Concepts in the Paradox

Friday was Critical Mass, and I decided that it would be an excellent time to try out my bike on a long bike ride. Upon showing up to the site at 6pm, I found over a thousand cyclists, with a constant stream of of new arrivals from Market St.

I don’t remember the exact route that we went, but at some point I took a look back onto Market St, and there was nothing but a sea of bikes. Maybe 8-9 blocks worth of all sorts of people on all sorts of bikes. Some people brought their kids along, others were riding fully custom bikes, and some were just using their regular commuter bikes.

The head of the pack chose the direction we should go, and people further in the back of the group would yell forward what direction we should go next, or if we needed to slow down to prevent the mass from getting too thin. We went up, down, and around: going through the Haight twice. That’s when trouble started brewing.

Most motorists and pedestrians waved, cheered, and even stopped cyclists to ask what this mass cyclist event was about. Even stuck in a flood of bikes for 15 minutes, people in cars would smile and wave. Cabbies seemed to take it the hardest though. I saw an incident where a female cabbie was upset a cyclist was block her, as some people in the mass would do to prevent cars jumping in at intersections. The cabbie got out, tried to remove the bike blocking her, and the other cyclists would circle around to watch what happened next. In this case, the cabbie sulked and got back into her cab.

Around Haight street was a different story. An irate pedestrian pulled a random cyclist from his bike, causing him to careen into the side of a parked car. This guy looked exactly like Fabio, a tall, built, and long blonde haired man, dressed like he was going out for a night on the town. Per usual, cyclists swarmed around him to see what the fuss was about. With over 300 people surrounding him, this muscle-bound man declared what the cyclists were doing was “stupid”, “no one cares” and we were only there to cause trouble. Sure, some people were, but the vast majority were enjoying their urban disobedience against cars.

The man yanked off his button-up shirt, with buttons flying every which way, just like in the movies. Underneath you could see that he went to the gym every minute of his life, and he wasn’t one you’d want to try to fight. He continued to created a fuss, tried to get people to dismount their bikes and fight, but luckily an SFPD bike cop came by and told Fabio to chill, to which he stalked off, grumping all the way home.

Our ride took us all the way up to Hyde and Lombard, famous for being the most twisted hill in San Francisco:

We also went both directions through the Broadway tunnel, yelling and screaming as we passed through. I have to admit that I was taken in by the whole scene, and found myself also screaming; joining the protest against the cars that dominate the city. We then headed through the Stockton tunnel, which after I decided to retire. The whole ride was three hours for me, and there was still a group of 200 or so headed back toward market.

I think that Critical Mass is an important monthly demonstration in the city, and for anyone from the outside world looking in. People take their cars for granted, and ignore the many social and economic problems they create. Oil prices are high, people are out of shape, and transit is almost non-existent or non-functioning. I hold CM has an example of people doing something, instead of complaining.

I’ll be there next month.

I did a dry run of my commute, taking Post down to Market then going in the Davis & Market Embarcadero entrance. I then locked up my bike, looked at the time, and from start to finish it took exactly 30 minutes. 6:07 to 6:37. This included my normal fumbling like, “where is my helmet? Gloves? Locks? Oh! I need water!”

The way back also took 30 minutes. I took Drumm up to Sutter, then Sutter all the way back home. The whole process was pretty exhausting.

Here’s what to expect taking a bike on the busy streets of San Francisco:

• If you don’t take up the whole lane, taxis will try to nudge past.

• If someone is driving an old beater, watch out! If you can smell the car, chances are they’ll try to run you over.
• This isn’t a good way to get fresh air. Most of the cars stink, especially gas powered taxis, police cars and police motor bikes.
• The hills aren’t as bad as they look. Expect to hit plenty of red lights so you can get some rest.
• Pedestrians don’t notice you. They’ll walk right into your path, even if you have right of way.
• Don’t worry about Muni. You’ll zoom past the bus and never see it again during your commute.

I need to buy a bell or horn or something so I don’t have to yell at people to get out of the way, as well as some flashing lights so I can get around at dusk.

I must say one thing is for sure, this will get me into shape way faster than the gym did!

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I just bought one of these shirts:

Any guesses what it says in binary?

You can order them here until May 20th.

If you don’t already read xkcd’s comics, you should start.

I finally got around to putting my Mac Mini, which has been sitting disused in a box for 2 months, up on Craigslist. I made up a nice little ad, slapped on a price of $450, and immediately got one buyer, and only one buyer, who was interested. Expecting another flake out, I told this guy to pick it up ASAP or I’ll sell it to the first guy who comes to my door. “Sure”, he says, “I’ll be over tomorrow morning”.

Since I had just given some stranger my address and phone number, I figured I’d see if this “Cliff Stoll” guy had any Google juice. And well, uh, I guess he has Wikipedia juice too.

When he showed up, he didn’t even ask me to boot the little Mac up. He said he’d looked at this very blog, decided that since I ran Linux I was trustworthy, and handed me the cash.

I was now $450 richer. So what to do with $450?

I went to the Freewheel Bike Shop on Valencia and asked what they recommended for $450, and they recommended the Marin Muriwoods 20 urban bike. I took it for a ride up the block, in what I can only describe as “frightening” San Francisco traffic (really, is it possible for people to drive any worse?), and loved it. I bought it with a helmet and ulock, and now I have one less way to get fucked by Muni in the morning:

On the computer front, my file server seems to have forgotten about it’s network interface. I don’t know how long ago this happened, but I guess I should fix it. Backups are sort of important, and all my backups get dumped onto this box every night.

The Z is happily compiling Konqueror-embedded and xmms, and has been for a few hours now. The poor thing has some pretty terrible disk I/O, and I’m wondering if it would just be faster to do my compiles over the wireless with NFS. The disk is really slow — like it matters though. When I put it into daily use I’m not going to be compiling things all the time. I’m going to post a Palm TX vs. Z SL-C3200 review here in a few days and post my package builds as well. Openbsd doesn’t include pre-compiled packages for the Z, much to my chagrin.

I’m in the process of finding all the bits and pieces for my Mac Mini so I can put it up on Craigslist. So far I have the Mac Mini (512MB, wifi, bt, super drive, 1.42Ghz), Belkin Hub for Mac Mini, and iSight gathered together. I need to reload the OS, stick it in a box, then see how much I can get someone in the city to give me for it. I’m thinking about $600 for everything, maybe $500. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the extra cash since it counts as computer budget, and there isn’t anything I really want right now. Perhaps I’ll get a Happy Hacker keyboard for work and save the rest for later?

I went home early with the dizzies and a scratchy throat. After the drugs kick in, I think I’ll resume installing OpenBSD on the Zaurus. I was able to get the bsd.rd to start up, and the little guy is dual booting, but after I fdisk’d the thing (very carefully, mind you), I discovered that the USB network card wasn’t being picked up by OpenBSD. This totally sucks, because I wanted to do the net install.

After double-checking the supported device listing, I found that my SMC 2102USB is indeed supported by the kue driver. My theory is that the card is sucking down more power than the Zaurus’s little usb port can pump out, so I’m going to run it through a powered hub to see if that fixes it. If not, then I’m doing a disk install, since I left 400MB for the Sharp ROM so the dual boot would still work. I’ll pull over the tarballs from the openbsd site, load them onto the 400MB partition which is fat32 formatted, and do a disk install.

4 more days until I get the CF wireless card. Right now it is on a truck in Texas. Damn Texans! Give me my network card!

Nathan and I made it to the DNA at about 11:30, and started in on the agenda I published yesterday. There was some drinking, and I went past my 3-drink limit, though I only had one extra. The wine I had tasted sour, so I figured I deserved an extra vodka and coke.

Around midnight, The Spores came on stage. I didn’t even bother looking up the band that was playing in my haste doing the chores of Sunday on Saturday so I could stay up all night. However, I was so impressed with the band, complete with puppet show, that after her performance on stage I tracked her down outside, said what a great performace she gave, and bought a CD. I almost never buy CDs — what a waste of money, but I’m glad I did. She gave me the ever so rare “good person” vibe, so I hope she succeeds in her career.

We stayed at the DNA until about 3am, dancing the night away, and gawking at women, then made a stop at the famed Lucky Penny up the street from me, and crashed about 4:30am.

A walking tour

It was another nice day in San Francisco Sunday, so I gave Nathan the walking tour of the Mission, the alleys of SoMA, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, the TL, and North Beach: you know, for compare and contrast. I was able to make a couple of my apartment hunting stops: One place was on 19th and Valencia above a store. It had a really strange layout, with various small rooms all over the unit, but was otherwise alright. I didn’t fall in love, but if I had to live in the heart of Valencia, it would be a good deal at $1980/mo. The other unit I stopped by was on Grace and Mission: I actually feared for my life going down that alley. It was littered with used needles, qtips (!), and shattered window glass. The landlord didn’t pick up his phone, so I didn’t take a look inside, but I don’t think I’d like to be in that alley after about 10pm on any given night.

I still haven’t heard back about the place I liked on Dolores. Perhaps I’ll get a yes or no tomorrow?