Category: First World Problems

Marvel-ous

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
Eurocrossin’ in the New Mexican desert.

Why is a Steelman Eurocross better than a BMW 7 Series?

Well, for openers, it’s a Steelman Eurocross. And you can’t just slide on down to your local Steelman dealer and drive one off the lot, because Brent Steelman isn’t making them any longer.

Even if you could, its touchscreen wouldn’t be showing you an ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” the instant you climbed aboard, which BMWs are doing. My Steelman Eurocrosses ain’t got no steekeeng touchscreens. Oh, sure, they share an ancient Cateye Velo 8, but it doesn’t say shit to me because it saw what I did to Herself’s sportswatch with a claw hammer when the fucker started beeping and wouldn’t shut the hell up.

I knew this day was coming the first time I pulled into a gas station for a tank of the cheap stuff and the pump started shrieking advertising bullshit at me. I nearly drove off right then and there, but I was running on fumes, and figured that if one station was doing it, they all were.

And they all are.

The Eurocross “touchscreen.” One button, no Spider-Men.

So, guess what? If six-figure BMW 7 Series sedans are inflicting advertisements upon their owners — and nobody at BMW gets fed feet first into a wood chipper over it — your $24K Kia Shitbox will soon be pitching Happy Meals, weight-loss programs, and boner pills at you.

My 2005 Subaru Forester? Not so much. The only screen in that sucker is the windscreen, as the Brits call it. The clear one I look through to see where in the hell is it that I’m going.

John Gruber sums up the whole deal nicely at Daring Fireball:

This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real. 

Ho ho ho. What isn’t?

Comments gone wild!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Possessed by devils, are we?

A quick housekeeping note:

Some of you are seeing your comments on posts multiplying like parasites in a Taco Hell salad. I’m looking into it and will be tugging on the coat of some “Happiness Engineer” here directly.

I asked Herself to post a comment and she did so without issue, using an M1 Mac Mini rocking Big Sur (yeah, I know, OTBJ) and some equally aged edition of Safari. We didn’t get any duplicates, triplicates, or quadruplicates of the comment, nor was she presented with a “continue reading” button after posting, which Longtime Reader of the Blog Steve O’ suggests may be the trigger for comment duplication.

She was not posting as a subscriber to the blog, just using her email and a screenname.

That’s all the intel I have for the moment.

In the meantime, while we await Wisdom, maybe commenters should ignore any “continue reading” buttons after posting and hit their browser’s “back” button instead.

And please be patient while waiting for a comment to appear. I’ve noticed some sluggishness from WordPress lately and attributed it to our ridiculous Internet connection, for which we pay far too much in a town with a national lab, a university, and all manner of other outfits that require something with more git-up-and-go than dialup AOL.

Could be that all these bells and whistles WP has been adding lately has caused something to go awry.

• Addendum: Still waiting on MeatBased® support here. A.I. speculates that “theme-level behavior” may be our problem. This would not surprise me, as this is an old theme, to which I switched after the even older theme started showing some behaviors that would get it punched in some of the bars I used to frequent.

I may have to go to manual approval of comments for a while, so if anything you have to say seems to be a tad slow on the rebop, why, you can blame Your Humble Narrator.

Go fish

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
The latest iteration of the Pescadero from Soma Fabrications.

Ho ho ho, etc. The Santas at Soma Fabrications have a fresh catch of Pescadero road framesets for all you good girls and boys this Christmas.

The Pescadero is a “road-sport” steed, designed with 35mm rubber in mind but good to 38mm, my personal tire width of choice. And did I mention that it takes rim brakes? Your choice of centerpulls or dual pivots.

This was the frameset I wanted to review Back in the Day® for Adventure Cyclist, but it was out of stock. So I went instead for a first cousin from the Merry Sales family, the New Albion Privateer, which has become one of my favorite bikes for the mean streets of The Duck! City. (You’ll see mine, black with silver rack, in the photo carousel.)

Hm. Decisions, decisions. I need a new MacBook Pro to carry on The Work, but another resident of the San Francisco area has annoyed me by leaping clear across the country to kiss the Pestilence-Erect’s ring (hope you packed plenty mouthwash, Timmy me lad).

Maybe I need to redirect my holiday spending. Some might say I have too many two-wheelers already, but I have plenty of Macs, too. And as we all know, the proper number of bikes for a man is n+1.

An old story

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
My Nobilette takes five at the Michial Emery trailhead.

It was the Wednesday Geezer Ride and I was running on O’Grady Standard Time as per usual.

I almost always make our meeting spot on time, or within shouting distance of it, anyway. But not this Wednesday.

After a distracting morning spent accommodating Herself and a visiting sister I was horsing the Nobilette northward along Tramway, a few minutes off my usual delayed kickoff and feeling a little light in the jersey pockets for some reason.

So I gave myself a quick pat-down.

“Shit, forgot my tools. Aw, probably won’t need them.” Onward.

Then the Watch cheeped.

“Forget your water bottle?” asked Herself.

“Shit again. That I will definitely need.”

So I texted the Ride Leader to let him know I’d join up somewhere along the route, then pulled a U and big-ringed it back toward El Rancho Pendejo, which this morning seemed aptly named.

While headed south I saw our Ride Leader headed north. We both looked at each other like, “WTF?” He should’ve been at the meetup while I should’ve been a couple minutes behind him and closing in.

“Back in a minute!” I yelled and punched it.

At the casa I grabbed bottle and tools and headed north once more, advising the Ride Leader via text that I’d try to catch up around Simms at Eagle Ridge, or at the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

But when I got to Eagle Ridge, no Geezers.

So I backtracked the route a bit. Nope. Rode up to Elena Gallegos. Nix. Did a couple laps of that loop to pass the time. Nuttin’.

Shit.

So I rip a quick shortcut to the next checkpoint, in High Desert. Nada.

¡Basta ya! I text again.

“Where you gents at?”

“At top of Elena’s,” replies the Ride Leader.

Sheeeeeeyit.

Anyway, to shorten an already-overlong story, one Geezer had a crook gut and bailed pre-ride, another flatted (the Ride Leader stopped to offer aid, which explains why he was running behind), and there were a couple other no-shows. A late start thus became even later. Our carefully designed velo-structure simply fell apart like a toilet-paper tent in a heavy rain.

At least our communications devices didn’t explode in our pockets or hands. First World Problems only, please.

In any event, so we’re a little slow off the start line. So what? Rivendell’s Grant Petersen likes “pleasurable, unhurried riding,” and so do I. When I can manage it, anyway.

• Hat tip to Alex Strickland, the former boss-fella at Adventure Cyclist, for passing along the Rivendell story.

A ‘new’ year

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
The Sandias, pre-Snowpocalypse.

January’s getting all, well, January on us. New year, same old song.

It’s been chilly, but not so much so that a fella can’t ride his bike for 90 minutes with three or four layers of 30-year-old cycling kit, adding and removing same as conditions indicate while awaiting the fabled Snowpocalypse, which by noon Thursday was as you see.

The Sandias, post-Snowpocalypse.

Betimes we are reminded that rich people, politicians, and rich politicians can be insufferable, twisted, lying, featherbedding assholes. This is not an annual or even seasonal event.

Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, evildoers found a back door to our credit card while Herself was in an personal-electronics-free secure area and I was out on the bike, oblivious to my my own digital alerts as I removed and added layers of this and that while rolling around to no particular purpose beyond taking pix of the Sandias.

So, once I had been made aware of the breach in our fiscal defenses, I had to race home, doublecheck my receipts, mumble several filthy words, block the attempted piracy and croak that card over the phone, go get two new cards from a local branch, and then go back to get two even newer ones because the Top Secret Your Eyes Only Three-Digit Security Code was buggered on the first batch.

Now I get to work my way down the long list of bills set to autopay in order that we do not suddenly find ourselves freezing to death in the dark with no Innertubes and The Blog up on blocks.

It should go without saying that today was the day I had to drop Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster at Reincarnation for its semiannual pulse check. I did not ride a bike home from the shop and will not be riding one back there to pick up the wee beastie.

Thirty-three, feels like 25°? No thank you, please. I’ve seen the way Burqueños drive under warm and sunny skies. There aren’t enough layers in my winter drawer and none of them are Kevlar.