For various odd reasons, this article on the “loaf” had me laughing constantly. I guess it’s the concept of using some nasty food as punishment that cracks me up.
In Vermont, the punishment is one loaf, served at normal meal times, for up to a week.
“Oh, you tried to shank the guard? Well then your punishment is…….. to eat….. THIS!”
137 miles in a day. 10,000 feet of climbing.
In the end, the anticipation was killer; the ride was not.
I spent the leading week riding a few mellow rides, just getting miles into my legs, and eating a lot of yams, but other than that, nothing special.
I really only felt bad once, while climbing out of Buena Vista (pronounced “byoona viss-tah” by the locals) on our way to Trout Pass. The sun roasted us while we pushed the pace slightly, and I overheated quickly. Luckily, I am wily and I managed to recover by controlling the pace with extra long pulls at a slower speed. Whew.
Everyone did great, and our biggest problem as a group was our collectively sore junk-al regions. Ouch.
Overall, we were able to maintain a 14.3 mph moving average for a total of about 9 hours, 30 minutes of riding time and something like 12 hours from car to car.
Google Earth can be excruciatingly slow on a misconfigured system. For me, it was extra confusing because lookie here:
[achiang@ethanol ~]$ glxinfo | grep direct direct rendering: Yes
That’s goodness, and so one would think that I’m all set, right? Not so. I was seeing these errors:
do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly. Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.
After endless googling, I got a clue to install something called driconf, except the concomitant advice was bad as it referred to obsolete options.
But hey, let’s use our brain and guess that the error message about drmWaitVBlank means we should change the magic setting labelled “Synchronization with vertical refresh (swap intervals)”. (This would be after launching driconf as root, duh.)
On my system, the default was “Initial swap interval 0, obey application’s choice”, which resulted in epic fail.
Changing it to “Never synchronize with vertical refresh, ignore application’s choice” was the answer for me.
This would be with DRIconf 0.9.1, Fedora Core 9, the i915 module, and:
Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
Hope this helps. Now I can use Google Earth to plot the ridiculous 137 mile, one-day bike ride I did over the weekend.
Edit: ok, I lied — the other thing you have to do to make Google Earth perform at a reasonable speed is to go to View -> Atmosphere and turn that display off
Bicycle helmets can get pretty full of stank. In my case, the ripeness seems to come from the little liner pads that are velcroed in there and soak up sweat and grease. Removing them for cleaning is pretty easy, but I haven’t had such great success with hand washing in the sink. Plus, that requires effort.
On the other hand, simply throwing them into the washing machine just about guarantees they’re gonna get lost. And being a dude means I don’t own a linen bag for my “delicates”. What to do?
The solution is simple — throw the pads into a jersey that has a zipper pocket, zip the pocket closed, and then throw the jersey in with the rest of the wash. Done.
Brooks B66 saddle for my newest project — a 1972 Raleigh Sports. The paint job on this guy is a little rusty, but I’m gonna keep the original, and perhaps just refinish the fenders. Also on the TODO list: adding wire baskets, finding some nice lights, oh, and perhaps rebuilding the hub to get rid of the little bit of skippage in there. Ho hum.
As always, Sheldon knows the answer:
Bill Plympton meets Ralph Steadman?
One day, I’ll create my own content again, but for now, I simply connect you to another part of the tubes.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Here’s an outrageous video for the day:
track bike superstars! from julip on Vimeo.
Today, the Guardian posted a poignant editorial titled Remembering Tiananmen.
To me, this event brings back jumbled memories of 3rd grade in Mrs. Hennessey’s class. None of us were really old enough to understand what was going on, except that the Chinese government was killing students, and that was scary. Mrs. Hennessey asked me, the only Chinese kid, what I thought about that, and I babbled about how I thought it was Deng Xiaoping’s fault. My precociousness kinda surprised her, but all it’d really meant was that I had read through the Newsweek issue (we were a Newsweek family; to this day, I can’t stand Time) and remembered some key words. Mrs. Hennessey got smart and followed up with “why?” to which I had no response other than, “bla bla bla” aka nonsense, and she was smart enough to realize that I but was still a little young to really grasp the geopolitical implications, and so dropped the matter.
Fenby puts Tiananmen in an interesting historical context, given the advent of the Beijing-hosted Olympics.
Deng could have taken a different decision, to seek a reasonable way forward, admitting criticism and debate to try to solidify a regime which needed to grapple with the wider issues raised by the economic reform he had unleashed. It would have been difficult and messy, but it was not out of the question, and would have given him a unique place in history.
By putting the primacy of monopoly power first, the aged patriarch closed off a key avenue of potential progress for China [...]
On a more personal note, it’s a little scary to think that I am now old enough to have lived through — and remembered — some major history: Tiananmen, the fall of the Berlin wall, 9/11. It’s weird, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK; the moon landings, Vietnam, all that stuff has always been history book material for me, disconnected and dry. But the stuff that I lived through and remember seems so much more significant, independent of its actual historical importance.
Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to intellectualize the adage of those who cannot remember history being doomed to repeat it, but so hard to actually internalize. We’re only human, after all.