obfuscated.org

Hola, Amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I’ve rapped at ya about the bikes, so I figured I’d fire off a quick update.

I’m a little more than one third of the way done with my new years resolution. Today was my 17^th ride to/from work. To celebrate hitting the 1/3^rd mark, I took the northern route home through Sierra Madre. (Map below.) Stan recommended this route the last time I talked to him. He was totally right. The bike lane along Orange Grove and the section of Sierra Madre in Pasadena was awesome, and there were way fewer stops than my normal route. I don’t know that I’ll be taking it in to the office any time soon — the road in to Sierra Madre is, um… steep — but it’s great for coming home.

Some things I’ve learned over the past few weeks:

• I don’t enjoy riding home when it’s over 100, although the middle 90’s are fine
• Cars put out a lot of heat. It’s really uncomfortable being next to them at stop lights
• The Arboretum feels like a giant air conditioner when they’re watering the north end of the property. Which is really nice after sitting next to aforementioned hot cars.
• I need exactly one gear to get to/from the office. So perhaps I’ll get a single speed as a backup bike.
• If you’re putting a new chain on your bike, be sure to read the instructions carefully, least you destroy the chain pin. (Not that I did this. No sir. Not me. Although many, many thanks to Stephanie for taking the bike down to Stan’s and getting the chain fixed!)

Oh, I must remember to give glowing mention to the trunk rack I got a couple of weeks back. It’s a vast improvement over a backpack. No messy straps hanging all over me, no ugly sweaty back when I get to work. If you’re looking for something big enough to carry a change of clothes and a person’s worth of wallets and gadgets and keys, I can’t recommend the Novara “Deluxe” Rack Trunk quite enough.

So anyway, yeah. Yay bike commuting. I’m genuinely enjoying both not being in the car and getting outside more often. I’ve lived in the land of inordinately good weather for almost 14 years now, and I really can’t believe that I haven’t taken any advantage of that until now.

Memestealing from Pat, Kitty, etc.

The rules, such as they are:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search
2. Using only the first page of results, pick one image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into Big Huge Lab’s Mosaic Maker to create a mosaic of the picture answers. (Right click the mosaic to copy and save.)

And the questions/answers:

1. What is your first name? Corey
2. What is your favoriate food? sushi
3. What high school did you go to? East
4. What is your favoriate color? blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Bob Roll
6. What is your favorite drink? Martini
7. What is your dream vacation? Tofino
8. What is your favorite dessert? Scotch
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? retired
10. What do you you love most in life? Stephanie and Fletcher
11. What is one word that describes you? caffinated
12. What is your flickr name? cap

My new year’s resolution this year is to ride my bike to work at least 50 times. The first thing that I have learned from this is that I a master of excuse making. Between morning meetings, my employer’s occasional “dress like a banker” days, family scheduling, angst about being drenched with sweat at work and the good old fashioned lazy, I managed to go more than one third of the year without making any progress towards this goal. As of this week, however, I’m on my way.

The ride could not have been more pleasant. It was cool in the morning and not hot in the afternoon. Morning traffic was great. One driver waited at a four way stop and waived me through such that I wouldn’t have to come to a complete halt, which was totally cool of him. None of the cars got all up ons when I took the lane, which I did at every intersection. Exactly one car got within three feet of me. SGV drivers: thanks!

It took me about twice as long to ride — almost exactly an hour each way — as it does to drive on a bad day. (Although not an atypically bad day. Few of my drives in count as “good.”) That said, I got two hours more exercise than I would usually get, so I consider it a big time-saving win.

The home route through Arcadia’s peacock country may or may not be the best way to do things. I’m looking to avoid traveling on Rosemead or Colorado West of Baldwin, and this seemed an easy enough cut through, however I took a couple of wrong turns and ran in to some dead ends. Huntington in the morning was 100% reasonable; I’ll probably give it a go on the way home next time.

I’m planning to ride again next Thursday, and hopefully twice the week after that if all continues to go well.

Stephanie got me a subscription to Sirius for Christmas, and we were listening to its jazz channel this evening while doing the NYE thing. The first song I heard after midnight was Giant Steps. This bodes well.

Happy 2008, everybody.

The first project I ever worked on was in the news recently. The Synthetic Aperture RADAR run by the European Space Agency is being used to detect massive rogue waves. I worked on the Information Management System/Data Analysis and Distribution System (IMS/DADS) for the ESA satellite and a similar one run by UA Fairbanks, writing testing code for a huge Motif application used by scientists to get particular images for their research. The software that I worked on is likely long since decommissioned — does anybody use huge, Solaris-only Motif applications any more? Really? — but it’s fun to see what the project’s data is being used for.

Whenever I use the web or write email, my working environment displays in black on white and I’m just fine with that. When I edit text, black on white just seems wrong and I always switch things around to be white on black. This never struck me as odd until today. Does anybody else think it’s odd that one color scheme would make perfect sense in one context but come off as very wrong in another rather similar context? Or is it just me?

My son is doing a project for class this week that involves survey data and presenting it in graph form.  (Yeah, stats!)  Can you take a second to answer the $64,000 question below by 6 p.m. PT tomorrow (Wednesday).  Thanks!

From  The Kid:

What are your three favorite ice cream flavors? 1. 2. 3. Thank you for taking time to fill out my survey! Sincerely, The Kid

If you’ve already responded via email: Thank You!  Your answer is already recorded.

This morning, Stephanie, The Kid and I decided to go on a hike. We had already blocked out a chunk of the afternoon for sitting in front of the TV watching the Kentucky Derby and (for two of us, at least) having some mint juleps, so an afternoon out in the mountains seemed like a good counterbalance.

We drove up to Big Santa Anica Canyon and decided on the trail up to Hogee’s camp. The way up was fine. The weather was perfect. The trail was in good condition. Good times. We made it maybe two thirds of the way up before we had to start heading back in order to make it home before post time.

About a mile from the trail head The Kid stepped right over a rattlesnake. Literally. The snake must have been crossing the trail just as we were coming down, because another couple coming up had passed that point not two minutes before we got there. I seriously doubt that the snake was, you know, hanging out on the moderately busy trail sunning itself.

As it turns out, even people who have never heard a rattlesnake before know exactly what one sounds like. The Kid heard the hiss and the rattle and took the hell off down the trail. I’ve never seen him — or anybody, for that matter — move so fast. This was a good thing, because it got him out of the way of the snake, which was absolutely the appropriate thing to do. However, it did put me and Stephanie in an awkward position, as The Kid was down the trail and around the bend, we didn’t know if the snake actually bit him, and chasing after him was made difficult on account of the pissed off rattlesnake sitting in front of us on the trial.

Being a lifelong suburbanite, I’m not nearly as up on my animal kingdom language as I should be. There was a troop of boy scouts maybe a quarter mile up the trail from us, and I’m sure they could have accurately intrepreted what the snake was trying to tell us. Left to our own devices, all Stephanie and I could come up with was “stay back there or I’ll bite you.” I think we were probably right, or close enough at any rate.

Wanting very much to find out if The Kid was ok — we could hear him yelling at us from around the bend, which was promising — I did my best to communicate to the snake that it should get off the trail. There was a good sized stick by the side of the trail, so I grabbed it, broke a little chunck off and threw it at the snake. The message I wanted to send was “my species got to where it is in large part because of its ability to use improvised tools. So piss off before I get that big rock over there and crush your skull.” I don’t know if this was a good idea at all or even necessary — the snake probably would have taken off on its own had we left it alone, just like the other couple rattle snakes I’ve run in to have done — but I was in a hurry, and it worked, so oh well.

We trotted down the trail a bit and found The Kid just around the corner. He was a little shaken and all the way adrenaline-tastic, but the snake didn’t get him and he didn’t go tumbling down the side of the hill, so we were happy.

What did strike me as silly is that while we had water and first aid kits and whistles (well, most of us. While Stephanie and The Kid were well prepared for the hike and had whistles on them, I choose to not bother with probably the most important piece of gear you can have out in the woods. Smart.) and what have you, I don’t think we had anything for snake bites. And honestly, aside from “keep the bitten bits lower than the heart, stay calm, etc etc.,” I don’t at all remember what to do with snake bites. Had he been bitten, our only real save would have been the boy scout troop with all their gear up the trail from us (It looked like they were doing a shakedown hike for a trip this summer), as most of the looked to be the right age for having somewhat recently earned their first aid merit badge. I think that covers snake bites. Either way, I feel silly for not having a better idea of what to do in that situation.

It wasn’t too far from there to the trail head. I picked the winner for the race and probably won’t hike in shorts next time.

Yesterday was one of those days when both crappy and really, really good things happen. It’s a bummer that the bad goes down, but at least the good is there to balance things out.

So, the bad. I’m out of disk space on my laptop. Very, very out of disk space, to the point where I can’t do many things that I need to do. I got an external hard drive, and that sort of helped, but it was really too inconvenient for regular use. So, rocket scientist that I am, I replaced the hard drive with a much larger one and accidentally pulled the keyboard ribbon off the motherboard in the process. Oops. I now own a very expensive Apple-branded brick. (Although it’s an Apple-branded brick with a bitchin’ hard drive.) We’ll see if Di-No can fix it.

However, this was more than balanced out by the fact that Stephanie spent all day working yesterday to get the hot tub up and running. It is now fully operational. Which is rather more than braggable. Before bed last night, we poured a couple of cool beverages, turned the jets on, jumped in and watched the first half of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House on her (still functional) laptop. It was quite great.

This was the friendly greeting I received after taking the holidays off of work. I’m not one of the “I get 1,000 emails per hour” people, so this is more than a little terrifying. I wonder how troublesome the good old “select all, delete” would be ;)