Magic Spot Flowing

I just sent Amazon a feedback comment asking if they have either of two features:
1) Notification when an item on your wishlist becomes unavailable, and/or
2) The ability to easily switch from an unavailable edition of something to an available one.

I had quite a few items on my wishlist that had become unavailable. Some of them are really no longer available, but a lot have just changed editions. I want to 1) find out the items are not there without having to go look all the time, and 2) have an easy way to switch.

Do these features actually already exist, and would anyone else use them, if they don’t?

Yes, it’s possible to get sunburned in the small strip of skin between your bike glove and your watch. (Best option: sunscreen, then watch.)

I rode all the way in to work today and it took me 46 minutes total (including stopping time). I am getting faster. (I think I had a partial tailwind too, though it sure as heck didn’t feel like it. It was very windy today, and when I turned broadside to the Bay I got a headwind.) We got three people riding all the way in today at work, our own mini-BTWD!

I’m thinking of two rides this weekend. By myself, Saturday morning, either Sand Hill/Woodside or Portola Loop (Sand Hill/Portola/Alpine), and with friends, Monday, up Edgewood and down Canada, possibly venturing into Portola territory again. Sounds ambitious, but next weekend is the Sequoia ride, so it’s time to step it up. Soon after that it’ll be time to start proper training for Waves to Wine!

New favorite word: argh-inspiring.

And the blog it’s noted in (Wordlustitude), is also my new favorite blog.

Courtesy of the wonderful Sars.

Today was an interesting bike day.

In the morning, I had a bike-car contact moment when a guy stopped suddenly in front of me (someone had stopped suddenly in front of him). I had a moment to think “Huh. My brakes aren’t going to stop me in time. Whoops, I just hit him.” Fortunately it was just a firm but not fast contact of my front tire against his rear bumper, since I was only going a few inches per second. I lost my balance, but, not being clipped in at the time, was able to recover myself without actually falling over, although the bike fell almost all the way over under me. (When it has my bag on it, stopping it from falling over once it unbalances is challenging.) The only bad effect is a small bruise on my left shin from the pedal. Fortunately. It left me shaken and was a good reminder not to follow too closely and always be prepared to stop. Also, to not generally clip in in a hurry when at an intersection. (Despite the potential hazards of the clipping, I would have been more injured had I had standard pedals, because standard pedals have more sharp edges.)

The next interesting moment was when my constant paranoia at the right-turn that I had my first accident at paid off and I only had to slow a bit to make sure people were done turning before I got near. I always think my paranoia there is excessive, but occasionally it pays off. I have a general parannoia about right-hooks, and staying alert for that does seem to help generally. There were a couple of other situations on the way back where awareness kept me to the left of a person trying to turn irght.

I also had an epiphany about riding all the way to and from work. I’ve done it every so often for a while, but it’s actually taken me a pretty long time to really get the hang of the route to the point where I always have a feel for what’s coming next, how long it is, how to pace myself, how to handle the tricky spots best. It didn’t take me so long to get the hang of the route from the train station because it’s shorter and I was riding it nearly every day, so I didn’t expect it to take so long with this route. But now that I’ve got it, I feel more comfortable with the idea of doing it a lot. Today we finished our conference call at work about 15 minutes too late for me to catch the first evening local train, so I figured, you know, it’s going to take the same amount of time, why don’t I just ride. So I did, and it was pleasant, though there are always annoying bits (often other cyclists, I’m sad to say). I guess this is part of the process of becoming hardcore and just riding everywhere all the time like some of the awesome people I know. You just get used to it and do it, and not only does 10 or 20 miles not seem like a long way for a fun ride, it doesn’t even seem like a long way for an everyday ride. Also, I prefer it after rush hour is over. It makes the situation at Middlefield and San Antonio a lot less stressful.

I do really need to take care of this handlebar thing, though. I just can’t get comfortable on the Salsa handlebars even now that I’m used to them. It turns out they’re actually a bit deeper and have a greater drop than the Bontragers, even though I described the opposite case when I first looked at them. Anyone got a suggestion on finding a 60-65 mm (very short) stem with a 31.8mm clamp and a 15 degree rise? At a reasonable price, of course…

I was just rereading Nightfall, the novel-length expansion of a 1941 Asimov short story. I liked the book moderately well when I first read it, but on this reading, the story failed to distract me enough to suspend disbelief and two points started bothering me. First of all, they ignore all possible positions other than to completely disbelieve that darkness could fall, except that the scientists and university people believe the evidence and the religious people believe the religious explanation. This isn’t completely improbable, but realistically speaking it’s likely that reactions would have been much more mixed. The journalist said to be mocking the idea of darkness is unlikely to have worldwide influence (two different regions of the planet are specifically mentioned; he works for a newspaper in the main city of one of them) so what ever happened to the other part of the world, and why wasn’t the reaction more mixed? This isn’t really developed well at all.

Second and more important, can stars really come out all at once when totality is reached? Well, I thought this was improbable, but the Effects During a Solar Eclipse page says otherwise. However, that raises another question. The eclipse in the novel is supposed to have created 9-14 hours of darkness, but totality on Earth can only last 7 minutes. So it seems like either we can have very rapid progress to totality, and thus very sudden darkness and very sudden appearance of stars (as on Earth) or else it would be a much more gradual event, and could last as long as the 9 hours cited, but the progress to and from totality would be much more gradual (since during an eclipse the light changes are caused by the shadow moving over the planet at a constant velocity dependent on the distances involved), so the stars wouldn’t suddenly appear or disappear but it would be more like a standard sunset. I could be wrong about that; I’m not great at astronomy. If I’m not, though, the actual event described is astronomically odd. And even if I am, it distracted me enough to mentally jar me out of the story multiple times, which is annoying.

I also find it hard to believe that with the smallest sun creating a dusk-like atmosphere in its normal state (described before the eclipse) that some stars wouldn’t also show then. Our stars begin to appear long before we reach complete darkness, and we don’t have as many stars as this planet would (it’s supposedly in a region of a galaxy much denser with stars). The description of the light at the point just before the eclipse is extremely dark and ominous, and doesn’t seem strong enough to eliminate light from the stars.

So Thursday was Bike to Work Day, for which I was determined to do something more than just biking to work. After all, every day is already bike to work day in that sense. So I decided to volunteer to help out as an Outreach Host for SVBC at an Energizer Station, to provide information and make contact with potential members, as well as to help manage the station.

My first stop was Outreach Training, where I learned what the goal of being an Outreach Host is and how to talk to people about SVBC. It was a fun night with some pizza and meeting other members of SVBC interested in volunteering.

The day of, I had to be at the Energizer Station by 7 at the latest, so I got up at 6:15, hurried through my prep, and made it to Cal Ave with five minutes to spare. The day was scheduled to be almost 100 degrees, so I brought a hat, sunscreen, sandals to change into, and plenty of water. We were between busy and inundated almost the entire time I was there, from 7 to 9:15 or so (after that we were mostly packed up). We gave away all our new VTA maps and many old ones, all our bags, all the bananas, and most of the bagels and coffeecake, along with lots of coupons, goodies, smiles, and support.

I really enjoyed the experience, even more than the Amgen Tour of California bike parking volunteering, which I didn’t count for this goal’s purpose because the Tour isn’t a bike advocacy event, it’s a competitive event. This was all about supporting utility cycling and traveling by public or self-propelled transit (walkers, skateboarders, scooters, and others are, of course, also welcome at Energizer stations). It was nice to connect with other people who have high bike-to-person ratios in their households and commute or do errands with their bike setups. My bike and pannier setup got some appreciation. I saw the full gamut from kids (in bike seats and trailers, or on their own bikes or trail-a-bikes) to roadies (there was a Webcor Alto Velo photo op at the station around 8, a good follow-on from last week’s BTWW kickoff event at Webcor).

It started to get pretty hot around 8:00, and by 9:25 when I headed out to work it was very hot. I had to stop several times on my ride to cool down and guzzle water, and I was not appreciating the conductivity of my metal water bottle. Every time I had to stop for a stoplight in the sun, my self-created breeze disappeared and I felt like I was melting. But I made it to work all right, even with a bagel stop. The bagel shop employees kindly let me bring in my bike and gave me some tape to make sure the bagel bag stayed shut and attached to my bike.

One of the most encouraging things for me is that this year I got a lot more positive response from my coworkers. Two of them already bike to work either regularly or occasionally, and did on Thursday. Another rides a lot but doesn’t normally commute that way, but decided to map it out and ride in for Bike to Work Day. Three more are considering it, and our CEO said he will ride someday when he doesn’t have meetings. I am hoping for a company BTWD later this summer, maybe when it isn’t 99 degrees outside! If we really get everyone who’s considering it we will have 8 out of the 25 people in the office riding — 30 percent. And everyone else at least appreciates the bagels. :-)

The day ended with a trip down to San Jose for the Bike Away From Work Bash at Gordon Biersch. I wanted to bike down, but work called, so I grabbed a Caltrain and enjoyed more conversation with fellow cyclists. I missed the food at the party, but got drinks and good company, and missing the food only provided an excuse to go to Ben’s later, so it wasn’t so bad. I finally got home, tired and happy, around 10:30.

I’m sure this is only the first of many SVBC volunteering events I’ll be doing, and it was a great start.

The single paragraph in Garbage Land: On the Trail of Trash that most annoyed me was this one:

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which made exhaustive studies of consumers’ environmental impacts, the things that make the biggest differenc to planetary health are transportation, housing, and meat eating. It isn’t worth it, they said, to get worked up over paper versus plastic at the grocery store.

Okay, if your choice is actually only between paper or plastic, whatever — although I have my doubts about the equivalency given the persistence of plastic in the environment. But the thing is, there’s a third, very obvious choice: reusable bags.

It’s true that most of the choices we make have a relatively small effect on our environmental impact, but even in the small choices, sometimes there’s an option that’s clearly much better than the rest. Paper or plastic? Yes, who cares — not because they’re the same, but because you should ditch both and get some reusable bags.

The more interesting thing that I started to think about as I got further through the book is the idea of local waste disposal, especially as a parallel to local eating. One of the common threads of all the waste that the author tracks is that much of it goes a long way away from where it was first deemed to be waste — very much like many things we acquire are first shipped a long way to get to us. Even as far as the other side of the world, in both cases, some of the time.

The author talks to a few people who are devoutly into reducing waste (and others interested in it for financial gain), and one of the common threads, though it’s not mentioned explicitly is that the stuff doesn’t go as far away. Instead of being trucked to a landfill or going to a sewage plant, it goes into compost toilets or to a nearby Freecycler (Freecycle is mentioned briefly, along with craigslist). If we couldn’t push our waste so far away, we’d be more likely to notice that it’s excessive and noxious. Keeping everything local makes you care where it comes from and where it goes to. Local waste may be as important to the environmental picture as local eating.

Overall it’s an interesting book, although it’s a little inconsistent on information value since in many cases the author was denied access to the places that did her waste processing.

My new lotion (Alaffia Shea Butter Lotion) smells like Tofutti Cuties. The official scent is Vanilla Mocha, so it fits, but it’s a little odd for lotion to smell like a vegan dessert. I preferred my previous Tangerine Ginger, though what I’d really like is the Lavender Mint. Hmm, maybe I should mix the Dr. Bronner’s lavender and peppermint soaps to see if it’s a good combo…

I picked up a copy of Momentum magazine (“The magazine for self-propelled people”) out of a box they brought us at Maker Faire to take to SFBC. It turns out it’s an awesome magazine, and it’s incredibly cool that the ads are all for things I might actually want, or want to know about — bikes, bike clothes, bike accessories, bike events, travel, sustainability stuff…it’s great. And the articles are even better. From kinderbakfietsen (hee!) to Mellow Johnny’s, Chicago to Toronto, Safe Routes to School to Bike to Work Day, sustainable arm-warmers to helmet-mounted cameras…this is the first magazine I’ve seen in ages that I actually want to subscribe to, and the only one I’ve ever seen where I like the ads as much as the magazine.

They’ve already introduced me to a new line of adult trikes and a great writer and tourist. It can only get better.

I took a road bike class at REI today. The class was interesting because it was a mix of levels, from people (like me) who commute and do a good amount of recreational cycling, to people with experience mountain biking or light recreational cycling, to people who hadn’t been on a bike in years.

The main thing was that our instructors were really, really great. So patient and knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and they were able to teach all of us something. I went in knowing I would probably be a bit ahead of some of the stuff they were covering but also believing that you can always learn something, and I did — a lot of something. First, I learned to dismount properly instead of my awkward slides. Such a small thing but so cool and such an improvement. And lots of stuff about posture (‘ducky butt’) and some more advanced tips on shifting and cornering. Oh, and what those holes in the other ends of the tire lever are for!

I also learned that there’s no big secret to descending. It’s just scary sometimes, and bikes with you on them have a minimum speed that they want to go on a certain angle, and if you can’t handle it, you can’t — you can always walk it. We didn’t actually do descending much, but they talked about it. Of course, along with techniques to shift your weight, be in the right gear, etc. There were lots of tips that I wish I could have written down to ponder at leisure.

There’s definitely stuff I wish we had covered that we didn’t get to, but that’s fine. It’s stuff I can check out on my own and learn by asking people who are more experienced, which is really just a less formal version of the class.

But probably the most important thing I learned is that I can spend 30 minutes riding to a place, many hours playing and learning on the bike, on roads and trails, and 30 minutes riding home, and feel like, gosh, this is great. Even with a headwind and sulfur smell from the Bay and going pretty slowly and stinky bird poop (fortunately not on anyone, but it was around). It made me believe that I’ll actually enjoy the prep time for Waves to Wine — that I really want to spend that much time on the bike, learning and working and above all, just riding. It’s surprisingly easy to forget how great it is to be riding and to be engaged with pushing myself to learn and try new things on the bike, so I treasure the reminder.