So Heralded

So Heralded:

My friends—my riding friends—they all always have some mission, some dream, some ride that for them is crazy and maybe impossible and which the world will never care about. Some aim to do a single loop of 2-5-10 without walking. Some want to ride across the country, win national titles, world championships, just keep up for once dammit, or figure out a good route to work. And we all understand it all. We know as fully and purely as we did back in those summer days that something vital to life and truth is at stake every day. We have each other’s respect—though not, anymore, because we saved the world but, I think, because we’re still at play.

[Noah teaches me this every day. So do my riding friends who always have some mission or other. Bill’s on fire lately.]

Source: The Selection

This weeked (we celebrated Oma’s 100’th birthday)

summer

Bill writes:

On my bike, when I am aware, which is almost always, I am aware of being me, or, more rare, of simply being, or, more often, aware of the riding, and sometimes of how my bicycle and I relate or of something I hope to put into words. If those words ever feel at all to anyone anything like a ride, or if in them riders recognize themselves, I have done my part, whatever my part is.

[Well that ain’t gonna happen with this description… but the rides are beginning to feel good. Joyous and overflowing with beauty. It was cool outside this morning so I pulled on arm warmers until I hit the climbs. The gnats that have been bit of a plague on the climbs were MIA. Two woman flying down a decent left an odiforous wake of sunscreen mixed with detergent(?) that nearly gagged a pair of hikers kitting up on the side of the road. The riders were also talking so loudly a deafness warning zone should have been established around them, so now I have some potential new additions for the Velominati rules. As it was a fleeting encounter, we collectively shook our heads, smiled and moved on. The little cottage (rectory?) of the Church in the Woods is being rebuilt and is coming along quite nicely. And as you can again see from the above, the anglers stayed home.

By the time I rolled home Noah had saved the world at least twice (evil ninja’s, storm troopers, who knows from what else) and was headed out the door to get some summer reading books and to meet his friend at the book store.

Below, you can see my Oma making her entrance to the celebration of her 100th birthday. 61 (not counting babies) of her immediate family, their spouses, nieces, nephews, and including grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren were able to attend. Those who were not able to make it were missed. Beneath that is some of the food that was served and why the scale yelled at me this morning. But what is one supposed to do? We waited 100 years to have this celebration. I doubt I’ll be at the next one… Allez!]

Source: True BS

IMG 2588

le bad food

It’s 2013. Why are we still in login hell?

It’s 2013. Why are we still in login hell?:

The sites are the servers, and our browsers are the clients, suckling the servers’ teats for the milk of “content” and cookies to keep track of us.

This blows.

It has blown for eighteen years.

[snip -ed.]

But why should we need logins and passwords at all? If you and a site or service truly know each other, why put both of you through the rigamarole of logging in all the time? There are a zillion good security answers to that question, but I believe they are all coming from inside the same box we’ve been in for the duration.

It’s time to think and work outside that box.

[It’s a mess no doubt. I know why the company I work for has a login ( and then some ) but I wonder about others all the time. ]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

My Favorite Enemy

My Favorite Enemy:

And, of course, the more pain that comes your way when you race, the ­better you are doing. Whoever has the highest pain threshold is a winner, or is at least guaranteed to have a good race, to play an ­important part. I think often about what Eddy Merckx once said: When a race feels easy everyone can attack, but when you’re in awful pain that’s the moment an attack really matters, because all the others are hurting as much as you. Those are the moments that decide races, Eddy believed—and who am I to not respect the opinion of the greatest cyclist of all time.

There have been many moments in ­races when I have said to myself, “Okay Jensie, you are a good rider and if this hurts you this much then everybody else around you must be close to quitting, too.” That’s when I just refuse to give in, to let myself get intimidated by how much pain the race is raining down on us.

I would not exactly call pain a friend. But it is a constant companion in my life. Sometimes I say that pain is my favorite enemy. We have this love-hate relationship. We keep watching each other and waiting for the other one to show some weakness, to give in. Every morning when I jump on my bike, it takes only seconds for me to think, “Ah—there you are my old enemy, let’s get it on for one more day!” The pain and me, nothing can keep us apart. It keeps me going. It keeps me young.

[I need to apply Rule 5 to my rides.]

Source: Hardly Serious with Jens Voigt

TSA Misconduct on the Rise

TSA Misconduct on the Rise:

CNN: 

And the stories of its failures spread faster than a speeding jetliner: TSA officers stealing money from luggage, taking bribes from drug dealers, sleeping on the job.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that a new Government Accountability Office report, citing a 26% increase in misconduct among TSA employees between 2010 and 2012, is striking a nerve with some travelers who’ve had to endure the shoeless, beltless shuffle on the trip through security.

Shut them down.

[They need to go.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Dear Recruiter

Coyote Tracks – Dear Recruiter:

So this letter isn’t as much a waste of your time as yours was of mine, I’d like to offer a new slogan for your firm, free of charge: “Matching miserable people with miserable jobs at miserable companies since  YEAR .” It has a nice ring to it, and it’s exclusively yours,  RECRUITER NAME  of  BUZZWORDS STRUNG TOGETHER INC !

[Oy. Just Oy.]

Getting kicks at 66

Getting kicks at 66:

Funny, a few months back my 16-year old son asked what the point of “range” was with radio. He’s a digital native who is used to being zero distance from everybody else on the Net, including every broadcaster.

[I grapple with this all the time, as even my 8 year old has a different reality about music and video.]

Meanwhile here I am with a giant pile of trivia in my brain about how AM and FM broadcasting works. It’s like knowing about steam engines.

[I know a lot about various steam engines as well… sigh. At least the development world keeps me honest about the newer stuff.]

But mostly I keep living in the future. That’s why I’m jazzed that both VRM and personal cloud development is rocking away, in many places. Following developments took me on three trips to Europe in May and June, plus two to California and one to New Zealand and Australia. Lots of great stuff going on. It’s beyond awesome to have the opportunity to help move so much good stuff forward.

Speaking of distance, the metaphor I like best, for the birthday at hand, is “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.” Composed in the ’40s by Bobby Troup, the jazz composer and actor, it has been covered by approximately everybody in the years since. The Nelson Riddle sound track for the TV show Route 66 was evocative in the extreme: one of the best road tunes ever written and performed. In addition to that one I have ten other versions:

  • Erich Kunzel
  • John Mayer
  • Chuck Berry
  • Nat King Cole
  • The Cramps
  • The Surfaris
  • Oscar Peterson & Manhattan Transfer
  • Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby
  • Manhattan Transfer
  • Asleep at the Wheel

My faves are the last two. I’ll also put in a vote for Danny Gatton‘s Cruisin’ Deuces, which runs Nelson Riddle’s beat and muted trumpet through a rockabilly template of Danny’s own, and just kicks it.

Anyway, my birthday is happy, so far. Thanks for all the good wishes coming in.

[Because any blog post that mentions Radio, Route 66, *and* Danny Gatton is a sure winner. Bless you Doc! Many happy returns.]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Is there a good monoculture?

Ants are laying siege to the world’s chocolate supply – Ed Yong – Aeon:

P infestans is only one of the many plant pathogens that changed the world. Back in the 19th century, Britain’s drink of choice was coffee, and its colony Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was the world’s greatest coffee producer. That all changed with the arrival of the East African coffee rust fungus, which found a ready-made feast among Ceylon’s dense, back-to-back plantations. The British government sent Harry Marshall Ward, another pioneering plant pathologist, to deal with the problem. He issued a now-familiar warning: planting crops in vast monocultures is an invitation for virulent epidemics. No one listened. Within two decades, the fungus had slashed Ceylon’s coffee production by 95 per cent, forcing the industry to relocate to Indonesia and the Americas. The crippled plantations were replaced by tea bushes, and tea displaced coffee as the quintessential British beverage.

If Marshall were around today, he would probably be disappointed that his advice still goes unheeded. We still tie the fortunes of entire regions to single staples. Around 90 per cent of the world’s calories come from just 15 types of crops, most of which are highly inbred monocultures planted over sprawling acreage. These monocultures skew the evolutionary arms race in favour of pathogens, and create the conditions wherein old threats can easily evolve into new virulent strains.

[It appears that monocultures are “unnatural” in the most significant sense… they run counter to evolution. Diversity seems to win every time.]

Your app makes me fat

BLOG — Serious Pony:

And that’s all awesome and fabulous and social and 3.0ish except for one, small, inconvenient fact: zero sum. What you consume here, you take from there. Not just their attention, not just their time, but their ability to be the person they are when they are at their best. When they have ample cognitive resources. When they can think, solve-problems, and exercise self-control. When they can create, make connections, and stay focused. 

Is that “content” worth it?  Maybe. But instead of “Is this useful?” perhaps we should raise the bar and ask “Will they use it?” (and so, yeah, I’m more than a little self-conscious about typing that as I consume your cognitive resources. But I didn’t start Serious Pony to save your cognitive resources; I want to help save the cognitive resources of your users).

[I complain about various bits of cognitive drain to my wife all the time. No doubt a self fulfilling prophecy for her… I’ll have to work on that. On the upside, I bother my team at work about reducing it for others all the time. It’s zero sum game at every level.]

Fast Time and the Aging Mind

Fast Time and the Aging Mind – NYTimes.com:

The question and the possibility it presents put me in mind of my father, who died a few years ago at age 86. An engineer by training, he read constantly after he retired. His range was enormous; he read about everything from astronomy to natural history, travel and gardening. I remember once discovering dozens of magazines and journals in the house and was convinced that my parents had become the victims of a mail-order scam.

Thinking I’d help with the clutter, I began to bundle up the magazines for recycling when my father angrily confronted me, demanding to know what the hell I was doing. “I read all of these,” he said.

And then it dawned on me. I cannot recall his ever having remarked on how fast or slow his life seemed to be going. He was constantly learning, always alive to new ideas and experience. Maybe that’s why he never seemed to notice that time was passing.

So what, you might say, if we have an illusion about time speeding up? But it matters, I think, because the distortion signals that we might squeeze more out of life.

It’s simple: if you want time to slow down, become a student again. Learn something that requires sustained effort; do something novel. Put down the thriller when you’re sitting on the beach and break out a book on evolutionary theory or Spanish for beginners or a how-to book on something you’ve always wanted to do. Take a new route to work; vacation at an unknown spot. And take your sweet time about it.

[All the excuse I need to always continue programming, music, woodworking, photography, and everything else. One should never stop learning.]