Cycling in London: Not for the faint of heart!

Posted on April 8, 2008 by Trick

Fortunately for me I’m completely nuts!

So I’ve been in London (yes the actual City of London) for the past week and a half for work, and part of my adventure was to bring my bicycle with in order to try to ride around London and not get run over by any buses. The weather finally held (and I got my courage up) so I went for a ride. Needless to say, I didn’t die (else this bit of writing would be quite magical, no?)

It’s a bit different riding here. Shit, I’d take downtown Chicago at rush hour any day for a leisurely ride compared to here! Here I am, riding on the opposite sided of the road (which means that right turns are the difficult ones, not left turns!), none of the roads run in a straight line and always seem to be taking me away from the direction I’d like to be going, the roads are narrow and all under some sort of construction, the cabs are equally as crazy as Chicago cabs, and oh yeah — the cyclists here are completely insane as well…it makes for one heck of a ride!

However most importantly, I didn’t get eaten by a big red London bus.  Hooray!

I took a few pictures off Blackfriar’s bridge before the sun went down. Mostly just to prove that I was here. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out more now that the weather isn’t total crap.

Cycling in London == scary. However I did find some interesting resources on TFL for cyclists, and I’ve sent off for some maps. We’ll see how good they are!

If you’re a driver in London and were out today, thank you for not hitting me :)

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Hey Chicago! Voice your opinion for the Ordinance for Bicycle Safety 2008!

Posted on March 3, 2008 by Trick

I was just recently made aware that the CBF has been working hard at an amendment for some city ordinances on cycling which will help define some legal lines that drivers & cyclists can count on.  I think it’s quite reasonable from a purely safety perspective; I do not view this as a way for cyclists to get back at drivers or anything sly, but as a way to help guarantee everyone’s safety by outlining reasonable bits of understanding for cyclists and drivers.  If this is passed, this will be a good way to inform drivers of reasonable expectations so they can be better educated on how to interact with cyclists on the road.  This is a win for both drivers and cyclists in my book!  This amendment if passed, will mandate (snipped from CBF email verbatim):

  • Requiring a minimum of three feet of clearance while passing bicyclists
  • Prohibiting a motorist from opening a door into moving traffic, reducing the danger of “dooring”
  • Raising the fines for vehicles parked in bike lanes or marked shared lanes
  • Requiring motorists to yield to oncoming bicyclists when turning left, which prevents a “left hook” crash
  • Prohibiting motorists from turning right in front of a bicyclist, which prevents a “right hook” crash
  • Requiring motorists to exercise due care for bicyclists in addition to pedestrians

It also outlines some fines for doing bad things as outlined here, but I think that’s just to motivate drivers and I’m not concerned with the money values.  This amendment will help with some of the usual concerns that both myself and several others I’ve ridden with have had in Chicago; it can be quite worrysome cycling in the city and this is a good thing!

So, if you’re living in the city, please voice your two cents to your alderman!  From my understanding, not all of them sit on the Traffic Control & Safety Committee who votes on this, but it’s still good to voice your opinion.  The next meeting of the committee is quite soon – Wednesday March 5th at 9 AM.  If you support this amendment, please make yourself heard to make cycling in the city a safer place!

Feel free to check out a copy of the email going around about this.

The actual legislation is online as well.

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Unfreakingbelieveable: I broke my bike (again)

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Trick

So I’m in Orange County, CA visiting my sister this weekend, and have gone to some length to get my bike out here. So what happens? I demolished my chain within 60 seconds of our first ride. In all my years, I’ve never twisted a chain. Gah!

The wreckage:

[1] [2]

The attempted repair, using nothing but pliers and a standard screwdriver:

[1][2]

’twas unsuccessful, stupid chain won’t rail around the smaller gears. D’oh!

Off to the bike shop in the morning for parts and supplies. In the mean time, we’re off to the local pub to sample the local Guinness :)

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My own Upside-Down-Ternet

Posted on January 27, 2008 by Trick

So after reading about the Upside-Down-Ternet (particularly after seeing it featured on XKCD,) I couldn’t resist. After a few discussions at work, we decided that it would be a bad idea if we actually hijacked the company’s proxy and did this. The thought of 200-some people all calling IT for support help (and support in turn recommending that they all reboot their computers) would be so funny that we all might die of suffocation from laughing so hard. Then again, it might be a good way to go…

Regardless we had to do this. We needed to get someone. So I decided that I’d set up a proxy on my workstation, and have it ready for a devious day.

To prepare, I needed to set up squid and get familiar…it’s been several years since I’ve set up & run a squid proxy.  A quick setup of squid 3 on my router box here at home wasn’t much work at all, and before long I had a running proxy. Hacking in a url redirector script isn’t hard, either. Next step will be to set it running on my box at work!  Let the mischief begin(*evil grin*)

So as a variation on the original, which made me laugh (and I hope makes you laugh,) I give you Swirl-Ternet:

Swirl-Ternet

Hopefully in a week or two I’ll get a few co-workers with this and see how much trouble I can get into!

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Bye Bye Truckers

Posted on January 9, 2008 by Trick

So I finally got rid of my truck, which was sad. However I did something good with it — rather than going thru the hassle of trying to sell it, I donated it using donateacar.com which is a non-profit which facilitates people donating their cars, auctions them off, and donates the proceeds to a charity. Pretty cool, eh? Worked out quite well for me because I knew I’d have some trouble selling my truck here in Chicago.

Importantly, I did save the license plate :)

Been taking lots of pictures :)

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New camera (look, a sandwich!)

Posted on January 6, 2008 by Trick

Go ahead, laugh.  I know it’s funny that I somehow managed to break my old camera while making dinner.  What can I say.  I like to take pictures of things that I cook.  It just seems that it’s a bad idea to do so while excessively drunk, which is what finally did it in the end.

I’m one who loves old things, particularly when it comes to electronics.  Like sting, my P2 router.  Or my truck.  Or…well you name it, it’s old. So let me introduce my old camera – a Fujifilm FinePix A205 with a whopping two megapixels which I bought sometime in 2003:
old camera fuji a205

So here’s my shiny new camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000:

canon sd1000

For laughing effect, here’s tonight’s dinner:

mmm sandwich

(mmm, tasty!)

(no cameras were hurt in the process of making this dinner.)

To make life tastier, it worked right out of the box w/ gphoto and f-spot.  Wohoo!

I did however learn that the latest trunk of libgphoto2 is breaking ABI, which upsets f-spot’s crufty old version of libgphoto2-sharp.  Perhaps I’ll get back on the horse and get that sorted out sometime soon…

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Lesson in Programming: Why those /* (funny) */ comments are so important

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Trick

At work we always marvel about the comments we come across in our code. Indiana Jones stories that somehow get related back to the code by it, how tired the programmer was when writing the code, indications of the [lack of] sobriety of the programmer, random musings about various wildlife…you name it. There’s nothing better than finding a gem. Feel free to submit your own stories.

Actually, I take that back. There is! Discovering your own gems!

So this isn’t exactly code, but it really got me. When I upped to GNOME 2.20, I noticed my task list applet had some gibberish on the right-hand side of it. Strange, eh? Perhaps some sort of bug, perhaps? Naw, something that obvious would’ve been spotted a long time ago. I’ve done something strangely, I was sure of it. As always, a visual is best [red indicates my thoughs at the time…]:

Task Selector: Hmm….

It took me a few weeks of not being able to read such small text and not bothering to even try to before I even thought twice about it. It’s scary. It’s new. It’s something. It’ll go away. Or I’ll figure out what it’s there for.

Ah hah! All it took was a few drinks, and it all made sense. Those must be workspace names! But…uh…gosh, those are strange names when you manage to look close enough to read them. “comes after 11” — who the hell named these things?!

Yep, that’d be me. Guilty as charged.

Workspace Switcher Prefs - Hah

And I remember. Years ago. Naming my workspaces because “Workspace {1..4}” simply was unacceptable to me. But there was no good reason to stick a proper name on the workspace anyway, so I didn’t. I bet I childishly giggled to myself while writing those. But now it seems they’re used. And I’m laughing even more. Yep. Gem discovered.

Moral of the story: It’s better than finding $20 in your back pocket!

For those of you who can count, what /is/ after 11? I could never figure it out.

[but then I looked it up on Wikipedia…lo and behold!]

/* note to reader: it’s the american dream! [eddie izzard] */

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Storm carnage…

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Trick

So I finally got my power turned back on tonight a bit after 6:00…have been without since Thursday afternoon.  Only really frustrating part was throwing out a lot of good food.  Hardest part was trying to figure out what to do with myself having no computers/internet other than my N770 on GPRS.  Mostly looking forward to a warm shower!

I wasn’t home during the storm and downtown (just a few miles away) it wasn’t that bad down there.  Neighbors reported that it was the scarriest storm they’ve been thru (for whatever reason, Chicago seems to never really get hit that hard?)  One even mentioned that the windows in their home were bowing from the crazy winds/pressure.

I’m amazed by some of the huge trees that came down — uprooted and all.  The pictures speak for themselves.

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Can I possibly destroy any more hardware?

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Trick

In the last 30 days, I’ve killed so much hardware it’s not even funny anymore.

  • Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
    • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
  • Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
    • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
    • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
    • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
  • Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
    • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
  • My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
  • Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
  • Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)

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Death to the Zen Micro

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Trick

So yesterday I was quite convinced that I was going to make it down to see the Chicago Air and Water Show, hoping I could see the Thunderbirds.  Well lets just say that we got water alright.  I stood out in the rain for well over an hour hoping to see something, but it turns out that they cancelled much (if not all of it).  I came home soaked to the bone, but I had been smart enough to put all the electronics in my bad inside a spare plastic bag — or had I?

Last night I was unpacking my bag and found my Creative Zen Micro down at the bottom of the bag.  It was a sad sight.  I might as well have just gone for a swim in the lake while I was at it, because it was dripping, and I could see water inside the screen.  Tonight, with the help of this handy article at hardwarezone.com, I took it apart and found what I expected — pools of water inside the device. I’m hopeful that I can pull the ole “let it dry, reassemble and it’ll work” game, but I’m doubtful.

Does anyone have an old/spare MTP device that they’d be willing to donate or provide cheaply so I can work on MTP stuff for Banshee?  I’m going to comb eBay of course, but would be happy to take one off someone’s hands if they have a spare.  I don’t really have the cash or need these days to buy anything new.  If you have one, drop me a line!

In the mean time, I guess I’ll just have to write really clean code for Banshee that works perfectly, right? ;)

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