GLOBADOM

Uh-oh

Today, after a particularly successful hunt of the region’s garage sales with my imaginary friend Dave (The Lovely One, having not yet met Dave, insists he doesn’t really exist), I came home with:

2 high-quality Serratus saddlebags ($12)

a bunch of records and a Chinese-style embroidery for TLO ($7.50)

A whole lotta Atari 2600 cartridges ($2)

3 bikes from three different sales ($30)

That last one prompted some bemused remarks from my mother-in-law.

Imaginary Dave got a very nice Olympus rangefinder camera, the bar bag that goes with the saddlebags, and I don’t remember what else.

I resisted buying Command and Conquer for $1, and we narrowly avoided purchasing Simcity 2000 for OS/2. I also decided not to bargain with the kid who wanted $7 for two NES cartridges, instead just giving up on them.

The bikes were all interesting.

First find was a remarkably good-looking folder, an “Auto-Mini” from Austria. Singlespeed, but I think it will become the nucleus for a very fast folder shortly. BMX wheels were included with the purchase, and will be added on shortly. $10, can’t go wrong.

The second to be assimilated was a BMX bike I bought for $5 because I wanted the wheels, mainly as the rear had a 5-speed freewheel, well-suited to my plans for the Auto-Mini.

The last was spotted late in the day, when we looked over an interesting “Skykomish” bike, some sort of mid-range steel mountain bike, probably a Washington-state design by the name. Decent components (LX derailleur, 7-speed rear wheel) were why I picked it up, and in a fit of brutal bargaining, I extracted the bike and a BLT lighting system (sans charger) from the vendor for $15.

Meat for the grinder!

And here I thought I had nothing to post about

Google, as part of its ongoing plot to take over the world, has finally given me a shot at a GMail account. So I’m rcousine@gmail.com, and let’s see if this thing has any use at all.

They seem to be trying some fairly clever concepts out about searching. It’s as if Google’s attitude is that since they’re really good at searching and archiving, all problems should be solved using search-and-archive tools.

Well, it has worked for them so far. They’re not quite victims of their own success yet, though they seem to have barely fought off the PageRank-farmers even now.

Did a bit of lawn mowing on my day off, followed by a relaxing spate of dinner-making, interrupted just long enough to do a time-trial test. Scary. I have to hit 40 km/h average for just under 30 minutes if I want to win a TT coming up this weekend. According to my test, it will hurt!

Isn’t he cute?

The shed is up. I had my misgivings about the project for a while (especially when I was putting in the joist supports, every one of which I cut a little too short), but it looks like it will be usable as a real work space, even with a pile of bikes in one corner and a pile of crap, er, judiciously hoarded bike parts, in another corner.

But the workbench is up, thanks to a generous donation from Dave, and my tools have a place to live now.

Shed’s up, I’m out

Thank heavens. The shed project is done. But no photos of that yet, not even the silly one once again showing that I tastelessly own three blue bikes with identical orange seats.

Instead, I think I’ll just say I’m kinda beat. Oh, but I have to mention Greg Viger’s cool real-estate thingy, which is the answer to the question “what if your realtor was also a database programmer?”

I’ll say more about why Greg’s concept is clever next time, but it basically leverages (word alert! Word alert!) the power of taking a good realty database, and usefully hooking it to the web and e-mail.

Okay, what’s next to do? Not much racing for a few weeks, and the shed is up, so that means it’s time to sell the motorcycle. And mow the lawn.

Rain!

Well, that has certainly damped my plans to work on the shed tonight. We’ll see what happens.

I would like to personally thank Quentin Tarantino for appearing on American Idol tonight. This caused me to watch the show, something I would normally not do of my own volition. This caused me to see his interesting but not that impressive comments. But more importantly, it meant I got to hear Fantasia’s great-by-any-standard rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

Brave me. I’m not afraid to admit it when I watch American Idol. But you’ll never get out of me which Rae Dawn Chong movies I’ve seen.

To your right, a picture of Saint. More from the weekend’s load of pictures. Coming soon, previews of wedding decorations.

Clean-up week in Port Moody has been a bit of a bike-finding bust. Perhaps my standards have risen too high, but among the many bikes set out for disposal, I haven’t found any parts really worth the trouble of dragging home. I’ll keep looking. It only takes one gem to make a few hours of scavenging worthwhile.

On the video games front, I have just gone through a remarkable dry spell. Due to other stuff in my life, I simply haven’t played many games lately. But in the last week or so, I suddenly picked up my Game Boy Advance once more.

Residing within is the superlative Advance Wars 2 (note to game makers: we can figure that your game is for the GBA: it won’t fit in any other console. You do not have to put “Advance” in the name each time. On the other hand, games called “Wars” and “Wars 2” would seem pretty stupid, so maybe in this case it’s okay). I don’t tend to seek out turn-based “tactics” games, but this is a great one.

Advance Wars 2 does everything that a game should. It is reasonably pretty to look at, it is a solid addition to the tactics genre, and it nicely blends the opportunity for subtle play with fundamentally simple game mechanics.

But it also does the overlooked little things well. I timed it out of curiosity: you can be playing a saved game 16 seconds after you turn on your GBA. That is excellent. That combined with fast saves means that I have no compunctions about powering up the GBA in an idle moment, moving two units, and saving and closing. That takes maybe a minute.

There are not so many units or parameters that you drown in a sea of complexity. There is a lot of stuff to do in this game. I would sometimes find myself playing a campaign for a while, then changing over to play a Battle Map for a change of pace, then back to the Campaign, or maybe buy something in the store, or even build a map.

The best way to say it is that Advance Wars 2 shows respect for its medium. It was clearly designed very close to the metal, and it uses the strengths of the GBA (short bursts of play, quick startup and shutdown) well.

At times, playing the PlayStation 2 feels like a chore: load up the game du jour, wait a minute or two for it to load, wait some more for it to load the save, and then you get to play, but it’s really not worth the trouble unless you’re trying to kill a half an hour. I don’t really mind (except for Oni, a good game ruined by dreadful load times), but it’s not as much fun as just grabbing the GBA and going for it.

Not much to say tonight. Ate too much chocolate of course, worked on the shed some more (walls up, roof not up. Maybe tomorrow), and now I just want to post the prettiest flower picture ever. The full-size picture is quite spectacular; for once I wish I had a full-resolution version of this, but I was shooting at 1.2 megapixels.

The spectacular shot to your right comes from a flowerbox in a traffic circle near my house. The light was just wonderful for this sort of picture: intense and high in the sky. I believe I shot this Sunday, but it could have been Saturday.

There should be more photos later this week. It was a pretty fruitful weekend, shooting-wise, so I’ll feel inclined to post more.

Is there anything else I want to say? No.

Happy Easter!

Up and down. Christ is risen, thank God, which means I can end my Lenten devotion of not procrastinating. For the next fifty days, it’s nothing but unrepentant laziness!

Ahem. You see, that’s the problem with taking on a more nebulous form of self-improvement than giving up chocolate. With chocolate, you give it up, you eat it at Easter, you move on. With procrastination you really can’t start doing it again.

Today’s Harris-Roubaix was a big bust. I had a lousy start, in which I grossly underestimated how hard most people would ride off in order to get onto the gravel first, but that didn’t really cost me anything: nobody broke away early. But then on the second lap (I think) onto the gravel, somebody bumped my rear wheel on the very problematic transition to the gravel (it was virtually a dead stop for mid-pack riders and back). No harm no foul, but then on the gravel my bike felt like I had the rear brake applied. It took two stops to figure it out: my rear wheel got cocked sideways and was rubbing the frame. The stops and the fix cost me so much time I could barely see the bunch, and was never in touch. I chased for a couple of laps, picked up a few other dropped riders, and then abandoned when all hope was gone.

If I can take any courage from this, the gravel was fun to ride, and I learned a few things, and I was having a lot better day than the elite female rider I caught up to who had a flat which led to a gear mechanical. She should have been a contender, instead she was done.

And then there was the Cat 5 regular who, after abandoning near the start-finish for unknown reasons, threw his bike down in disgust. Dude! Don’t take it out on the bike! No matter how bad your race was, or who took you out, this is Cat 5 racing. Keep cool.

So the agenda for today is to finish the shed. I’ve been taking pictures, so more of that soon. I’ll have a lot of photos to download, everything from construction documentation to dog pictures to artsy flower shots.

And what is it about flowers, anyways? Perhaps it’s just Spring, but they seem irresistible for digital photography. I think it’s that web images have a luminous characteristic like slide film that makes colourful subjects in full light much more impressive than they would be as prints. Same goes for sunsets.

Feeling proud

Okay, now that the Pacific Populaire times have been posted, I thought I’d take a few paragraphs to brag about the magnitude of my achievement, followed by a few sentences of proper humility.

You’ll notice that me and Kristine finished with an official time of 2:55. I don’t really know her, but we fell off the pace of the lead group at the same time, and paced each other home. Either of our times would have been a record in any other year, though this year’s course was clearly much faster than the previous route. As it was, we finished 10th of 257 finishers, and 265 starters.

That’s astonishing. Go look at the 2003 times. It’s okay, I’ll wait; I finished with a 4:07. So I cut more than an hour off my time in one year. Figuring a true course distance of 105 km (about right, but my bike computer was acting up so I don’t have those stats), my average pace was 36 km/h. Which is stupidly fast. This gives me a lot more confidence than before about going into the Harris-Roubaix.

Now for the qualifiers. First, faster course. Second, I benefitted by a huge amount of pace-lining, and a lot of luck. I was dropped on the return trip over the Arthur Laing bridge, but managed to catch back on thanks to a well-timed traffic light. That meant I was able to draft all the way along Marine Drive before I dropped off, a huge benefit. The drafting pulled me well beyond my real abilities. Thirdly, several riders who might have stayed with the lead group had problems. EV rider Steve had a DNF for reasons I haven’t found out about. EV rider and co-worker Brian had two flat tires, but posted a 3:21 without the same drafting that I got. And that’s just the ones I know about. Fourthly, for all the mock-seriousness with which EV treats the Populaire, most racers ignore it. So when I say I outran the rest of the pack, most of the rest didn’t even know they were racing. Because they weren’t. This is, after all, not a race.

I’d also like to say hi to friends Ben and Daniel, who posted a 4:25 and a 4:31 respectively. But before you dismiss those results, think specificity: Ben rides 600 km brevets for fun. Daniel started riding last Fall and is planning to do the Seattle-to-Portland ride in one day, with a team from work. I doubt I could do a 600 k brevet (even a 200 would be a bit scary), and I know that I couldn’t have ridden STP in the year after I started riding.

But caveats and all, I had an awesome day of riding.

Edit: I replaced “enormity” with “magnitude” in the first paragraph after keith pointed out the, ah, criminal implications of my choice of word. Kids: don’t use it that way! And while I was there, I fixed another phrase that was bugging me in some trivial way.

And a big hello to my co-workers, who today will be listening to me blather on about weblogging as a new technology, and speculating on some departmental uses for blogging.

The fascinating thing about blogging is that like many great web-based ideas, the technology is not very complex (a blog-publishing system is, reductively, just a few scripts that automatically formats plain text into a pre-selected HTML format, and archive old posts). The magic of blogging is because it removes the boring scut-work and leaves the blogger only the task of writing the actual posts.

This is good!

Okay, so Alanis wanted to show that it was repressive to be taken aback by public nudity, and she demonstrated that by…not being naked.

C’mon, where’s the courage of your convictions, eh?

Ah, I’m not going any further with that story.

Another short entry tonight, for which I won’t apologise. I have just been busy. You heard about the ride on the weekend, the shed still isn’t done, and I spend my spare moments showing an apartment to people, a little sideline I’m doing for some relatives.

Cat? Still crazy. Me? Too lazy. TLO? she’s okay-zy.

22:30 and all is well.