I am 41 years old and still wear cargo shorts. Is this a life fail (Y/N)?
— Dan Bailey (@fontosaurus) June 16, 2014
Okay, so it’s not always as inane as the tweet above. Actually, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future (see also: my StandOut! results), and not in a daydream-y, fanboy kind of way, but in a more concrete, “what are the possibilities and how can I prepare for them?” kind of way. Continue Reading
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Without question and despite their getting knocked out in the ALCS, the 1989 Cleveland Indians remain one of baseball’s greatest teams. In the early season, held together by a core of aging veterans like catcher Jake Taylor and pitcher Eddie Harris, the Indians struggled. When out-of-control pitcher Ricky Vaughn was diagnosed with poor vision and steps were taken to correct it, the Indians began to gel, and then began a run so improbable that if it hadn’t gone down in the record books, you’d swear it was fiction.
Okay, so it was fiction. But even despite the semi-outlandish premise (you can just cook the books to move a pro team, just ask Norm Green), it was a movie that nailed a combination of memorable characters and great humor in such a way as to be unforgettable. That it’s not getting the same level of recognition as Ghostbusters is getting for its 30th anniversary is, quite frankly, a travesty. Nay, a fucking travesty Continue Reading
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1. John Scalzi
2. Chuck Wendig
3. Ted Chiang
4. Hugh Howey
5. Charles Stross.
Damn. All dudes. Based on my tastes, as evidenced above, can someone recommend some women writers that I should be reading?
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If you’ve known me for anything over about six months, you’ll know that I’m pretty bad with money. In the years since I’ve married Kate, I’ve gotten better, sure, but you can bet your ass I’m still not where I want to be. Coming out of eleven months of being out of the job market, habits slipped a bit when the paychecks started rolling in. And after a meeting with our financial planner, Kate asked me to read Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover, which I’m doing.
Dammit, I was right in the middle of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson! But. The weight of our meeting with our financial planner was still hanging over my head from the previous week, and I acquiesced right away and downloaded the book on my Kindle app. Continue Reading
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So recently, I started bike commuting again. It’s a long haul from home to work, and I stopped driving over a month ago and have switched to primarily the bus, with the bike subsituting once or twice a week.
Assuming $3.59/gallon of gas, and $6.25 for a day of parking, taking the car would cost $13.43 per day, or $67.15 per week.
The bus is $3 each way, for $6 per day, or $30 per week.
The bike costs $0.00 each way, making it effectively cost-free.
Given the costs, driving to work is just fucking stupid. With the weather, I’m operating under the assumption that riding year-round is, at best, foolhardy, and suicidal at worst. Hence, I’ll do savings analysis for a 4-week (mythical month), 26-week (the realistic block of time in which I can commute in a given year), and a 52-week (yeah, right). Continue Reading
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Holy cow, what a weekend. Crazy busy, and I’m exhausted — so much so that I decided to forego any notion of riding to work today (which is on track to be the hottest day of the year so far). Saturday was pretty alright, mostly it was just hanging out with the boys while Kate went to the Savage house and started prepping for the arrival of the movers (today), and started reading Total Money Makeover. Sunday, however, was much busier:
I love busy Sundays for some reason.
The movers are getting the last of our garage contents and our staging furniture today, and bringing it to the Chaska house, where we’re already stuffed to the gills. Oy vey. Massive garage sale sometime in August.
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1. New design mockups of what some designer thinks iOS or Mac OS X should look like.
2. Helpful emails from “businesses” because they just happened to notice that my site doesn’t rank well in the search engines. (OH NOEZ!!!1!)
3. Trolling. Because seriously, if what gets you off is baiting other people and being a ginormous douchewagon under the guise of anonymity, perhaps you’d be better off investing your time in something like therapy to deal with your issues…or a hammer with which you can give yourself a lobotomy.
4. Cable companies. I’m looking at you, Comcast, you pathetic waste of electrons. I mean, c’mon, what the fuck is wrong with you?
5. People.
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1. Legend of Zelda: The Wind-Waker (GameCube)
2. Metroid (NES)
3. Loderunner (Apple ][+)
4. Karate Champ (Arcade)
5. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA)
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For the weekend of the Fourth, we loaded up the Family Truckster and schlepped the whole family to the Duluth area to spend time with family. Given the duration of the stay, this was a great opportunity to partake of Duluth’s singletrack. I went up there with the intent of riding Hartley, Lester Park, and Piedmont — I simply couldn’t ride everything in one go. Well, maybe I could have, but I had other plans up there as well.
For the bike, I was riding a full-rigid steel 29er. Nothing super-fancy. I took a spare cog with me, given the hilly nature of the area, so I was equipped with a 32×16, which was my usual, and and 32×18 as my “oh shit hills” gear. Other than that, typical Camelbak, spandex, helmet, etc. Nothing outside the norm for a mountain biker.
I was going to spend the first half of the Fourth of July out riding the trails. So I woke up early, discovered that my 18-tooth wasn’t going to work with the chain length on the bike, but I said “fuck it” and went and rode anyway. Gearing be damned! Continue Reading
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Note that this post serves as a counterpoint to my previous list, Five Places I Never Want to Live.
1. Austin, Texas.
2. San Francisco, California.
3. Bora Bora.
4. Vancouver, British Columbia.
5. Italy.
Read More »© 2014, by Daniel W. Bailey. All rights reserved.
"Either I will find a way, or I will make one." - Philip Sidney
