Magic Spot Flowing

Courtesy the brilliant minds on the SVBC listserv and especially Margaret Okuzumi, ED of the Bay Rail Alliance and a very nice and friendly person:

Caltrain Bike Tips

Caltrain will tell you the bike rules, but those of us who use it every day will tell you how to do better than the rules and be a courteous bike commuter when using the train as part of your commute.

One thing we missed: don’t obstruct pedestrians getting on or off the train. Caltrain says pedestrians have the right to board and exit first. Try not to get in the way of a pedestrian or contact one with your bike — it could end in reprimand, anger, or injury. Sometimes simultaneous bike/ped boarding and deboarding is permitted by the conductors. If the stairs are divided unevenly, it’s bikes through the wide side unless you’re experienced and have a skinny bike, but if the wide side is on the south (pedestrian) side of the car, the pedestrians get to go first.

I came across this comment on a bike blog I found while trying to figure out what the vertical footage of Waves to Wine is:

I’m considering doing the STP in a day. Though for me it may be just a bit insane as I don’t get anywhere near the riding in that you do, but I downloaded a training schedule from Cascade and Cycle U and it seems possible. At 56 though, I’m wondering if I am being unrealistic in my goal setting.

Well, you can second-guess yourself for all kinds of reasons. Age. Commitment. Priorities. Whatever. It’s reassuring to know I’m not the only one doing it.

I think I should go for it. But I wish someone would tell me how much climbing it is. Why the lack of info? The only thing I could find was old ‘02 and ‘03 reports that totaled around 3000-3500 feet, but the route is different now (it used to start from Santa Rosa both days).

For anyone who’s interested in cycling stuff –

I’m thinking of riding Waves to Wine in September, the Northern California MS 150 ride. It’s two days, 75 miles each day (in challenging hilly terrain).

I have the book Long Distance Cycling which has several training programs in it for a century, two basic ones and one that’s for second centuries where you want to improve. Is a training program for a century adequate for the MS 150, or is it going to come in too low on giving me the endurance I’ll need for the consecutive days? If any of them might be adequate, would it need to be the more intense one?

Or would I have to find a different training program? Is the MS 150 not a very good first really long-distance goal because it’s longer than a century in aggregate and I should stick to just a century this year?

A century would still be a very major goal for me since my longest mileage in one day so far is 40 miles during last year’s Sequoia Century 50K (which I’ll probably repeat this year since the longer courses still look really intimidating, but we’ll see). The positive thing is I certainly wasn’t completely wiped after that because I hosted a party that same evening, and I’d done little if any real training (riding my bike to work more than usual was about it) so with training it should be easier.

Any thoughts from those of you who’ve attempted some longer distances, or know people who have?

I think wine should always accompany weekend work. Loosens up the synapses, and makes one care less that one is not relaxing, because one is relaxed, anyway.

I enjoyed this interesting linguistic slipup:

“Pullum, however, doesn’t really take Gelernter’s argument seriously, presumably because it’s absurd and ignorant and doesn’t deserve to be.”

Parts of this entry, from Peter Seibel, were excerpted on Language Log itself, but they missed this fun little failure of parallelism, probably resulting from editing failure

Pullum doesn’t [take Gelernter’s argument seriously] because it doesn’t deserve to be [take _ seriously].

This works surprisingly well for a sentence whose elided portion is not identical to any earlier constituent. It reminds me of the LL series on cases where a pronoun is introduced that matches an earlier possessive phrase. We sort of fill in the necessary information.

…I don’t twitter. But apparently several of you do. I’m curious why. It doesn’t really resonate with me — too much announcement, too little interaction, maybe? It seems like Facebook status on crack, with what is entered becoming a kind of social performance piece to up the entertainment value. It reminds me of the way AIM messages were used in college when everyone was logged on all the time, often either vaguely mysterious or highly uninformative. I got uncomfortable with that during my extended AIM hiatus in Scotland, and now the idea of updating people on my status even as often as I do on Facebook (which isn’t very) seems odd to me.

Thoughts?

I think most people who would write a blog post “Stumped by the NYT” would mean the crossword, but I’m thinking of their online home. I find the layout baffling beyond belief. The very top isn’t so bad — it’s obviously the top news & other-section stories, plus links to sections. But getting below that, we get the tabbed ad box, which doesn’t quite line up at the bottom with the bottom of the “main section”. Then there’s some videos and pictures, which look very cluttered in their arrangement. Following this is a horizontal block of featured articles from other sections, with pictures, then a vertical arrangement of non-featured articles from other sections that doesn’t line up with the previous segment. Finally, this far down the page, we get the most popular stories. Ads now line the left, but are stuck in one wide box on the right, and the lower right is filled with replications of links from earlier.

Does this layout actcually work for anyone? What am I missing that the web design professionals at the NYT clearly see?

Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions.

One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was about exactly this issue, partially a rebuttal of Thomas Friedman and partially of the assertion of a friend which was similar to the assertions Pollan mentions coming from even the august liberal media: how can my action make any difference?

Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

His approach is a little different from the one I took (and more academically phrased), but they’re quite compatible. I talked about moral consistency, which is in line with his mention of character. We have to call on ourselves to make the change, he says, and then we have moral standing to ask other people, and other countries, to change. I said, “To have any moral standing, I have to be acting out my own ethical standards to at least a high percentage. If I’m preaching and not practicing, what I say rightly has very little weight.”

I discussed in greater depth what I called “demonstrated opportunity”, which is essentially what he’s describing here: if we change our choices, then there’s a knock-on effect in the economy because the economy is made up of our choices, and it shows that there’s an opportunity and a need for new kinds of services.

His article also called to mind a book I recently finished, called Deep Economy, by Bill McKibben. I have more to say about the book, but the point here is that McKibben outlines different personal and governmental choices people have made to move toward locality, community, and sustainability, and creates a vision of how our whole world could change by moving in that direction. But while he, like me and like Pollan, supports some of that change coming from ‘above’ (laws and governtment), he also emphasizes the necessity of personal and community choice, the need for responsibility to oneself and one’s community.

It may be old-fashioned to believe in personal virtue. But how far might we get if we are the people pointing the way?

I met some friends in San Carlos for a ride today, and we went up Edgewood Road past 280 to Cañada, and then rode up to 92, and came back the same way. Total distance: 18.2 miles.

Edgewood Road kicked my ass, hard. I really wasn’t properly prepared for any ride harder than Sand Hill/Whiskey Hill/Woodside, since I haven’t ridden as much, and have done exactly no hills, since I had the flu. I had kind of assumed that Edgewood wouldn’t be much worse, but it is. It just goes up and up and up and up forever, it seems like. There’s a few brief flats and downhills, but it’s just a twisty up and up otherwise. Quite beautiful though. For the first time ever a road kicked my ass enough that I had to get off and walk the last little segment. I could see the top but I just couldn’t keep going. And this was after three or four previous brief rests.

Then the road just DROPS. I forgot to turn on my cyclocomputer before the drop, but I was going awfully fast, enough that I was just sort of going “Oh my god” the entire way.

Cañada is nice, kind of rolling hills. It’s supposed to be closed to cars on Sunday, but it wasn’t this Sunday for some reason. But due to the usual closure there was very little traffic. There are a lot of rollerbladers too, including one who was tailing me as we went 18mph. Wow… (and scary if I have to stop suddenly). That part was mostly pretty pleasant and relaxing despite fighting the wind on the way north. The way back was great.

But then I had to climb the DROP on Edgewood and descend the long, twisty, “forever up”. I made it up the hill, going “I think I can” like the Little Engine That Could. At one point I was going 32 on the descent, which probably wasn’t my max speed, but it was close. (My cyclocomputer didn’t record the max because I have to clear the max separately after each ride and I didn’t, and previous ride involved a wireless traffic sensor which makes my bike think I’m going 73). And on that twisty road it was scary.

At one point there’s a parking lot entrance to one of the county parks, and people also park on the shoulder, so I was fortunate that I was paying attention and noticed I needed to leave the shoulder, and was able to time it properly so that no one was in the traffic lane.

Then we came back down into the neighborhoods, for a calmer return to the start. My muscles that pull the brakes were so sore then I was having trouble braking. Fortunately my brain must have been overriding it while I was actually descending because I knew I really needed to brake (and to stop braking periodically so as not to glaze my brakes).

This is a great ride, and would be really awesome if they would close it properly. Edgewood is a challenge and is a little scary in spots, but overall a great ride. And it connects up with a lot of other possible rides, like Woodside, Portola, and Sand Hill, if you have that much leg. Which I clearly don’t. And if I intend to do Waves to Wine in September I obviously need to get on that.

I made two recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance this week as planned: orange-glazed beets and sweet potatoes with five-spice and watercress.

Both are good. Beets I’m ambivalent about. Not to put too fine a point on it, they taste a bit like dirt to me. A nicer way of putting it would be to say they have an earthy flavor. But I wanted to give them a chance. The orange glaze is sweet but not too sweet, and mellows them out a bit. Not bad. If I wanted to eat beets regularly I’d probably include this recipe in my repertoire, and given the nutritional profile and cheapness of beets, I probably should. No B12 though — damn!

The sweet potatoes I can rave about unreservedly — the five-spice combines nicely with them, the garlic adds a bit of savoriness, and the watercress a topping of freshness. This is listed as a brunch dish but could really be any meal. You could substitute other light, fresh-flavored greens (arugula and similar), but spinach would be too, well, spinachy, in my opinion.

Both recipes are easy and quick, with most of the work devoted to peeeling and cutting the vegetables and stripping the stems from the watercress; a little more prep for the other ingredients and you stick them in a skillet and cook them 10-20 minutes, and you’re set.

By and large, a double success on this one.

I just navigated a long and stupid phone menu (which had no proper way of failing if you can’t give a phone number that matches your address except to wait for a long time and finally transfer you to customer service) and several customer service representatives who transferred me to yet another representative, with the accompanying hold times, only to try talking to an extremely rude customer service representative who would not explain why my “attempted delivery” notice did not say that I would have to be at home in person to sign for and receive the item I ordered (the 2WG bag, which is coming from Canada).

The delivery notice was placed April 8th. It was placed, first of all, in my mailbox instead of on my door, which is both unusual and frankly kind of silly, because packages aren’t delivered to my mailbox so I don’t expect to find anything about them there. UPS puts them on the door. On the other hand it’s my own fault I don’t check my mail every day.

Second, it didn’t bear any marking showing that a signature was required at the time of delivery. I carefully followed the directions to request redelivery, including signing where designated only to get the notice stuck back in the mailbox (again) with a notation that I had to sign and fill out the address in a place that the instructions definitely did NOT say I had to sign and fill out.

I did, and the notice was picked up Monday. No indication that anything was wrong. But when I called them, I got (beyond the usual “Your package has notice left status.” “Yes. I know. I’m calling because I want to know what happened to it after I returned the notice.” “Oh, well then I have to transfer you to [other department]. Please hold.”) this woman who was extremely rude to me, as if I was the stupidest person in the world not to know that I had to be present for delivery, and who when I asked her why this was not made clear on the notice, left a short silence and then said very curtly “Do you want to schedule a redelivery on this package?”

A: “First I want to know why the notice didn’t tell me I would have to be home to receive it.”
USPS: “Please tell me if you want to schedule a redelivery on this package.”
A: “I would like to know why the notice didn’t tell me –
USPS: “Please tell me if you want to schedule a redelivery on this package.”
A: “I do, but I also want to know why–
USPS: “Well then please hold.”

She did schedule a redelivery, eventually, at which point I just wanted to get the thing done. Throughout the entire thing she was extremely curt.

I called back to register a complaint about her rudeness, and even though I wasn’t able to get her name or ID number, they were able to find out who it was by looking at who scheduled the delivery. So, a complaint will be registered. Which makes me feel a bit better, at least. The rest of the people I talked to were fine, it was just this one.

The postal service screwed this one up by not being clear. Just admit it, apologize, and offer, politely, to fix it. There really is nothing wrong with just saying “I don’t know exactly why this happened, but maybe the postal delivery employee did not realize that this package could not be left at the door or forgot to indicate that on the slip. I/we apologize for any inconvenience. Let’s schedule a redelivery so you can get your package at the best time for you. When would you like it to be redelivered?”

Update: Even better — I got home and said package was waiting for me on the doorstep!

It’s probably churlish to file a further complaint about this, but seriously — that woman was completely wrong, and furthermore, doesn’t the post office know when trackable packages go out for delivery, so shouldn’t they have told me that it was on its way? Instead of making me go through this entire rigmarole?