[ related topics: Weblogs Software Engineering Law Copyright/Trademark ]

I think, as I look through my previously low spam e-mail address business centric: mikeh@.. and find 40+ spam messages for every ham message. All do to ONE of my customers getting infected, and that e-mail address ending up on the evil people's lists..

I think that I will be building a new server soon, and my thought is that EVERY customer, client, contact, e-mail list, website.. etc.. will get a unique e-mail address, like: mike-danlyke@geeklabs.com would be what I give Dan. Then when I get lots of dreck to: mike-danlyke@.. I add that e-mail to my blacklist and it goes away. I don't want to have to whitelist, or TMDA people, I want to issue e-mail addresses at whim that work, but tag the originator of that address, and let me blacklist it as needed, and publically flog the deserving. Thoughts?

[ related topics: Spam Coyote Grits Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Monty Python ]

Ok Local Flutterbarians, Nancy and I are plunging into a very small hot tub, and need a hand Saturday... About Noon-sh. If 4 to 6 strong backs and legs help, we can pick the hot tub up to the deck. It's a small 3 seater and only weighs about 400 pounds, but it's gotta traverse up a hill to get to the deck.

Plan B: Mike with: winches, rope and luck.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Yesterday, Charlene and I took a little ADD trip, up to the Russian River, where we didn't find the vibe we were looking for, so we headed out to the coast and tooled up Highway 1, stopping at Fort Ross State Park, a Russian beach head in California, took a right up to see what was at the Kruse Rhododendron State Reserve (little this time of year), headed up a dirt road to come out on Dry Creek Road which we took across to Lake Sonoma and then, noticing that we were in the wonderful little town of Healdsburg, we called up Dori and Tom and had dinner with them (and we owe them dinner, hopefully we'll drag them down to our beautiful neck of the woods at some point), and came on home. A great day.

Today... in the planning for the Marin Cyclists Mt. Tam Double/Marin Century, and my recent bike woes, I haven't had a chance to get out on two wheels recently. Today we did the worker's ride, a chance for the people who missed out on their California Triple Crown credit to rack up a 200 miler, and the rest of us to hold on for a hundred miles or so. I met the pack about 14 miles in, we rode up Bolinas Fairfax Road to Ridgecrest, up to the East Peak of Tam, down to Muir Beach, cranked along Highway 1 to Point Reyes Station, then split off from the 200 milers and came back around Nicasio Reservoir. My abbreviated version was 77 miles, done at a leisurely 5:17 bike time for an average of 14.6 MPH, max on a downhill was 45.7.

Now I'm off to wish Forest a Happy Birthday!

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area California Culture Travel Bicycling ]

Weird Bike Link of the Hour. - If a Hoo from Hooville needed a bike, this guy can help.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bicycling ]

#0 - ISP's hosting hundreds of domains should not run sendmail

#1 - spam/bot/nets must DIE

#3 - Courier-MTA Rocks!

#4 - When I can bring a server running a load of 8+ to under 1, with under 100 lines of bad circa 2002 perl code.. adding iptables rules from parsing /var/log/maillog.. the spam-load out there is insane.

#5 - Did I mention Courier-MTA Rocks! - partially 'cause my (servers I built) servers (one at a moderate cable company/ISP) don't have these issues.. it denies all the invalid e-mail from the start.. partially cause the server load is negligable even when loaded.

#6 - I hope his check clears..

#7 - it's time for sendmail to fade away.. why does RedHat still include it?

#8 - I hope his check clears..

[ related topics: Spam Perl Open Source Monty Python Sports Public Transportation ]

Went across the bay and up the hill to Chabot Space and Science Center. Wandered through the exhibits, had fun, although had the usual conundrums of such places, sometimes I want more stuff targeted towards the curious adult, and the information density seemed a little low, but it still took quite a bit of the day by the time we wandered out to the patio on the top level and saw the telescopes.

If you're a fan of late 1800s to early 1900s technology the way I am, there's some beautiful machinery there. We'll have to go back sometime to look through 'em, but they're gorgeous. Free looking through them, weather permitting, every Friday and Saturday nights, and we're definitely going to have to go back over to check 'em out. And soon.

Kudos and accolades to MarkV for his efforts in the restoration and setting up of those gorgeous devices.

[ related topics: Bay Area Space & Astronomy Machinery ]

Two for your listening pleasure, if you're in the North Bay: First, Michael Klapholz in Larkspur:

Em K (aka Mike Klapholz) will be performing a concert Sunday September 10 @ 5 pm at the Lark Theater 549 Magnolia Ave. in Larkspur. Doors open at 4:30 and tickets are $16.00. Tickets are available at the theater box office (info 415-924-5111) or online at www.xtracousticguitar.com.

Second, on Wednesday night, for free, Ruckus will be rockin' the house at Peri's in Fairfax.

I recommend both.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Theater & Plays California Culture Real Estate Michael Klapholz ]

Brilliant: Country Inns Along The Trail, Vermont apparently sets up credit card tours for hiking, biking, and cross country skiing. Tell 'em how many miles between stops you want, they give you route maps, set up reservations for lodging and food, and let you go.

Not cheap, but credit card touring often isn't.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Food Sports Travel Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

Okay, it's getting to the point where I really need to take some time and revamp Flutterby so that we can split some announcement type things off to the side, and put things that don't really need archives or archived messages somewhere. For instance...

This weekend's ride included a stop in Point Reyes Station, a town that has a lot of bike parking, and whose bakery does a brisk business serving carbs to people crankin' out the miles. One of the people I talked to there where we were hanging out was a part of R.N. Field Construction, and he was putting together a team from his company to ride the ALS Association Greater Bay Area September 24^th fundraising rides.

One of the things that struck me about this is that it's available in 10 mile, 25 mile and metric century distances. Given that we've billed our metric half-century (31 miles) that climbs over Big Rock as a "family fun ride", this is clearly a different world. However, in communicating my "thank you"s off to the various volunteers I've realized that there's a need for some of those shorter rides. Here's such an opportunity.

[ related topics: Bay Area Bicycling ]

Stolen from crasch: Animator vs. Animation.

[ related topics: Humor Animation ]

While we're on an animation kick: Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase is a wild clay animation in the styles of all sorts of artists by Joan C. Gratz of Gratzfilm, home of Downward Facing Frog: Yoga Practices and Etiquette in the Animal Kingdom.

[ related topics: Animation Art & Culture Video ]

One of my favorite books is a book on the history of Perpetual Motion Machines. The questions is, has it been achieved? Steorn claims to have "developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy." and is challenging the scientific community to prove them wrong.

While my logical mind says "Ha ha ha ha..." - I find myself wishing them luck.

[ related topics: Books Community ]

Right now the Linux machine has its own monitor and is across the room from my primary workstation, because we have the helicopter controls hooked up to it, and we use it for things that happen simultaneously with me doing development.

However, Starjewel points to Synergy, which lets you share a single mouse and keyboard across displays for Windows, Linux and Mac systems. When we get into the Linux port, this'll be important.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Macintosh ]

I'm whipping together a little tool to make managing some SQL data easier, and one of the things I want it to do is to automatically create tables and table rows if they don't already exist.

Anyone know a DBI/Perl-ish way to query table information for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite? So I'm far holding table information in a secondary table, but I'm not happy with that solution.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Databases ]

Argh. Next time I have a bunch of code to translate from one language (our expression graph description language) to another (C++), I write a Perl script to do it. No "A couple of Emacs macros and it should be fine!", just start with Perl and acknowledge that it really demands a more complete solution.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source ]

Anyone out there have experience with heart rate monitors?

Yeah, I know, what I really want to do is build a couple of ZigBee devices, probably using the Freescale MC13191 transceiver, one for wheel revolution pickup, one for pedal cadence (although I could probably coalesce these into one device on my rear triangle that, later, also picked up crank force, although I'm not sure how to do that yet; piezo pickups in the cranks seem like a lot of machine shop cost, and looking for vibration in the chain seems like quite an engineering task), and once I got that far something that'd transmit physiological information to a Linux box on my handlebars seems like it'd be trivial, but...

Sometimes you've gotta look at the time available and say "ya know, I'd really rather be riding my bicycle rather than diddling with hardware I'm not getting paid for."

So what I want is something that tells me, when I bonk on climbs, whether I'm up against blood flow or nutrition.

[ related topics: Free Software Wireless Dan's Life Health Open Source Bicycling ]

FDA Approves Over-the-Counter Access for Plan B for Women 18 and Older (SFGate Article). So those 18 and over can get the "morning after" pill from a pharmacist, but without a prescription, those under 18 need a prescription from a doctor. A step in the right direction, the restriction on those 17 and younger is all about politics and a sop to the fringe radicals of the anti-abortion lobby.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Health Current Events ]

I need to get the workbench cleaned off and the STK500 fired up again so that I can lay down some of these projects that Charlene and I have floating around. But in my poking around yesterday looking for low power short distance radio systems like ZigBee I ran across the ANT wireless personal area network solutions.

I haven't thought about taking a real bike product commercial, but it sure looks like one could come up with one made out of parts bought in low quantities that'd give the current top shelf offerings a hard run for their money and be hackable. And it's fun to stretch myself by looking outside my current task list while I'm waiting for compiles...

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Wireless Boats Embedded Devices Bicycling ]

Iran has been really close to making nuclear weapons for 15 years now, or, yet another example of hoiw f*cked up our "intelligence" community is. (Via RC3 / of interest)

[ related topics: Community Guns ]

I think that U.S. troops policy could take a lesson from this slightly older article about the deployment of the Lebanese article in the current strife:

In Dibin, a shopkeeper, who had a generator propped against a door that had been blown to the side by a blast, recounted how he had fled the town at the war's start. In the month that followed, Hezbollah fighters took food from his shop -- tuna, rice, sardines and sugar. When he returned, more than 30 receipts were waiting for him, and he was paid in full, more than $1,000, he said.

[ related topics: Food History ]

Okay, I know that Google Video and YouTube must have a solution, and I just checked out YouSendIt and it does a reasonable job of actually giving user feedback, but...

We've got a simple PHP app that needs to do uploads from the browser, presumably via HTTP. It does small uploads just fine. It does not do large (> 10MB) uploads.

I've done everything I can to tell PHP to not restrict my upload size, I don't have access to the system-wide PHP.ini but I've added the lines:

> php_value upload_max_filesize 2000000000
> php_value post_max_size 2000000000

to my .htaccess. When I try to do the upload, my browser just sits there waiting for the response.

If PHP can't handle this I could pass the upload over to a Perl script or whatever, but we need to be able to upload animations and such.

Anyone done this? I can probably even wheedle a small budget for it.

[ related topics: Web development ]

I've decided that I don't have time or space in my life for my N-scale model railroad stuff. My dad's S-scale sits proudly on a shelf here, but the layouts and T-trak modules that I played with every once in a while never got attention often enough that there was actually positive movement. It's time to pare back.

So I've got a whole bunch of stuff that I'd like to sell fairly cheaply to a good home. I've had one guy express an interest in one of the locomotives, but I'd rather not take the time to parcel this stuff off a piece at a time through eBay. List follows in the comments, special consideration to someone who says "here's $N and my shipping address".

Ignore the list: This has been sold.

[ related topics: Trains Toys ]

Okay, Eric, I'm doing some mental masturbation on the ultimate bike computer, and wondering what you know about GPS antennas. The devices I'm looking at have an SMA mount and are set up for a passive antenna, although they could be modified for an active one. Power consumption is, however, an issue.

What are the trade-offs?

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Bicycling ]

Well aircraft security has come to its logical conclusion.

http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/notices.php?notice=060822-ASP-EN

This should reduce terrorism and get rid of the Burka for ever! Luggage pickup should be very interesting as well.

[ related topics: Aviation ]

We recently went to a get together out here where the usual suspects were talking about things that we as the valley community can do to reduce carbon load, and I came away with a real sense of "wow, there's a lot of bullshit flying around here and I'm not sure what I can believe". The usual self-righteousness about what cars people drive, talk about changing lightbulbs, and of course we eventually went from "how can we reduce our carbon load" to "nucular is eeevil" from some woman who, when pressed, admitted that she was actually protesting against a conventional weapons test, but it was being done in Nevada, and all sorts of nuclear weapons tests had been done in Nevada, and that meant that this was going to kick radioactive fallout into the air...

Yeah. Ooooookay. Backing away slowly now, and returning to the more mainstream views...

A while back I linked to that CNW Marketing Research on energy cost per mile of vehicles, and then realized that they were claiming that many popular cars had a third of a million dollar lifetime cost, and that adding up all of those numbers started to come up with amounts that were several times the world's GNP. Didn't make sense.

We've tried the compact flourescents out here, and while we use standard flourescents for some of our lighting, we found that the compact bulbs had a half-life that was unacceptable, our house was getting dim gradually without us realizing it, and we ended up changing bulbs far more often than with incandescents. Bulbs that had to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

I'm enthused by "local agriculture", but is it really any more efficient for a farmer to drive a pickup truck 250 miles from the Central Valley to a "local" farmer's market than to move a semi-trailer or boxcar full of the produce to my supermarket?

Similarly, if buses and mass transit are so much more efficient than cars, how come they're often more expensive per passenger mile, even with huge tax subsidies (that, in the case of buses, build on top of the ones given to automobiles)?

Despite the computers in our house, our electricity bill is pretty low. We could probably switch to a propane water heater, and we could install a wood pellet stove (but pellets, not straight wood!), but...

Overall I'm thinking that there's a whole lot of FUD and crap flying around in this "carbon load" thing, and the fact that most of the carbon load calculators out there on the net either seem to be scams designed to get your marketing info, or just account for your direct energy usage.

So does anyone have sources for environmental impacts that they trust? Unfortunately, following any facts I can find about environmental impacts quickly leads to things that people just aren't willing to face, like negative population growth and more city living.

[ related topics: Politics Law Consumerism and advertising California Culture Automobiles Marketing Machinery Economics Public Transportation ]

Lagunitas over to Fairfax where I met up with a large pack from Marin Cyclists, back up White's Hill, out through Nicasio, Point Reyes, Tomales, towards the lighthouse but we took a left to go to the top of Mount Vision. Stop at the awesome Busy Bee Bakery in Tomales, then back through Point Reyes and Nicasio, and I turned left on Sir Francis Drake and left the rest of the group to head on home. Visibility was poor, the coastal fog didn't lift 'til we were back on our way to Nicasio, but the ride was great.

68 miles, average 16.2, max 41.9. A large group, the pace was officially "B-C", and it was comfortable. Highlights:

• Slowing down on a rise, wondering if I should get all cocky and blow around the group (and pass the Curt and Rebecca on the tandem, something not done lightly...), then looking down at the computer and seeing that we were still at 21.5MPH.
• Climbing out of Tomales, getting ahead of the pack, breathing as much air as I could suck down as I battled Travis for the summit, and then, just before we topped out, having Ron, with 7 decades of experience, break free from the pack, close the hundred or two meters, and dust us both. It was some consolation that a few weeks ago he'd won the Nevada-California Time Trials for his age group by 7 minutes, and had just gotten back from a week of high altitude touring in eastern France.
• I won't name drop or anything, but biking is the new golf, except with people you'd actually want to associate with.
• Having Tim beside me mention that in this tight quarters I probably want a hand on my brakes. He couldn't see that I, in fact, had my right hand on my rear brake and was using it, which meant that I was smoother in the line than I thought.

And, well, I don't want to single anyone out, but I ended up drafting someone in Sunshine Bicycle shorts for a good distance, and that was really good advertising.

[ related topics: Bay Area Consumerism and advertising California Culture Bicycling Bicycling - Tandem ]

Bahahahaha! So on Sunday's ride Curt said "why don't you do some longer rides?", I mentioned that I was thinking about trying next spring's Solvang Double, and then maybe going on to the Davis Double and our Mount Tam Double worker's ride, for the California Triple Crown. Curt says "I think you're up to one of the real rides".

So today I do a little searchin' around, see that there's a Fall Solvang Double that should be beautiful, and I run across Colin talking about Curt:

Curt Simon is a nice guy most of the time but he does have a way of getting under your skin. He throws out ideas in such a way that make you think they are your own after awhile. Like you actually want to do this or that double century, this or that Brevet or even PBP. For a while I was even thinking the 508 was my idea and even a good idea at that. I now understand the clever and subtle ways I was manipulated.

So, yeah, anyone want to hang out in Central California on October 21^st?

[ related topics: California Culture Bicycling ]

While some of the tales of Burning Man and biking on this site deal with unintentional dehydration, there's another side.

Charlene's been wanting a dehydrator to play with some confections. Athena has a tree that's been showering her in apples, and we ended up with a large box. And Diana, down the road, has had surgery and hasn't gotten to harvesting from her apple or pear trees. So we popped up on Craig's List and sure enough there was an Excalibur 2900 9 tray beast, unopened in the box, for sale. The only feature it was missing was a timer, which we solved for $9 at the hardware store. It's now whirring away in the other room working on its first load of apples, while the jars for canning the load of apple sauce are sterilizing on the stove.

There's something wonderfully comforting about putting food by. It's something I remember from childhood, summer and fall weren't just times of harvest, they were times of storage and preservation, from canning cherries in June to the night in October when the frost forecast was harsh enough that covering the tomatoes wasn't enough, and we'd drag the vines inside to hang on the laundry racks racks, hoping that a few would ripen more, making of green tomato relish with the rest. I grew up in an area with a fairly short season. And the only time as a kid that I liked kale was after that big frost, because it turned sweet and wonderful.

And, yeah, the carrots packed in sawdust weren't as great as when they were pulled directly from the ground and wiped off on my T-shirt, but food had seasons.

I'm not saying that I don't really enjoy salads in January, but so much of food is in the ritual and meaning that we put into it, and the rituals of preservation are powerful ones.

And last night we talked with Owen, a young man from down the street, about prepping for his first trip to Burning Man. As we thought about ways to use our newly acquired toy, several "Oh, this'd be great for..."s came to mind.

[ related topics: Burning Man Children and growing up Health Nature and environment Food Work, productivity and environment ]

A couple of bits worth reading:

• A Salon review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's work "Lost Girls", an opus that aims for "dignified pornography" (not erotica).
• Columbine wrote Notes from the Great Cave (alt link if you have privileges), a long musing on computer games, in which a "must read" link was given to:
• Tea Leaves: The Design of Everyday Games, which talks a lot about richness versus complexity in game design.

[ related topics: Books Games Sexual Culture ]

I've heard it said that "humor is other people's pain". It must be true, 'cause I got a good laugh out of this: Jeff forwarded along some video of a dirt-bike hill climbing competition. Note all the guys on rappel there to catch the falling riders and their bikes. Note the falling motorcycles. And falling riders.

And in the final sequence, someone actually makes it up.

[ related topics: Humor Video ]

Viv has discovered visual evidence of the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, via an Air Force picture out the back of a C-17.

And a refresher on Pastafarianism for those of you in the dark.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Photography Aviation Flying Spaghetti Monster ]

So one of my tasks in the online learning world, it to be able to export what looks like our online content management system PHP and MySQL driven interactive courses work in a tightly controlled stand alone environment as well. The tools: Static Web Pages, some flash, JavaScript and Cookies. No big deal, I'm just good enough at JavaScript now attempt it. Did it, The LAMP server exports a set of nice static HTML files with the JavaScript embedded in make them work like they are attached to a live system ie: You answer questions, and on the last page you get a nicely formatted 'quiz results page' and the last page has JavaScript that, behind the scenes makes a post to the launching "Learning Management System" that the person took the course, passed or failed, and what their final score was. So I'm stuffing Cookies in the browser as questions are answered.. JavaScript is reading them, parsing them.. making things happen and it all works great in FireFox and Opera. It all seems to be working great in MSIE as well.. Life is good. Until we try it on bigger courses.. and find out that MSIE allows 20 cookies of 4kb each. Not 60 of 100 bytes. not even 21 of 100 bytes. 20 cookies. Then it FIFO's them.. Instead of other browsers that handle it as ?? Bytes, and you can stuff it any way you want (it seems so far).

ReWrite. Tomorrow I'll stuff 1 to 5 cookies with lots of data.. maybe import some static textual data from an XML or ASCII file as well to make it easier on brain dead M$IE.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Open Source Coyote Grits Nature and environment Robotics Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Embedded Devices Education Databases Gambling ]

This morning, on the run from Muir Woods over to Highway 1, the pack split and I was back in the slower pack. Breaking away is a weird feeling, looking ahead to see if there's room, pulling out to the side where the wind drag is suddenly huge and the air roars past, making a lot of noise.

Usually I have no problem getting ahead of the pack, for short bursts I'm pretty strong, on one ride recently I looked down at my computer and realized I was over 30MPH as I tried to cover the distance between the groups. What's weird is that sensation of trying to catch the draft.

In approaching another pack from the rear I don't want to have the relative speeds too high, because it's hard to brake to exactly the matching speed, but I don't want to stay out of the draft too long. So there's always this stretch where I go from gaining on the pack to feeling like they're just out of reach, needing just a little more speed before the constant noise in my ears becomes a buffeting and then quiets down as I settle into the slipstream. And there's always the fear, as I match speeds with the group but still have six or eight feet to go, that I won't be able to keep up the pace for the time it'll take me to settle comfortably in to the quiet zone.

Of course by the time all that happens we're usually approaching the home stretch before the stop sign, where the line breaks up into an all-out sprint to the finish. But I skipped that today so I'd have something left for the climb up beside Green Gulch Farm. It's amazing how saving that little bit helps on the long sustained efforts.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Bay Area Bicycling ]

What do y'all know about vacuum packing in the home? I mean, I've thought about building a vacuum system out of an old refrigerator compressor for compressing the resin out of carbon fiber construction, but I'm thinking more for food preservation and preparation.

Not an immediate purchase, just one of those casual "keep my eyes open at garage sales" things and I'd like to know what to look for. Spurred on by the acquisition of the dehydrator and an entry or two over at Ideas In Food.

[ related topics: Food Machinery ]

Since Viv recommended the Polar S725x in my query about heart rate monitors I've been thinking about bike computers. $500 is a reasonable chunk of change, especially given my income over the past few and prospects for the short-term future, and my desire to tinker starts to make me think about what I could build for that, and...

...and then I realize, like on this morning's ride, that I also just need to become more disciplined. This morning I'd left my bike computer sitting on the desk next to my mouse where I'd had it to type in the stats after Sunday's ride.

Perhaps the real purpose of building something wireless and next-gen would just be that I could put a transceiver out in the driveway that'd be able to transfer the logs when I arrived home.

[ related topics: Wireless Dan's Life Bicycling ]