Magic Spot Flowing

I hate them. Why does everyone talking about them on the internet seem to love them, except one guy who twittered that he hates them?

Oh, and someone who thinks the “older version” solves it. No it doesn’t; the older version doesn’t have chat!

Dear Google,

Please give me back my old Gmail (with chat, thanks), where every element blended nicely into every other, instead of my messages being white while my inbox border is blue, and my chat search box being white while the top and edge are blue (or whatever color). And where my chat windows had nicely coordinating icon colors for minimize/pop-out, and blinked a nicely contrasting, if kind of obnoxious, orange.

Your new “default” theme is not the same as the old Gmail and you know it.

And your new themes are almost entirely ugly, and most of them are impractical as well.

Don’t do this to me. Make a theme that really makes it the same as it was before. Please? Pretty please?

By the way, I hate the iGoogle themes too. Can I have my old iGoogle page back while you’re at it?

…Okay, except the Terminal theme is the geekiest, coolest annoying thing ever. You are forgiven. But give me back my normal Gmail anyway.

One of my favorite things about not having a car is that it reminds me to think of my journeys as part of the fun of my trips. Journeys take more of my time than they do of most people’s, so if I don’t enjoy them and look for ways to spice them up, I’d be much more annoyed by their duration, and I might as well just give up and buy a car.

This weekend I had several long-journey adventures.

First, I decided that instead of taking the Capital Corridor train all the way from San Jose to Davis, I would shorten (and save money on) the journey by taking BART to Richmond. (It’s not really shorter, but the weekend afternoon CC and Caltrain schedules don’t mesh very well.) There are two options: Caltrain to Millbrae to Richmond, and bike to Fremont to Richmond.

Fremont beckoned. In the three years that I’ve lived in the Bay Area (I moved here on the second weekend of November in 2005, so this was my anniversary weekend), I’ve never been to Fremont, only through it on CA-84 and I-880. And I’ve never biked over the Dumbarton Bridge (CA-84) which is one of the four bridges in the Bay Area you can bike over, and the only one that’s within my normal bike area that I have never biked over (since I crossed the Golden Gate for the first time during Waves to Wine).

I mapped out a route using Fremont’s bike map, aiming for roads with bike lanes because I’m not familiar enough with Fremont’s roads to know which non-laned roads would be comfortable for riding. The route I chose was scenic, but not short:

Willow > CA-84 Bike/Ped sidepath/sidewalk > Marshlands Rd > Thornton Road > Paseo Padre Parkway > Mowry Ave > Civic Center Pl > BART Way

The total distance was 17.8 miles, so my roundabouting added about six extra miles (Fremont is about 12 miles as the crow flies). Luckily, I planned for the extra time, leaving around 1pm for a 2:30 BART train. I got to the train just in time to board without being in a desperate hurry, but not without being worried. Thank goodness for having a tailwind most of the way, and for my leftover W2W fitness.

The route, despite involving bike lanes for nearly the entire way, was not entirely what I would call pleasant riding. To go about it backwards, Paseo Padre is a bit like Central Expressway (something I suspected from its Parkway appellation) only the bike lanes are even more poorly lined at intersections even though they are official bike lanes and not shoulders. The intersections were poorly designed overall, with bad pavement and short lights, and the intersection of Thornton with CA-84 and surrounds (yes, you get off 84 and then have to cross it again) was seriously the most terribly-designed intersection of a bike-laned road with a major highway I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen lots. Fremont? Not a terribly bike-friendly town, based on what I saw.

Before you get on Thornton, Marshlands Road is a two-lane road with “bike lanes”. The lack of real bike lanes rather than gravelly, terribly-paved, nearly unpainted imitations isn’t a serious problem because there’s almost no traffic, but the paving in general is very poor, although the scenery is quite nice: marshy areas, with hills arising out of them.

The bridge bike-ped path, and the path leading up to it (it starts at Bayfront Expwy, where the road gets wide and the speed limit high) was for most of its length fine except for having a lot of debris, which is basically par for the course for sidepaths. However, it also had two inset plates which were so inset that had I hit them unawares, I could easily have lost control of my bike. Note to self: find out who is responsible for that crap, and get it fixed. And then there was the flooded road. Yes, really. The road up to the bridge, itself, of course, was not flooded. Can’t have that. Cars must get through. But the sidepath/road to the recreation area (which you’re supposed to use until you reach the sidepath for the bridge itself) was under several inches of water.

No thanks. So I rode a short distance on the shoulder of the bridge approach, then carefully took my bike down a small embankment and over to the bridge path proper.

Riding over the bridge was pretty awesome though. The temperature was in the upper 70s and it was as clear as a bell. I watched the blueish water of the bay, and seagulls flying along below me, as I took in a view of the contrasting pinkish-tan East Bay hills ahead. It’s a longish climb but shallow, and an equally nice descent.

I enjoyed my BART ride too: conversation with a fellow bike enthusiast, reading and people-watching, and an unexpected view of the city and the bay when the train came up out of the Oakland subway portions. Transfer at Richmond was fairly painless (this was also the first time I’ve ever been north of Berkeley or south of Bay Fair on BART — now I’ve been to all the line termini in the inner Bay Area!), and the views began again. The Capitol Corridor runs along the edge of the North Bay there and I’ve never seen it in full daylight before, so it was a treat.

As we approached Davis, the sky pinked and the sun slanted prettily over the green fields. I rode around downtown Davis for a while as it got dark (sporting my new MiNewt light so I could actually see — amazing). It’s a pretty town, lots of trees and big houses, perfect for just tooling around going nowhere and enjoying it.

Today Mike and I went on another long-journey adventure: a ride over to Winters for lunch. It’s a 28-mile roundtrip, so neither long nor short by ride standards (mine anyway), but certainly longer than you would usually take just to have lunch. But the ride was part of the point, which is my point: when you ride, the journey is fun too.

It’s an interesting area to ride in, very different from the Bay Area. Out in the farmlands, you wouldn’t know you’re in California except that when you look west, you see mountains — that, and the fact that it’s in the 70s in November! But the farmland is amazingly like every other farm landscape I’ve ever seen, except flatter than some. Green, brown, and tan fields, distant lines of trees and small buildings.

It’s very, very flat, and so windy that it’s almost like having hills, though today was not as windy as the last time we went riding. Also, no tomatoes to avoid, but plenty of cracks in the asphalt. Does anyone know why asphalt cracks horizontally in that weirdly regular way? Or why fruit trees are painted white in the middle of their trunks, but not at the thicker lower part? Such are the mysteries that arise while enjoying the journey.

I was introduced to Pandora the other day. It’s pretty cool. I’m not great at discovering music, so I like that aspect. And it’s fascinating to see how the classification performs. I started it with Eddie from Ohio, of course. After a while, it worked its way around to Carbon Leaf — not unexpected, and awesome.

Also, new folk-musical love: David Rovics. So cool.

I had a crappy day at work today, and have been feeling a bit muddled lately, but tonight I got back to feeling to how lucky I am, and how much I am given every day by the awesome people I know and meet and the awesome planet I live on.

Oh, goodness. My blog has no music category! That Must Be Fixed.

I seem to have been overcome by winter lethargy lately. Not severely so, but enough that I’ve noticed my demotivation. It’s funny because I am not a fan of the concept that winter is not ‘cycling season’, but I really just don’t feel like riding in the cold and rain very much. I’m missing the sunshine. I also don’t feel much like cooking, which is weird because usually the winter sends me into baking, casserole, and soup mode. I don’t even really feel like shopping for food. I feel like reading and drinking hot drinks, and that’s about it.

Any suggestions for defeating the winter blahs? Or for good activities that go with it, but still encourage me to get things done/try new things? (Reading, movie-watching, and hot drinks are already on the list.) This is kind of a new deal for me — like I said, I don’t normally react to winter this way, so I’m hoping some suggestions might reinvigorate me.

Language Log likes to talk about snowclones. In fact, they popularized the term “snowclone” (though they did not coin it, as you can see by the entry).

Here’s one I don’t think they’ve looked at, even though they have used it, which has an intriguing distribution:

You are in a maze of twisty little X, all alike.

In the original phrase, the X slot was filled by ‘passages’. It’s from the text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, and while it’s clear that this phrase is a full-blown snowclone (anything can fill the X slot, though the rest of the phrase is mostly still fixed), it’s one with limited distribution: the main usages are clearly computer-related or otherwise nerdy (or geeky if you prefer).

(I know the phrase, but I’m actually not familiar with Colossal Cave or similar games as such. I actually thought the passageways line was from Zork, but the Google Meme Observatory corrected me. Shows what I know! The computer games that I played when I was younger all had graphics, albeit simple ones like flat green buffaloes and pink H’s surrounded by green blocks.)

Here are 22 interestingly representative examples of the snowclone:
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little injokes, all alike…
You are in a maze of twisty little corporations, all alike…
“You are in a maze of twisty little emoticons, all alike.”
In the limiting case, just because I install a Python parser, it shouldn’t force other modules into a maze of twisty little whitespace, all alike.
code that seems to be a maze of twisty little bitShifts, all alike, follows.
You are in a maze of twisty little tabs, all alike.
A maze of twisty little standards, all alike
You are in a maze of twisty little weblogs all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little classes, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little menus, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little boxes, all alike
You are in a little twisty maze of think-tanks, all different.
You are lost in a maze of twisty little filesystems, all alike….
You are in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. You may be eaten by a deadline.
You are in a maze of twisty little APIs, all alike…
Anyone who’s worked in a maze of twisty little cubicles (all alike) will be able to relate to the situations presented here.
When considering the rules mentioned above, plus some other rules about tax-treatment on pre-IPO stock options, the whole mess might be paraphrased as: “You are in a maze of twisty little rules, all alike.”
you are in a maze of twisty little header files, all alike…
You are in a maze of twisty little accounts, all alike (2007/3/30)
You are in a maze of twisty little config files, all alike
A maze of twisty little railroads, all alike
You are in a maze of twisty little offsets, all alike

And for the final touch, a link to Language Hat!
I live in a part of Berkeley build up in the 1920s, which for drivers is a maze of twisty little streets, all alike.

(Sadly, Mr. Language Hat did not use it, just one of the commenters.)

The variations show that the phrase is either a tad flexible, or difficult to remember with perfect accuracy. And indeed the wiki page explains that there were both a maze of passageways all alike, and one of passageways all different, which was described in several variant ways.

I’m rather fond of this snowclone. I think my favorite is the “maze of twisty little whitespace all alike”, but that’s just because I hate Python.

This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail ballots submitted on Election Day have not been counted; more than 3 million ballots remain to be counted) so I will hold out a small hope yet. Other smaller happinesses (Prop 1A, Prop 2) abound. So, I resort to interesting linguistics:

“It felt very, like, moving.”

I heard this on the Caltrain shuttle tonight, and it constitutes one amusing linguistic tidbit regarding the election. No doubt I’ve said things that sounded equally empty-headed because I put ‘like’ in at an inopportune moment, but this one struck me as funny.

The other interesting linguistic bit was McCain’s use of “an historic” in his speech, and what happened to it afterwards. We were watching Fox News at the time (why? I don’t know) and they were putting pull quotes in the little “Alert” box. When they did this, they changed it to “a historic moment”. MSNBC, though, has the correct version in their story.

“An historic” is an interesting pattern. I don’t use it; it’s almost exclusively used by older people, who I think learned, or were explicitly taught, to use “an” before words starting with H (that are not stressed on the first syllable, a restriction I was not aware of explicitly until looking it up for this entry). It’s described well on this page. The origin is from British h-dropping, which later receded, leaving this little island of confusion. I was surprised to see Fox News ‘correcting’ McCain’s correct, if less common, usage. Did they do it for familiarity? Or because they really thought he misspoke?

It was raining like crazy all day yesterday. I had agreed to go to a party in the evening, so I decided, in the spirit of adventure, to find out whether my bike raingear was up to the task of keeping me relatively dry and comfortable on a 9.6 mile ride in moderate to heavy rain.

Answer: relatively comfortable, yes, relatively dry, no. I was warm enough (mostly; I wish I had worn my long-fingered gloves), but my jacket soaked through eventually, and the rain came in between my tights and shoes my ankles to wet my feet, so that even wearing waterproof shoes was only somewhat helpful. The jacket was marginally breathable enough, and the weather barely cool enough, that I didn’t sweat too much, but I got wet from the rain instead. This is the eternal problem of cycling raingear. Some people swear by Gore-Tex, others say that it leaks or doesn’t breathe. I’m thinking of getting a cycling cape — apparently a place in Oregon makes them.

The waterproof shoes did show their value when I ran into a huge puddle in Mountain View. The entire right lane was covered in water to a depth of about six or eight inches, and I was nervous about riding through it, so I got off, walked up the cross street until I could get on the sidewalk, and walked through a shallower part of the puddle that was on the sidewalk (still 3-4 inches deep). And my feet stayed dry through that.

As I’ve found before, rain pants are not worth it; I just wear my bike tights, which dry quickly and are warm and comfortable even when wet (the microfleece layer stays soft against my skin and doesn’t feel wet). I also don’t bother with a hood or helmet cover; instead I comb out my wet hair when I get someplace. I wear my cycling glasses because I hate getting rain in my eyes, but I do take them off every so often to wipe them off, and occasionally when I get tired of trying to see through them.

My conclusion is that I need to find a better upper (or maybe alternate several, using the current one for light rain, a cape for warm and wet, and a truly waterproof jacket for cold and wet), and get some of those booties/gaiters for my ankles to limit the drippage. I hate wet feet more than I hate almost anything else.

Overall, I did enjoy most of the ride. There wasn’t much traffic on a rainy Saturday between 5 and 6 pm, so the ride wasn’t stressful. The trees are turning colors, making the scenery interesting, and the cool, dull color of the light was soothing. It was nice to try the central route in relative daylight, and see the interesting things I passed by — parks, schools, cool houses. Everyone still had Halloween decorations up, which was also fun. I wasn’t in a huge hurry (though it took longer than I expected — oops) and was riding my old commuter bike, the first long ride she’s been on in a while, so I just toodled along, feeling relaxed. However, I was very glad to get home and change into dry clothes and warm up in my cozy blankets.

I learned just now that Tony Hillerman, New Mexico mystery author and a former neighbor of my family, died on Sunday at 83. (We moved — I think the Hillerman family still lives in the house that we used to live next door to.)

My parents really like his books. I never read them (not being really into mysteries), and his family tended to keep to themselves, but they were good neighbors and it’s sad to hear that he’s gone.

Test post from my phone. My phone also plays my music now. I feel so 21st century.

Added later:
Regrettably, it looks like it’s much harder to add pictures to the blog directly from the phone. One needs a plugin, and I have had very little success adding plugins to my WP installation.

Really it’s past time for me to start running everything on a little miniserver in my apartment, but as yet I have not gotten that far.

Hey, at least Facebook knows what to do with my picture messages.

Today was my first recreational ride since Waves to Wine. It ended up well, but I had a really hard time finding my legs for the first 10-12 miles. I finally found them somewhere on Cañada, when I noticed I was chatting and pedaling on auto-pilot, and felt better than I had. By the time we got to Woodside, I was feeling good and ready for Portola. It was nice to be back on the bike and just enjoying myself, no goal other than keeping up and enjoying the ride.

Stats:
DST: 26.8 mi
MXS: 30 mph
AVS: 13.6 mph
Ride Time: 1:58 (total time 2.5ish hours)

Route: Started in San Mateo near 3rd and El Camino. 3rd > Crystal Springs > Skyline > 92 > Cañada > Mountain Home > Portola > Alpine > Sand Hill.

The northern part of the route I wasn’t so familiar with, and had never done going that direction (only going the other way, for the Tour de Menlo). It was a lot of climbing to start out with, and my legs just felt like they were missing. I joked that they went on vacation and never came back. The rest of the group was pushing the speed a bit harder than I normally do, so that made it even tougher. But the view of the reservoir as you come down Skyline is fantastic that way…it was so serene, and just hazy enough to produce the nice blue effect on the hills. I love that area so much.

The traffic on 92 was terrible because of the HMB Pumpkin Festival, so that wasn’t great, but it’s a short stretch. And the rest of the ride was wonderfully enjoyable. Just a nice fall day, warm but not hot, breezy but not unpleasantly so for most of the way. Having the rest of the group pushing the pace a little was good for me; I ended up tireder than usual after a recreational ride, but it’s good to know I can do a shortish one at a higher-than-normal pace and not crap out before the end.

I think of all the effects of Waves to Wine, other than confidence in goal-setting, the effect of the endurance training is the most significant. Instead of responding to challenging activity by crapping out, it feels like my body goes “Oh, you’re doing stuff…I should make more fuel” and supplies me with the energy I need, and I feel better rather than worse as time goes on. That’s a compelling inducement to do more endurance activity, so hopefully it’ll feed on itself and I’ll stay in good shape.