Mile42

That’s Great, But, What Have You Been Up To LATELY?

April 18, 2012 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Amused, Happy, Tech

Biking around Oakland all day like some punk-ass deadbeat hipster has been lots of fun.

Also, visiting my parents and sisters and nephews during my time off has been totally awesome.

Don’t worry, there was no permanent scarring. Heh heh heh.

Not to mention the vacations with Erika. She took a picture of me finding … (band hit) … A SHRUBBERY !!!

Our adventures also reached the dizzying heights of … (wait for iiiiit) … SHOPPING FOR PANTS !!!

Should Garrett buy these? Y/N?

In total, I can surely say it was an Excellent Adventure and a Bogus Journey.

But lesson learned: I need to work on big things I believe in, or I feel rudderless. That is why, after a few rounds of interviews, I began working at the Joint Bio-Energy Institute in Emeryville. Contrary to what the name implies, they do not spend all day rolling joints and flailing about spastically. It’s all about alternative fuel research and genetics, yo.

The JBEI is a 20 minute bike ride from my house. Flippin’ sweet. Yesterday I picked up my badge:

I also got a tour of the place. You know those tacky commercials where some actress puts on a white lab coat and stands in front of some complicated beeping machines and glassware to convince you that Bob’s Double-Nose Enhancement Pills are the one true path to enlightenment and skipping merrily through fields of pollen, and also they are definitely not rat poison? The grain of truth in the stereotype is that the white lab coat and the hardware convey REAL SCIENCE, right?

Well, I am now apparently surrounded by REAL SCIENCE.

There are huge rooms here at the JBEI where people in white lab coats stroll around in front of complicated beeping machines and glassware. Tons and tons of glassware; acres of it, with strange liquids writhing inside. There are other rooms filled with thunderous air-conditioning and rows of industrial freezers, with digital readouts saying things like “-80 C”, and signs tacked on the wall reading RADIATION HAZARD and MUST USE PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR.

While I was getting the unofficial walkabout tour from one of my co-managers, I heard a polite voice behind me calling, “Excuse me! Please; excuse me!” I turned around to see a short woman in a lab coat and glasses, with a huge embarrassed grin on her face, and an enormous glass bottle cradled in her arms with some mysterious clear liquid tumbling about inside. She said:

“Can you open this? Like, just loosen it, but not take the lid off? Please?”

Then she handed the bottle. It took a few seconds of careful macho twisting, but I got the cap to turn, and handed the bottle back to her. “You got it! Thank you!” she said, grinning some more, and then turned around and strode back into the lab.

A charming omen for a first day. Like my first day at Apple, when I encountered Steve Jobs in the cafeteria. This omen illustrates the general tone for this new chapter in my working life: I like helping scientists!

The rest of the day was spent setting up my build environment, then diving straight into a thorny mess of code. Afterwards I was dead tired, but Erika gave me a ride to the Soup Restaurant of Deliciousness, and I perked up over the meal. We had an excellent time.

That night I prepped the recumbent in the living room:

Inflated tires, oiled chain, tightened bolts, and reattached storage bags.

The bags contained items to customize my work area:

Six dark chocolate peanut butter cups.
A box of dark-chocolate covered walnuts.
Three Hawaiian shirts with matching plastic hangars.
A framed painting of a striped kittycat that has been on all of my office desks since 1998.
A pair of shoes
A hefty bike lock
My newly minted badge
A toothbrush

Some time after I packed it up and rolled sleepily into bed, Erika sent me an Emoji version of how my next day would go:

She got it spot on. The ride next morning went perfectly, and the recumbent sparked a conversation in the parking garage, and I made a new friend, then another in the elevator on the way up to the fourth floor.

The second day: Eight hours of A-game hacking. By the end of the session, I’d learned a ton of new things about Java, Tomcat, Ant, and Indigo, and I’d come up with a good strategy for untangling the design flaws in the my newly-assigned project.

Awwww yeah.

Then I rode home, fed the cat, grabbed some laundry, rode to Erika’s, and we dashed out to catch yoga. An hour-and-a-half of balancing, stretching, and serene, focused movement. An excellent Tuesday ritual. Between this and the bombastic expression of Karaoke I think I have a good thing going.

Let’s see where it takes me!

Kevin’s Drawing

March 8, 2012 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Amused, Happy

It's totally me in "daclaratory mode". He's an artist! Love that guy.

On being back

December 25, 2011 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Curious, Happy Tagged with toledo

Part of me is trying to take my routine from the road and cram my “real life” into it. One obvious reason why it doesn’t fit is, I just have too many possessions. They’re stacked around me. I need multiple rooms to hold them all.

And yet these are all needed for a typical life in one place. They save time and money. They’re valuable. Right now I am seeing them from a strange perspective. They remind me of the heaps of trash I saw on the lawns of the houses in small Kansas towns. Lives destroyed by poverty and methamphetamines. What good did their possessions do them?

Actually, let me pull the brakes on this whole train of thought, and grind it into reverse. Let me ask, “what does all this introspection and writing do for me?”

We both die, after our singular and cosmically ineffective lives, me and the tweeker with his garbage on the lawn. I am taking my own tendency to take things seriously too seriously. Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson from this trip: All of our lives, even the most important things we can identify in them, are transient.

I look around here at the environment I left behind, and I remember how I felt inside it, and I think, “It could be like the trip never happened at all. Here’s all my old stuff, and all my old unfinished business.” But I can now see the ways in which this old life chafes me, like a badly tailored suit.

So much activity – so much thought and observation – was crammed into every hour on the road, and I now feel a kind of revulsion at the slowness of life before it. Did I really spend entire days indoors, reading web pages and moving files around? Did I really consider a bicycle ride to the supermarket across town, less than two miles, to be too difficult? Too time consuming? Too much hassle? I just spent the last month riding 50 miles every day of the week, with 50 pounds of ballast, through wind and thunderstorms, and all it did me was good.

What were you thinking, previous me?

You must have been really twisted up inside yourself to see things that way.

Being unemployed has given me plenty of time to think but it has turned into a poison. I need to hammer at the dream of society building again. It’s time to get things done.

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Post-trip ruminating

December 18, 2011 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Stress Tagged with toledo

Oakland has its appeal, and for all the danger and grime I actually enjoy living there. But I hear stories about bears wandering along the shores of San Francisco Bay and I have trouble picturing it. They were all long gone before I was even born, and it never even occurred to me that they had been there.

I was thinking about it, and I started to wonder:

How much more can we lose, from generation to generation, and forget about, before we actually start to suffer, irrevocably, from the cumulative loss? Will we eventually reach a point where we will live our entire lives without ever seeing animals other than pets and livestock? The very idea of animals surviving independent of humans will seem absurd, since all the independence was bred out of them years ago.

What will we miss? Can it be described? What will each of us do?

I imagine one of my grandchildren standing in a grassy field. There are no birds, so to relieve the silence, she plays some music on her phone. There are no animals to encounter, so to relieve the loneliness, she starts texting one of her friends. All the plants look like the plants everywhere else, so to relieve the visual boredom, she starts playing a puzzle game. “Nature is boring, granddad. Why were you so into it, anyway?”

Packing Up The Bike

December 18, 2011 by TheCuriousCyclist Filed under Advice, Tech Tagged with toledo

The key to taking apart a bicycle is to have one of these on hand. It’s a tiny adjustable wrench, small enough to carry in a toolkit and lock nuts in place, and just big enough to remove the pedals from a bicycle.

And, of course, you need a variety of hex wrenches!

The key to transporting a bicycle once it’s in pieces is to use a sturdy box. After sinking a big chunk of money into the recumbent itself, I figured I could justify spending a chunk to get it home safely. I chose the Crateworks “tandem”-size box.

It’s freaking enormous. 70 x 11 x 32 inches. Even so, it was just long enough for me to fit the main boom of the recumbent in diagonally. Around that I packed almost all of my gear – three of the bike bags, the clothing, the sleeping bag, the tools, the spare tire, and some remaining food. The fourth bike bag remained outside, so I could use it as carry-on baggage for the plane ride home.

Recumbent disassembled and placed into a Crateworks long-style box.

It took most of a day to break down the bike and install it in the box. The end result was close to 110 pounds, the ceiling for cross-country oversize shipping at the local FedEx depot.

The box is clearly labeled with arrows indicating “this side up”, but as far as I can tell, FedEx employees totally ignore these. When it arrived in Oakland six days later it was upside-down in the back of the truck, and the delivery agent dragged it out and lowered it by turning it end-over-end, leaving it upside-down on the sidewalk in front of me. At least he helped me carry it into the house.

Interestingly enough, due to the seasonal discount on my plane ticket, it cost just as much to ship a 110-pound box home in a week as it cost to fly my 180-pound ass home in 12 hours.

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