Seattle Bicycle Master Plan | June 27th, 2009

Thank You.

I’ve noticed the sharrows, and green paint starting to pop up. Some bike lanes are wider, some are new, some finally connect. So far, very little of these improvements have directly effected my daily riding. Two days ago, I rode to West Seattle and was very pleased with the improvements made to a normally rough and shitty ride.

The waterfront now has a smooth paved bike lane seperated from traffic that starts just after the coast guard building. This stretch of road used to be a dilapidated brick stretch that was rough to ride, and forced you out into the lane of traffic just to have a manageable ride. So thank you.

But that’s not what made me write this post. Several years ago I wiped out around the corner turning onto the trail on Spokane street. This skinny corner has been enlarged, with a large patch of black top added to the inside of the corner, allowing a much better line through the corner, and a lot more space for the large number of bikes passing each other on the trail.

Just these two small strips of black top, made a massive difference in the ride quality of my ride to West Seattle.

So thank you.

Westside Invite 2009 | June 3rd, 2009

Well, another year has come and gone, and the 9th annual west side invite just ended. In past years, the West Side has been held in Portland, but for this year, Seattle stole it. A good thing too. It’s been a long time coming.

I mostly missed fridays events cause I had to work, but the core hore, a womens only alley cat centered in the core was the main event of the evening. The riders were based at Wa-Leg, rolling dice to see what stop they would have to go to and how much they would get paid for it. Of course we just stood around, got in their way, and drank beer.

Saturday morning, cool guy park.
Pre time trial jitters were being smoothed out with energy drinks like rainier and pabst. The hill side was littered with bikes and people awaiting their individual start times. From Cool Guy, the TT went to Gas Works, then Queen Anne, along the way, many of the racers got caught at at least one of the bridges. After Queen Anne, a stop at Qwest field, then make your way south to the hat and boots before finishing at Anarchy Point on the Duwamish.

The afternoon was spent working on two kegs of Elysian beer. Skids and track stand competitions happened on 8th ave S, covered in gravel and full of potholes and cracks, it had to be the worst street I’ve ever seen used for a skids competition.

By early evening, once we are all tired from the TT, the sun, and the beer, the alley cat is due to start. My TT time wasn’t the best, I got caught at the Fremont bridge for well over a minute, and maintained an alright pace. The alley cat took us into South Park, then West Seattle, before heading to the Central District, Queen Anne, and finishing in Belltown. It was windy as hell, and hammering along west marginal way required pacelining just to break wind.

I was hot, dehydrated, and I bonked after climbing california. In both the TT and the alley cat, I lost my water bottle by the first check point. Slugging across the waterfront, I had to stop in the ID and pick up a bottle of water and take a break before climbing Jackson to the CD. I’m sure it didn’t help that you had to shotgun a tall boy of Rainier at the first check point, and down another in the CD. All in all I think I finished 17th in the TT, and 15th in the Alley Cat. With around 50 racers, I’m more than happy to take the two top 20 finishes.

Sunday morning, colonade park.
First, I met with some friends at Cafe Venus for breakfast, and to discuss possible routing for the race. The course was centered around eastlake, in a big oblong loop going north south. Colonade park was base, and there were 6 checkpoints. A total of 7 possible manifests with 3 picks and drops each. Routing was crucial in this race. If you didn’t route correctly, you found your self zig zagging up and down the hill, retracing your steps, and wasting lot’s of time. This is also a part of the city where local knowledge helps. Whether it’s cutting the sidewalk through Fred Hutch, or the alley entrance to the Boylston stop, routing made all the difference.

It was hot. The race kicked off right on time, a few hours late, in the heat of the day. I drank 4 liters of water, and a liter of cytomax during the race, and I still cramped. When I turned in my 6th finished manifest, I could barely stand up due to my quads cramping. I still had 11 minutes left, and depending on which manifest I got, I may have been able to get another stop, but it was futile. I fell over backwards in the grass and reveled in the joy of being done. The cramps were worth it. I finished 5th place.

A great weekend, well organized, and well executed. As with most messenger events like this, I had to wash the beer off of everything I owned the next day.

West Side!!!

“It’s in the PI” will be playing as part of the “Disclosures”, at SIFF 2009. May 29th, 9:30 p.m.

I’m very excited about this film. The crew that came together to make this was amazing. I’m really happy it’s going to be seen by such a large audience as SIFF.

For more info, check here

Tickets are on sale now!

Cheers

We made the official selection! This is amazing news. We all new the short documentary was good, this just reaffirms the fact that it’s great!. From the invitation letter:

“I’d like to invite Bradley Hutchinson’s IT’S IN THE P-I to be screened as an official selection of the 35th Seattle International Film Festival (May 21-June 11) to be shown during the Short Film Weekend (May 29-31, 2009). All of the shorts will be screened at the new state-of-the-art SIFF Cinema where all formats are brilliantly projected. SIFF is also a recognized Oscar™ nominating Festival.

The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest and most well-attended film festival in the United States with 150,000 attendees expected in 2009. SIFF screens a wide selection of the best new international features and documentaries over the 25-day festival, presenting more than 400 films from over 50 countries. With extensive local, national and international media coverage, the Festival has emerged as one of the country’s most accessible and highly publicized film events.

We would be honored to present your film in Seattle and look forward to receiving your confirmation of its availability. Of course, if you have questions or require additional information please contact me.”

For other similar projects by some of the same people, check out the Last Quest blog here:

http://www.thelastquest.org/blog/

Today, a Swedish judge sentenced 4 men to a year in jail, and fined them a collective 3.6 million dollars for operating a website which allowed users to share files amongst themselves. The money will be owed to a handle full of major entertainment companies for aiding in the copyright infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties.

Of the people, For the people
right?
I’m not so sure.

Lawsuits like this, are based solely on the basis that large corporations are scared they might not maximize their profits, and driven by that fear, target whomever they are allowed by law to target. This makes for a dangerous scenario, one which has proven over and over again, to value greed over human rights. I’m not saying free distribution of intellectual property is a human right, but ruling in favor of the corporations against the operators of a primary infrastructure of data communications technology is clearly putting corporate wealth ahead of human wealth.

The Pirate Bay operators never engaged in copyright infringement. No copyrighted materials were hosted by the Pirate Bay, and no censorship of the users were imposed upon the users, allowing the users to utilize their infrastructure for their own desires. I strongly disagree stating that the Pirate Bay operators were at fault for the users of their infrastructure using it to distribute copyrighted materials. If it were the responsibility of the Pirate Bay operators to monitor and censor the files shared on their network, it would defeat the point of a peer to peer file sharing system. It also wouldn’t be ethical. Censorship is a tool for the powerful to invoke their power on the less powerful. By these same exact arguments, the media companies could sue ISP’s for supplying the infrastructure that allows users to distribute copyrighted material. You could also sue GM for making a vehicle that empowered drivers to cause accidents which have killed over 42,000 people a year. Or you could sue McDonald for you idiocy claiming that their at fault for their hot coffee burning you when you accidentally spilled it on yourself.

Of course we know these are ludicrous proposition, but here we are, with a legal system that is well beyond reason, as is seeming more and more to be geared towards Capitalism, and not humanism.

It’s time to revise our idea around copyrights. Although that’s another post.

New training ride | April 17th, 2009

I’ve started riding a new loop in the evenings. I find it to be a pleasant ride throughout, and a great in city training ride for fixed.
The gist:
Beacon Hill - Follow the ridge all the way
Rainier Beach - Start Heading north
Lake WA Blvd - Follow
Madison Park - Just a little extra loop
Arboretum to Montlake
Interlocken
Home

View the map here

Portland for a movie? | April 11th, 2009

That’s right, last wednesday we drove to portland and back in the same day to watch a movie. Not just any movie, but a collection of short documentaries produced for the international doc challenge 2009.
I was part of a team who made a short named “It’s in the PI”, a short doc about the closing of the PI in seattle. The response to the film was tremendous. The show was sold out, and watching our short on the big screen was really great.
All in all, it was 6 1/2 hours in the car, for 3 hours in PDX. Well worth it.

A Manic Engineer’s Day | March 21st, 2009

1.
1234. 1
Cross
Spin rotate thread thread.
rotate
next
cross

initramfs>
cannot read from cd-rom
error mounting .iso

USB stick swap
back and forth back and forth
rsync cp copy?

spin rotate
1.
1234. 1
cross
turn grab place
spin rotate thread thread
every other hole

Taking shape
One step closer
Both progress
with flawed beginnings
hold power
10 seconds
Restart

Flip reverse
align again
copy pattern
x=x-.5
Over over under
Over over under
Over over under
Valve hole between crossings
Bury the threads

the spokes are laced
the partition scheme changed
not done by far
but done all that’s hard
12 hours past
my bags are packed
I retire home
a drone

This poem is a reflection on two aspects of my day today… Building a wheel, and installing Linux. My thoughts for the day consisted mostly of spoke tension, usb devices, lacing patterns, copying, troubleshooting, and calculating. Really mostly trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the ubuntu installer to install off of a usb stick. Turns out I was using the wrong initrd.gz and vmlinuz versions. Hmm… who woulda guessed?

Pluto is too a planet!! | March 13th, 2009

Declared so by the state of Illinois, every March 13th, for the entire day. So there science, the law says Pluto is a planet, so Pluto is a planet right? I mean it’s law, I have to respect it to the “t” don’t I?

“Still, Brown calls the Illinois resolution “very silly,” noting that such legislation can be dangerous to public understanding of science.”

You know what’s dangerous to the public understanding of science?

Science telling us our whole lives that Pluto is a planet, then one day, in a broad and thorough marketing campaign, declared Pluto is no longer a planet. And you complain about politicians flip flopping?

‘”Go, Illinois!” said planetary scientist Alan Stern, principle investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. ‘

I say … “Go Pluto”

But…

For all of you who live in Illinois, that does mean that one day a year it is illegal to believe science. So March 13th, make sure you don’t believe what science is telling you, otherwise, unknowingly, you may break the law by stating that Pluto is indeed… uh … what ever the hell it’s classified as these days?! (technically a dwarf planet btw) forgetting that it’s a planet today. Just today only.

So what are you going to do on March 13th? Take the lame road out and avoid all conversation that has to do with Pluto? Break the law while pointing out the dynamic nature of scientific thought?
I’m going to rejoice the fact that Pluto is a planet, as it rightfully should be, as I contradict myself by blindly believing that Pluto is a planet with no reason to care at all. And I’m going to have fun doing it.

in response to:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090311-pluto-planet-illinois.html?source=email_wn_20090313&email=wn

Asynchronous Internet | February 17th, 2009

Wizzy has made it into the news recently. SciDev did an article recently called “Rural Internet — not online but still connected”. It’s an excellent article, well written, and is realistic in the challenges of providing internet access to rural populations.
Dave Wood, a software engineer for Wizzy Digital was interviewed, and one of my photos was used in Wizzy’s section this feature article.

Read the article here:

http://www.scidev.net/en/new-technologies/features/rural-internet-not-online-but-still-connected.html

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