July 2008 Archives

have to get to an early morning meeting, and also, yesterday's against-the-grain shave left the skin a bit unhappy.

strapped on my forerunner to take with me, mainly as a timer and speedometer -- i knew the accursed thing would lose track of the sky enough to be useless as an odometer.

i left it on the patio for 10 minutes as i dressed, it gave up looking for sats and threw up a "are you inside?" message. then another 5 minutes by the curb to get sat lock. ugh.

and then, the kicker: the default biking screens HAVE NO SPEEDOMETER. they have a trip ave. speed (!) and some giant timer that is not time elapsed, but something else (!!) but no fargen speedometer. wtf garmin?! WTF!?!

the ride was less fun this time, probably since yesterday was not a rest day, and because i had the garmin, plus a lot of other junk on the mind. instead of noodling around in ascension's hood, i took a right up to ralston trail and took canada to edgewood, then back up ralston trail and home. there is truly a lot of poison oak all over my ride, it sucks. coming off the footbridge/overpass/horse toilet on teh ralston trail return trip, i realized that if i had a brake failure i'd head-over-heels right into a poison oak forest. so: bike control.

and yet, i have much to say on the topic. here are my things to say on the topic, in bulletted list form:

BANG! My buddy Spu has discovered, through the grace of The Duchesse, that he likes sour beers. My other beer buddy, The Captain, is a huge fan of sour beers. Once the Captain gets back, I forsee some sour beer trips in Spu's future. Actually, I forsee such things this weekend without the Captain. We'll see.

BANG! I overhauled the pub last weekend. Bottled the remains of two kegged beers, cleaned the kegerator, brought beers into work for the coworkers, and prepped a pair of full half cornys for dispensing, which leads me to the next bullet...

BANG! The Fifth Commandment Belgian Stout will be fully aged on 8/2. I may tap one of the half cornys before then. It was brewed in February, with help from The Chef, in honor of the wedding anniversary of our parents. I will attempt to bring them into the presence of their beer at some point. The half corny is eminently transportable.

BANG! I have resolved to get back into the beer festival scene. There's one that looks rather crummy this weekend in Monterey. Now, it's got the fact that it's in Monterey going for it. I haven't been to Monterey too often, but it's always nice when I'm there. However, the lineup doesn't look great. The good news is that next weekend, there's an IPA festival at The Bistro in Hayward. Now, Hayward isn't Monterey, but The Bistro is a great pub, and I went to their Double IPA Festival earlier this year. Assuming the IPA fest is mathematically half as awesome as the DIPA fest, it should still be a pretty excellent festival. That should kick off and (probably end) my re-entrance into the scene.

BANG! Speaking of beer next week, as of today, the Chuchichäschtli beer has been dry hopping for one week. Next Wednesday I reckon I'll undergo the delayed pain of transferring it to a keg. Pain, that is, because I will most likely have to resort to extreme measures to get the hop bag out of the carboy. I knew that when I put it in, but that's the swell thing about delayed pain: you never know if you'll get lucky and not have to deal with it.

BANG! The Captain gave me a bottle of cherry wit that is even now chilling in my fridge, and will be ready for consumption this evening (comprising the entirety of my plans for this evening). Bowdler gave me some mead a couple weeks ago, which will also be consumed soon. I realized a moment ago that I hadn't assigned a nickname to Bowdler. Hopefully he is pleased with Bowdler.

BANG! Speaking of consuming beer, I'm not buying any liquor at all (to take home, that is) for the next month. I'm full up on beer. What that means, though, is that I'll be depleting my stores. My goal is to be totally empty by month's end. It seems a worthy challenge.

:D

i am not sailing, though.

the Captain is away for a week or two, and I suspect but do not know that Uproar and Downtown don't tend to sail without him, even though it's their boat and they're both competent enough to do it.

those kite surfers sure seem to be having fun. hope they enjoy the skin/bowel/eye cancer.

wife made it out of yosemite.

still compelled to write like rorschach.

hopefully no other characteristics emulated. we'll see.

it isn't today, but tomorrow that i find out if hops was consumed by the fires in yosemite.

when her dad called yesterday to find out if she was still alive, he and i agreed that it is probable that she is, as the park service would probably have contacted me were she not. still, the government is not known for its apt handling of such things.

my "let's do stuff" friend is out of town, so i guess i'm on my own for tonight after all. i know, i'll work late! hooray!

1. the mining stock that i own did not lose 50% in one day. it split. whew. big whew. boo google finance portfolio dingus for telling me i lost 50%.

2. my car's engine/tires did not cause a sudden loss of performance. the guys at the carwash gave the gas pedal a floormat wedgie which hampered acceleration and simulated a "something's wrong" condition. easily fixed ;) whew again!

wow, so much sci-fi.

some folks came over and saw my leftover benchpress 2nd-set weight left set on the booth.

"that's some serious weight," they said.

no, man, what's hanging over my belt is serious weight. my bench press is light.

and their copyeditors are even stupider. look at this horeshit:

Transportation Security Officer Scot Peele leveraged his training and experience when he detected the suspicious item while monitoring the X-ray image of the passenger's carry-on bag..

I've had the TSA's experience and training leveraged at me when they searched and swabbed my bags, alerted by but never actually opening the container of my electric toothbrush.

"We must treat every suspicious item the same and utilize the tools we have available to make a final determination," said Federal Security Director David Wynn. "Procedures are in place for a reason and this is a clear indication our workforce is doing a great job."

Brilliant! They're proud of this bullshit! Treating everything the same when it sets off the suspicions of some uneducated dumbass who can't tell the difference between a battery charger and explosives -- and whose dumbassery is then enforced by people who presumably do know the difference -- is really not the way to make anyone safer. But we have to treat any potential threat the same, whether it's a bottle of water, 3.1 ounces of hair gel, or a battery with a wire attached.

of course schneier nails it: "the public" doesn't know what a bomb looks like, they know what a movie bomb looks like, which is to say, a jumble of colorful wires and bits of metal. we're protecting against science fiction.

the internet is changing what cops can get away with.

if not for cell phones and youtube, nobody would have believed the cyclist (critical mass douchebag though he may be).

big brother is far, far ahead of us in the surveillance game -- and since it doesn't make us safer, what's the point? well, there's always fundraising. don't forget, of course, that surveillance should be left to the pros, for obvious reasons.

i'll try to stay on the viewing end of things, but i sure hope if this sort of thing ever happens to me, someone with a cell phone video posts it on youtube. curiously enough, this magnificent interweb of ours can be used just as well for reclaiming civil rights as it can for porn.

okay, yeah, it's better for porn than civil rights.

waking up early is a great idea if i go to bed early.

not such a great idea if i go to bed late.

get it right, internal alarm clock!

i was thinking much of last week that i need some new outlet for expression. writing is too hard, electronics is unexpressive, i don't play any instrument, and poetry does not stand up to the test of time. and yet, i have much to express, which, given an outlet, might be swell to some degree or another.

and then, just to twist the knife a little, the night before last i was visited by a dream which contained an emotion so intense, pure, and beautiful that it has failed to fade completely, even today. sure, it was the same dream where my parents' dog nibbled on my toes, his removal requiring pointers from my mother, but that's how dreams go: a combination of the sublime with the ridiculous. you know, just like life.

sitting here listening to m83 paint moods, places, times, and souls on a canvas of pretension (ha! no, that's me, they paint on sound), i realize that it can be done. i think it can, that is. who is to say that what moods i receive from music are the moods intended by the artists?

i can express myself through the craft of beermaking, but that is a teutonic expression of order and imposition of will, not exactly the same deal as expressing a beautiful emotion from a dream.

i can take you on a scenic/thrilling bike ride that may invoke in you some of the same or similar emotions and moods that i get from cycling, or even from dreaming, but that sort of thing doesn't travel well, much less stand the test of time.

(m83's Car Chase Terror is campy, silly, and extremely creepy.)

anyhow, until i come up with something, i will have to remain a consumer of great art, rather than a producer.

a forum in which i participate has a "feud" on with another website. even though that website provides a great service to the same community served by the forum, the website and its proprietor are not only non grata, the mere mention of them is cause for the forum moderators to edit, close, and delete posts/threads.

"the site that shall not be named" is the silly way that the site is referenced, and a bit of further, unplanned and coincidental research revealed that another guy, who has some small association with "the the site that shall not be named", and who also seems rather influential in "the field" is banned from the forum, mainly for his association, and no further offense that i could find (not that i looked too hard).

the internets are a weird place. but then, as i said to a coworker yesterday when he called me weird, i suppose i'm sitting in a glass house.

did i say that daft punk was the greatest band ever? i meant to say m83. talk about mood! holy cow.

spu said she looked rather frightened as i zoomed by.

good. what an idiot.

as a followup to a previous post, i'll try to prove that i'm not a total douchebag when i'm on my bike.

but first, i read up on Critical Mass and found out what real douchebags on bikes are. after reading that i understood why my san franciscan friends hate cyclists. i had heard of critical mass before but i thought it was a once a year kinda deal, not a once a month shut down random roads and piss off motorists kinda deal.

now, abuse of police power is not the way to deal with douchebaggery of this sort, and i guess the NYPD agreed, since they stripped that guy of his badge. it's not clear to me what the best approach is to deal with the CM folks.

anyhow, my rules of the road are pretty simple: don't piss off people that don't deserve it, don't put myself in danger, and don't give cyclists a bad name. sure, i'll blow through a stopsign, but not when it violates any of the above. if there's a motorist approaching, i'll make sure he's ceded the right of way, willingly, unless he's being a total sack, in which case i'll take it. example of being a total sack: trying to take my right of way when i got there long before he did, and was waiting for peds to cross.

i'll ride in the middle of the road sometimes, because there's no bike lane and the shoulder is full of potholes, glass, and other hazards. yup, it holds up traffic too timid to pass me, but they seem to mostly understand.

actually, when i ride, i don't tend to see a lot of poor behavior on bikes. yeah, i see plenty of sidewalk riders around town, and biking through crosswalks, or diagonally through intersections, and that sort of thing. but for the most part, i guess i'd have to be in a much more urban area to see the sort of poor behavior that i myself try to avoid.

i've already had enough clipping practice, though. no need to stop at that sign 1 block from my apt if there's no traffic and no cop.

maybe it was my early bedtime. maybe it was pleasant dreams (though they did end with my parents' dog, harley, nibbling forcefully on my toes (!)). maybe it was the slightly undercooked but still delicious spaetzle in my tummy. maybe it was the old potrero. maybe it was my bowels' tremendous desire to expunge themselves of the horrific little sichuan lunch that had been foisted upon/inpon them. whatever the reason, i woke up 45 minutes early today, well rested, energetic, and eager to not go into work early.

when inflating my tires, i noticed that i had not removed and returned the speed sensor when i took back my cyclocomp on sunday. that made me feel really, really bad. i will take it back today (it's Turkish Tuesday, and the Turkish place is close to SCREI) but I really hope there are no ramifications for the nice girl who neglected to check the box contents (which was a good idea at the time, i had not forgotten my still-sweaty heart rate monitor chest strap).

i hit the road naked, no instruments, no chest strap. i kept feeling like there was something wrong with my jersey, but there was not. i kept looking down to check my speed, cadence, heart rate. it's a reflex. i couldn't stop it.

i think i did great on all metrics. but the metric that i had forgotten about while "training" was fun. i had a whole lot of that today. instead of taking my normal tuesday route, i diverted up crystal springs, which i'd wanted to do for a while. it was not nearly as hard as i'd feared, though i had a bit of a black-humor laugh when i spied the 280 overpass and mistook it for the end of my hill-climb. i've taken that road down, but never up. going up gave me the opportunity to appreciate the immensity of the 280 overpass, and to really appreciate the amazing sounds that it makes, echoing throughout the gentle canyon, as cars and big-rigs speed their way across it. when i got to the top, i considered exploring sawyer camp, but did not. the ride toward bunker hill was impressively scenic on both sides -- another thing i did not notice when zooming by in the opposite direction, eyes on my speedometer.

for the first time ever, bunker hill's arse end was deemed to be the lesser of two evils, the alternative being an unpleasant climb up a busy 92 to canada to ralston trail. i must have taken it easy on crystal springs, bunker hill never seemed so easy. so easy, in fact, that i turned right on Something Drive instead of descending, noodled around in the highlands for a while, keeping it flat, until i started an inevitable descent. as i approached a steep drop i experienced the delight of the roller coaster -- i could not see over the hill. where did it go? i had no idea, but i whee'd over it and down possibly the most entertaining descent i've yet taken, and found myself in top gear at a stop sign on polhemus, right uphill of de anza, at the junction of the moderate and hard part of that road.

i did some donuts to change gears to one that i could use for crossing the busy street, and started my trip home. but ascension drive was calling me, and i took it, and it did not wipe me out, so i hooks a left on 21 and lewis, some brothers shootin' dice so i said "let's do this".

at the top of rainbow drive i had the choice of 2 cul-de-sacs or another beefy ascent. i stopped to drink some water, and noticed that i had missed behind me an adolescent deer snacking on someone's hedges. i remembered my toe-nibbling dream and kept my distance, lest the nibbling had been prescience. we shared some words and i waved goodbye. back down rainbow, but i really wasn't done yet. i went further up ascension, this time pushing "big gears" (well, okay, not big big, but i wasn't in granny+granny, at least). i muscled it up the hill, my legs remembering what it's like to muscle things, and quickly ran out of steam. that's what i get for focusing on aerobics for the last month, eh?

anyhow, i dumped it down to easy gear, finished the hill, and, faced with even more steeper hills in all directions but the one i had come from, i turned around and headed toward the obstacle course. unfortunately, the safest way for me to negotiate the course is to stay almost on the yellow line. yeah, sorry dudes behind me, but what will be a minor annoyance for you will ruin my whole year. the course is only about a half mile long.

tuesday is supposed to be my "easy" recovery ride. i suppose this could have been a lot harder, but "easy" and "hills" aren't usually associated at my level of fitness. whatever. biking is supposed to be fun, and just in case you missed the title and tone of this post, i had that aplenty.

i have no explanation.

how good old potrero is. i've wasted it on me pals.

how good "heat" is. pacino uses the same move on that bodyguard that de niro used on waynegro. didn't notice that before.

neat.

how good old potrero is. i've wasted it on me pals.

how good "heat" is. pacino uses the same move on that bodyguard that de niro used on waynegro. didn't notice that before.

neat.

i ordered a new cyclocomputer. it's expensive. it's european. it's $30 cheaper at performancebikes. i ordered it from rei, will arrive late next week.

rei has me as a customer for life. i can think of few places who have worked so hard to earn and maintain my business. i ordered with the full (but somewhat sheepish) confidence that if i dont like it, it can go back.

i have this little part of my brain that automatically acronmyizes any long string of words that I hear, particularly names of organizations.

so today when I heard NPR mention these guys, I burst out laughing.

didn't they google their acronym first before picking a group name?

awesome argument.

"what if someone stole your house?" "well, if someone made a copy of my house.."

your metaphor failed, angry kenyan "artist".

YES!

he just said "shitty" on international radio. win.

"you have to stop conflating physical property with intellectual property"

oh jeez, now someone is comparing music to free samples of pie at the bakery. the pirate bay dude really has it: stop thinking of physical things as metaphors for digitalized music. it doesn't map.

"but how does that translate to sales for me?" says the kenyan "artist". ha! tipped your hand.

that's compelling radio!

they'd definitely be welcome to beer and my couch.

they're probably the only group of dudes on a commentary track i'd want to spend time with.

oh the trek jokes we'd make.

i spent saturday morning bottling beer, it's going in to work.

last time i did that i sent a mass email and got a poor response.

this time, i shall abuse my position as maintainer of a major internal website and put up a big banner ad.

this time, it's fresh beer that people will like.

last night i fell asleep watching the commentary for the new futurama movie. it was about 8:30. i went to bed at nine. didn't wake up feeling great.

the new air filter in the bedroom really seems to help, i wake up less congested, but i think until i have hardwood floors and no bedroom furniture, i'll always wake up congested.

my left ear is making a funny sound when i press on it, a sound like a stretchy straw doing its stretchy thing. it has about 3 more days to go away before i make a doctor's appointment. no detectable hearing loss but i don't much like the idea of ear problems. although, i used to say i got new allergy symptoms once a year, and i seem to be about a year behind on symptoms.

because of the ear noise, i stopped sleeping with earplugs. it's a little odd hearing stuff in bed, and i still have fat, clumsy upstairs neighbors, but i manage to sleep. the new air purifier helps with its loud whooshing.

one of the persistent possibly-allergy-related symptoms is the infamous "funny taste". i thought i had nailed it down to either my shave cream, my aftershave, or my shave brush. over the course of three days i did some science and proved it's none of the above. back to no idea.

i forgot to wash my cycling pirate hat. i will rinse it off in the sink.

yesterday's food intake: oatmeal, performance goo, sugar drink, protein drink, carnitas quesadilla, chips, salsa, 2/3 of a chocolate babka. today: stomach making noises like The Predator. surprise!

hops are sprouting outside, which, of course, isn't helping the allergies. i'm allergic to my paly's dog, but he's a fun dog, so there's the old tradeoff of fun vs. breathing nicely. unfortunately, can't play with dog and have whiskey tasting.

speaking of Rorschach, seems that since reading Watchmen again last week, constantly tempted to write in style of Rorschach. More efficient. No wasted words.

headache will vanish after a day's work in sterile air environment.

a cycling sock didn't make it into the laundry, doh. now i won't have enough socks to go all week without reuse. no big deal.

hops' underpants smell like smoke. no, i'm not smelling her underpants, quite the opposite. when unpacking the clean clothes basket, i wondered, "what is it that smells like smoke?" i sniffed around and identified the offending articles: the underpants which she presumably wore last trip to yosemite. so it's not just her person that comes back smelling like laphroaig. that's the dilly-o with camping, no matter how few forest fires occur while you're out, you always come back smelling like laphroaig.

speaking of laphroaig, i like whiskey.

there's a great little exchange in "Watchmen" where Moloch says to Rorschach, upon being asked what kind of cancer he's got, says, "you know the type of cancer where it goes away and you get better?" Rorschach says, "yes", and Moloch continues: "that's not the kind I've got."

Someone asked me the other day what hops plans to do with the MS she'll soon have, and I failed to think of the reply, until today, of, "you know the type of marriage where people talk about their plans for the next five to ten years?"

also: the jerk store called.

because it's cloudy, or monday, or cold, or whatever, kalw isn't coming in clear on my stereo, no matter where i put the antenna.

so i resigned to listen to terry gross on my macbook, piped through the lavry if needed. no, not needed: kalw has an mp3 stream, which can be played by itunes, which will send the sound to the very speakers powered by my crummy radio.

it's crystal clear! hooray!

my new record for sighting of fat man on little bike is an estimated 500lb.

i've seen an estimate 400lb dude on a bike, but yesterday, that guy had to be 500lb.

i was already past him by the time i had the presence of mind to shout encouragement. i was really not on the ball yesterday for helping/encouraging people.

i am now sans cyclocomputer. rei took back the busted one, no hassle. sadly, neither of the two reis i visited had a suitable replacement.

how will i know my speed and cadence? i will wing it. my heart rate? PE scale! Oh boy!

what happens when two stopsign-ignoring roadies arrive on collision courses at a 4-way stop?

i could tell by the way he was laughing that he was wondering the same thing.

we both yielded. it was a moment.

in other news, i didn't escape my sunday ride without a honk. i thought i did, but i got one descending crystal springs at the very end. it was a "behind you" honk, not a "i'm a jagov and think you did something wrong" honk.

i thought up a fitting (and obvious) name for the deadly potholed section of crystal springs: the obstacle course. i made it through without impacting any obstacles.

in other other news: my stupid cyclocomputer gave up the ghost. i hate to do it but i will be returning it to rei. at mile 13.4 it decided it could no longer read any sensors, and despite powering it on and off every 10-20 minutes, it never regained contact with the sensors.

now, there's probably some master reset switch that will fix this, but in the words of jesus gris: no mames. i've had the thing less than a year, it's failed 4-5 times, and it lost 25+ miles of my ride today. that's defective goods. it's not a dead battery, either, since there are three separate sensors which all went out simultaneously, while the comp itself had power. unless the comp has two batteries, one for sensor reception and one for powering the display, but this seems unlikelier than unlikely. so now i have to figure out what to get to replace it.

as to the ride: i haven't done this route before, and since my dingus crapped out, i dunno how long it was. i estimate 38-45 miles.

i took alameda all the way to sand hill, sand hill to portola to a big whee down alpine, then santa cruz/alameda to woodside, reconfirmed that woodside is easy to canada, canada to 35 to crystal springs to home.

i got some good sprints in, did better on some hills than others, drafted a dude for a couple miles (it made a big difference even though i kept at least 4-5 feet of distance), passed a paceline which had previously passed me and then proceeded later on to pass me (i'm still slow on the uphill). my hrm was working on the torturous part of alameda, and my hr passed 160. however, it used to push 180 on that hill, so hooray for training effects.

it was a good ride, a very nice day, and it's a bummer that it was so windy at the end, although without the wind i would not have so enjoyed drafting that dude.

the bugs were out, today, in force. i got one right in the teeth as i was climbing the unhappy part of alameda, and another one in the ear somewhere near palo alto.

but it said 208 each time.

makes no sense. last saturday it was 212, and since then i've had a night of partying, a missed workout, lots of big meals, and beer nearly every night.

but the numbers, they do not lie.

i've been trying to lose weight, so maybe it's the thought that counts.

the great eldritch god cthulhu sleeps, not in shadowy r'lyeh beneath the sea, but atop my head.

or is that nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos?

no wait, i recognize his noodly appendages: it's the flying spaghetti monster!

this post would be much better with pics. sorry.

i racked the latest batch of homebrew to secondary, making a mess in the process, and stuffing a hop bag down the neck of my carboy, which i am certain i will not see whole again (the hop bag, that is, not the carboy).

that finished, i decided to transfer the 2 half cornys of 5th Commandment Belgian Stout into my lagering fridge (heh). i took a CO2 tube and connected it to the CO2 tank, then to the keg. the line immediately filled with beer. oh crumb, i realized i had not pressurized the line. hooray for clear tubes, though, that's what I bought them for.

so i removed the tube from the CO2 tank and received my second free physics lesson of the evening! there wasn't just beer in the line, there was pressurized beer in the line, but not for long once one end of the line was exposed to atmosphere! and then the atmosphere was exposed to beer! and the beer was exposed to gravity. and then I and my furniture were exposed to beer.

lots of exposure. i forgot to open my mouth during all of this and thus have still not tasted the beer.

after a cursory, lackluster wipedown, followed by a whole bunch of sanitizer spritzing, i redid the lines, keeping in mind the laws of pressurized gasses, and stacked the two kegs in the fridge. only i didn't quite do this, since i can't stack them both in there if either of them is connected to CO2. so i removed the CO2 line from the keg, and then from the fridge itself since it's a pain to have all those kegs *and* a CO2 tank in there.

then i had to find space in the other fridge for the bottles that had been in the lagering fridge. man, i'm bushed.

found a bevmo -5% coupon.

too bad i swore off alcohol purchases for the next month.

all full here.

last night at the climbing gym, i saw a guy with a shirt that said, in monotype font:

emacs > vi

i told him that those were fighting words. he thought i was commenting on his girlfriend's belay technique, but when he realized what i was talking about, he said that he's from north carolina where nobody gets the shirt, but when he visits the valley, he gets lots of comments.

har!

i am 1/2 quarter behind on the schedule i presented 1 and 1/2 quarters ago, but i am 1 week ahead on the revised schedule i created 2 weeks ago.

meh.

my new haircut made me ride faster.

i was bushed on tuesday's ride, not to mention sunday's. today i felt good. on both tue and today my ave cadence was 90+, which is great. today, i even got my ave speed over 15mph.

i noticed i'm taking downhill turns faster. i read up on countersteering and now i'm paying attention to that. i take up the entire lane to turn, but i'm faster. going to tighten it up sometime in the future.

i discovered a route that bypasses a steep uphill on the return, which is great for my "flat distance" rides but i worry that it will weaken me overall. we'll see.

it's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x30!

got a 1/2 this time on account of it's growing season.

chicken noodle soup, rye bread, and a tomintoul godfather.

yesterday, a guy with an honest-to-god mister T haircut and beard gave me a metal CD. i think he's in the band.

sadly, though it was well produced, it had no solos. de jabba no badda, no solo!

hellboy was about hellboy.

hellboy 2 was about guillermo de toro's imagination.

both are excellent movies, but i was disappointed by 2's lack of focus on... hellboy. 1 really was all about the main character, with great character development and romping adventure and wisecracks and so forth. 2 was a lot like pan's labyrinth: about bringing an exquisitely envisioned fantasy world to life. in 1, the villains were nazis, and not just nazis, but nazi mystics -- my favorite kind of nazi villains. #2 had great villains, and maybe a more poignant plot... but... it just wasn't as "fun".

in any case, hellboy 2 was my first visit to a theater in a really long time, and i'm glad i went.

as part of my Evenings Of Boredom program, i've been watching movies from my collection. it's been rather startling to notice a couple of things: a lot of the movies I thought were good are actually crap. For example:

- Star Wars : Such poor direction! The character of Darth Vader changes dramatically throughout the movie, from fast-talking, shouty, and corny to sinister, to comical ("watt?!?!"). leia has an accent that fades over the course of the movie. you know all about lucas' edits, and i can't fault the movie for those since my brain blanks them out. the light saber fight is geriatric and lame, and there's no excuse for that other than lazy direction. 90% of the lines are corny at best. Since I never saw this in theaters as a kid, or, if I did, I was too young to remember it, I'm not plagued by the nostalgia that would make me fondly remember it.

- The Matrix : I did see this in the theater, and I am plagued by the nostalgia to fondly remember it. Actually, I hated it in the theater, but for different reasons than I dislike it now. I used to joke that I alternated between liking and hating the movie every time I saw it. I suppose next time I'll like it. The problems: it's not just that Neo delivers his lines like a braindead surfer, it's that everyone delivers their lines like Keanu Reeves. Look, I know bad writing. If I want to experience stuffy, pretentious, condescendingly-delivered writing all I need to do is read my blog. While the what I am saying is very important and you can tell that because I'm saying it so slowly routine does work, it can't work if you do it for every single line. not to mention if every freakin character is doing it! the leatherclad nerds going to hipster dance parties was done better the year before by blade. the undeveloped extras (that skinny blond woman? what's her name?) are distracting.

Unbreakable : I used to think this movie was extraordinary. I used to think it was proof that Shamalamadingdong wasn't a total jerkwad, despite all the crap he's piled on us before and after. Whelp, somehow I missed a couple details. For example: If I wanted to see Samuel L. Jackson play Jules Winnfield, I'd watch Pulp Fiction. Sure, he was a mostly distinct character... until he busted out with the "Does this look like a toy store/Do I look like I want to be fucked"? speech. Right. Nice and unique. Then, we've got Bruce Willis the superstrong superhero bench pressing... 350! Aye, that's more than I can bench press, but I'm wimpy, and if you want to talk about bench pressing, a decent powerlifter Bruce Willis' size can do hundreds of pounds more than that. A superhero should be able to do better. I still like the paradox of who created what, but ultimately, not even the plot can deliver more than a "huh, that's neat".

looking at my thoughts, I'd think that if I were just being cranky, I'd have less actual criticism and more general bashing. but no, i have specific nits to pick, and i think it's because these movies are actually lame. bleah.

at the end of my ride, when i was fatigued, i chose to go up ralston, so i could bypass ECR on the final leg of my ride.

so there i was, huffing and puffing my way up the hill, and a BMW suv zooms by me and honks.

what? i can understand the confusion of morons on canada who don't realize that i have the right to exit the bike lane when passing, but this part of ralston had no bike lane, and i wasn't passing anyone. so i'm not sure what the moron was honking about. maybe he thought i should bring a can of paint with me on my ride so i can create a bike lane as i go?

maybe not.

i rode up woodside and was rather disappointed: it was easier than any of the other ways i've found to get to canada road.

when i got to sand hill i turned right and followed orange pants up sand hill, where i'd never been before. then she turned on to old la honda and i decided to take my chances with the unknown "straight ahead" rather than the known pain that would be OLH. turns out sand hill becomes portola and t-bones alpine. portola is plenty easy and alpine is all downhill where it intersects with... sand hill. that was a surprise. after some stoplight mistakes, i managed to get back on sand hill, then back to canada via whiskey hill, then down edgewood. my plan was to take flea street back to ralston, but sadly, i was fooled by that irritating discontinuity, and i ended up on ECR (went down "san carlos" instead of up it, sigh.).

so now i've gone from end to end of ralston, not that the part from ECR to fleas is hard.

also, right at the beginning of my ride, my water bottle flew out of the clip, jumped across the street, and rolled down an embankement. i had to climb over a rail and down a loamy hill (checking carefully first for poison oak) all in my socks, since my road bike shoes aren't good for anything besides road biking, certainly not bushwhacking.

so i recovered my water bottle, and managed to eke out 45.8 miles with plenty of hills, bringing my weekly total to 75 miles. whoopie.

.

a sister of a friend of a friend decided that being a GP just didn't provide enough opportunity for sticking her fingers up strangers' asses, so she decided to become a hemorrhoid specialist. now she uses lasers to shoot people in the ass, full-time.

it's great to find your calling.

yes, you, the one i bought in wisconsin or wyoming or wherever, for all those jack and cokes that i and hops were going to drink but never actually did.

now that i'm a mixin man, it turns out you make a decent old fashioned. hooray for you!

remember how i wanted to cook more?

whelp, my dinner plans fell through so now i'm back in the kitchen, attempting to perfect my spaetzle and cheese recipe. also, kraut and bockwurst. yum!

but i'm bummed about the lost dinner. i braided the catfish and everything.

try putting some wort in it.

chefjef's voicemail says, "sorry you're having trouble," and then it hangs up on you.

it's like the universe is sending me messages.

today's outing was 1/2 racing practice and 1/2 pleasure sail. pleasure sail last week was beer-on-board, pleasure sailing this week was stop-for-beer. both fine choices.

racing practice was also good stuff: i worked the mast position again, pulling lines. i made a huge mistake dousing the spinnaker and pinned the jib sheet, but to my credit, i didn't do that the second or third time i doused the kite. in other words: learning took place.

i'm still slow as a snail hoisting the sails. i don't know if i can claim to be learning on that. the halyards are slippery, and though i'm strong, i'm not fast. but today's practice helped a lot with knowledge, confidence, and balance. i'm getting better.

The Liver says he doesn't really do racing, only pleasure sails. I told the Captain I might adopt The Liver's attitude if he (the Captain) keeps yelling at me. I was joking but don't tell him I said that.

We had a brief bit of actual racing -- another J24 was out and we raced each other for a bit. They were flying a smaller headsail than us but still smoked us. I confirmed later on with Uproar that this means what I thought it meant: we suck. Not only that, but of the 4 people on the other boat, only one was a sailor, the others were just rail meat. Not even rail meat: they never hiked at all.

That said, one of the reasons I didn't stick with sailing the first time around is because I wanted someone more competent than me on the boat, in command. The Captain isn't just "more competent than me", he's extremely competent. Cool headed, confidence inspiring, and all the good stuff you want in someone skippering your boat. We may not be the fastest boat on the water, but I'm fairly convinced that when the going gets tough, I'm on the right boat.

Maybe I'm just easily fooled ;)

After practice we picked up a friend of Uproar's and went for our pleasure cruise. Uproar made sangwiches and we ate them, despairing loudly that there was no beer. To rectify this, we moored (possibly illegally) at some crummy commercial dock and Doc and The Liver disembarked and walked to a nearby liquor store. They came back with What's Needed For Pleasure Sailing, and off we went again.

we saw one of these and that was pretty cool. i don't think i've seen a double-mast catamaran before. there were a ton of sailboats on the water today, though few got the pre-lunch start that we had, and even fewer docked for a beer run.

in the past, when doing a friday sail, i've been wiped out on saturday. this bodes ill for my ride tomorrow, but i feel rather quite peppy at the moment, so maybe i can hold on to that and make it work tomorrow.

although this is my fourth to sixth time on this boat, i have not sailed with the same crew twice. meeting people! it strains my nickname imagination.

we had a new crewmember on the boat. she's a GP and not new to boats at all, but new to this one. during the relaxing part of sailing, she and The Liver and I got to talking about food, and in answer to my question about the closest Jewish restaurant, she said: "brooklyn". now, i happen to know a couple good places closer than that, but one's in LA and the other is east of that, so in terms of convenience she wasn't far off.

The Liver tends to make chicken stock every once in a while. Before I could ask, Doc asked how he manages to make more than 4 cups at a time, and he said he starts with 16 pounds of chicken parts. Back when I made chicken stock I also ended up with a rather small amount. The trick, it seems, is to make a buttload at a time. He uses a 10 gallon pot.

Now, I have a 10 gallon pot, too, and plenty of propane to simmer my stock for 12 hours (could i actually simmer it? i think i can only boil on my burner), the only problem is that all my beer after that would taste like chicken.

i like chicken as much as the next guy, and i wouldn't mind one batch of chicken flavored beer, but i couldn't make a habit out of it.

so i don't think i'll make my own chicken stock, though i should. i also realistically won't get back into the cooking like i used to be, though that i also should. i'm sort of approaching activity overload. i've also been working pretty hard lately, too; you know, producing stuff. results and so forth. and it's too hot to spend time in the kitchen.

excuses!

into having a second beer on the boat.

it didn't take much.

mmmmm, speakeasy amber. smells great, tastes malty! a bit inspirational, in fact.

i've been listening to my running music in my car lately, and though i've faithfully quit running for the past two weeks, the slammin' beats and whatnot have really got me aching to run.

biking is great, and i prefer the pain of biking to the pain of running, but the lack of music and the greater difficulty are a bit of a downside compared to the running. also, i can't do the superman thing on the bike. well, i guess i could but i like to keep one hand on teh bars.

i <3 del toro.

the director, not the actor nor the animal.

there were parts of "pan's labyrinth" that make me extremely reluctant to watch it again, which is a shame, because the rest of it is fantastic. i watched hellboy last night and it remains one of my favorites ever.

also, del toro seems to have an affinity for ron perlman, which is great, since i have a similar affinity. i followed up my hellboy with a blade ii, which was much less of a disappointment than the last time i watched it. it was great to see wesley snipes avoid the taxes^H^H^H^H^Hvampires and watch hellboy grimace and swear and be all ron perlmany. sure, it's not as good as any other del toro movie i've seen, but it coulda been much worse.

f'rinstance, it could have lacked ron perlman.

i'm spending more time on a boat than off, lately.

that is good.

since there is no name for my beard style in any of the (known) beard style guides, Uproar dubbed mine "The Catfish".

My mom likes catfish but I don't think she likes my beard. This will present her with a quandry. I didn't really get her anything for her birthday yesterday, but it seems that now I have something for her after all: the aforementioned quandry.

So happy birthday, and enjoy your quandry.

i guess i have to. if i had, i wouldn't have to spend 15 minutes i don't have searching for my sailing shirt. yeah, it'd be easier to find if i could just ask -- but i can't do that, now, can i?

i was cycling along canada (on the stretch where my cyclocomp went nuts last time, worked flawlessly this time, go figure) and across the street i saw what i thought was a rabbit, on account of the floppy, large, bunnylike ears. but as the unknown wildlife person-thing turned right to cross the street (in front of me! how rude!) it was immediately obvious that it was a cute, adorable, absolutely adorable (did i say that already?) big-eared fuzzy-bodied puppyfox. it flop-loped across the street, saw me, flop-loped into a frightened turn, continued across the road, and stumbled up the embankment.

i shouted some encouragement as he scrambled, tractionless, as only a puppy can do up a gravelly, slippery slope. and that was the end of that.

also, there was an unbelievably stinky truck. i actually had burning in my trachea. bleh.

plus, a guy on a phone that was not hands free! where's a cop when you need one?

sometimes, when i dont get enough sleep, or i'm really tired, or i haven't had coffee, i feel dumb. i don't like feeling dumb, because not being dumb is the only thing that sets me apart from dumb people.

when you're chewing on some food and your beard gets stuck in between your teeth?

no? that doesn't happen to you?

you've got a short beard, then.

since beer farts out CO2 while it's fermenting, am i contributing to global warming by brewing beer?

maybe yes and maybe no, in any case, it's better to be globally warmed with beer than without.

took it real easy today, did 33 miles without the monster on alameda, tons of rest stops, and a time under 15mph. this was in part because (for once) i followed through on taking it easy when beginning a new program (that is, riding multiple times a week), because hops is home and steals the covers so i wake up at night, and also, the gallon of whiskey that passed through me last night.

hops really liked the route. i thought it was good but had too many stop lights/signs. it was: polhemus to ralston to alameda to sand hill to whiskey hill to canada to the arse end of bunker hill. i stayed on target (like at the end of star wars) and kept my cadence close to 90 the whole time, with my HR right in the aerobic zone. except for that part where i raced some dude up a light hill on canada. and went anaerobic. and he beat me. doh! but he didn't beat me by much. and i beat his girlfriend, at least.

when i got home i performed minor bike repair (front de-railler was "sticky" and required lots of force to get it to shift up, i applied lube where i thought it would help, and it did help). i ought to be able to perform bike repairs. i'm getting there.

i carry a spare tube and a cell phone when i ride. the spare tube is in case i get a flat. the cell phone is in case i get two flats.

you betcha!

the captain invited us and some of his and our friends to go out for a nice relaxing pleasure sail on his boat on the fourth, and then come back to his place after for a bbq.

by 7/3, everyone but me, hops, and tom petty had backed down, so it was just the 4 of us on the boat.

okay, just the three of us.

the weather was initially foggy but cleared up quickly and became the perfect weather for sailing. the mood was far more relaxed than a race, we didn't get exceptionally wet, and nobody got hit by the boom. we sailed from berkeley to angel island, where we got off, had lunch, and hiked around the island. we sailed back to berkeley in time to miss all the hubbub that was amassing at the marina, which is just what we wanted.

the hike featured a date-appropriate discussion of idealized governments and why we can't seem to manage to get one, plus beer and a crab sangwich.

on the way back to the captain's residence, he remarked that things were going fantastically well and there was not even much traffic. i would have thought a sailor would know not to tempt fate by saying such things. the traffic remained mild but halfway through the barbecue the gas ran out, and being the 4th, and past 8pm, there was no place to go for more. the "barbecue" finished in the oven and on the stove, and we had a great time ridiculing the captain for the rest of the evening (and i'm not even done with it yet).

all in all, a swell way to spend a 4th.

on angel island we saw a guy carrying what looked like a coon skin cap, and when he asked us to take his picture, i asked whether he was going to wear his hat for the shot. it turned out to be a fuzzy shield for a mic, he's a sfx recording engineer or something and the dead cat thing filtered out the copious wind of angel island. also, there was a lizard.

in the shower tonight that now, as i am approaching 31 years old, i really ought to be able to open my eyes in the shower, after water has gone over them, without rubbing them with my hands first.

boy was that hard.

my ideal weight as a cyclist, at 6'0", is 144lbs.

ha.

ha ha!

hahahahahaahahahahahhaahahahahahahahahahaahah!!!!

i'm not sure if it's the better resting, the better weather, the better training hints, or the better mixed drinks the night before, but my three most recent rides have been big improvements over all previous rides -- i've finished faster and fresher on these three rides than i'm used to.

key to my improvement is staying aerobic -- focusing on keeping my HR low and my cadence high. while my meter was working today, i tried to keep the cadence above 90. i tried to keep it above 80 on the weekend. both times, i tried to keep my HR beneath 150, 160 being the comfort threshold, and both times by relaxing more i finished in less time than usual.

searching through old posts to look for stuff to link to for a new post, i recognized that my blog postings can (very broadly) be divided into two categories: the category of where I just did something cool or fun or challenging and most often alone, and i excitedly record the experience, or melancholy-to-downright-unhappy posts where i muse and mumble about why i'm melancholy or downright unhappy, often by means of oblique hints and references without coming right out and saying anything.

sure, i have a bunch of other junk, and some "fiction" too, but the other junk and the fiction is greatly outweighed by the cat1 and cat2 posts.

a large percentage of my "readership" has recently commented on how the blogging has really picked up of late, and i guess there are two reasons for that: i'm more or less generally unhappy (leading to many opaque category 2 posts) and i'm quite enthusiastically exceeding my limits on my bicycle (leading to many long category 1 posts).

on a forum i've been reading of late (can't say which one, it'd be too hilariously lame) a member posted something because he didn't have many real life friends and nobody to talk to. his wife left him to go get pregnant with some other guy. he was rather down in the dumps about it and there were several complications that managed to make things even worse.

like many internet forums on any subject, there were lots of really great, supportive, and wise people that replied. the consensus among people who had advice to give seemed to be, "you've got to just keep on living, man". as vapid as this advice ultimately proves to be, if you don't think about it too much, it can be taken to mean that he (and by extension, you, I, and we) should do the things we enjoy doing to keep us from dwelling on how melancholy to depressing our lives actually happen to be.

and so i must consider myself very well adjusted, by the yardstick of this particular bit of advice, which i suppose is about as useful as any advice could be, since the multitude of cat1 posts indicates that i am indeed "keeping on living" despite being stuck in the sorts of things that motivate me to write the other kind of posts.

once again, then, yay me!

$25 bike pants < $50 bike pants << $100 bike pants.

i could not ride 50 miles in my $25 bike pants.

ow.

there is a giant pile of horseshit on a pedestrian bridge over the 280. it's been there for a week.

if you see me up there, off my bike, with one of these: >:D look out.

my cyclocomputer went totally fargen nuts today, on the stretch of canada rd. between edgewood and 35. HR 225 or 0, speed and cadence 0, speed occasionally showing as 4mph.

the odd thing is that on the exact same stretch of road, in the opposite direction, during the previous 15 minutes -- no problems at all. once i got on to bunker hill, no problems for the rest of the ride.

this is the same general area where the computer has crapped out before, although this time it was borked for the entire stretch of road, instead of on-and-off like the other times.

there was nobody nearby, at least not for the whole time.

so. wtf? anybody have an explanation?

here is the thingy.

my guess is nearby cops with radar guns. eh?

this is weird.

really weird. really really weird. i'm a bit weirded out.

i think the roaster is fixed. i roasted up a batch of unlabeled beans, which i think were yemen. i hope they're yemen, because the roast was very uneven, which would be par for yemen but might otherwise imply a poor agitator.

speaking of the agitator, after much personal agitation, i happened upon a design which definitely works well "in the lab" and has survived one roast. if the stopper nut melts, though, i'm back to the drawing board.

the arm was very unbalanced, so i removed one of the doohickeys and now it's perfectly stable. there's a fin on one end, a doohickey also, and now nothing on the other arm where a doohickey once was. i'm considering digging out the other fin which i purchased, though that may be a tall order, and attaching it to the other arm, which may also be a tall order -- i'm happy to finally not really need to disassemble the roaster.

perhaps the best bet is to find the fin, keep it accessible, and next time i am forced to disassemble, i can attach the fin.

the test batch is going into work so my buddies can tell me whether the JB weld melted into the beans.

daft punk's "aerodynamic" is, as you of course know, an example of "perfect music" -- a song that could not be made better in any way, lifts the spirit when listened to, and just generally kicks a lot of ass all over town. it's hard to get better than "aerodynamic" without bringing out the heavy beethoven guns.

best of all, the song is constructed such that it can be looped. hooray for looping!

but alas, my tubes lack the bass slam to make it work. i do have another set of tubes that i have not tried, a set of tubes that sounded more "solid statey" to me and thus might make up for this deficiency, but instead of trying them, i plugged the cans straight into the lavry and experienced the music as it should be experienced.

even more alarming, though, was the failure of the akg's to produce the proper thump on any hardware. i'm listening on the grados! oh my!

today while biking i suddenly thought of the word "rotwang".

i had heard it before but could not place it. was it a person in an OSC book? someone from an anime? a type of sausage?

nope.

huh. haven't seen that in years.

sore legs today.

is it from my 50 mile ride on sunday? nope.

my 12 mile ride today? nope.

the 75 KB swings I did with a light weight yesterday morning? bingo.

sigh.

my first weekday ride. notes:

lots more dumptrucks and stinky flatbeds. sigh. got passed by a cement truck just as i was starting the hard part of the arse-end of bunker hill.

maybe a return to kb swings, even if it's only for 5 minutes, isn't the best way to recover from a long ride, the day before a training ride. didn't really interfere beyond messing with my head a little on account of the soreness.

weather isn't so nice so early in the morning. yay, i got to wear my new sleeveless jersey. boo, it was underneath my jacket.

angry american: where is this guy from?
accented man: i'm palestinian, dude!

awesome.