Ride #21: First Up Cossaduck, and One Unlikely Number

Ride #21: First Up Cossaduck, and One Unlikely Number:
Must admit that I seriously considered just sending this picture to a couple cycling-friends (Steve, Daniel, I’m looking at you…) with no comments. :-D

Stats: 39.78 miles (64.04 km) in 2h 20′ 43″ for an average speed of 16.96 mph (27.30 kph).

(Reminder not to make too much of that low average speed. This ride had loads of climbing and the season is still very young.)

[Outliers, outliers. Anyway, there’s no cyclist I know who could resist telling the story behind a true number like that…]
Source: Truer Words – A Journal

Trouble in Capital City

Trouble in Capital City: I suppose the lack of public discourse is because saying you’re opposed to a major public-works housing project being located directly adjacent to the retail hub of the village makes one sound like a bigot—it sounds like you’re saying you’re not in favor of the people who live there.

Personally, I’m not in favor of the criminals that live there, just as I’m not in favor of criminals that live anywhere else. But really I’m not in favor of is a social-political development that fosters the continued dependance on the broken unemployment and social assistance programs in our country. I’m not in favor of any development that makes people of any income class live in small, squalid housing with little to no job training and no connection to the community.

I’m not in favor of treating people like lesser citizens because they make less money on average than most. I’m not in favor of ugly subsidized public housing that ends up fostering crime.

Maybe instead of talking about parking meters and who is going to run the marina and to what end, we should talk about how to develop sustainable housing in Nyack for ALL income classes, without making any look or feel like they are second class citizens, and without creating further blight in Nyack. [Right on David, right effin on.]
Source: Attention Deficit David

Springing forward

I’ve been riding outdoors at least once a week since roughly December 2nd… usually on Sunday. Sometimes more, but not usually. Sometimes on the trainer, sometimes on the rollers in addition, but mostly it’s been once a week on Sunday, and I can’t think of a break in the streak.

Until now.

Passover is going to eat the next two Sundays. It’s that simple. So while I’m going to try and get out in the middle of the next couple of weeks, odds are bad. So despite the slowly improving weather… (I’m down to three layers from five for these early morning rides) The next couple weeks could well be a bust. So it goes.

Today I rode with some folks I haven’t seen in ages… they didn’t ride through the winter. They were in typical Spring form, and to my delight, the ride felt slow and relatively easy. It was about half as long as the ride I’ve been doing, and every little rise seemed to stop one person dead in their tracks.

Normally, I wouldn’t even notice… I’m rarely amongst the fastest folks… especially these last two years with all the knee pain (first left, and then right, one year each). Last year was a complete disaster, as somehow I almost never made it out to ride. I got slower and heavier all season, to the point where I couldn’t keep up with folks I could blow away a year earlier. But this year, so far, I’ve been feeling good, and the consistent riding has helped. I still have a lot of weight to lose… but that’ll come along (it’s already started, but I have a lonnnnng way to go to get back to where I was.)

Today I wore a heart rate monitor for the first time. I got inconsistent readings, which serves me right as I spent no time testing before the ride. Other aspects of the new computer will unveiled soon. And I’ll make sure I get the heart rate thing going over the next couple of weeks. Should be fun.

As an aside… I been riding the “weapon of choice” road bike for the last three weeks. Simply amazing. It’s not in full regalia yet, I’ve been riding with the midweight wheels mostly because I’m heavy, and figured if I taco a wheel, it might as well be the less expensive ones, plus they’re all crudded up from the winter, so until the roads are a bit cleaner, and I’m lighter… plus I never bought a new high end gruppo as planned, because, well, I wasn’t feelin’ it. This one will do for this season at least, we’ll see what happens down the road. Even so, the bike is light, stiff, and comfortable. Truly amazing stuff.

Thoughts on Google App Engine

Thoughts on Google App Engine: I’m more than a little concerned, though, by how much vendor lock-in there is with App Engine.  At first glance, it doesn’t look like the apps will be portable at all.  If I want to switch providers, or add in other providers so I’m not relying solely on Google, I’m outta luck.  

I’m hopeful other languages get supported, too.  I think Python is great – don’t get me wrong – but we have a lot more experience with other languages, so there’ll be a learning curve.

Finally, I’m dying to find out what pricing for an application of our scale will look like.  I can see some immediate, obvious things I’d like to try to do on App Engine, but the beta limits aren’t gonna cut it for us.  :(

[snip -ed]

My favorite bit?  In theory, Google has solved the data scaling problem.  I don’t mean raw binary (blob) storage, which S3, SmugFS, MogileFS, and plenty of other things have solved, but the “database” scaling problem.  Every popular web app runs into this problem, and it’s typically solved with a combination of memcached, federation, and replication.  But it’s messy.  In theory, Google has automated that piece for us.  I can’t wait to play with it and see if that’s true.

I also can’t wait to see who else is going to wade into this fray.  Sun?  Microsoft?  Yahoo?  IBM?   [More info from the field…]
Source: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill

Let my People Have Root

Let my People Have Root: App Engine is certainly convenient for Google because it maps exactly to what they have already built for internal use. But does it mean that Google has solved the hard problem of how to manage a cloud computing offering while simultaneously giving developers the freedom of full root control? And is root access important? [Granted they have a self interest, but they still make a good point…]
Source: Joyeur

Generation Squeeb: Barack Obama’s Reverend Wright controversy, and America’s squid-heart

Generation Squeeb: Barack Obama’s Reverend Wright controversy, and America’s squid-heart: We can’t focus for more than ten seconds on anything at all and we’re constantly exercised about stupid media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small mountain of favors for the next four years. And we… shit, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. I’m just tired of this tone that’s always out there when these scandals break, like we can’t fucking stand the existence of this Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute longer! — when we all know that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten and we’ll be jumping en masse in a panic away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a real problem. [Too much truth here.]
Source:

Mr. Silver Does It Again (Congestion Pricing Killed)

Mr. Silver Does It Again – New York Times: New Yorkers should remember Monday as the day Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, used the power of his office to deprive them of $354 million in federal funds to help mass transporation, ease traffic congestion and improve the air that all New Yorkers breathe.

Backed by his Democratic conference, the speaker killed congestion pricing in the most cowardly way: without even holding a vote. Mr. Silver said so many members of his own conference were against the plan that it would never pass. How many? Who knows? The speaker hid behind closed doors to keep the public from watching his cronies do the deed. [Shameful!]

Coda Confidential (The birth of RSD)

Coda Confidential: We had just recently finished Coda, and with one hour to fill and a lot of Coda-related things still swirling around my mind, I pretty much just started talking. What followed was a whole lot of hyper-warp thoughts about all things Panic. [So what caught my ear was the story of the first product they did which was an early version tracker which got shelved because they realized they’d either have to have access to “version tracker” or the like, or maintain their own database of latest versions.

This was kind of how RSD got started. I had a docs page which discussed the settings Archipelago (the blog editing software I had authored) needed for several of the major blogging platforms. As I was updating it for the millionth time with yet another engine I realized that I could write a document that Archipelago could use for setup, and the customer service emails (which is what caused me to update the page) would probably go away to a great degree. All I’d have to do is keep, say an XML file on my server up to date, and having done it once all Archipelago users could benefit.

Happy with the thought, I was dissatisfied with how this wouldn’t reduce the problem to near zero because while I had all the major cases covered, it would always be my problem to keep “database” up to date. I looked for an existing format so that I wouldn’t have to sell anyone on a format and found really dense hard to understand formats that were very general and didn’t seem to cleanly fit the use case. I floated a couple of versions past the indie developers I know, found some support initial support from two vendors I cared greatly about, and the rest as they say is history.

It was a nothing to lose story in that if I had received a big yawn, I could have hosted the file for my users, and they at least would have had a better experience most of the time. But this result was far better since everyone has benefited, and we all continue to benefit from the support of the blog engine folks.

Anyway, years later it comes as little surprise that a lot of software small and large have similar birthing stories…]
Source: Coda author

Something to live for

We live when we have something to live for.

Time and again, when you hear from a survivor, what you hear is “I thought of my son, daughter, wife, husband, parents…” We would think that survival would be a very selfish process, but it’s not. It’s much more about how embedded in a family or a community we are. Seemingly, we cannot save ourselves. Survival, even salvation, lies in our love for our family and community. Survivors literally use the power of love to survive. People who care about others have a better chance of surviving. At the moment of truth, if we are thinking only about ourselves, we are at a disadvantage.

How do we get ourselves into trouble? Simply wanting to do something can often overwhelm all other considerations. We know we shouldn’t, but we want to. So we tell ourselves a story. Our story is built on truth. We turn experience into stories. They feel real and truthful to us. When the story reflects the world as it really is, we do well. When they don’t, we find ourselves in trouble. Want something badly enough and the story will only have the thinnest veneer of truth. It’s a false story. And it leads to the commonly used phrase “What were they thinking?”

To use a recent example what was disgraced former Govenor Eliot Spitzer thinking? What story did he tell himself that made these actions OK?

And how many times did I hear someone say “What was he thinking?” in regard to Spitzer’s actions? Too many to count.

People swim in shark infested waters and get hurt…”What were they thinking?”
People climb mountains when storms are approaching… “What were they thinking?”
People get drunk, attempt to drive home and kill themselves and others… “What were they thinking?”

You’d never let anyone hurt you as badly as you hurt yourself.

Logic and reason can inform us but emotion makes us decide and act. And wanting is an emotional thing. Without the aid of the stories we create and the emotions they generate, we are all but paralyzed. Stories hurt us when they reflect only our desires. Stories help us by making other’s experiences real and prevent us from having to experience every situation for ourselves. They warn us of things so we don’t have to survive them ourselves. But for the latter to occur you need to be embedded in a family or a community, to trust other’s experience. And as we know, people who do trust, who feel that connection, who don’t only think of themselves survive even the the most dangerous, stress filled, gasping for breath, I-almost-lost-my-life moments. Such is the power of love.