Posts for category ‘Personal’

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.

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.

So Sally left me.  Well she ran away with Glen– Although he did pay me for her, so I guess it’s not such a bad deal.  The nice part is that made room in the hallway for Shannon (bigger!):

Shannon is a Bridgestone RB2 which was designed by the legendary Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bikes and I gotta tell ya, that guy knows his stuff.  Even with both wheels badly needing truing and air it rode like a tightly spinning gyroscope all the way home from the loop.  The only concern I have is that the rear hub is pretty much shot and the front chainring seems a bit warped (I’m hoping it’s just the big chainring) but neither one of those should cost too much to resurrect this classic.

If you happen to dig it check out Sheldon Brown’s page on the old Bridgestones– there’s quite a bit about them that’s well ahead of it’s time and it makes for some interesting reading.

For some reason I am really not photogenic. I mean, if I sit there long enough with a camera I can take a picture that looks like me, but more often than not in quick snapshots I’m the guy who looks either like a goon, a goof, or a monster from another planet. This is why I was amazed when my friend Julie managed to take a casual snapshot of me that not only looks like me, but that actually looks good!

Too bad there’s not much call for shots of me sitting on the sidewalk next to a trash can and a bike.