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cycling

A lovely, cold Monday

Had the opportunity to work from home today. Lots of emails. Lots of texts.

It was also cold. The high was 48. Naturally I chose this afternoon to work from home, because that meant I could get in an afternoon ride. And that meant riding at 48 degrees.

So I put on my stretchy clothes and a layer with sleeves. I put on my fingerless gloves and pedaled very hard, right from the outset. Maybe, I thought, this would warm me up. At the light closest to home, where I haven’t even started riding yet, I’m already cold. That’s a good sign. I don’t really know how to ride in that weather. The chill, the wind you create, the sweat staying with you … These are rare problems for us, fortunately, but I should figure it out.

What I did figure out, my hands were only cold when I stopped. My torso was only cold when I was moving. So I got in a quick 15 mile ride around the perimeter of town. Then I came home, wrapped myself in a towel and made a hot tea.

And then made quite a few phone calls, working on recruiting the next class of students into our department. I like talking to the students, some of them ask great questions. I also like talking to peoples’ answering machines, too. Sixty seconds, done!

Leaf update: Still going strong.

I took that picture last week of the last leaf on my indoor tree. I’ll keep you posted on how long it sticks around.

Things to read … Drones Offer Journalists a Wider View:

The best way to film the destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban, the Philippines, said Lewis Whyld, a British photographer, was from the air.

But Mr. Whyld did not want to beg for a ride on a military helicopter, taking the space of much-needed aid. So he launched a drone into the skies above the city. In addition to shots that showed the scale of the damage, broadcast by CNN recently, his drone discovered two bodies that were later recovered by the authorities, he said in an interview.

“The newspaper was for still images,” said Mr. Whyld, who builds his own drones, “but the Internet is for this.”

Yep.

4 examples of innovative online newsgathering:

You may be accustomed to using RSS feeds, Twitter, Google Alerts and other tools for newsgathering. Here are four reporting techniques you may not have thought of.

[…]

These four examples were flagged up in a presentation Journalism.co.uk gave to journalists at Swedish Public Radio.

Photographer Wins $1.2 Million Lawsuit Over Images Taken From Twitter:

With an endless amount of photos floating around on Twitter, it’s easy to find images of almost anything. But this large social-media bank of seemingly free-to-share photos can also lead to issues regarding ownership and copyright infringement.

A New York jury delivered a landmark decision on Friday when it sided with freelance photographer Daniel Morel after he sued Getty Images and Agence France-Presse for using photos that he posted on Twitter without his permission. Morel won $1.2 million for the unauthorized use of his images.

So be careful out there.

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute wants to digitize, preserve its Oral History Collection, and it wants your help:

If the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is one of Birmingham’s greatest assets, the institute’s Oral History Collection is one of its greatest assets. It is comprised of 500 video interviews, many lasting an hour or more, with the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. The subjects of the interviews include many of the names you know, like hours with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and dozens and dozens of names you may not know, but who played a role in the struggle nonetheless.

[…]

BCRI hopes to preserve that material, and to that end they’ve launched a fundraiser on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo seeking financial support for the digitization and archiving of all the material in the library.

That’s a worthy project.

Here’s my favorite, which you’ve seen here and on Twitter and Facebook among other places: Help Molly Walk Again. She’s more than three-quarters of the way to her fundraising goal. Great story, a young Auburn woman who had a bad car crash and a traumatic brain injury. She rehabbed enough, learning to walk and talk and feed herself again, to return to school and finish her degree. A remarkable young woman. Now she’s trying to continue her rehab. Her fund raiser continues through the next several few days. If you have the means, please consider helping her out and passing along the link.

cycling / Friday / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read — Comments Off
1
Nov 13

Broke 4,000 miles

I call this one “Where I’ve been, where I am and where I’m going.” I broke 4,000 miles on my bike this afternoon — not all at once, of course. It took far too long, actually. Took a few pictures, including the odometer on the Cateye. Here’s to the next thousand miles:

I got honked at today. I was doing about 26 miles per hour at the time. I’m pretty sure the full framed gentleman in his truck has never done that under his own power. But I won’t judge. Sometimes I pass trucks. Sometimes the guy inside hurls a slur. It all works out. The late afternoon and early evening was beautiful and life is grand.

That was a 30 mile ride which is, I’m embarrassed to say, the longest ride I’ve had since August. Felt like it, too. Have to ride more.

Things to read …

This is a long — but vitally important — one. And also an attractive example of modern web design. The Guardian offers NSA files decoded: What the revelations mean for you

Coolest story of the day: San Francisco Will Become Gotham City For One Day To Make A 5-Year-Old Boy’s Wish To Be Batman Come True

And since I talked about foliage yesterday … this was one of the better parts of the scenery today:

The clocks move back this weekend. Fall is here. I’d hope for more warm weather, but that is beautiful.

cycling / I do not know what is happening. / running / swimming — Comments Off
31
Oct 13

The month’s workouts

This is what I did on the bike and on my feet and in the pool. It was not the kind of month I want to have. I can do better.

At least I rode my bike (red) more this month than I did last month, but they were all short rides. There is very little swimming (light blue). I didn’t realize that until just now. So I’ll fix that. (red) to be found. I just started swimming (light blue). And I need more running (dark blue). All units are miles. (Ignore the numbers above the calendar, which are wrong.)

Taken another way: I wasn’t doing this spring, so there’s that.

cycling / movies / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
31
Oct 13

The non-Halloween post

The neighboring yard has a red maple. Shot this this evening:

Had the opportunity to ride a few hills before it got dark today. It was misting and sprinkling a bit, a few hours before the meteorologists said it should. Perhaps this kept away the early trick-or-treaters. I didn’t see any while I was riding. I was the only person in a costume, a sorry cyclist huffing up little hills. The trick was on me.

Watched Oz the Great and Powerful, where James Franco was dressed up as an actor.

This explains that:

Because Time Warner owns the rights to iconic elements of the 1939 MGM film, including the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland, Disney was unable to use them nor any character likenesses from that particular film. This extended to the green of the Wicked Witch’s skin, for which Disney used what its legal department considered a sufficiently different shade called “theostein” (a portmanteau of “Theodora” and “Frankenstein”). The studio could not, however, use the signature chin mole of Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was a fine movie. You can see the 3D elements, even on your TV, which is to say the many obligatory things that are rushing out of the screen to “immerse” you into the film. The poster probably read “Some of the effects are better than others.” It was a kids’ film, and it plays that way. But it was humorous if you’re in a light mood, and Franco inhabited the role, as they might say. He’s laughing all the way to the bank.

You know, there are many adaptations of the Oz universe, but this one makes less sense than most. Some could exist in their own universe, like The Wiz, for example. Others, like the Muppets and animated versions, were just cashing in with other franchises or audiences. Great and Powerful, though, has allusions to the popular 1939 Judy Garland version (which was not the first Oz on screen) despite a different company owning the rights, as discussed above. So if you assume this one is referring to the Judy Garland-universe of Oz then it is something of a prequel. A prequel of her concussion-induced dreams about a place and people that didn’t exist.

OR DID THEY?

You’d think, more than 80 years on, we’d have some answer to that question.

And so it begins: the annual Parade of Sullen Ingratitude.

— James Lileks (@Lileks) October 31, 2013

We didn’t do Halloween tonight. Singlehandedly we are responsible for the poor candy sales this year.

It is a good neighborhood, though, none of the little ghouls and princesses had to go without. Kids have their parents drive from the next town over to case this subdivision. Apparently all of the good candy comes from our nearby grocery store.

So we left off the lights and sat in the back of the house, hiding from the children, of whom we were not scared.

After an appropriate amount of time I went out to pick up some dinner at the Chinese restaurant of choice. The owner knows us by name now.

When I returned home there was a clutch — Or was it a gaggle? The costumes make it hard to tell. — patrolling down the street. I swept into the garage before the door was all the way up the rails. Waited until the kids were out of sight before I turned on the lights in the kitchen.

We’re not scared of those kids.

I got my fill of the costumed little ones on Facebook. This is, for my money, the best day of the year on that site. One guy has a boy and a girl. He posted their front door shot and their Halloween conversation.

“What do you want to dress up as for Halloween?”

“A fairy princess butterfly! … (Pause for dramatic effect.) And he could be a dead butterfly!”

So, he concluded, in the spirit of keeping his son alive, he went as a miniature John Wayne.

Another lady has two little boys, who dressed as Luke and Yoda — green knit cap with great ears, felt feet already rolling up on his shoes. The youngest said his “lightsaver” was the best part.

Now I feel like I have to go pick up candy to go give those children. But I saw the pictures. They cleaned up.

cycling / family / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off
24
Oct 13

You’re going where again? Canada?

I managed to sneak out for a late day ride today. I probably won’t get another one for a few days, so it didn’t seem important to go far or ride hard. So I stopped and took two pictures, which I should do more. It isn’t like I’m setting any great records or chasing anyone anyway.

Above is a stretch of road on the local time trial circuit. I tried the race against the clock one time. I am no good at it. So I just ride it as part of most every other route. Today I did it on the bike half of my ride, a measly little 15 mile circuit. But I got all the good curves and some of the better hills in, at least.

This one is a bit closer to home:

You ride on down the road, turn into a subdivision and then out the other side. You go over a little roller and turn again there’s a little hilltop finish that I always imagine is a big race finish. Except I never really beat my best time. Tonight I was pedaling and it was apparent there was nothing in my legs and yet there I was, straining and trying and wheezing and there was a car waiting patiently behind me.

Which is fine, because he passed me, a few more turns were taken and I managed to pass several cars. Sometimes, now, I can do that. It usually involves a downhill tailwind and a distracted driver who is out for a Sunday stroll to admire the scenery. But still. I did it on a Thursday night, and that’s something.

Called my grandmother this evening, to check in after a recent doctor’s visit. She told me all about the football she watched this past weekend.

Also, she’s now planning a trip to Canada in the spring. It seems my mom and step-dad mentioned this scenic place they’d discovered. “I figure I deserved it by now,” she said. Now both my folks’ mothers are going on this trip.

Both ladies are in their 80s.

Things to read …

This is pretty tough to hear. Many middle-class Americans plan to work until they die:

A growing percentage of middle-class Americans say they have saved so little for retirement that they expect to work into their 80s or even until they either get too sick or die, according to a recent survey.

Nearly half of middle-class workers said they are not confident that they will be able to save enough to retire comfortably, according to a Wells Fargo survey of 1,000 workers between the ages of 25 and 75, with household incomes between $25,000 and $100,000.

As a result, 34% said they plan to work until they’re at least 80 — that’s up from 25% in 2011 and 30% last year. An even larger percentage, 37%, said they’ll never retire and plan to either work until they get too sick or die, the survey found

It seems like every survey similar to this finds some slightly different numbers — perhaps someone should do a meta-analysis — but there are some common themes emerging. The role of news on Facebook:

(A)bout half of adult Facebook users, 47%, “ever” get news there. That amounts to 30% of the population.

Most U.S. adults do not go to Facebook seeking news out, the nationally representative online survey of 5,173 adults finds. Instead, the vast majority of Facebook news consumers, 78%, get news when they are on Facebook for other reasons. And just 4% say it is the most important way they get news. As one respondent summed it up, “I believe Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it.”

However, the survey provides evidence that Facebook exposes some people to news who otherwise might not get it.

Here is some navel gazing about web design. Ignore the headline. WYSIWTFFTWOMG!:

Since we’ve been using computers to make websites we’ve tried to make them like print. Of course, early on, that was fair enough. It was familiar. We knew the rules and tried to make the web like it. Even now, with the realisation that the web has changed – or rather, we’re being honest to the way the web is. It never really changed, we just tried to make it something it wasn’t – we’re still enforcing a print-like mental model on it. Not necessarily us designers and developers, though. This is coming from people who write and manage content. Just like printing out an email before they send it, they will want to preview a website to see how it looks.

The problem is this: The question content people ask when finishing adding content to a CMS is ‘how does this look?’. And this is not a question a CMS can answer any more – even with a preview. How we use the web today has meant that the answer to that questions is, ‘in what?’.

Here is the only thing in America getting smaller. The Incredible Shrinking Plane SeatPeople have an idea in their head, given the cost and security and the herding indignities and now the shrinking seats, of how far they are willing to drive before they’ll resort to flying. You have to think those numbers are going to slide a bit more when people enjoy these … intimate … tiny experiences.

Well, tomorrow is Friday, and I hope yours is as big as possible. Do stop back by when you can. And, of course, there’s always Twitter.