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Well I’ve been busy but a few things have been happening that deserve a good blogging. In no particular order:

I’m now in rehearsal for Toy Chest with the Tantalus Theatre Group. I think it’s really going to be an interesting piece. It’s a bit more focused than a lot of the stuff we’ve done in the past and I hope it shows when we reach opening night. The (slightly) scary part is I have to do a little dance/sing number. I’m not scared of the singing but I’ve got a pair of left feet when it comes to choreography so I’m a bit trepedatious about the dance number. We open March 10th with a preview on March 8th so mark your calendar now!

I’m feeding my bike addiction a new bike frame that’s in process of being built in my apartment right now. She doesn’t have a name yet, but it’d better be a fast one. Feast your eyes on this little number. It’s all scandium alloy and carbon fiber and it weights about as much as a cup of coffee. There will be more pictures along with my new track bike when all of the pieces get put together.

The bears have made it to the Superbowl. I think they may burn this city to the ground if they win it (although I predicted the same thing when the White Sox won the world series and I barely even noticed the celebration).

The big holiday party that my apartment was all decorated for in the pictures from the previous post was a huge success in more ways than one. I won’t get into details, but I’m pleased with the way life works sometimes.

So life goes on and these days I seem to be on the upside of it most of the time.

Wheeeeeee.

Someone asked for some pictures of my new place in it’s new furniture/Christmas glory. Well why take pictures when you can shoot video?

Living room video
Living room picture (small)
Living room picture (huge)

Dining room video
Dining room picture (small)
Dining room picture (huge)

Kitchen video
Kitchen picture (small)
Kitchen picture (huge)

Bedroom video
Bedroom picture (small)
Bedroom picture (huge)

No footage of the bathroom– it’s bloody boring!

By the way, you’ll need quicktime to view these video clips.

Oh and yes I know my camera takes really crappy looking video but it’s what I’ve got.

Well I realize that those who would find this useful have probably already finished all the shopping but just in case they haven’t

A pair of Soma Everwear bike tires (23c with the blue stripe!) or Contenential Gatorskin tires (Size 23c).
A set of computer speakers that don’t suck such as these or these or (my fave) these.
A membership to the Chicagoland Bike Federation.
A gift certificate to Nashbar, Performance or something similar.
Some cool artwork, especially paintings.
A donation to the Tantalus Theatre Group.
A gift certificate to Filene’s Basement or anywhere else where I can get some new threads.
A gift card to Ikea or World Market
Some books:
An Acrobat of the Heart
Little, Big
Anansi Boys
The Diamond Age
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
That’s all for now but I’ll try to edit this later as I think of things.

Ever since I started biking regularly on city streets I’ve been waiting for the day. Every regular bike rider gets hit by a car eventually and today my number was up. Riding down Ashland in the rain I was hit from behind by a SUV who clipped my shoulder with his mirror. He didn’t even stop. My front wheel jerked hard to the left and I took a header into the pavement. Luckily I’m fine other than a bruised up shoulder and my bike escaped in good shape too, just a few extra scratches on the already scratched up handlebars.

Now that I’m home and I’ve taken a shower and a few Advil I find rather than being scared or hurt I’m just pissed off. Drivers of big things with four wheels in the city don’t keep a very good eye on what they’re doing. I see people eating, talking on phones, applying makeup, and doing all kinds of other stupid shit while driving that really yanks my cord. So as a measure of protection for myself and other cyclists I’m going to make it a goal to talk to at least ten people about watching out for cyclists on the roads. I don’t know if it will help but I feel like it might.

Ride and drive safe out there!

Man do I need a beer.

After some thought I decided on this:

Matt is right.
While I do relish the idea of telling people off for being examples of why I hate MySpace, the greater political good is a far more lofty goal. Who knows if it will do any good, but if it gets one extra vote somewhere then it’s worth every bit of bandwidth it takes.

As promised here’s a map of the course (there’s also a neat-o interactive one here). I should be moving at around 8:15-8:30 per mile. Given approximately a ten minute lag time to get across the starting line here’s a breakdown by mile marker where I should be.

All times are approximate of course. I’ve never done this before so I have no idea how much this will vary– Plan on as much as fifteen minutes either way and I think you’ll be safe.

• Mile 2– 8:26:30am-8:27:00am
• Mile 4– 8:43:00am-8:44:00am
• Mile 6– 8:59:30am-9:01:00am
• Mile 8– 9:16:00am-9:18:00am
• Mile 10– 9:32:30am-9:35:00am
• Mile 12– 9:49:00am-9:52:00am
• Mile 14– 10:05:30am-10:09:00am
• Mile 16– 10:22:00am-10:26:00am
• Mile 18– 10:38:30am-10:43:00am
• Mile 20– 10:55:00am-11:00:00am
• Mile 22– 11:11:30am-11:17:00am
• Mile 24– 11:28:00am-11:34:00am
• Finish Line– 11:45:30am-11:52:00am

If you’re planning on being on the course, drop me an e-mail or leave a comment here and let me know where you’ll be (what side of the street in particular) and I’ll keep an eye out for you!

It all began with this post to my blog about a year ago. I doctored up a picture about Samuel L. Jackson’s movie Snakes On a Plane, made a funny comment, and moved on.

Cut to a few days ago. I was checking the web stats for my blog (which I haven’t been particularly good at updating over the summer months) and I noticed a had some very odd sites linking to mine– people I don’t know about on topics I don’t care about. After a little digging it turns out the reason is that they are direct linking/in-line linking my Snakes On a Plane picture. Now in case you don’t know what it means here’s the brief version. There were using pictures hosted by my web server for their websites– more from wikipedia
This pissed me off pretty well. If you’re going to take someone else’s artwork (and yes I use the term VERY loosely) and post it on your site at LEAST have the decency to

A: host it yourself and

B: ask permission first.

So I replaced the image with this:

This made me a feel a bit happier and it was taking up a LOT less bandwidth since the new one is much smaller than the original.

Cut to this afternoon. I was taking a closer look at the past few months web statistics and discovered the extent the linkage had gone, and how much it was still going.

Holy Crap! Over 7 GBs of data in August! 800,000 people viewed it! I never suspected that it was so widely linked. After doing some more digging it seems it’s still in very wide circulation, the numbers are decreasing but we’re still talking hundreds of thousands of people looking at this image I control over the next few months. The number one culprit?

MySpace.

Now I really hate MySpace. It’s an unattractive, annoying, pit of Internet stupidness. Yes I DO have a profile there but only for the purpose of keeping up with a few friends who are otherwise difficult to reach/keep up with.

So here’s the dilemma– I have the ability to replace that image again with whatever I want. It can be crass, ugly, gross, insulting, or whatever I want it to be! I can even advertise a good cause or my own website. My revenge on MySpace for being a eyesore on the face of the Internet is at hand!

What should I do? If anyone has brilliant idea’s please leave them here as a comment– but for right now I’m going to ponder the possibilities and giggle happily.

The first snow always makes me very, very excited.

2005 Chicago Half Marathon results

• Place in my age/gender bracket(25-29 male): 443 out of 561
• Place overall: 4306 out of 7145 finishers
• Age: 27
• Time for the first 1/2 of the race: 1:08:35
• Overall time: 2:14:43
• Pace: 10:17 per mile
• Afterwards: Hobbled to the bus, wrapped my feet in ace bandages and spent the rest of the day on the couch.

2006 Chicago Half Marathon results

• Place in my age/gender bracket(25-29 male): 191 out of 671
• Place overall: 1400 out of 8989 finishers
• Age: 28
• Time for the first 1/2 of the race: 56:01
• Overall time: 1:47:52
• Pace: 8:14 per mile
• Afterwards: Ran another 7 miles for marathon training then went for a bike ride with some friends.

Bring it Chicago Marathon. I’m ready for ya.