Hot times in Dogpatch

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Little Al' is fine for light work, but for heavy lifting I'm gonna need something bigger.
Little Al' is fine for light work, but for heavy lifting I'm gonna need something bigger.

Got a little busy around here all of a sudden, and the madness will continue today with various deadlines involving ’toons and words. Plus it’s gonna be about a thousand degrees outside. Well, 94, anyway. And me with no air conditioning. Oh, the humanity.

Colorado’s typical speed-shift from 60-something to 90-something is always a shock to the system. The cats and I spend the first few days of summer sprawled on the floor, licking our butts and coughing up hairballs. Ain’t nothin’ but a party.

Meanwhile, in cooler climes, The Black Turtleneck Mob is expected to announce the impending arrival of many pricey, shiny objects today at the Worldwide Developers Conference in Gay Bay. Items to look for include a new-and-improved iPhone plus iPhone OS 4, perhaps refreshes to the Mac Pro and Mini series, and various bits of this, that and the other.

The New York Times will be live-blogging Steve Jobs’ keynote speech this morning. I’m not all that interested, frankly, though I am in the market for a new laptop. When my Internet croaked yesterday and I had to leg it over to Dogtooth Coffee Company for their free wi-fi I learned pretty quickly that I’m not going to be able to easily work the VeloNews.com website using a 12-inch G4 PowerBook. Ain’t nearly enough screen real estate on that bad boy to operate a WordPress blogging platform the way the VeloNewsers have that sucker tricked out. It runs this site just fine when need be, but we’re talking a skateboard compared to a White Freightliner here.

Thing is, I’m not all that impressed with Apple’s quality control lately. My 2006 2GHz MacBook Core Duo blew up its hard drive in under three years of extremely light use and still emits an annoying processor buzz and sports a fiddly trackpad; it has been demoted from committing journalism to running our home theater setup. And a photographer pal just completely detonated his 2-year-old MacBook Pro while on the road — probably a fried logic board.

So I dunno. Maybe it’s time for something completely different. I can pick up a 2.2GHz Intel Core Duo Dell Inspiron 15n running Ubuntu Linux for $579, which is about half the price of the low-end MacBook Pro. Any Linux geeks in the audience with experience running a WordPress blog? Feel free to speak up in comments.

BP = Butt Pirates

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

The lamestream media has finally caught on to the Mother Jones story about how British Petroleum is controlling — as in blocking — American press access to the mess these swine have made in in the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking to The Washington Post, an unidentified turd-bag from BP — who remains nameless for no reason which I can comprehend — spake thusly:

“With regards to media, we follow an incident command system, a tried-and-true way of responding to crises. You have public information officers and you have a joint information center that includes the responsible party, BP, as well as government agencies who have involvement and oversight for this spill, the Coast Guard being the federal on-scene coordinator. We have state people, NOAA, representatives from Transocean [the company that owned the rig that created the spill]. We’ve had MMS. What we do is use information that comes in through our operations and create, if you will, the message to share.”

Uh huh. Well, fuck you, Captain Invisible. Journalism is not what is “shared” by criminals and the police, it is what is uncovered by a free press, which seems to be a little off the back here. I think a few journos need to get up in the grill of a few of BP’s hired goons, get arrested, and start writing some interesting stories from the Louisiana lockup.

But that’s just me. I write about bike stuff.

Old Timers’ Day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
The DBR ti' mountain bike — 15 years old if it's a day. And it's still a better bike than I am a rider.
The DBR ti' mountain bike — 15 years old if it's a day. And it's still a better bike than I am a rider.

This being Bike Month in Colorado, I decided to designate today as Ride Bikes That Look Lonely and Unloved Day.

First I rode the Soma Double Cross — tricked out as a touring rig, with triple crankset, XT rear derailleur and panniers front and rear — to the Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage and fetched home 21.5 pounds of grub.

The bike handled pretty well despite all those spuds, onions and greens weighing it down, but then again I wasn’t climbing any hills and the ride was all of 9.6 miles, round trip; 26 minutes each way. I’m guessing that hauling 21.5 pounds of this and that up Hardscrabble Cañon might be an entirely different sort of lactic acid trip.

Next I broke out the old DBR ti’ mountain bike, cousin to my Sandvik-built road bike, and spent 90 minutes fooling around in Palmer Park, riding some bits that stymie me on the ’cross machinery. There’s something to be said for big fat tires and a cushy suspension fork in certain situations, and Palmer Park has many of them.

This bike is as wild a hodgepodge of components as its road cousin. It still has much of the original drivetrain — eight-speed XT derailleurs front and rear, OE bottom bracket, industrial-looking AC crankset, Tioga Alchemy headset — but the rest of it is from all over the place. The bike is so old I can’t remember the original spec’, though I do still have the original wheelset; Mavic 217 SUP UB Control hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs.

Today the bike sports a set of Mavic CrossMax tubeless wheels, but I dislike tubeless and run ’em with tubes inside some burly Panaracer 2.1 knobbies. The RockShox Judy SL is courtesy of the fine folks at Hippie-Tech. There’s a Sachs front twist-shifter and a SRAM Rocket rear, XT V-brakes and Avid levers, Easton EA70 bars and stem, RavX bar ends, a USE seat post topped by a Flite saddle, a Cateye Enduro 8 computer and a little brass bell to startle the mortal shit out of the clueless.

The latest addition to this rig is a pair of XT pedals for style’s sake and because I had run flat out of Time ATACs. I like the cheapo SPD pedals on the road, and these XTs treated me just fine in the sand of Palmer Park, but I still prefer Times or Crank Brothers in the mud.

When do I ride in the mud these days? Uh, never, is when. Is there anything sadder than a retired cyclo-crosser?

Meandering and Miranda

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Elephant Rock, as seen from the bike trail near Palmer Lake.
Elephant Rock, as seen from the bike trail near Palmer Lake.

It’s Bike Month here in Colorado (yeah, we’re off the back on a lot of things, including that). So, lacking official duties, I went for a nice 50-mile ride to Palmer Lake and back.

I rode the Nobilette and took the trail, and it was just about as perfect a day as could be. Just a wee bit of cross/head wind on the way out and mostly tail wind on the way home. Fat city. I celebrated with the leftovers from yesterday’s Memorial Day steak, spuds and broccoli feast and then treated myself to a short nap.

All good things must come to an end, of course. I awakened to find that yet another 5-4 majority of the Supremes has been chiseling away at the Miranda decision again. From The Washington Post:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the sharpest dissent of her young career on the court, accused the majority of casting aside judicial restraint and creating a rule that marks “a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination” that Miranda established more than 40 years ago.

“Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down,” Sotomayor wrote. “Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent, which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak.” She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Well, boys, there you have it. When the deal goes down and the coppers have you in that windowless back room, give out with two quick sentences — “I ain’t sayin’ shit, and I want my lawyer” — and then shut the fuck up. Assuming you ever want to enjoy another glorious June outing on the bike, that is.

Keep the home fires burning

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
No wonder my old man always rented. He must've heard of the Heritage Lake Homeowners Association.
No wonder my old man always rented. He must've heard of the Heritage Lakes Homeowners Association.

You don’t hear much about Afghanistan or Iraq lately. Lately it’s all about BP’s feeble attempts to stuff its greasy genie back into its mile-deep bottle, the final episode of “Lost” or whether Obama is too Spocklike to be president (after eight years of Alfred E. Neuman, Spock looks pretty damn’ good to some of us).

Maybe because it’s been five years since Darth Cheney famously announced that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes. The American public has the attention span of a meth-addled fruit fly (“Oooh, iPad!”), and frankly, it’s pretty easy to draw those red-white-and-blue eyeballs away from a couple of meat grinders that just patiently chew up and spit out our brothers and sisters in uniform.

Nevertheless, for today, at least, let’s take a moment to think about all those folks who won’t be hanging out beside the Weber with a cold one, shooting the shit instead of getting shot at.

And thank your lucky stars you are not a member of the Heritage Lakes Homeowners Association in Frisco, Texas. You ever get the feeling we’re bombing the wrong people?