Primate Brow Flash

Inspired by Jim’s post last week, complete with map, my friend Paul and I just rode up to the Coon Rapid’s Dam and back. The wind was in our faces on the way up. To our consternation it was also in our faces on the way back! My seat was the pestle to my mortar and it was giving me some electrical thrills that didn’t feel at all natural. I moved it forward a bit and tilted it down and it became a different bike. The great part of this ride is that it is almost exclusively on bike trails. Some of those trails parallel the roads and seem to make cycling MORE dangerous instead of less. I rode in the street for those. I’m not sure what all the towns around here think they are accomplishing with that type of trail. Not counting those, there are some wonderful trails leading up there.

It was cold today, but I could sense the sun breaking the back of this long winter in the heat rising off the pavement.

According to this article, our electronic appliances use more energy over the course of the year in stand-by mode than they do while they are in use!

The article announces a new smart power strip called “100% off” that notices when a device is in stand-by mode and shuts ‘er down.

100% Off contains an 8-bit microprocessor programmed to run a mathematical algorithm that identifies power modes by measuring the current consumed during normal operation and in stand-by. Miquel Teixidó, a UPC researcher and director of the project, explained that the benefits of this innovation will also be felt outside the home, as it could potentially lower total residential electricity consumption by between 10 and 20% and reduce CO2 emissions by 1%.

The device is apparently not yet for sale, but according to their website, they have a patent.

It was damn cold this morning for the end of March. The wind was mostly at my back again, and I didn’t really notice I was riding a bicycle until I got to the corner of Como and Dale. Usually I notice this at Como and Snelling.

My entire pelvis is a gallery of discoloration and pain. It doesn’t hurt to walk or bike, but it hurts to get up out of a chair I’ve been sitting in for a while. And it hurts to lift a leg over the bike. And it really hurts when a kid jumps into my lap!

Snopes has a good piece about the myths surrounding the Bakken formation

http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/bakken.asp

It is the perfect combination of fact, fiction, populist rage and denial that defines our age.

The wind was whipping shitty bits this morning. I hated it for a while. While pedaling along, I remembered something that was said at the meditation lecture last night: “Try forcing yourself to think the thought that you are suffering for reason x and then notice that the thought ends eventually and leaves emptiness”. I couldn’t get to the emptiness at the end of that sentence. The wind was too persistent.

What is it like to be the entity that experiences wind? I don’t know. I do know that I’m glad I wasn’t rained on.

Frank: do adults ever use training wheels?
Tim: Some adults have problems with their ears that make it hard for them to balance on a two-wheeler, so they can get recumbents with three wheels.
Frank: I never knew ears could get so heavy.

I should never have said, ” yeah, wouldn’t it be a shame to wipe out on the ice on the first day of spring”. This may have been a fantastic day, but the morning was icy. In spite of patches of ice, I rode over to Hiawatha cyclery without incident, and once the sun came up, felt completely confident, even bordering on good. But… on the River Road under Franklin Ave., a rider in front of me went down. I swerved to avoid him, and my bike shot out from under me. I landed hard on my hip. The shadow of the bridge was harboring a nice ice patch for us. Falls have their own anatomy:

• The knowing
• The impact
• The unknowing
• The groaning
• The standing
• the checking
• The shaking

My hip is swollen and painful, but I feel like it is all muscular and will heal by itself with time. I’m glad I was wearing a helmet because smacked my head on the ground as well. After i fell, I couldn’t keep up with the group very well and I lost them. Through expert use of cell phones, we soon regrouped at the Spring Street Tavern for a giant breakfast. The Spring Street Tavern has the largest bottle of ibuprofen I have ever seen in my life. They gave me four of them in a shot glass.

Here is a photo I found on Flickr of Maggie’s Irish dance school in the St. Patrick’s day parade
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgallevo/3364739080/sizes/l/

She later danced at the Fine Line cafe. It was a long day. We started in the morning at Fairview Ridges hospital in Burnsville and spent the day driving from performance to performance.

I think the most rewarding performances were the parade, where there was much raucous cheering and the nursing home, where the residents were visibly delighted.

Last Tuesday, the day of that ice storm, I rode my brand new Long Haul Trucker to work in the warm drizzle and decided to try out one of Metro Transit’s bicycle bus racks for the ride home. Half way home, my bike just fell off the front rack and got crunched under the bus. We were exiting Snelling Avenue onto Como and going downhill on the ramp. The bus braked a bit. That could have been the instigator. I’m just sick about it. It was pretty uniformly crushed, as if by a steamroller. I think the tires and chain may be salvageable. I feel like a big dummy for trusting the racks. I would advise anyone with a taller bike with fenders to either avoid the racks or bring along a strap, lock or bungie cord to secure the bike better. I bet I could have easily brought the bike on board that day after negotiating a little with the driver. Anyway, he sure let me bring it on after the accident, so a bus full of strangers could stare at it and contemplate the temporary nature of things.

I’m struck by the foggy discontinuity in my memory of the event, When I feel along the thread of memory for that moment, I pull away with a fist full of painful fragments and I shudder. I really liked that bike. I think I will only be truly healed when the replacement comes.

Read this fascinating article about yet another dramatic reshape for the computer industry. It describes the exact direction of the computer industry in the near future. To my surprise, it is cheap, small, weak laptops (~$200), running Linux with flash memory instead of a hard drive, and a reliance on web services such as Gmail and other Google apps. This means that once again Google got ahead of the curve, that Microsoft failed to anticipate a major change in the market, and that I am in the market for one of these netbooks.

Nearly every company in the PC industry has had its game plan uprooted by netbooks. Microsoft had intended to stop selling Windows XP this summer, driving customers to its more lucrative Vista operating system. But when Linux roared out of the gate on netbooks, Microsoft quickly backpedaled, extending XP for another two years — specifically for netbooks. Most experts guess that Redmond can charge barely $15 for XP on a netbook, less than a quarter of what it previously sold for. (Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks assures me the company is earning “good money” on the devices and plans to make sure its next OS, Windows 7, can run on netbooks — Vista performs poorly on them.) For its part, Intel is selling millions of its low-power Atom chips to netbook manufacturers. “We see this as our next billion-dollar market,” says Anil Nanduri, Intel’s technical marketing manager — except that the company makes only a fraction of the money on an Atom chip as on a more powerful Celeron or Pentium in a full-size laptop.

I’ve noticed that for my last few new computers, I had very few files or applications I needed to retrieve from my older computers. Nearly everything is online - in SVN repositories, in Wikis, and in Gmail.

I’ve been fixing a severely disabled bicycle. It needed several parts including a seat, chain, brake cables, bottom bracket, and repacked hubs. I inherited a seat from a friend (thanks Mark!) and splurged on a new sealed cartridge bottom bracket after trying in vain to find parts. I stripped the threads taking off a crank arm so I took a hacksaw to it. I got a donated replacement (Thanks Rob!).
The other parts, I found in the “salvage” section at the Hub. They have file cabinets full of used parts. A plastic piece that broke off the cantilever brakes made them stop working. at the Hub, there were about 50 different versions of this part rattling around loose in their drawers. I felt pretty good about that.

The brake cables were frayed and so I replaced those. The thing that bugs me now is the handlebars. I must have been used to them at some point because I used to ride this bike all the time, but now, having got used to the much wider bars on the 29er, they seem absurdly narrow.

I used it to go on several errands this weekend. One of the errands was biking over to the Meditation Center for their weekly group meditation and lecture. The lecturer was on fire. He said, “We are fixated upon WHAT is known”. The challenge of meditation is to be aware of the act of knowing. This has been my focus for the past 24 hours.

The meditation center has moved into its new building and it is fabulous. Now that there is more space, a lot more people are coming and I think that they have a real chance to grow.

Google blogoscoped links to a browser guide from Google that provides a great deal of insight into the inner workings of browsers and browser security. Google ought to know all about browser peculiarities. If you haven’t seen it before, Google Blogoscoped keeps track of all things Google. and there is a lot!

The guide could be titled “how to speak browser inconsistencies”. It dives into such topics as

• Security-relevant differences between HTML parsing modes
• differences in HTML entity encoding
• The “multiple inexplicable oddities and quirks that plague DOM data structures in every browser”.
• differences in browser implementations of javascript.
• differences in cross-domain origin rules
• clickjacking
• Gaps in DOM access control

Required reading for web developers and security researchers.