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M o n a x,
Yet another blog.

Tony Adams
email: tony at atoms.net

web: atoms.net

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Please don't compare Sarah Palin to a hummingbird

Please don't compare Sarah Palin to a hummingbird. Hummingbirds are admirable and stunning birds who can fly across the Gulf of Mexico without stopping, who brighten our gardens and pollinate our plants. They give joy and remind us about what is really important in life.

In fact, please do not disrespect any form of animal life, no matter how low that life form is perceived to be, by comparing Sarah Palin to it.. Even the lowly earthworm aerates our soil and makes our gardens healthy. The feared and despised leech has powerful medicinal qualities.

Sarah Palin is out there all by herself and in this world for Sarah Palin only. Leave hummingbirds out of it.

Scout
Dearborn, Michigan
May 27th, 2010
7:16 am

Reading the comments anywhere, even at the New York Times can be a painful experience. But this reader comment on The Palin Brand reminds me why it is sometimes worth the pain!

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'83 Schwinn Continental SOLD

Four or five years ago I bought one of the last Built in Chicago Schwinns, a 1983 Continental. I got it from a guy with a guy with a basement and garage full of bikes. Sure, it weighed a ton by current standards, but it has been rock solid reliable and it has been a great bike for me. It has put up with a LOT of abuse taking me through lots of Chicago winters, crappy Chicago streets and lots of adventures off road in the forest preserves. But, I've started to accumulate parts for my next* commuter/daily rider so when the opportunity to sell the Continental came along I rather impulsively decided to sell it so that I'd be motivated to get moving on the next project.

Behold those chrome forks!

*The next commuter/city bike project will be built around an 88 Schwinn Le Tour frame. It is a frame up build as it has pretty much nothing on it: no fork even!

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Facebook: from bad to worse

At the risk of this humble blog turning into just another jihad against Facebook, here is yet more damming information about Facebook's disregard for your privacy.

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Birds and Oil

It is just me or is this blurb from Reuters both hilarious and sad?
President Obama is hoping that a plan to allow oil and gas exploration off the coast of Virginia will kill three birds with one stone.

That was the blurb on the front page pointing to Obama announces drilling expansion for climate push.

I just cringe whenever I see the word "Birds" and "oil" in that kind of proximity.

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I'm not joining facebook

Forgive the impersonal email, but I've been getting a few invitations to join facebook, and each time I get one I intend to write back to the sender explaining why I won't be accepting their invitation but I've had a hard time getting around to it. So rather than pretend that this screed is a personal email to you I'm just sending you this mass rant. You might be getting this because you actually invited me to join facebook, or you might be getting it because I've been directed to look at some photo or video or something you posted on facebook, only to find that I don't have access because I am not a member. That membership thing right there is the core of my main complaint about facebook.

Facebook is a walled garden. The internet is supposed to be free and open. Walled gardens are excusable for private land, but Facebook is a walled garden pretending to be a park. I'd probably enjoy seeing the video of your dog applying for his first job, but posting it on Facebook does not make it available to me since I am not a member of Facebook. When you invite people to your home to watch a slideshow from your recent trip to Antigua do you make them fill out a form first? Do you ask them to list their favorite movies and their cat's IQ? You could suggest that I could solve this problem by simply joining facebook. You would be correct, but what I object to is the principle of a private internet. I join facebook today to look at the adorable video of your four year old niece doing Henry V's speech at Agincourt. Fine. What about tomorrow? Do I then need to join MySpace to listen to my best friend from elementary school's nephew recite Homeric epics? And the day after? Do need to sign up on Linktdin to download your scratch and sniff resume? When does it end? I'll tell you when it ends. It ends yesterday. I'm not signing up for any of it.

And then there is the financial problem - facebook continues to lose money.Why does this matter to us as users? Well it may not matter for a while, but eventually facebook will have to do something to earn a profit. They have nothing of value now but an immense store of personal data and hundreds of millions of users. Unless they figure out some other way to make money, eventually they will have to sell that data somehow since they can't sell their users. There have been several occasions over the years where facebook has decided to try some new way to make money by compromising user privacy. Who knows what they'll try next? Will it be your grandson's DNA sequence that "accidentally" gets revealed to Martian terrorists next time? I'm not willing to risk it.

And finally, (for now anyway) the founder and current head of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is a bad person. Whenever possible I try not to contribute to enterprises which pay bad people large sums of money. I'm basing my judgment on one event, which may be harsh, but it was the only time I got to experience Zuckerberg without the filter of the media. I was at the SXSW conference in Austin in 2008. One of the keynote events featured Zuckerberg being interviewed by a young blogger/journalist. She started picking on him a bit about something - I can't recall what it was. Instead of exhibiting the least bit of grace, instead of taking the opportunity to help a youngster learn how to conduct a civil disagreement in public, he turned vicious - mocking and berating his interviewer. Now that was bad enough, and one could argue that she had it coming given that she started down the path of conflict. But sensing the audience's willingness to take his side, Zuckerberg egged on crowd to join in on his taunts and in the end completely humiliated his interviewer to the roaring glee of much of the attendees. It was sickening. Certainly his ability to do such a thing, to get a crowed riled up is a sign of leadership chops and great personal power - but to use that power to hurt a person and stir up a mob to magnify that hurt is inexcusable and unforgivable.

I'm not telling you what to do, but rather what I refuse to do and why.

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The Charter for (limited) Compassion
I was pretty excited when I heard about The Charter for Compassion. I even added a badge in the left column of this blog. It might still be there urging you to "join the conversation".

I was excited about the idea, but now that I've read it I'm pretty disappointed. For me, compassion helps us recognize our commonality with all the creatures on our planet. The charter is pretty clearly limited to humanity. Humans or humanity is mentioned at least once in each of its four paragraphs. Humanity's membership in the animal kingdom is ignored. If we limit our compassion only to members of our own species, this selfishness will continue to be our undoing.

Buddhists seek enlightenment "for the benefit of all sentient beings" and this clearly includes animals. If they could figure that out hundreds of years ago why should it be so hard to draft a charter for compassion now that is not so exclusive?

I hesitate to even Affirm this document, as simple and painless as that act would be, I feel at the moment that I just cannot do it in good conscience.

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Bottom Bracket, Cranks upgrade

Thanks to a lot of helpful peeps at Blue City Cycles, BikeForums.net and The Chainlink, I finally upgraded the Schwinn's bottom bracket, cranks and pedals. As you may be aware, these old Schwinns have a larger unthreaded bottom bracket, so tossing in a replacement cartridge is not an option. There is a beautiful adapter though, made by Truvative, which converts the big old American BB to a nice standard Euro version. It was supposed to be a straightforward operation, but my particular early 1980's Schwinn has an obstruction - an inner sleeve which gets in the way of the screws that hold the two sides of the adapter together. After a lot of consulting on bikeforums.net and the Chainlink, I decided to file a path for the two obstructed screws. Yes, it took hours of filing, but it was worth it. Or at least I keep telling my stubborn and frugal self that it was worth it.

Here are the two channels I filed:

Here I test the two screws to make sure they clear all obstacles before pounding in the non-drive side adapter: They threaded in clean with plenty of clearance in case I didn't get the second adapter exactly lined up.

Here are both sides of the adapter installed:

And here is the Shimano UN54 installed:

add some (used Sugino $20 at LBS) cranks:

and some parts bin pedals:

and viola, a couple solid days of work and my twenty minute upgrade is done:

I think the bike lost at least a couple of pounds. It feels much tighter and smoother, but it was due for an overhaul anyway, so it is impossible to say for sure how much of that improvement is due to the upgrade itself.

tags: bike, DIY

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Brand New Music from Much Earlier this Year

uh, oh, two music posts in a row...

Somehow it took me six months to get wind of (prepare to cringe at the name of the artist) Das Racist and Wallpaper's Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Amazing!

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Air

I love this French duo. If I had to pick a list of my top five favorite bands I'm pretty sure that Air would be on it. Certainly if that list was limited to artists who are currently producing new music. And given that they are they only band which has ever asked me to install their widget on my blog... hey - why not?

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Green Rice
Forgive this mostly a note to myself... At the moment I'm eating some Trader Joe's Indian food. It is pretty good and vegetarian and one can't beat the convenience really. A hugely great feature of this paneer dish is Spinach Basmati Rice.

The rice is not just yummy, but it is green.

So my next project will be to replicate that somehow. I'm guessing that including some fresh spinach in the water with the rice when cooking it will do the trick. Spinach or turnip greens or anything that leaches green... It won't be as dramatic with brown rice, but I reckon it will still be fun AND tasty.

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An Ancient Suggestion
Every time unemployment approaches ten percent, the idea of a 32 work week gets trotted out by the usual passel of labor agitators, leftists and layabouts. For example... oh wait. Perhaps this time it is only me?

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New Blogware?
It is sloth or boredom that drives me to consider switching to another blogging system. Blosxom is great, and there is probably a way to integrate it with some kind of photo-blogging stuff, but I'm too lazy to figure it out.

So, over the next few decades, be prepared to see this space a changin'.

mebbe...

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OpenID
I'm looking into OpenID. I needed to update this blog to test it. So this post is rather short on the usual drama and gossip to which I have allowed you to become accustomed. For that, I am steeped in regret.

I am grateful that your forgiveness remains without bounds.

Using these excellent instructions I was able to set up and start using a delegated OpenID in just a few minutes. But this is not ready for grandma. (with tons of exceptions of course) She is not willing to edit the HEAD section of her blog, assuming she has one in the first place.

There has to be a better solution to single sign on than OpenID or whatever half-baked gizmo Microsoft cooked up. Doesn't there?

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Hacking A Bank Alert
I had this crazy idea of setting up an automated alert to let me know when I'd racked up $1k on my credit card. I'm trying to support the economy by spending, but I'm also try to keep my spending under control, so I figured setting up a personal "soft limit" would help me to both.

Doing such a thing however appeared to be impossible. There were a lot of preconfigured alerts, but none which would be triggered by reaching an arbitrary limit. But then I saw one that could be exploited to serve that purpose. There is an alert that will fire when one gets $____ away from the credit limit. I set it to fire when I got to $My Credit Limit minus $1000 away from my credit limit. Don't tell my card issuing bank. I have this feeling that they would prefer that we don't set arbitrary soft limits for ourselves.

tags: financial, self-help, credit-card, hack

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Non Profit Status for Newspapers
Last week we made some angel hair pasta with mushrooms. Somehow, it was not very good. We improvised a few ingredients, but in the end we decided to just dispose of the recipe and move on.

I'd clipped the recipe out of The Times, a Lerner neighborhood weekly that went bust a couple of years back. That clipping was like Proust's madeleine for me. Ok, not for my entire life, but it did bring on some serious wistful nostalgia for the era of little independent newspapers. By any reasonable standard it was not a great paper. It was not even very good - but it was the only reliable place to find out about pancake breakfasts and community orchestra auditions and read a pretty complete police blotter for my otherwise neglected by the news media northwest side neighborhood. It was bad, but I miss it.

This week I see some potentially good news: Senator proposes nonprofit status for newspapers posted at the SF Gate.

Stuff like this gives me a shred of hope.

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AcktiveTrans
A couple of weeks ago, Kara and I attended the annual member meeting of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. At the meeting we were informed that the organization had changed its name to better describe its expanded mission. The CBF is now the Active Transportation Alliance.

At the time I was somewhere between crestfallen and dumbfounded, but I figured that I should give the change some time to sink in. Perhaps I'd get used to it.

Almost three weeks have gone by and I've moved from crestfallen to livid. The name is horrible. Even worse than the vague name is the cold and corporate logo.

Pedestrians, transit users and bicyclists certainly have a lot of overlapping interests. I commute to work on a bike almost every day of the year. I do most of my shopping on a bike and do as much riding to social and entertainment events as possible on a bike. But it is great to walk once in a while also. One sees far more stuff at walking speed and when one only needs to watch out for motor vehicles when crossing streets. I also use public transit once in a while - sometimes in conjuction with a bike trip and sometimes not. I'm grateful for the work that the CBF has done to get the Metra and the CTA to be more accomodating of bikes. As a user of all these modes of "active transportation" it is obvious that improving transit and conditions for walking will make Chicago not just a better place to bike, but a better place to live.

I don't have a problem with an expanded mission as long as the historical mission of bicycle advocacy does not get neglected. But I joined the CBF because it was the local bicycling organization. It did more than advocacy, it - and at the time I could say "we" - celebrated biking and recognized that biking was more than just a way to get from point A to point B.

Bicycling is more than just a mode of transportation. As often as I can, I go for aimless rides because it is a fun and glorious thing to do. I get some exercise and I don't pollute or need to send funds out of the country to fill my tank, but I don't do it for those reasons. I do it for the sheer joy of motion, feeling the wind on my face, seeing a new neighborhood or seeing an old neighborhood in a new light, from a particularly flexible vantage point on a finely tuned, but simple and inexpensive old American machine that allows my body to propel us along with amazing efficiency and impressive control. One is never more engaged in motion than when one is having a great bike ride. If it was about transportation than why would all of my best rides be big circles? The best of biking is not about getting from point A to point B, but about getting from point A and back to point A again with the greatest possible amount of fun. That is not transportation. That is riding.

By removing any reference to bicycles from the name, the organization has exorcised its very soul.

The most appalling aspect of the change is that they did this without consulting their membership. It seems that they (over)paid consultants to run this crap past some focus groups, but the members, people who allegedly drive the organization were not consulted. Institutions are generally soul-less, so this should have come as no surprise. But the CBF seemed different. It probably _was_ different.

I will give it a bit more time, but my current plan is to request a refund of this year's membership dues and will not renew my membership next year.

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End the War on Terror - Gary Kamiya at Salon
The last thing I want to do with this blog is just post links to "real" pieces and perhaps add a line or two of glowing praise or bitter lament, but once in a while I reserve the right to take the easy path. Especially when something is as good as: Why Obama should end the "war on terror" by Gary Kamiya at Salon.

Stuff like this gives me a shred of hope.

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I will spend
Upon learning that the RNC spent $150k on clothing and accessories for Sarah Palin and her family in September, liberal whiners are suggesting that us average joes won't spend $150k on clothing in our lifetimes.

Well based on an average of my last three months spending on clothing, aproximmately $15 a month, I could EASILY get up to $150k in my lifetime. I would only have to live for ~833 years.

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So much for iGoogle
For most of this year my default startpage* has been Google's portal iGoogle. While iGoogle is not perfect, it seemed to provide the best balance between simplicity and power for my needs. A while ago Google started to experiment with the layout moving the main navigation tabs from the top where they were mostly out of the way and at any rate only used one line or so of valuable screen space to the side were the two (in my case) tabs now result in an entire column of almost nothing. The result is a huge and absurd waste of space. During the experimentation phase of the project one could turn it off. Google now appears to be imposing the new layout on all their users.

It is bad enough that this change is imposed on us without giving us any option to turn it off, but the dealbreaker for me was that this wretched waste of screen real estate was imposed on us silently. One day the screen is just 80% less useful - 20% full of nothing but two links which formerly stayed on top of the display area out of the way. I'm sure there is a plan up someone's sleeve to add more tabs in that column - or perhaps I failed to add them myself? But my experience right now is that iGoogle has outfeatured its usefulness.

I'm switching back to netvibes.

*actually my browsers tend to start with a set of four or five tabs including ssome kind of widgety portal thingy such as iGoogle or netvibes.

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a route and a test of schmoogle map embedding

View Larger Map

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Live Music Four Nights in a Row
Thurs Sept 25 Calexico at Millenium Park. Calexico always puts on a great show, but this was all the way over the top. They redefined the top and went so far over it that it probably looked like the bottom from up there. If they could see it at all.

Friday Sept 26 Coctails, Anteitam and KatJon at the Hideout. Pretty amazing show.

Saturday Sept 27 Handsome Family, Megan Reilly backed by Anteitam!) and Speck Mountain at the Hideout. I cannot even begin to describe how great this show was.

Friday and Saturday night's shows were the Carrot Top Records Sweet 16 Party the proceeds of which were directed to the Accelerated Cure Project.

Sun Sept 28 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Riv - this was one of those "I glad I can say that I saw him live" musicians who you then realize that he is one of those rare acts who despite putting on a heck of a show, might be better enjoyed via their recordings.

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Cowhorn Project
The bullhorn bar on the Schwinn project got a push by way of a broken front brake cable.

I had been accumulating the parts for a few weeks and figured that I might get around to it later in the Autumn (Glorius Autumn!). But having new cables laying around already rendered doing the new bars an obvious solution to the busted cable problem since routing the cables was gonna be the hardest part of the project. Or so I thought.

The picture shows the aero bar brake handles installed upside down. That was not my plan, but after I'd sawed up the new drop bars (thanks Ross!) and removed the old stock drop bars and was in the process of mounting the brakes I realized that the aero bars had a slot for routing the cable out, but it was only on one side - the top. It still makes no sense to me, but there I was with only a couple of choices: either fly the cables out of the top, which would look sloppy and diminish the value of a simpler kit, or, drill some kind of new escape route for the cable, which given my set of skills would be some combination of dangerous and impossible.

Who saves the day but the above mentioned Ross, who gave me the wide drop bars for the project in the first place, "How about mounting them upside down?" he asked. So that is what I did.

Except for those brake levers themselves, the project is a huge improvement. There can't be that much difference in weight, but the bike feels like it lost ten pounds. The bars are about an inch wider then the stock drop bars they replaced. I'm not sure if I can get used to how wierd they look and feel with the upside down levers, but I'm gonna give it a shot. If I had it all to do over again I'd get some bar end reverse brake levers, some of which have the added advantage of being available in all black.

• new bars: free
• tape: $4 (really! at Irv's)
• aero bar levers: $20
• cables $8

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Customer Service Almost as Bad as Netflix
Here is the text I submitted to a How Is Our Customer Service survey from VirginMobileUSA:

really? you actually care? First I email to inform the team that the images were not working for me UNLESS I used Internet Explorer. To me, this is just unacceptable. I can't stand using anything from Microsoft, especially their lame ass browser. I get a response asking me to CALL TO RESOLVE MY PROBLEM. I AM NOT THE ONE WITH THE PROBLEM. I was just reporting a problem out of the goodness of my heart.

Then I get this response telling me to, wait, this is just the most insane part, telling me to ADJUST MY SETTINGS IN IE.

I freaking E.

If anyone else even came close to providing the kind of deal i get from VirginMobile I'd be out of here in hot second.

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Bike Insurance?
I just caught wind of some insurance which is supposedly available for bicycles. The anecdotal rate I heard for a Chicago resident is $130 a year. I've had one bike stolen (so far) in the twenty years that I've lived in Chicago. Twenty years at this rate works out to $2600 for the insurance. I hesitate to add it ALL up, but while my total spending for bikes, maintenance, parts, accessories certainly adds up, insurance would not reduce expenditures on tires, patches, freewheels, bearings, etc anyway.

My Chicago Bike Purchase History
since 1988

1. The bike that got stolen (can't recall what it was < $300 for sure)
2. Ross Mountain Bike ~ $250
3. Raliegh Hybrid ~ $300
4. The French Bike - $50 (broke crank and sold bike via CL for $30 so) $20
5. The Wisconsin era Trek 500 free (but $300 of parts and labor)
6. The Chicago era Schwinn Continental $80 + $200 (new wheel, single speed conv, etc)

But wait, it gets worse. Let's imagine that one put that $130 a year into some kind of savings vehicle with an interest rate of 4%. After twenty years that account would be worth $3,871.15.

The moral of the story is certainly not an original idea, but like most good ideas it is worth repeating:
Don't Insure Anything You Can Afford to Replace.

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Open Source IM Client
Pidgin is an open source IM client. I just installed it on a Windows machine at work. (I know, it is appalling to mention Windows. Sorry). It works and looks great. I recommend it to anyone who finds herself stuck using Windows.

I found myself growing weary of the antiquated look of Gaim. It looked like some cheesy Linux app hastily ported over to windows. I finally decided to look around for something better.

The hilarous part is that Pidgin turns out to BE Gaim refreshed and renamed after some legal hassles with AOL. (As if we needed any more reasons to hate AOL). It has been out for over a year.

It is axiomatic in software circles that people don't bother to upgrade software when their existing stuff gets the job done without causing too much pain.

Apparently that is true even for software developers.

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Bad Chain Goes Bankrupt
Speaking of weakness, I also have something like a weakness for cheesy family casual restaurant chains. I'm not sure what it behind it - some mixuture of nostalgia and a desire to embrace the mainstream - or at least to try to understand the mainstream experience? I dunno. All I know is that even though I know that the odds are good that the food will be bad, I still feel something pulling me toward the soul-less chains that infest suburbia, the interstate exchanges and even formerly sacred places.

My most recent adventure provided further data for the "food will be bad" argument. The wyfe and I stopped in at a Bennigan's in Chicago for a beer and a snack on our way to a (yet another bad) play at the Goodman. We somewhat miraculously managed to get some good local beer and an order of chips and salsa. The chips were fine - not great, but edible at least. The salsa however was an embarassment to the name. The flavor and consistency were identical to that of a cheap generic pasta sauce out of a jar. No. Make that a can. It was just about unbeliveable - I mean, they should perhaps get a speck of credit for being creative, but at least carry on the creativity to the menu - call it "Chips and Ragu".

With this trauma fresh in mind it therefore came as absolutely no surprise to see that the entire chain has gone bankrupt.

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AMA
I have a bit of a weakness for joining membership supported organizations. My most recent binge was joing the American Motorcyclist Association. The group looked pretty good on paper, but I was not aware of a ton of controversy and bad sentiment which had sprung up over the past decade over the group's priorities and organization. They do still list their priorities as "Rights, Riding and Racing" in that order, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for a while and see how it pans out.

I was further encouraged today by the news that Erik Buell was appointed to the board of the AMA. The Buell website claims that: "Buell Motorcycles are born from the belief that every innovation must be focused on doing what's right for the rider." Which sounds like a marketing schpiel, but as far as I can tell, this is actually true. I don't have any interest in racing. I think it is a bad idea to burn fossil fuels for entertainment or sport - so it was difficult for me to get very excited about the Buell mission in general when it is so wrapped up in producing sport bikes.

But my Buell Ulysses just happens to be a sport bike - albeit without the uncomfortable ergonomics of a typical sport bike. It also happens to be a great touring bike and handles crappy roads, dirt roads and gravel pretty brilliantly. I bought it because I had become convinced that an "Adventure" bike was as close as I'd get to the ideal motorcycle for me. I had been planning on finding an airhead BMW GS or something like that, but a series of catastrophic transmission failures on my 1982 BMW R100RT disillusioned me with that marque. Casting a somewhat wide net, I started looking for a new bike in the spring of 2007 and stumbled onto this engineering marvel. I was hooked.

If you would have told me ten years ago that I'd be re-assured to find that the head of a domestic sport bike company was appointed to the board of the AMA, I would have laughed in your face. But we all change and here today I'm greeting that news with a mixture of delight and relief.

(It is ok. You can call me a dork.)

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Connect to Server
I actually used AppleCare today, so I feel like less of a sap for buying it.

Upon trying to use the "Connect to Server" feature of Mac OS X, I found that I could not type in the "Server Address" box. Pretty weird. I did the usual diagnosticky stuff, scoured the internet for docs or forum discussions and even resorted to the Microsoft Tuneup (restarting the computer). No luck.

So I called AppleCare and after about ten minutes the helpful tech had me move a configuration file out of its expected spot and restart the computer. It worked like a charm. SO just to save you a call should it ever happen to you, here is what fixed the probem.

1. Find this file: "com.apple.finder.plist" in /[Your Home Directory]/Library/Preferences/
2. Trash the file (or to be extra safe, just move it to your desktop).
3. Restart the computer. If all is good, and if you have not done so already, delete the file you moved.

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Married!
Really! Check it out!

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Ad Long Last
After much fruitless resistance, I've finally caved in to the relentless demands to show ads on this blog. Don't worry, I'll try to spend most of the income on local, organic ale (and liquor) and parish carnival raffle tickets.

In case there was any doubt, it turns out in fact, that I am a complete moron. I set up a Google Adsense account a couple of days ago. Trivial! Then I generated an ad and added the code to my homopage - also trivial. I did not see any ads. The help docs at Schmoogle warn that in some rare cases it may take up to 48 hours for ads to appear on a new site. So I wait.

Two days later I'm still not seeing any ads. I pore over the docs again and notice a suggestion in the Troubleshooting section about... you've already guessed? Ad blocking utilities.

d'oh

As soon as I disabled the ad blocking for my domain I started seeing ads immediately.

PS
I will be performing in Milly's Orchid Show on Saturday July 19, 2008.

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Spring 2008
This is just a stub, ok, a set of stubs which I hope to flesh out later. This is a partial list of stuff I've been taking in or taking on lately.

• Jim White and Orso at the Old Town School of Folk Music
• Drews Eatery - vegan Italian sausage!
• 250 Mile Motorbike ride with my friend Mike
• The Strangerer by Mickle Maher - an amazingly great play. I've worked a few shifts at the box office
• attended a prayer service and opening of The Keiskamma Altarpiece. It was pretty amazing.
• I got my R100RT back from Memphis!
• Veggie Bite - sure it is horrifyingly decorated, and the service is erratic, but it is vegetarian fast food! It is a good time to be alive.
• Will Dunne's sweet, yet brilliant Ascension of Carlotta at the new 16th Street Theater in Berwyn (yes! Berwyn)
• Artropolis -we got in free by riding our bikes!
• Merlo on Maple - like dining on anohter planet
• Pilsen Art Walk
• Chant in Hyde Park where we discovered the Gin Mule - The Perfect Drink
• A Day at Northwestern
• Union - best pizza in Evanston
• WhiskyFest

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SXSW
I have an undone todo list a mile long. One of the many things on it is to at least scribble a few notes about SXSW 2008 from which I "just" returned a couple of months ago. (I back dated this file so that it would get a date closer to the event.) I just heard a song on the awesome KCRW which prompted me to go look up the Republic Tigers. One of the first hits was this badly streaming video from their showcase at SXSW - perhaps the best showcase I missed.

So forgive me dear reader, but this is one of those Notes to Myself about catching up on the life story backlog.

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Miles
Some participants on a local bikey mailing list have been reporting their annual miles ridden as tallied by their cyclometers. In a new(?) twist this year, one of them calculated the amount of gasoline that those miles would have consumed if travelled by automobile.

The best ideas are always worth stealing.

I don't have a cyclometer installed so I will have to guesstimate. My commute is 80 miles a week. Social, recreational and errands account for at least another 20 miles a week on average. (A lot more during the summer, but a lot less during the winter.) My average is probably more than 100 miles a week, but it is is probably somewhere around there and one hundred is such a nice even figure I think I'll stick with it.

So - 5200 miles a year on the bicycle - the equivalent of a round trip to Ketchikan, Alaska. At 25 MPG, that works out to a savings of 208 gallons. Not spewing all that pollution into the air is a good enough reason to ride, but there are of course more immediately selfish benefits as well such as the ~$645 those gallons would have cost at $3.10 per. (I am not perfect of course. I did put about 3k on my motorcycle ~45 MPG).

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After (new kitchen faucet)
The kitchen remodelling, started just seven years ago, has taken a great leap forward. For years I've been living with an ever so slightly leaking faucet. A new cartridge probaby would have fixed it, but the faucet was ugly and not even remotely period appropriate for the circa 1928 bungalow - so instead of fixing it the plan was to replace it. But of course I had other things to do so this got put off. Then about a month ago things got much worse. The old Moen would sometimes not shut off! I could always manage to get it to stop after a bit of fiddling, but it seemed that it would only be a matter of time before I'd have to resort to using the water supply valves. That would have been too much rigmarole for even me to bear.

The amazing thing to me is the tremendous amount of satisfaction I get from looking at the thing - or even using it - and then realizing that I am just now up to the normal baseline of most people's kitchen faucet experience. But for me, it is an occasion for immense gratitude.

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New Server (again)
Wow. A year and a half of neglect! I just moved atoms.net to a new host and in the process, realized that this blog was seriously neglecticated.

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Florence - Rome
In March of 2006, I went to Florence and Rome to look at art and architecture and see what pizza is like in Italy. I took some photos. This account is rendered more or less chronologically and probably does not take advantage of hypertext in the way that it should.

5 Marzo, 2006
Pizzaria La Routa, via Angelo Emo 25. I spend an hour wandering lost... well, sort of lost. I have a map on which I can plot my lostness nearly exactly. I was shooting for an area just outside the eastern walls of the Vatican. One wrong turn and I seemed to be irrecoverably stuck on the west side of that nutty Vatican. Not that I'd actually seen any such Vatican at that point - just a big looming can't-get around-it hill. After pursuing a few dead ends - uphill dead-ends of course, I see a pizzarria. Wasn't that what I set out to find anyway?
Here in the states we also have a thing that goes by the name "Pizza Margharita" but it is a different animal. At La Routa, and at pretty much every other dozen or so pizza places I visited, a Pizza Margherita is a thin crust pizza with a small amount of tomato sauce and a generous pile of mozzarella cheese. Not slices of fresh mozzarella, just shredded regular old mozarella. The crust at La Routa was extremely thin - the thinnest I'd have on my whole trip. A few seconds of spying at the open kitchen revealed the secret tool for this amazingly thin and consistently thin crust - a rolling pin!

Now I'm not gonna name any names, but a dear friend of mine chastized me up one side and down the other a year or so ago for using a rolling pin on my pizza crusts. It seemed like the obvious way to go. However, in the USA it is simply not done. Observation of a few pizza chefs in action here confirmed it. After my chastizement and my abandonment of the pin my crusts DID improve dramatically. But I was never aiming for anything as thin as the La Routa crust. So there you have it.

Slices or Squares?
Another burning controversy in Chicago anyway is the Slice vs Squares debate. Chicago pizzarias have been cutting their larger pizzas into tiny squares since the beginning of time. The reasoning is that given the less foldable crust, a small square is easier to manage than a big sloppy slice of the size that would result from cutting a huge pizza into slices. Newcomers to the area, especially those from the east coast find this practice to be a heresy of the most soul endangering proportions. A pizza must be cut into slices! they claim. In Rome if you get whole pizza it is not cut AT ALL except by the customer. You get a pie perhaps a bit larger than your plate. There is none of this small, large, extra-large, somewhat extra large rigamarole either. If you need more pizza you just order more pizzas.

to be continued

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From: viewer@pbs.org

Subject: PBS
Date: December 16, 2005 9:04:23 AM CST
To: tony@asdfasdfatomssdfgfds.net

Dear Mr. Adams:

Thank you for writing to PBS.

We apologize for the frustration you have experienced checking the schedules of the two PBS stations you receive. We have forwarded your comments to our Interactive department for their review and consideration. Feedback from our viewers is important when we are making our decisions, so thank you for writing.

We hope you continue to enjoy the wide variety of programming available on your local PBS stations.

Sincerely,
Rosie
PBS Viewer Services

At 04:39 PM 12/15/2005 -0800, you wrote:

----- Original Message -----
Thursday, December 15, 2005 1:54:14 PM
Subject: Contact Us
To: Bowser
"Click your preferred PBS station."

I don't prefer either one of Chicago's PBS stations. I simply want to know when the program will be on. It may be more convenient for me to watch the program on either one of Chicago's PBS stations.

By forcing me to choose one or the other, I have to go back and go through the whole thing again to see if the broadcast on whichever station I didn't choose the first time works better with my schedule.

Please consider adjusting your UI.

Thanks and keep up the (otherwise) great work,

Tony

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The 30th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was last week. NPR did a largish piece on it. Of course they played bits of the song throughout the piece.
I never realized it before, but that song was about an event which had *just* happened. A top forty song which told the epic story of a contemporary catastrophe. There was actual storytelling in a song that became a huge hit. It is unimaginable today. Of course there are countless examples in the tiny niche markets of folk or alt-college-whatever and I suppose a decipherable story graces the occasional hip-hop song, but who ever hears the story? Who will still be talking about any of them in 30 years?

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Taste of Polonia
By the time I got there around 6:45 or so the Ampol Aires were on the polka stage. They were awesome. The real stuff. I cannot even begin to describe how great they were. I enjoyed them tremendously even *before* I drank any beer.

So anyway, the beer situation. It looked mighty bleak initially. There was only one beer tent in the big main area of the fest and it was only selling Okocim. Okocim is not bad, but like most european beers, I find it boring. I get one for $4.50 and wander around listening to music and ogling the dames, of which there were gajillions. Then, over toward the polka stage (the west end of the fest) I find another beer tent - more of a hut. They have the regular Okocim on tap near the hut, but the hut is selling cans of different kind of Okocim. I ask one of the hombres what the deal is with the cans. He tells me that it is "Moscne" which is Polsku for "strong". He claimed it was 7% as opposed to the regular stuff which is around five percent alcohol. It costs a dollar more, but the math suggests that it is the better deal, assuming a goal of most alcohol for my drunken dollar.

The moscne is MUCH yummier in addition to packing a bigger whallop. It is slightly darker, not quite amber. I wander around more. I listen to a U2 cover band for about a minute. They did an adequate job. The interesting part was the singer. He looked a LOT like Bono - kind of like a younger version of what Bono looks like now rather than the Bono of 1985. He also had the swagger down pat. But it was way non-compel.

I spent most of that part of the evening enjoying the Ampol Aires. I did watch Hetman for a while also.

Hetman was fine. Nothing eighties about them unless there was a style of metal in the eighties that I was not aware of. They were also 100% non-compel. I did like the fact that they sang in Polish and yammered entirely in Polish. Makes for a more "authentic" experience. I went back for more Polka and another Moscne.

Flush with drunken pride, I ask for a moscne with as much care as possible to pronounce it the way the initial hombre taught me. The volunteer tried to explain that he did not speak polish and had no idea what I wanted. He had just started his shift. I dunno why, (well, i guess I was drunck already) but I had to go along with the misconception. I yelped "beer" in my best fake eastern european accent. He reached into the icy tub, grabbed a bottle and pointed at it. I just assumed that they had bottles and cans of the moscne, (it was the only beer on the menu as far as I could tell) so I nodded. Well it turns out that the bottles were Okocim Porter.

8%!

and even yummier than the moscne. Like most porters it was rich and dark and a bit too sweet. Nice. Unfortunately they had a very limited supply of the porters. By the time I finished it and returned for another they had run out.

Then around eight thirty the Ampol Aires made an announcement. The next act that was scheduled to perform on the polka stage was stuck in traffic or something so they would play "a little longer". They played two more sets, like two more hours closing down the festival. The next act never showed up. Or perhaps they did show up and the awesomeness of the Ampol Aires intimidated them to death or something.

Around this time I'm wandering past the stage where the U2 band had been playing and I hear an announcement about clearing space in front of the stage. A pretty big crowd was gathered so I walk over to investigate. Canned music starts playing from the PA. It sounded like Strauss, but I dunno what it was. Then a large group of dancers in (what I'm assuming was) traditional Polish garb start spinning and twirling and well, you know, dancing in front of the stage. Now, being a male and all that I'm not very interested in dance, especially as a spectator sport. But these kids were really really good and the costumes were awesome. The young women were mostly all mostly beautiful. I was transfixed. Sure, I was drunck by then, but it was almost moving if you'll pardon the expression. I think they did four pieces, each one with a costume change. There were at least two "squads" who changed costumes while the other group was doing their bit. It was entirely great. Even now in the clear light of my hangover I STILL want some of those cossacky boots and trousers.

The Funky Polak was 100% boring. Poland's answer to Eminem. Did I mention that he was boring? I suppose rap in a language that one does not understand has a pretty big handicap right off the bat.

Think Floyd followed Hetman on the main stage. Now, again, I was well drunk by then so YMMV but I loved them. They had three women backup singers so they could actually sort of pull off Dark Side of the Moon and stuff like that. The main singer dude did a fine job of singing. I fergit which song it was, the lead guitar player sang lead vocals on one song and not quite adequately, but given the enormity of the task (imitating Pink Floyd!) I must say that they managed it pretty well.

I've been to a lot of festivals. This was the only one where the bands all stop playing for a brief break at last call so that everyone can go get one more beer without missing any of the action. Awesome people those Poles. Bravo.

The admission charge is a whopping $7. Either it is higher this year or I forgot how much it was. That was bit of a surprise. The festival is held on private property so unlike the usual Chicago street faire, the admission charge probably isn't optional. Also, the food and beer tickets are only sold in $5 sheets so it is quite possible to end up with a few unused tickets, effectively raising your admission. This is a minor issue though, and not one that can't be solved by applying funnel cake.

I was tired when I headed over to the fest, but the combo of all that great music and beer or something gave me a huge second wind. After the fest I rode down to The Mutiny where I drank a lot more beer and watched a band from Rockford, whose name I've already forgot and the Venom Lords, who were good, but have a new less cute, less female bass player. Wah.

Then I got a beer and a slice at Santullos who restoreth my faith in pizza. (Ever love a place so much that you wish you didn't? I'll be crushed if they ever close.)

And now I wonder why I'm hung over?

Oh and I almost forgot the funniest moment of the night. I'm riding down Milwaukee on my way down to The Mutiny. A car load of young latino men yell something at me as they pass. I honestly didn't hear it well enough to understand what they said. I just assume in these cases that it was something unpleasant. I catch up with them at a red light at Irving Park and, being very drunck and stupid I approach the car and ask them what is up. The guy in the passenger seat looks at me, smiles and ROLLS UP THE WINDOW! I was SO dissed, but it was just entirely hilarious. I nearly fall off my bike laughing and I see that in the car they all appear to be laughing also.

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50 Mile Commute
For the first time today I rode the bicycle both ways to (and uh, from) Wheaton.

I'm pretty tired now.

I love how riding in direction one all the time, you can just totally miss stuff. Like a trail I discovered this morning through a little section of forest on the Des Plaines from Thatcher in River Forest over to Madison at the River. Coming from the west it is not at all obvious. I might have never seen it if I always took the bike on the train every morning. The trail replaces a few blocks of nasty riding on Madison. The forest there was refreshing. It seemed so much healthier and free of beer cans and crap compared to the river trails north of belmont.

Then, on the way home, with less of a schedule to worry about, instead of following the east/west trail I traveled in the morning, I kept going north along the river (sort of). It remained beautiful, but the best part was yet to come.

After crossing Washington I stumble upon the Thatcher Woods Savanna.

it was quite different than most of the cook county forest preserve woods, which are nice enough, but don't seem particularly healthy or "natural". This joint was really nice. And then, as if the savanna was not cool enough, at the northern end of it, some actual topography. There are some fairly serious ravines. I keep going and I stumble out onto the Union Pacific West line tracks, onto a road that I've seen many many times from the train.

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