doodledee

So yesterday I’m riding my bike home from the office and I’m just tooling along over by that new Pizza Luce that’s going up on Blake Rd in Hopkins and I get to the part of the trail where you need to actually cross Blake.  There are a few cars coming and I have to actually stop for a few seconds and wait for traffic and while I’m sitting there this older dude rolls up behind/next to me on his skinny tire with his spandex and his rocket calves and he doesn’t trackstand or anything but it was clear that when the gap came he wasn’t going to give me honors.  Not that I expected them or anything – what with my 40 pound backpack and fat tires and no spandex – it’s more just the set-up to where I’m going with this.

We both push off at the same time and he glides out ahead of me and cranks up the spinning RPM’s and within a few minutes he opens up maybe a 30 or 40 yard gap.  But yeah, he’s an older dude within a few minutes my Ullrich-esque locomotive has reeled him back in and it was a nice day to just kinda joyride and that’s when I decided to draft him for a while.  Like maybe a mile or two?  And I wasn’t right up on him or anything, but I was maybe 2 lengths back for a long time.  He looked back at me once, but he never said “jackass!” or anything at all really, and it occurred to me that maybe he was ok with it?

Or maybe it’s cool in the first place?  I have no idea what the etiquette for commuter drafting is?  You’d think it’d be just some natural extension of the experience or the lifestyle or whatever.  You roll out, you pick up some like minded pace sharing anonymous strangers, and you gang up and beat the headwind into submission with your many-trumps-one attitude.  Or is that defeating the whole notion of The Individual And His Bike to such a degree that it’s just sorta inconceivable to the culture?  I’m sure google would answer most of these questions, but what’s the point of a stupid blog if you shout them into the wind yourself, right?  Right.

Thanks for the ride, old dude.

The power went out a few weeks ago here at the house and I figured I’d take the opportunity to roll out this new half-baked site I started one evening last November and never got back to.  See, the power supply fan on my other machine is SO LOUD and when the power goes out I really just appreciate how quiet it is in my office.  So I moved the webserving duties to my other little “media server” machine and it’s quiet and fast(er) and none of my old pictures work and the formatting is all jacked and who knows what’ll happen with all that but let’s try this for a while and maybe I’ll get back to fixing all the broken stuff when my current big work project wraps in 2025 or whatever.

And hey – thanks for reading.  It’s been like 10 years now.  And my design skills have gotten no better.  And my content is thinner.  But that’s still a lot of us wasting time together.  And I still think about you all every day.  Omg jk.  Most days I just think about motorcycles, not you.

Um, Soichi Noguchi’s twitpic stream is killing it way harder than anything you or I ever post. No offense. None taken. This one of Japan – seriously aykm? Crazy.
The ruggedness of Atlantis in a lot of the shots from this mission really make them extra fantastic. Check this NASA Pic of the Day from the other day. Atlantis looks like it just rolled in after 2 weeks in the BWCA. It’s really great stuff.

This picture of the Deepwater Horizon blowing up and sinking just kinda stunned me. The size of it, the intensity, the complexity, the bottom starting to tip out of the water, the flatness of the sea, the [unseen] insane aftermath, the whole bit. It’s instantly iconic.
Here’s a full size shot of it in transit, just to get a sense for how big it is.
Good lord what a mess.

Exactly.

Whassup greenthumbs?! Here’s the salad table junior and I built earlier this season. It’s been moving around the backyard soaking up sunshine and sprouting spinach and lettuce for a few weeks now. Starting to come in nicely, right? Right.
What’s a salad table? Trendy in the Times a few years ago, it’s basically just a raised bed on stilts. You build a wooden box with a hardware cloth bottom, fill it with soilless potting mix and compost, plant some seeds, and then water it every so often while you sit back and wait for salad magic to happen. Genius! And it’s high off the ground so the short little bunnies can’t get it. Genius again! And you don’t hurt your back bending over working on it! And you can move it around the yard so it gets full sun in the spring and part sun in the summer!! IT’LL MAKE SALAD ALL SUMMER THIS THING IS LIKE FRICKIN MAGIC, PEOPLE!!
Very easy to build. You all should look into it. The mothership for this idea is really The University of Maryland and their PDF plans and whatnot are solid, but google has plenty of samples and plans and seriously I just made mine up it worked fine it’s a table that lives outside it’s not that complicated. Also this: even Martha has directions!! DaddyT broke it locally. Nice.
Go outside. Dig around. Grow some stuff. Seriously get moving, it’s like mid-May already. I know!

Originally an out-take, this song makes the cut on the reissue of ‘Exile On Main Street’ that hits on May 17. Not sure it’s worth re-buying for the new material, but it’s neat to hear the stuff that didn’t make the album, right? For sure. Because sometimes you forget how good the Stones really were. Ha. Just kidding. No you don’t.

Some dude put together this gmaps mashup that let’s you overlay the oil spill right into your neighborhood. It uses the new Google Earth plugin for maps. Looks like we’d be pretty much wrecked by it. You think they’d let us buy beer on Sunday if this happened? I’ve gotta believe that’s a yes.
The Times ran a piece about the workers today. It had some great graphics and stories and background and whatnot. The technology involved here is nuts. I did some sediment coring/drilling work from boats back in my Geology days and even in shallow midwestern lakes it was crazy complicated. To think they can do it a mile down is one of those “airplanes can’t fly, they’re too heavy” type brainteasers to me.
Crazy stuff all around.

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The thing about having a kick ass daughter is that I’ll get to buy her stuff like this to hang in her room. Though maybe not this year. Maybe for now I’ll go for this one?
Well done, Patricia Canney. Fun stuff. See you next week at the whirl.