The novel is still in the outlining/gestating period of things. Last week, while driving to work in the rain, I wish some evil upon the more tentative (”wussy”) drivers out there. Those wishes were not fulfilled, but they did lead to the idea of an interesting environment. I filed it under “Neat Place to Set a Sci-Fi Novel”…and did nothing more with it until Sunday. I realized that it will work into the currently book quite nicely, and be even more useful if/when I write follow-up pieces.
On the bike side of the equation, I already went ahead and blew my entire next bike shop paycheck on parts for the commuter rig, which is getting close to done. Acquired: Shimano XT rear derailleur (the cool “Shadow” model), bottom bracket, crankset, chainring (42-tooth), fenders, and a few other minor items.
On order: handlebar, bashguard, and some other cheap part I can’t remember.
Still remaining: wheelset, STI 9-speed shifter, front brake cable hanger (using cantilevers), brake calipers (front and rear), and then I have a ridable bike. To make it commuter worthy, I’ll still need to get panniers,
Over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Dillinger muses on why Apple would buy out PA Semi. It’s an interesting line of thinking and it raises some awesome questions. Foremost among them is, why is Apple buying out a chip design group that specialized in varieties of the PowerPC architecture? This is an important point to ruminate on, as Apple just invested heavily in making the switch to Intel’s x86-based Core chips for their hardware.
Mr. Dillinger goes on to speculate on Apple’s reasoning behind this — and eliminates the concept of a PWRficient chip in desktop macs, as well as in mobile applications (notebooks, iPhones, etc.). He then moves on to speculate that Apple will put chipsets in its boxes for the purposes of hardware acceleration, which seems the most likely line of reasoning.
[If you’re here for more information on commuting by bicycle, try starting with this particular entry.]
Not a lot exciting to report here. Racing season was supposed to kick off on Sunday, but I didn’t make it. There’s an opportunity tonight, but I don’t have the energy for it. I could race on Saturday, but there’s this century ride on Sunday, and it’s my last ride with my friend/riding compadre, Liz, before she heads off for her medical residency in Buffalo (NY) and I never see her again.
Progress on the track bike has stalled — don’t think I’ll be racing the velodrome this year due to financial constraints. Read the rest of this entry »
The city of London has an ad they’re playing about staying aware of your surroundings while driving, which I’m embedding here for the sake of completeness:
This has inspired some thinking on the subject and I am beginning to wonder a few things.
Are cyclists frequently victims in vehicle accidents because we’re such an unexpected encounter on the road? Or is it that driver’s ed spends all of about 30 seconds in dealing with the subject of cyclists? Thoughts?
Once again, I face the prospects of entering a season with little/no training. Now, to my credit, I actually made an attempt at training this year before I started racing. Unlike last year’s festivities which, hereinafter, shall be referred to as the “Year of Blowing Chunks”…
The good news is, it’s still early in the season and I have plenty of time to get into some semblance of conditioning.
Sunday, I have my first race of the season, the MSU Campus Criterium. MSU used to be “Mankato State” and is my alma mater. Should be an interesting time.
Photo by jessflickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons.
[This piece is the fourth in a five-part series in this blog about how to effectively commute by bike. For Part I, click here.]
I’m hoping that my earlier posts about bicycle commuting got some of you inspired to get out there and start riding. Here in Minnesota, it’s still a little bit on the cold side, and (as I write this) in almost the middle of April we’re under a winter storm warning. I’ve been working on building a commuter bike, since my commute is about 7.5 times longer than it used to be. A single-speed won’t suffice anymore. (I’ll detail the completed bike in a future post.)
So. You’ve been commuting. You’re probably dropping weight, and starting to see a general improvement in your moods. But things could be better. This section will discuss things to improve your commuting experience. Read the rest of this entry »
So I got asked the following questions by Christopher Hawley:
1) Your take on the Olympics, the venue, and whether bicycling is adequately represented in the official events
2) optimism/realism/cynicism/pessimism: where do you see yourself on this spectrum? Is there another position which you would prefer to find yourself?
3) perversity of the universe, and why it tends to a maximal value (possibly one of Niven’s Laws, but ICBA to check): any personal anecdotes or insights?
[Here’s a starting topic: Why are people who are most hard of hearing the most likely to unplug the phone ‘because its ringing would disturb my sleep’?]
Well, let’s go through these one at a time.
First, the Olympics and cycling’s place in it. The venue? I’m fine with the games being hosted in China. Sure, they’ve got some human rights issues that they need to work out, but as a whole, I’m fine with the games being hosted there. That said, however, I feel bad for any endurance athlete that has to compete in Beijing’s air pollution. Read the rest of this entry »
Even though I’ve got a category for it, I don’t often discuss my font design work on here, which is odd, given that the design of such things is such a strong part of my identity. I always carry a Moleskine and a source of black ink with me, and am often doodling in the notebook.
The source of my inspiration has actually changed over the years. When I first started designing fonts, I was inspired by a lot of external sources — mostly the work of other font designers. The last few years, however, my inspiration has become much more internal, and in reading an article about it, I’ve come to the realization that my creativity (at least where fonts are concerned) has become something like the thought process of a jazz musician.
I’ve learned to shut off my self-censoring. Like a jazz musician’s framework of the “rules” of music, I have the framework of legibility that I must work within. I’ll give myself a few more rules — for example, I’ll plan on a “handwriting font, comic book style, with an odd flourish”, and then I’ll just start doodling. I let the sketches mutate and evolve as I go on — I don’t try to make a perfect font right out of the gate anymore. And I keep the evolution process going until it “feels right” and that’s what I codify.
What I’ve noticed is that as I’ve started becoming more internally-driven is that the quality of my work has increased significantly. Whether this is because my work is less derivative of external influences or because the self-editing process has been put on hold is hard to ascertain.
Things I learned from my really drunk girlfriend last night:
1. In discussing Charlton Heston’s death, I learned that there are twelve commandments, not ten. She could not, however, tell me what the two additions were.
2. She won a best butt contest. On-stage. I’m not surprised by this, really. It is rather impressive.
Photo courtesy of dunechaser. Licensed under the Creative Commons.
Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I wrote nothing in here about it. From that, you could infer that this factoid is meaningless to me. That inference would be wrong, despite my being born four years (and change) after his death.
I could go on and on about how the world is a much better place for his having been here, and how much poorer we are since his passing, but that would be just repeating the words of others. There’s not much I could say that would add value to the conversation.
Leaders like Dr. King are a rarity. Using only the power of rhetoric, they can make you sit up and take notice of a situation that’s wrong, despite hundreds of years as a practice. They can create change by the force of those words and their willpower. And they can make the world a better place, simply by manipulating the language that binds all of us together and forming it into a mirror that forces us to see ourselves and the world around us not only as we are, but as we should be.
And as a writer, that’s something that inspires the hell out of me.
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