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.

I read a lot of Lifehacker and other organizational blogs. The trend these days is GTD. Basically, you keep and manage lists and ideas on a series of cards, in folders, whatever. This is my implementation of that. (this has also been called a Hipster PDA as well.)

What I use are Mead Ringdex cards..

I've been helping my mother set up a website for the business she started recently. I gave here a straightforward drupal setup, with TinyMCE for some WYSIWYG HTML authoring.

That's obviously not enough though. If she's going to make her own content, she needs to at least understand the basics. Here's an email I sent her on the topic of why the content she created isn't available anywhere, while some of it is. (there are no links to it.)

Maybe it'll help someone else as well.

Apple finally cracked down on iphone hackers. So today's the day I feel justified in not buying one yet. They've released a fantastically powerful tool and hobbled it to be nothing more than a shiny toy.

As consumers we need to demand access to the software of systems we buy. Software being in the hands of everyone to modify is what gives it great power.

Hackers STARTED Apple. The kind of innovation going on with the iPhone is precisely the kind that created the pc revolution in the first place! People weren't content to have a slice of time on a massive mainframe, they wanted their own computing power in their own hands. They wanted to run whatever code they wanted on computers without asking permission. Without that hacking, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.

Once again, financial forces are causing people to make stupid choices. Good luck with that Apple. In order to preserve a relationship with a cellular provider that bought into a stupid deal, you've pissed off every iPhone owner with an ear to tech-news. (that's.. most of them)

If someone were to hand me such a system that was as open as my PC, I'd pay through the ass for it.

I made a flickr group for my more interesting pet toys. Our dog chews through toys faster than we can buy them, so I've been reworking them with needle and thread whenever possible.

Craftzine took an interest. Yay!

The Flickr group can be found here.