GLOBADOM

More pictures on flickr, of course.

Take one Nashbar “X” frame, add their fork, and then go to town on black parts. Thus the black bike, my purest cyclocross bicycle yet.

I was able to recycle a fair number of parts besides the frame and fork, and Dave helped me with the rest, mostly issues due to this bike having modern sizes for the front derailleur and the seatpost.

It is fun to ride. I had to change the seatpost out during the first ride, though, as it stripped a vital little part. The new one should last longer.

I was digging through the archives of my own site for something else, when I came across this bit of fluff from three years ago:

When wondering whether Bill Murray or Sean Penn should have won Best Actor this year, I point out one thing I feel pretty confident about: in five years, Lost In Translation will have a strong cult following and be well-regarded and will age pretty well. Mystic River will be just another feel-bad movie with all the rewatchability of Gandhi and all the cult following of Kramer Vs. Kramer.

Three years later, would anyone gainsay me on this?

So I’m opening a new box of Glad® Cling Wrap and taking note of its interesting and comprehensive features as I do.

The pull-away cardboard closure to initially open the box seems remarkably good as these things go. It comes away in one easy pull. I note with satisfaction the Stick Spot™ where the free end of the cling wrap goes to stick so it doesn’t retract back into the box in a mess. I approve. I start pulling the Easy Start® Tab and am pleased with how easy this is even in my sleepy, somewhat addled state. As the roll tries to pop out of the box, I realize there are conveniently placed Roll Tabs® at each end of the box, and I wonder why they aren’t pushed into place before the box leaves the factory, but I do so.

As I happily return to pulling the Easy Start® Tab out of the box, I drag my pinky finger across the invisible Cut You Bad™ blade on the bottom of the box, make a most unmanly squeal, and go off to the bathroom to stop the bleeding and apply a Band-Aid® brand bandage.

Glad® Cling Wrap’s slogan is “Clings Tight without a Fight!™” but I can assure you it kicked my ass in less than 30 seconds.

A teeny tiny cyclocross bike. My own, rather larger cyclocross bike will now need building.

Aside from the process of finding a suitable rigid fork for the front of the bike (canti posts plus the right size of steer tube), converting this 20″ wheeled “mountain bike” to a road machine was not that hard.

I highly recommend the 20″ (ISO 406) wheel size for all manner of crazy projects. Lots of interesting BMX-based equipment is available when it comes to wheels, tires, forks, and the various other likely bits. The semi-slick tires on this machine cost us about $8 each at the local shop.

I am reliably informed that the rider of this machine has been clocked at speeds nearing 30 km/h.

So, as we established about a month ago, I’ll buy anything.

But after a month, I finally understand what it is I’ve bought!

Thanks to a bit of research, a kindly James Thomson stepped forward and pointed me at this page, proving my tandem isn’t unique. But note the single-sided drivetrain (chains only on one side of the bike) as opposed to my two-sided drivetrain.

But here’s a museum-quality exhibit of another (Carnielli) Graziella Tandem, this time in Colorado, and with what appears to be the same two-sided drivetrain as my bike.

And here’s yet another Graziella, this time being fawned over by an Italian gadget blog. They’re pointing at an ebay.it auction, where the bike seems to have sold for 165 Euros.

Alas, the same James mentioned above also pointed me at this ad for the bike, which was being auctioned off on eBay. Against nonexistent competition, I successfully overpaid for this personally meaningful artifact!

Because I don’t want to tell tales out of school, of the “co-worker X is such a jerk” variety, or whatnot. But this anecdote shall be told because the only person who looks like a jerk is me, and virtually all my co-workers heard it firsthand.

At a meeting today, while discussing the relative merits of two user interfaces, I described the debate as akin to arguing over “the tastiest part of a booger.”

The next performance review should be awesome!

Ever wanted a peek behind the scenes at Wired Cola LLC, where all the magic happens?

I didn’t think so.

However, you may accidentally get one fairly soon. I may soon make some changes to this site which will be fun for me, and hopefully fun for all 28 of you. If you’ve ever heard of Drupal, you have an idea of where I’m going.

Unfortunately, the way I’ve organized (ha!) this site virtually guarantees that the changes I have in mind will cause some transitional headaches. This post is an attempt to explain how to minimize the damage.

For those of you who read this site via a bookmark, or by just typing the URL into your browser, there’s an easy route to happiness. Just make sure your bookmark (or URL) reads http://wiredcola.com. If you see “blogspot” in the url (as in “wiredcola.blogspot.com” I predict future pain.

The good news is the wiredcola.com URL works right now. Type that in, you’ll just see this blog. If I make any changes in the future, you’ll still be pointing at the right site, because I own that domain.

I’d explain the technical background what was going on, but you either already know what the problem is, or you’d be bored by the explanation. It’s not especially interesting, and I probably should have fixed it long ago.

For those of you reading this blog via a feed, you may reading a URL that will break, and that’s my fault. The good news is that by changing your feed URL to wiredcola.com/atom.xml, you should be future-proof. It looks like the feedburner feed (whose URL is ugly) should also work fine through this transition.

The rest of this post is technical details, so I’ll reward those of you who got this far with a funny picture:

Maoist vases! Yours for a competitively low price, I’m sure.

As to why I’m doing this, the short answer is that I’ve outgrown the Blogger structure. I’ve talked before about reducing friction, and thanks to Blogger’s aggressive (but sadly necessary) anti-splog captchas, it’s a pain to post here. The email interface is also hobbled to uselessness.

I could get around some of this friction by just hosting the blog somewhere other than Blogger’s servers, but as long as I’m going that far, I think I’ll do a bit more work and go to the all-singing, all-dancing Drupal CMS. The advantage is that Drupal not only allows for blogging, it also allows other forms of content, astounding levels of configurability and expandability (Drupal has lots of switches and buttons, and I like switches and buttons), and it is well-supported. I get the impression after Blogger’s most recent software update (Blogger 2.0 or whatever they call it) that blogs hosted off of Blogger’s site will now be second-class citizens. It’s not that they hate such things, but self-hosted blogs don’t have access to some of the features of the Blogspot-hosted blogs, and I suspect that this situation is not especially temporary.

In fairness, I haven’t taken advantage of all the features of Blogger. I still think it’s a really good service, and would happily recommend it to people thinking of starting a blog. There’s no shame in it, and the price (free) is about what most people should put into their first blog.

But Drupal does stuff that Blogger can’t dream of, and as far as I can tell it also does stuff that even WordPress and Movabletype aren’t well-positioned to do. I’m not sure how much of that power I will take advantage of, but I already have plans to do so.

I’m also open to suggestions on hosting. I’m strongly leaning towards Dreamhost, because they’re fairly cheap ($8/month or so), and they allow good stuff like free-and-easy shell access (useful when you’re, say compiling ffmpeg; I’ve had some pretty bad experiences on a phpwebhosting-hosted project, as that site does not allow access to gcc, which makes installing ffmpeg incredibly painful). If anyone has suggestions for a hosting service, my requirements are pretty vanilla other than that.

* * *

Hey, how about an update on that DVD-commentary project? The short version is that Apple’s DVD player has enough limitations that implementing my idea will be, at the very least, hard. The next best (maybe even better than that) is probably to use VLC, which has so much configurability that it may be a matter of choosing among several possible ways of making it do what I want.

Further research is required.

I somehow managed to see Pan’s Labyrinth in theatres, followed a few weeks later by the DVD of Borat.

Borat you surely know about. I found it a mostly uncomfortable experience.

First, I found the movie funniest when it was most contrived and least based on ambushing the unwitting. The scenes with the bear? My favourites. I mostly felt the movie was “Americans having their patience tested,” as most of the participants tried to fit Borat’s increasingly outre behaviour into their default preference to be polite to him. One hint: the less screen time a person got (think Alan Keyes here) the more likely they were essentially unimpeachable in their behaviour.

The frat boys have a lot of explaining to do. They were drunk, but that’s essentially shorthand for “willing to let yourself drink enough that you are out of your mind,” and I think that’s a pretty thin excuse.

That said, the revelation that frat boys like to drink, say stupid things, and pursue women sexually was not especially shocking.

I found large chunks of the film virtually unwatchable. The DVD menus were nice.

Pan’s Labyrinth was just astoundingly depressing. Its structure, with a gritty, realistic tale of newly Francoized Spain juxtaposed against a young girl’s fertile imagination, is a nice way to plot the movie, but thematically it suffers from a viewpoint that, as best as I could make out, was either hopelessly confused or dogmatically nihilistic. It was a children’s movie that absolutely should not ever be shown to children. Well, unless you’re a devout nihilist, in which case you could make it into a little trilogy with The Ninth Gate and The Life of David Gale. Maybe sprinkle in some Kenneth Anger for spicy weirdness. Okay, maybe that trilogy ranges a little too widely from satanism to nihilism, but you get the idea.

I’m loath to say more about the plot at the risk of spoiling it, but I can’t help but read the ending as either astoundingly empty or else filled with a Marxist sensibility. Only the future matters! We will write you out of History!

I’m probably biased and over-thinking it. It’s still an astoundingly depressing movie with lots of wild imagery and no character development.

* * *

Hey, since this is a movie post, ever notice that in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the only character who is not changed by the day’s events is Ferris himself? He is very much the same person he started the day as.

Of course, the thing you really want to know is what happened to all these characters 10, 15, 20 years later. There’s a good reason people were so eager to read Election as a pseudo-sequel to Ferris.

* * *

You’re still here? It’s over!

No, seriously. I’m looking for a DVD player (presumably software, but hardware is interesting too) that can take a commercial DVD and a list of time/cut/scene cues for that DVD, and playback your customized cut of that DVD.

Yes, this would exactly be an open version of the ClearPlay concept.

Video editing types will recognize this as a reinvention of the Edit Decision List (EDL).

Nice to have: how about a feature where I could intermingle my own audio and video tracks? So, for example, I could play a “fan commentary” MP3 as the new audio track, or better yet at 100% volume, with the original audio at 30%, reproducing the way actual commentary tracks work? Dynamic and selectable volumes for each track would be perfect, of course.

I’d also like to be able to select in an optional second video track, or maybe even alternate caption/subtitle/video overlay tracks. So, for example, I could cut to a video clip I had created (or maybe just a title card) in the middle of my fan cut of the original DVD.

It looks like a few of the players out there (VLC) are either open or open-API enough for me to do this, and I have a faint hope that Apple’s DVD player is scriptable enough to let me do this, but so far I haven’t found an off-the-shelf solution.

Why? For the same reason ClearPlay does it, only more: I want to recut DVDs my way. How about the “No Adrian!” recut of Rocky? How about cutting all of the frame narrative grandfather/grandson scenes out of The Princess Bride (the “Gooder Parts” version)? We can finally fix Lost in Translation by removing the dreadful “rip my stocking!” scene, and possibly the confusingly off-note treadmill physical comedy joke (or not; make your own EDL).

The biggest problem I see is movies available in multiple DVD versions. I doubt there’s a tidy way to handle that, especially since an edit may call for scenes not available in all versions. Each DVD version will probably require its own EDL, though it may be useful to be able to bundle multiple EDLs with a DVD check so that if one of the supported DVDs in the bundle is in the drive, it switches to the corresponding EDL.

Suggestions welcome.

Update: Apple’s DVD Player may well be able to do most of what I want.

So here I am, after half a week off work for a stupid cough-cold annoyance. No bike racing this weekend, because of a stupid cough-cold thing. No computer, because I am making a desperate last-ditch effort to revive its screen. and I’m falling behind on virtually everything.

Enough. Don’t read this grumpy post. Go back and look at Guido the tandem instead.