So I made it my goal to ride to work every day ever since I started my job in February. It's been interesting. The winter was practically easier than summer heat. (and it's only gotten to about 85 around here) Business casual dress + 5 miles a day on a bike make for a not totally nasty, but funkier than average Aaron sometimes.

Anyway, the other reason I really wanted to post this is to test out google's spreadsheet embedding in html. Here are my calculations about the commute:

Google's becoming pretty fracking impressive. It's a pretty fun time to be an html fluent webmonkey.

Back to the commute for a bit, I was surprised to see that had I driven my car that whole time, I would have only saved about 17 gallons of gas (as of 6/10). Here I was telling my wife that all the money I've been spending on my bike has been offsetting lots of expensive fuel.. bummer.

note:
The commute stretches over to mountain Ave on the way home so it can end up being a good 20 minutes of excercise. Some days I go straight home, some days I go much further.. so it's just an attempt at an average.

My friends and I were recently chatting about cellular service providers. AT&T seems like it's going to be in control of the next generation of iPhone and we were comparing their plans. The scary thing we find is the nasty tendency to nickel and dime you for all kinds of services that, when you boil them down, are nothing but bits over a wire.

We all know the price of bits people. In the days of the internet, they're extremely cheap. In fact, as Slashdot recently posted, SMS messages cost 4x more than data transferred from the Hubble Space telescope! The only thing I can think of that would be analogous as far as worthless expense goes, is bottled water consumption in America.

Cellular providers are engaged in some pretty nasty anti-competitive business. Yes, we have a couple wins under our belt, (you can at least take your phone number with you when you change providers) but generally, you're still locked into using a provider for a couple years. As a result, when a competitive advantage between providers shifts around it does so at glacial speed.

Here's what I want... Cellular neutrality. I want you to provide me with 2 pipes. One for voice communications, one for data communications. Other than that, you leave me the hell alone. I'll send whatever I want over those two pipes, and you will charge me a fair rate for it.

If a company were to do that, and still give me a device to use on that network like the iPhone, I'd pay a premium.

I ride my bike around Fort Collins, CO a lot. Collins is nice, it's a college town, so by default it's peppered with cyclists. Lately, it seems like cycling is on the rise, and it's becoming cool to have a single speed fixie and dress like a bike messenger.

My problem with Fort Collins drivers is not the usual one of rudeness, it's one of politeness.. When I show up to a busy 4 way stop that's moving smoothly with everyone taking their turn.. and a motorist (who was there first) tries to wave me through, I get seriously angry. This waving exchange takes a good 5 seconds or so, whereas if they would have just treated me like a car and acted normally, traffic would have kept flowing.

Yeah, it sounds like a silly thing to be angry about, but think about it this way. Dumb motorist sits there waving at me.. I do what they say but the one across from them (who thinks it's their turn) doesn't see any of this. That results in me riding to the center of the intersection and getting hit.

The rules of the road are extremely well thought out. There are very few instances where you need to trust a motorist to not do stupid things, you only have to trust that they too understand the rules. If you throw those rules out for cyclists, we are suddenly put at risk because we have to trust that the rules this one polite idiot just made up won't kill us.

This morning I was crossing a busy 4 lane road, The first two were clear, and the second two had one lone truck, followed (at a bit of a distance) by a huge pack of cars.

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I've been doing this thing where I exercise in some fashion for no less than 20 minutes every day. I hit 2 years over a week ago, and it was more or less a non-event. The 20 minutes thing has gone from something i'm 'doing' to just something I do. It's habit. I think about it every day, and I just do it.

I got a cubicle job in February at CSU, and because I'm a strange man with strange goals, I had to set up a new one related to this job. I'll never drive to work. I plan to ride my bike, regardless of weather for a year. I'm up to 2 months. I've ridden in slushy muck, rainy snow, etc. So far so good. (I'll blog about what I've learned on that subject here too.)

The point is, that ride (about 2.5 miles) each way has become my average workout. I run less than I used to. I also go climbing with my brother every week, and go to yoga with my lovely wife and friends. So really, the 20 minutes thing has gotten rather easy. I have so many regular opportunities and exercise commitments that I sometimes forget I'm still doing it.

I haven't recorded my workouts in quite a while. (the runs are still tracked on my gps) So I don't have many stats to give. Again, the weakest workout I've had was counting a brisk walk or two. But on average, I'm still the fittest I've ever been, though I'm probably getting a bit less cardio than I did last year. My weight is still holding around 135-140.

The point is, after 6 months or so, it just becomes habit. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

The Numbers:

I needed to take apart a my precious Thinkpad today. (The poor thing is getting on in years, and I needed to swap out its CPU fan.) It struck me as I was taking it apart. (something I've done many times) I don't know of any other puter manufacturer that makes it this easy on you. This is a primary reason I love the Thinkpad. It's like the Jeep of computers. Simple, easy to service, uses basic, standard parts and screws.

Celeste mentioned to me that a bunch of the design blogs she reads have switched to a grey font on a white background... which is.. frigging stupid and hard to read.

The neurotic problem solver that I am, I told her about Stylish, a Firefox Plugin that lets you easily write user style sheets on the fly before content loads in your browser.

You can fix pretty much any display annoyance with application of stylesheet rules these days. The only obvious drawback to this plan is that most people don't know CSS or how to wield it. That, I can't really help you with. I'm just planning on illustrating the power here. ; )

The target:
http://www.mstetsondesign.blogspot.com/

notice the grey text on a white background. Yeah.. you'll be upgrading your glasses prescription in no time.

Here is a nice little piece about when and why to distrust expert opinion.

His example about pain reminds me of a great article I found and used in my Media English class (to the befuddlement of student and colleague alike, I'm afraid). Do you remember being taught that the reason your muscles hurt after strenuous exercise was that there was a buildup of lactic acid? Well, it's totally unscientific bullshit.

As I've climbed higher (and really, I'm not that high) on the academic ladder, I've realized something: Experts are just people. They work hard, but they can make mistakes, and they actually have more important things to do than be right. They usually have to eat, and admitting everything you've said for your entire career is bunk can be very hard to do.

Language is not pure information; it's information shorthand. It assumes a high degree of already-shared knowledge about the world. Some of these assumptions are near-universal; many are not.

Japanese and English (my languages) offer a great example, especially as it pertains to machine translation. Whereas English is a subject-predicate language, where basically all the information is encoded in the language stream, Japanese is a topic-comment language, where, once set, the "subject" is not re-stated until it changes. Beginning Anglophone learners of Japanese make the mistake of putting a "wa" to denote what they think of as the subject in every sentence, when it does not need to be there. "Wa" is a topic marker; not a subject marker.

This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about language and, therefore, about the world. Germanic languages seek to operate regardless of context; Asian languages seek to augment (or "comment on") it. If you've ever felt that Japanese people who speak English are beating around the bush or being vague, part of that is cultural, but part of that is the language of the culture that does not require explicitness. A big part of learning Japanese or, for Japanese people, of learning English is learning how to think about the world and about human interactions in a very different way.

Machines aren't human. They are information processors. They don't know what a "cat" is; they just know that it's a piece of code that can be slotted into a certain place in a set of syntax. Until machines are really intelligent (and I don't think that will be anytime soon), expect more crappy translation than useful. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably selling something (a crappy machine translator, to be exact!).

This is one of the longer posts I've made regarding Linux's viability as a Windows replacement. I've edited it a bit from the original for things that have changed since then:

Linux is a toy. A powerful toy. An-almost-infinitely-customizable toy. But a toy nonetheless. I say this because the people who use it do so because they enjoy fiddling around with config files. Even if they actually like using it--and of course they do--using it requires one to fiddle with config files in ways that one would only know how to do if he enjoyed learning about such things. I'm sorry, but that is a tiny subset of the computer-using public. Most people don't want to fiddle with things to get them to work or use weird, off-brand knockoff software developed by groups of people who do it as a hobby. It is a toy.

Invariably, this comment upsets a lot of people and there's the obligatory "It runs the internet!" and "dont be rediculous i use it for my business!" (sic) replies. But none of that means it's not a toy. OpenOffice or Crossover Office do not a real computer--as most people actually use them--make. Most businesses do more than type and make spreadsheets.

Here is a quick list of software my parents' company, for whom I do IT from time to time, uses. These are industry-standard applications:

PowerClaim [powerclaim.com]

Xactimate [exactimate.com]

Internet Explorer (for dealing with the head office)

Without these, their business does not run.

Another repost. I have intimated on this site before my thoughts on Linux, and have always wanted to write a monster post that details them more thoroughly, but the time doesn't come. Here is a slightly-edited-for-readability post from elsewhere on non-computer-savvy people's ability to set up and use Ubuntu Linux:

I build my own PCs. I think that's falling-off-a-log easy. But try to get a noob friend of yours into it. No really, try. They'll come up with the goofiest, craziest, hardest questions you've ever heard. I understand on a conceptual, top-down level what is going on when I'm putting a system together and getting drivers, etc. I've been doing it long enough that when I build a new one, it's a simple matter of just learning the changes since last time I did it. Usually I already know about them because I'm a geek and keep up on such things for fun. But, for example, the change from 20-pin to 24-pin ATX connectors caught me completely by surprise and required another trip to the store to get an adapter. It still happens. I know to look up beep codes. I know what to do if it doesn't start up. When all is said and done, I forget these little problems because they are not memorable--they are not salient events because I calmly and quickly solved them. This is not the case to a person who doesn't have that comparatively vast storehouse of latent knowledge.

For someone just starting out, though, that "24-pin ATX connector" confusion happens with every single step of the process. What seems simple to us only seems that way because we've got a massive backlog of understanding that we just take for granted. We only need to make adjustments to it.