And you can have it! It's for
a friend that works at a bar called Sweet Ups and The Royal Oak,
which is prety cool so you should go there. If you go there soon you'll even
get to hear good music...probably.
At this time yesterday I was about 20 miles into my first 100 mile bike ride on
the newly named Ivan, aka a NYC Bikes City Fixed model from 2005. I was really
nervous about doing this but at mile twenty I felt fine. It wasn't until about
mile 45 when my tendons began hurting in an unnatural way. Then, not
suprisingly everything got real simple and automatic after the mid way mark. 50
miles in and
I felt like I was gliding at a smooth pace between 19 and 20 miles per hour on
the Westhampton shore.
The Hamptons are beautiful with their extravagant estates hidden behind
manicured shrubs. If the land had a vinyard on it the whole package would look
like some bottle of Cotes du Rhone or Bordeaux. The Hamptons that are not
extravagant are still very cool. Beach houses with minimal archetecture and the
ocean only a sand dune away. The Ponquogue bridge is unbelievable with it's
east and west view of crystal clear blue water as far as the eye can see.
Some notable comments I got from strangers:
"Is that a fixed gear?! You are crazy!"
"How do you go down hills? How do you stop?"
"No helmet? Leave the century NOW!" (yes, I forgot my helmet and didn't realize
until I was at the start line. This is bad, I know and I felt terrible but couldn't quit
without starting. I did not leave the ride at this random man's request) Getting passed by a man on a Bianchi track bike. "A
kindred sprit." Apply Doppler effect. Passing an older man on a custom fixed gear. "It only takes one!" Standing in the beer line after finishing, over heard. "...and then there's the guys
on the single speeds. Woah, can you imagine? No gears! And I even saw some of
these guys wearing pants! Now that's style and substance."
The ride ended with a few miles of...hills! Fuck. Strangely enough they broke
up the monatony of the final stretch and gave me a chance to pedal at different
speeds. I ended up passing many people up the hills and had to go full speed
down to conserve energy. It worked very well. At the end of the hills I nearly
pulled my right calf and slowed down. The final 200 feet had a ridiculous
amount of headwind. It was like someone was sadisticly saving the worst for
last. I got over that, pulled into the finish line and realized I pulled my
left hamstrain. After some stretching, eating and beer drinking everything got
better. This morning I felt fine considering.
The NYC Bikes City Fixed is an aluminum frame with a
carbon fibre track fork. The wheels are deep-v 700s and the handle bars are also
aluminum but slightly angled up for more comfortable distance riding and easy
pothole skipping. The gear ratio is 46x16.
And if you are still reading this far because you are waiting for an
explaination of what makes riding a fixed gear 100 miles so "crazy" here it is.
A fixed gear is a variation on the classic track bicycle. The only components
on the drive train are a single chain ring on the front and back and a thicker
than normal chain. The back ring
is reverse threaded and stuck in place with a lockring. This means the bike
cannot coast. Riding 100 miles means pedaling 100 miles. Classic track bikes
are almost always steel, have a wheel base so narrow the back tire is only
milimeters away from the seatpost and there are no break mounts, therefore the
only way to stop is to apply back pressure on the chain. The handle bars are
extremely steep. My bike has none of these characteristics. Wider wheel base, a
front break, an optional rear break mount and less steep handlebars.
And last night there was an "awards banquet". Media people are funny because
when they decide to do something, they do it with all the gusto of a top story.
And in the end, it was a top
story. My bowling style was captured on film. This
should describe accurately the comitment of Team Gawker
A recent bit of hilarity at the workplace, kept discreet for our reader's sake
(note that "reader's" is the singular possesive, not the plural). We need a
video to record from cable television. Since the business pays for cable, we go
to the trusty cable box and change the channel to the station and attempt to
purchase the pay-per-view content. Weird, there's no option to buy it, only an
option to call the phone number printed on the screen. Okay, called the number.
Looks like business accounts are not allowed to purchase pay-per-view content.
...
Did I hear that correctly?
...
Wow. Ummm, I guess I have nothing more to say...time to head over to the PC and
bittorrent it. Hey, we tried to pay you but you said no.
Last.fm is neat! Your music player sends their database the metadata from the
tags of a file you're playing and it can be published on another web page. They
do all sorts of data mining to see how many other users are doing the same
things you are. Popularity contest! Music! Yea!
I'm using iTunes because my workplace got one of those Apple
Airtunes thingies
that let you "wirelessly connect" to speakers from your iTunes library. I might
mention that this adventure began with installing VMware on the GNU/Linux host
OS and installing Windows XP as a guest OS. Then installing the sound drivers and
iTunes in that. Fuck you iTunes #1, you don't support my operating system.
So I start importing my big ass folder of music only to realize that 80% of it
isn't getting added. I then remember that iTunes is the last big player to
intentionally not support ogg/vorbis by default. Fuck you iTunes #2.
I find the official xiph.org vorbis Quicktime component. Cool! They took over
the dying project from five years ago. I install the component and lo and
behold, the rest of my music library is added. But wait! There's no metadata.
Huh? I'm very particular about marking up music files and I know I have
metadata on all of these. I confirm this and say fuck you iTunes #3, you make
volunteers program to a crappy API that only half functions on your product.
Whatever, I can handle re-adding some metadata. Artist and album will do fine
cause all the filenames are the track title. I do that and listen to some music
in my franken-os-itunes-ified virtual machine. I'm using headphones from my
computer's sound card. Now's the chance! I "connect to remote speakers" and
start playing some mp3 files over the speakers. THen I start playing some of
the ogg/vorbis files. Guess what? They don't play with airtunes, only on the
local system's sound card. Fuck you iTunes #4, your product's components don't
work with your other products.
Then I notice the cool sharing feature. I share my music, hell yeah! Then I
connect to a co-workers shared playlist and try and play a file. Oh shit! It
asks me for a password because "that file is only allowed to be shared with 5
others". 5 others? Who though up that number. Fuck you iTunes #5, you're just
being stupid this time.
I later discover that a xiph.org employee was approached by the company who
makes the software on the ipod and told they will never support vorbis. Guess
what? That company wasn't Apple. Fuck you iTunes #6 your compatible products
software isn't even made by the company that makes you.
All this so I can play music over the office speakers. Seriously. Ughhh!
Is a totally awesome event, though not as much of a party as Critical Mass. I
did the 42 miles on the fixed gear and got away with only a small pulled
muscle. The highlights were riding on the BQE through Red Hook and over the
Verrazano bridge into Staten Island. FDR on the upper east side was fun too. I
met the two guys who run Old Skool
Track, a web site dedicated to the people with steel track frames and no
front breaks. They were very nice to me despite my decidedly non-old skool
alumimum/carbon frame, front break and deep-v rims.
Next stop, illegal underground races through the city!
It's named Istanbul and it can
record the mouse movements of a Gnome session to either a raw YUV video or Ogg
Theora compressed. I did a test
recording of me starting Jack and getting a
test tone out of PD. I don't think it records sound at the moment and the
developer seems to have taken a break for from CVS commits for the last 10
months.
One remarkable bug is that the application itself segfaults when
hovering the mouse over any Gnome Pannel applet that has a tool tip. One
remarkable feature is it can stream to an Icecast2 server for live
screencasting! Neato.
-lee
The phone can do bluetooth too. Check this shit!
Browsing 00:11:24:65:9D:1B ...
Service Name: Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
Service RecHandle: 0x10004
Service Class ID List:
"Serial Port" (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
"L2CAP" (0x0100)
"RFCOMM" (0x0003)
Channel: 3
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x656e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
"Serial Port" (0x1101)
Version: 0x0100
I'm installing Windows XP in a VM Ware virtual machine for web development and
application testing. I'm installing the updates and it asks me about an update
with the above title. Knowing full well I have no malicious software on the
computer, I uncheck the option to download that tool. It asks me if I really
know what I'm doing and even offers to stop bugging me in the future. I choose
both of these options. Five minutes later the little warning bubble pops up
again and tells me there are new updates. Guess which ones they are? Yup, same
one I just told Windows to shut up about. I go through the don't-bug-me-stop-trying process again...and guess what
happens? I'll bet you can guess. Same warning a third time.
Fuck you Windows.
About
I work with communications, open source software, sound and video.
I'm the most happy when I work on all of these things at once. Sounds,
Systems, Robots, Rocking Tigers.
CV? (.doc | .odt | .pdf)
