GLOBADOM

So, I’ll be back to work tomorrow. The Lovely One and I, after three days of more or less living in hospitals and doctor’s offices, don’t know much more about her state than we did at the start, except that it’s nothing that will kill her. So we wait.

Trying to distract myself, I’m caught in the throes of manic insomnia. So I’ll just mention that I’m training seriously for this season’s racing, and I’m starting my first, glorious race on February 27, believe it or not.

I invite you to come see me race. This is my own club’s “Spring Series,” the traditional spate of warm-up races, and a lot of fun.

The Feb. 27 race is a very flat course with few technical issues. It’s a good way to warm up the legs, and a pretty place to come out and watch some racing. Afterwards, you can go shop at nearby Fort Langley. Races start at 10:30, and since they run three classes of racing all at once, there’s lots to watch as a spectator.

For training purposes this year, I will be racing in the “B” group, which is a bit daring, and I will be racing with a very specific focus and goal. This contrasts with last year, where if I had a race goal, it was “maximum comedy.” No, seriously. I rode off the front to chase a breakaway because I was bored, and packed a Chinese coconut bun as my on-board fuel. This year, I’m taking the bell off my race bike.

The last 48 hours have been weird. If I haven’t answered your e-mail, it’s because I’ve been dealing with a, well, a family emergency. It may all be resolved in a few days (or, who knows, a few months), but until it is I may be a bit erratic. Patience, and I’ll post/write/call/visit as soon as possible.

Spectacularly hokey is the only word that can properly describe the Paul McCartney stage show. The climax of “Live and Let Die” was accompanied by more pyro effects than the climax of the James Bond film of the same name. Half the stadium was holding colored cards to spell out a “Na Na Na” logo at the end of “Hey Jude.” It doesn’t matter. McCartney has a legitimate claim as the best rock and roll songwriter ever, and his short greatest-hits set makes a pretty good argument in his favour.

The football game is still tied, too. I’d better pay attention.

I need your help.

I’ve been mulling over some ideas for Wired Cola for some time, and I think I’ve got a good one, through the miracle of synthesis (basically, I took something The Lovely One gets annoyed by, combined it with somthing keith was annoyed by, and mixed it with an exhortation about local content being the next frontier for blogs (that’s not necessarily true: the successes of bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds are largely a product of dealing with non-local concerns).

The result is not ready yet. I need some more ideas. If you want to help, you can send me your suggestions for interesting things to do or see in Vancouver. At least for now, I put no limitations on what this means. It could be anything from the indoor go-kart track in Richmond to the curious sculptural balls around BC PLace Stadium; anything from a good restaurant to a good place to pick blackberries. I need a whole bunch to feed the machine I’m planning to build, but I promise it will be worth the wait.

Share & Enjoy.

As always, a TWL post is a rumination on some serious issue of the day, but long after anyone else still cares.

In today’s post, the subject is the recent introduction of the Airbus A380, the famous double-decker of the skies, coming to an airport near you sometime in 2006 or later.

Of course, the rebuttal was delivered by loyal opposition Boeing, in the form of the 7E7 (recently recoined the 787) Dreamliner. The Dreamliner is touted as a smaller, more efficient approach to transoceanic flight, at least when compared to the A380.

After being inspired by Colby Cosh’s article on these planes, I went so far as to correspond with him n a half-assed idea I had about the role of the Boeing entry. Mr. Cosh was kind enough to correct me on some misapprehensions, both of his article and of the role of the Dreamliner, and I took them to heart. To wit: I don’t think Southwest will be buying these anytime soon.

But now I have a whole new misapprehension. I think that Boeing may have designed the 787 around the ideas of Southwest, but in a different venue. Right now, Southwest just does one thing: point-to-point US flights, using 737s.

Now imagine something similar but bigger: what if you wanted to do point-to-point transoceanic flights on the cheap, using a single type of aircraft, for all the reasons that Southwest does that?

I submit that once you came up with this idea, your dream plane would be a high-efficiency aircraft with a moderate but not monstrous passsenger capacity. I submit that Boeing has deliberately built their new plane with for such an intercontinental cheap-o airline, even though such an airline doesn’t really exist right now. But maybe such an airline will be inspired by Southwest, or the existence of the 787, and thence be generated, and with a little luck, fly 787s.

Given the success of Southwest and its imitators, this seems like a pretty good bet.

For uninteresting, used-up-my-quota reasons, I’m rehosting the website. The good news is you shouldn’t be able to tell, at least if you’ve got it bookmarked as wiredcola.com, which should continue to be an authoritative home for the site for some time (as in, I’ve paid for that domain through 2009, ensuring the security of the Wired Cola legacy.

For the technically-minded, I moved the hosting to blogger’s hosting, which may or may not be a stopgap. The major reason for doing this was to avoid filling up my quota on my SFU account, which is 88% usage, a number which has been climbing at about 1% every week or two.

The second, and possibly much less important reason, is to enable the possibility of commercializing this thing in some way. At the moment, I don’t expect that to happen. The main reason is I’m not popular enough to bother. But as long as I was hosted on SFU’s system, it would have been an abuse of the terms of use, specifically that document of mythic symbolism to a certain class of student, the dread GP 24. That clause disallowing “pre-emptive use of the system for personal gain” would almost certainly preclude a blog that was hosting external ads, for example.

So now you can comprehend the master plan of Wired Cola: get big, somehow, then sell out. It’s going to be a long journey. I have some theories, but nothing concrete. For now, the biggest commercial activity will continue to be my attempts to sell my bike.

I may also change some other things about the site: the logo, which I love so dearly, may be sacrificed for something less horrible. This is by no means certain. After all, I would have to overcome my laziness to do so.

But laziness is something I’m working on these days. The new plan is to focus and finish.

Just to let you know, I’ve decided to sell the under-used mountain bike to drive more funds into my ongoing road bike obsessions. It’s a ’97 18″ Kona Kilauea with a nice Marzocchi Z2 fork, recently overhauled with new oil and nice Enduro seals, so it’s better than new. I even have extra springs for the fork, and two differnent stems (short and long). The thing’s a peach, a super-tough steel cross-country hardtail with XT components. I want, oh, $400 for it, or trade for all manner of nifty road bike stuff, from frames to wheels. I’ll post photos shortly.

Ahh! Apologies for a gross lack of content lately. For her part, The Lovely One has been roundly chastised, and will be back on schedule shortly.

For my part, too much stuff, almost all of it blandly personal and not really informative in some external way. Enjoy a peek behind the curtain of my posts for a moment: I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I’ve used a general principle with my posts that they should be of external interest whenever possible. That means I favour commentary, recommendations, the rare tasty link, and intrinsically interesting photos. Whether I succeed is left as an exercise for the reader. I try to write somewhere between the exposed diaries of LiveJournal and the very non-personal posting of pros like Kausfiles. If I were to create some sort of target for these posts, I’d say I want to provide an interesting thing every day.

Back to the salt mines. First the impersonal. Yay Iraq. While the enemies of democracy threatened to (according to that article) “wash the streets with ‘voters’ blood'” (and presumably to clean the windows with their bile, and sweep the sidewalks with their intestines…say what you want, those suicidal terrorists have an ear for dialogue), Iraqis voted in numbers on par with the most recent elections in Canada and the U.S.

Now for the personal, which has been pretty frantic lately. Last night, I stayed up until 0130h doing as-yet-invisible prep work on my club’s website. Due to some internal household rearrangement, TLO and I have decided it’s time to get a new computer, and the last desktop machine in the house, the reliable and silent Indigo Montoya, will be retired for a cheap-and-cheerful 12″ iBook. Those things are tiny! More like a hulking PDA than a small laptop. Speaking of PDAs, whatever happened to inkwell? There’s an OS X technology that was either intended for a device that didn’t come out, or is intended for a device that will come out, or was waiting for tablet PCs to succeed (which they have not, and probably will not: the problem is that keyboards are faster than pens). Speaking of OS X, the one thing holding me back from actually purchasing the iBook is my interest in figuring out when Mac OS X 10.4 (“Tiger”) and the next revision of iBooks will be released.

I think at some point I have to admit I’m not an edge-chaser. If I get a G4 this month and G5 iBooks are announced in two months, I’ll live. Anyone want to buy an iMac?

Meanwhile, I also want to sell one or two of my bikes. Too many bikes, not enough riding to go around, and the race bike needs an upgrade. Time to fix that by getting rid of the MTB for now. Anyone want to buy a Kona Kilauea with a Marzocchi Z2 fork?

But now I’m thinking about some New Year’s resolutions that are coming to the fore. One of those was to think seriously about making myself more valuable, or at least better compensated. Taking a page from my father-in-law, I intend to stay at my day job, but make my after-hours work pay better. This will help with a lot of things, for a lot of reasons. More on this and other plans later. Also in the short term, I have to rack that crab apple wine!

The job jar is plumb full: take down the rest of the Christmas lights (I’m still way ahead of last year, when the husk of the Christmas tree mocked us from the backyard around Easter; this year it became mulch about two days after Epiphany), finish a bunch of side projects, work more on the bike-club site, and fit in some training. Maybe the most important project is this: I want to do a much better job of keeping my to-do list in hand. Not sure how yet, but I finally understand why both my father and my grandfather always have a small notepad in their breast pocket. It’s because no Cousineau can remember anything.

Did I mention the bike training? I feel great! Motivated, well-planned, and ready to shock the world! This year, I have a plan, I have guidance, and I know what I’m going to do. I’m putting every Cat 4 in the Lower Mainland on notice now: Don’t bother peaking between June 26 and July 3, because I am going to be in perfect form then, with patient tactics, a quiet soul, a sharp mind, and a strong body. I recommend you all go to the July 2-3 Race at the Edge in the Queen Charlottes, because I will be at the PoCo Classic (the, er, inagural running…) on July 3, and I will be so strong, determined, and successful that you will feel the sour kind of pain while I revel in the sweet kind of pain!

As usual, I found some time to read Car and Driver at the newsstand this week, and the most interesting article of all was a column by Csaba Csere, one of their several smart, engineer-background editors. Kudos to them, by the way, for making the content available online.

He was on about the genuinely shocking news that electronic stability controls (ESC) in cars make a big difference in the rate of accident involvement of those cars. To sum up the most significant finding, cars that are equipped with ESC had about half the rate of “involvement” in fatal single-vehicle accidents, versus previous versions of those cars without ESC (read the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety report; I’ve elided some minor details). Since single-vehicle accidents are about half of all fatal accidents, this means, in theory, that universal ESC adoption could prevent about a quarter of all annual fatal crashes.

That’s a big difference. And Csere has some interesting ideas about why this is so, especially since (maybe even more shockingly) anti-lock brakes don’t seem to have any effect on accident or fatality rates. The column is a must-read.

Csere quotes studies from the IIHS and the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (an actual US government body). I haven’t found the latter document yet, but they do have this page on their general ESC research, complete with pictures of a heavily-instrumented Corvette on a wet course.

Otis Spunkmeyer. Can you tell that’s a made-up, awful company name? Of course you can.

Branding is a recurring theme in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, which includes the theory that the Tommy Hilfiger brand, because of its incredibly derivative and obviously calculated style, is the most soulless brand ever (this is important, because the main character is allergic to bad branding).

That’s how I felt when I encountered Mr. Spunkmeyer in a Zeller’s diner. They had a coffee-and-cookie deal. I had a double-chocolate cookie, and it tasted pretty good.

The cookie was a genuine Otis Spunkmeyer’s Traditional Recipe cookie (you think that last link was superfluous, right? OS has five separate lines of cookies. Heaven help you if you get yourself in such a situation as to be served an Otis Spunkmeyer Value Zone cookie). The product wasn’t the problem, meeting, as it did, all my cookie needs. I’d buy the cookie again. I’ll never buy into the brand, which has some sort of ludicrous gay-nineties (1890s) overtones going on, but which I only decipher as some sort of misbegotten attempt to hit the mental branding space between Famous Amos and Orville Redenbacher, with maybe a little Little Debbie thrown in.

It felt deeply fake, because it was! (Your attention is directed to the “Company Facts” sidebar.) This is what happens when you let 12-year-olds name your cookie store. It’s not surprising, at least retrospectively, to find out the company started with that name in 1977, as it sounds like a vaguely homey, old-timey name from whatever messy nostalgia originated in the 70s. I have a guess that the logo (company name in a jolly, serif display font that looks like it was stolen from Strawberry Shortcake) has not changed since.

Kids! Don’t let this, or other bad branding (Genexxa!)