You can call me Nerdifer

Good Times!

2010-03-25T23:08:00.001-04:00

Go Me! 1000 miles tracked

2010-03-24T14:59:00.003-04:00

I achieved 1000 miles tracked using runkeeper yesterday. I don't always use runkeeper every time I go for a bike ride, but I have managed to capture most of my commutes since last July.

Overheard from my apartment

2010-03-14T14:02:00.004-04:00

Here's an except from an argument I heard last night around 4am:

Guy 1: "You're a racist, dude" (repeat a few times)
Guy 2: "I'll punch you in the face" (repeat with variety a few times)

I realized as their voices drifted off, that they were continuing to walk together anyway. I'm left to wonder if their argument ever escalated, or if it just petered off.

My favorite songs of 2009

2009-12-12T19:44:00.006-05:00

According to last.fm, theses are my top tracks from the last 12 months.

What dumb question is that the answer to?

2009-11-03T22:37:00.003-05:00

Walking down the block today I heard a woman say to her friend:

"Well the yuppies have 9 to 5 jobs and that's why they don't stay out late drinking. But the hipsters don't, so they can like sleep in, stay out late, drink, and have fun and stuff."

[UPDATED] Bike lanes, love em or hate em

2009-08-04T22:44:00.012-04:00

The new 2 block bike lane on Sands Street in Brooklyn is finally open and, in full effect. I've snuck in some rides since the tar went down, buts its now officially open with all the signs, lights, and painted lines in place. The first day I rode the enclosed part of the path, there was head-phoned jogger up ahead going the same direction. In order to pass her (she was totally oblivious to the world around her) I had to cross the yellow line into the oncoming lane. I wondered why she was running in the path, with there being sidewalks right there for her to use.

I also happened to notice that when you're not logged into twitter - the home page has a search. After my tweet, I searched for "bike lane" and sure enough its a highly contentious topic. Both reasonable and stupid people alike are up in arms about bike lanes all over the US.

So yeah the new path is great, I love it, its great. Really. But... there are 2 big problems.

First, to lawfully enter and exit the Manhattan bridge path you have wait and cross for 2 lights. There is only an L crossing, and not a full square. Most cyclists will run the light in a diagonal direction as soon as opportunity strikes.

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If the fence was opened up on the SE corner, then a 1 light crossing would be possible. You can tell by looking at the curb cut on the NE corner that the plan only intended for cyclists to enter from one direction. The new path is not in the google street view, but you can spin a 360 and figure out what I'm talking about.

Lets take a closer look at the new bike specific traffic lights at Sand & Gold St. Hmm...

Once you pull up to the intersection, the light is completely obscured by the sign.

It seems that the bike lane painters and the street sign installers, don't work in the same department. They certainly aren't sharing notes. This problem doesn't seem like as much as a design oversight as the crossings at Jay St. But it certainly seems like the street sign installers need better instructions to do their job or just some common sense.

[UPDATE] The sign has been fixed! I sent an email to the DOT, including the pictures from this post. Monday morning the sign was chopped down, and no longer blocks the traffic light. There was also a DOT truck and worker filling out paperwork, as I passed.

Teetering on the edge of total data loss

2009-07-08T21:03:00.006-04:00

I've had a pretty rough week and a 1/2 concerning my digital life. I have about 700GB of data that I care about. This is spread across my 500GB main disk in my iMac, and the 3 external disks I used for backups and secondary storage. My time machine backup disk is a 1TB Western Digital that suddenly stopped working last week. It was under warranty so I sent it back to be repaired. I then tried to use one of my other Western Digital drives as a time machine backup volume. I let it run overnight, and woke up to find the backup failed and so did the whole disk. Now the only disk I had left for backups was already full with my DVR recordings (using eyeTV). I dont have a cable subscription, so this my main way for me to watch TV. I didn't really want to give up my recordings. So I decided to swap the 2 disks power supplies because the are the same model. When I did that, I was able to access the disk again, and tried to back my iMac again. At this point I realized it was the power supply that the problem, but it also killed the working drive I had plugged into it. Both of these Western Digital drives are also covered by warranty but I know If I send them back, no effort will be made to preserve my data. I opted to crack open the enclosures and see if the disks would work in another enclosure. To my relief they did still work.

At this point I decided, fuck Western Digital enclosures, and I ordered my Drobo that same day. I scrounged together all the compatible HDs that I had, to create enough space to copy my DVR recordings to the drobo. As soon as that was done, I moved that disk into the Drobo as well. Now with a total of 883 GB available I can have my full backup and DVR recording safely stored.

So far I am very pleased. I hope that I can rely of this equipment. I will give a better review once I have had more time with it. But the Drobo has certainly lived up to its promise of simplicity. Its really easy to setup and add more space on the fly.

Getting ready for the 5 boro bike tour

2009-04-18T23:37:00.007-04:00

One of my coworkers also singed up for the tour. So I met him in the Bronx and we rode together down to our office near Battery Park. We stopped to eat, and then I made my way back to Brooklyn. In all about 23 miles. That has to be the furtherst Ive ridden a bike in a single day. I rode my single speed bike, with no issue. This long ride has me relaxed about my ability to conquer the 42 miles for the tour.

The route using Google maps isnt very accurate because it wont let me plot the actual route we took, but its pretty close.

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This Google Maps Pedometer mashup is more accurate.

Bicycle commutes, past and present

2009-02-06T22:55:00.014-05:00

I currently ride about 6 miles each way when I commute to work. Bushwick, Brooklyn to Battery Park, Manhattan, and back.

When I first moved to Brooklyn, I always took the Williamsburg...

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Now I often take the Manhattan Bridge:

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The Williamsburg Bridge's great strengths are the wide paths and lack of tourists impeding the flow. Its a steep climb, which is either a plus or minus depending on how I feel about exerting myself.

The Manhattan Bridge's strength is its separate bike and pedestrian paths, which are mostly respected. Its steepness is in between the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges.

The Williamsburg could be the best bridge for commuting except for it being the only shared bike and pedestrian path I know of to have those 2 groups on a collision course towards each other. Most shared paths follow the road standard of 'stay to the right.' Not here -- where bikes are to the right and pedestrians to the left, directly into each other. This could work if the rules didn't contradict so many other traffic norms.

Before I moved to Brooklyn I had a shorter ride, but I had to cross the 1 mile wide Hudson River by mass transit. The ferry was efficient but expensive, and the PATH was cheap but unreliable.

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My first cycling commute was from Newark to East Orange NJ, back in the mid '90s.

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Sometimes I would take this route home:

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The original bike I used when I first started commuting was a crappy Huffy that got stolen from the locked shed in my backyard. So I graduated to a crappy Diamond Back Outlook.

I recently left that bike on the curb in Jersey City right before I moved.

Riding my folding bike was fine, until my commute more than doubled...

So I upgraded...

How I setup a dual boot hackintosh osx86 netbook

2008-12-01T20:12:00.002-05:00

The MSI Wind Notebook that I bought came with the HD pre-partitioned. Lucky me because I was able to skip the partitioning step and I didn't need to fuss with the MBR. However I don't own an external optical drive, so I had to use a USB Hard Drive to install OSX86.

The first thing I did was to own a retail copy of Mac OS X 10.5, the family pack in my case. Then before even buying the Windbook, I started to download msiwindosx86.iso. If you don't know what that might be, or how to find it, don't even bother reading the rest of this.

The first boot of the Windbook took a little over a half an hour to finalize the XP install. Once I got the Windbook up and running in XP, I converted the emtpy 68GB partition from NTFS format to free space. This can be done with Disk Management in XP's Computer Management tool.

Next I used another Mac's Disk Utility to restore the iso file to a blank HFS+ formatted USB HD, erasing the contents and restoring as block copy. Now while still using OS X I downloaded Chameleon 1.0.11 and installed it to my newly restored USB HD installer.

Note: There is more than one way to install Chameleon, and I tried 2 different methods before being able to boot from my USB HD. I cant say which one worked because I ran into issues at this stage, and tried several different things.
I also attempted to install from a USB key, formatted exactly like the USB HD but it was too slow. In fact impossibly slow, I waited 30 mins for the OS X installer to load past what is usually a brief initial blue screen. I gave up and went back to my USB HD, which did work when given enough power. I had a special USB cable from another device, that pulls power from 2 USB slots. And that ordeal is why I like firewire, and I'm sad to see it going away on new macs.

At this stage, the USB HD is ready to be booted from. Before installing OS X, I had to use Disk Utility to format the 'free space' partition to HFS+. Then I then I was able to install OS X on that partition of the Windbook's HD. It took about 35 mins to install.

When I first tried to startup OS X I got an HFS+ partition error. I booted from the installer HD again and used fdisk in the terminal to make this new partition bootable. It would be best to read the man page for fdisk on how to do this. I also installed/copied the chameleon bootloader onto the new partition.

I rebooted the Wind again and it worked! The bootloader let me choose my osx86 partition (or XP,) and I'm running OS X on my Wind!

There are only 2 things that I care about that don't work:
1 wifi - huge problem because whats the point of a wired "netbook" ?, but Im going to replace the wifi card with a compatible one.
2 audio out - this also sucks, and there are alot of workarounds available. I have a USB audio out (Griffin iMac - $10 at radioshack) that requires no drivers, so I'll get by until the wind drivers are updated.

I also upgraded to 10.5.5, and had to reinstall certain drivers, but that's a whole different post...

The center of "around here" starts with you

2008-09-09T13:14:00.001-04:00

I got off at the Bogart St exit of the Morgan L stop yesterday.
Some guy in a car pulls up to me and asks: Do you know where Chez Bushwick is?
Me: No
Guy (exasperated) : Uhh, you know, the art gallery?
Me: No, I don't.
Guy: Well then do you know if Boerum Street keeps going for bit, that way?
Me: Sorry man, I don't know.
Guy: Is everyone around here a fucking idiot?
He then proceeds to try and make a quick u-turn, but fails, and it turns into a slow and awkward K-turn.
Me: Uhm, you're the one who is lost.

Breaking News!

2008-08-13T20:29:00.009-04:00

I took the Ferry from World Financial Center over to Jersey City tonight. As the boat approached I noticed that 3 of the streets that run up to the waterfront had bright lights, and there were a ton of people on the pier. Cool, I thought, some kind of fair/concert/etc. Not until we got closer did I release that those lights were emergency vehicle lights, and that the streets were blocked by police and ambulance. After the ferry docked I slowly made my way down the pier, and saw a gang of police officers disperse the crowd. So my instincts kicked in and told me to get out my camera.

I looked in the direction where all the people were looking and saw a man swimming in the Hudson! One of the ferry boats was approaching the man, and threw him a life preserver. Eventually even some NYC police boats arrived. I spoke to some people at the scene who told me that the man jumped in. He apparently took his clothes off and left them on nearby bench and the jumped right in. After the ferry docked, they put him on stretcher...

Duane Reade doesn't like wheels. Well, only certain kinds of wheels.

2008-07-31T23:23:00.010-04:00

Last week I had to leave the new duane reade in Jersey City without my intended purchase.

Some mumbling guy whom I can only assume was a sort of security guard (judging from his all black outfit of boots, work pants, and golf shirt) tried to tell me I couldn't have my folding bike in the store. I say "tried" because he hardly spoke sentences to me. He mostly mumbled, shook his head from side to side, and pointed back and forth between my bike and the exit. I explained to him that I was being very careful and would not knock anything over.

We "discussed" the situation for about 2 minutes. He mostly just did more head shaking, mumbling, and pointing. He wouldn't answer me when I asked him if strollers were allowed in the store, or walkers. I told him my bike was smaller than a stroller. He responded "we have to clean the floor" as he made a sort of infinity symbol with his index finger. I assumed he meant that my tires would leave scuff marks? I gave up rather than tell him how I couldn't scuff the floor unless I was skidding my tires or using the brakes.

I told him "I \was\ going to buy something and then leave, but, now I'm just leaving." But that guy doesn't care if I buy anything. He followed me to the door and waited for me to leave. I lingered for a few moments, and looked at the long line by the cashier. I decided that I didn't want to wait the 10 or more minutes to find a manager. The sad part is I actually went in there to buy baby wipes to clean my bike.

iCal explosion

2008-07-27T19:02:00.006-04:00

Sorry If I have to blow off our plans. But as you can see, I'm extremely busy for eternity.

But seriously, I opened iCal the other day and every single one of my calendars was duplicated atleast 3 times. I think its a combination of issues from MobileMe hiccups, and syncing my calendars to Palm OS. But hey I just got my iPhone3G so i can finally ditch Palm OS, forever.

Poor reporting. But it is from the future!

2008-07-27T18:53:00.005-04:00

I will let this picture say it all...

Biking from Jersey City to Brooklyn, and back.

2008-07-17T00:29:00.008-04:00

Well-rounded day of city bike commuting today. I crossed the Hudson by both ferry and train, and crossed the east river by subway and bike. This was my first time crossing the Brooklyn Bridge; biking or walking. Incline-wise its a lot easier than the Manhattan Bridge, but the crowd on the Brooklyn is its own challenge.
On the way back to Manhattan I met a nice guy who rode the bridge too and was looking for the PATH, and I escorted him across town, He was grateful. Then I rode Broadway to meet up with some people for drinks. Its amazing to me that just 3 or 4 weeks ago Broadway seemed like such a scary place to ride. The pavement may be terrible, but at least its predictable.

When I finally got back to JC I decided to go up Christopher Columbus Dr. The street was empty, and I was on the right side of the 2-way, 4 lane road, about 6 feet from the parked cars. A car with its windows up, started to pull out of a parking spot right in front of me. I said kind of loudly in surprise "Woah!" without even much of swerve and kept on riding. I stopped at the red light. A few moments later that same car pulled up behind me. There were atleast 4 guys, and the guy in the passenger seat began yelling out of the window:

him "blah blah blah" (I can't tell what hes yelling)
me (looks back) "what?"
him " I don't see a license, I dont see a license plate"
me "I don't need one"
him "I don't see a bike area!"
me "I'm 100% legal, I dont need any of that"

They drive off yelling something I can't understand
me (to myself, very loudly on the street) "Motherfuckers! I have the right to be here. You just feel guilty for almost hitting me!"
me (now into a mumble) "I didnt start anything with you, you bastards"

Evernote & Skitch

2008-04-18T21:37:00.007-04:00

I'm all excited about 2 new (to me) pieces of software. The first, Evenote, I've been using heavily since I signed up for the beta. The second, Skitch, I havn't really used, but find incredibly cool, and I should atleast come up with an excuse to use.

Evernote is a cross-platform/web based, collector and syncer of your "notes", I write that with quotes because the notes, can be so many things; web pages, text, pictures, pictures of text, screenshots.

I've got a couple of invites left, so let me know if your interested in checkin' it out.

Now onto Skitch,

And finally, the video that got me super excited about Skitch again...

Leopard's (not so) Hot Spots

2007-10-29T20:25:00.000-04:00

It's looking like Apple removed Hot Spots from the Leopard release. Its listed on the 300 New Features page, and I'm sure that won't last for long. I haven't been able to find any settings for it. There is no mention in the fancy new built-in Help. The Universal Access System Preference pane provides no button , checkbox, menu or any way of using Hot Spots . Bummer.

step back a few

2007-10-03T20:18:00.000-04:00

I noticed an interesting feature of the iPod Touch today. If you resume watching a video, it doesn't only begin where you left off last - the video rewinds a few seconds back. I assume this also happens on the iphone. What a nice touch, it reminds me of the tivo software.

FUD

2007-08-17T12:59:00.000-04:00

This post on ZDNet really annoyed me. The problem I have with it, is that the examples used don't account for the fact that OS X has serveral different settings for font smoothing and rendering. They are:
Automatic - best for Main display
Standard - best for CRT
Light
Medium - best for flat panel
Strong

The samples Ou uses for the Mac is obviously set on "Light" When I take a screenshot my font rendering does not look like like that, it looks quite dark and bold.

My Sample:

Ou's sample:

Look alikes

2007-07-30T21:19:00.000-04:00

I was watching an episode of law and order and the actress reminded me of Eddie Izzard. Her name is Molly Pitcher, and I looked her up to see if she was his sister. She is not, but here is a montage of my little bit of research.

Annoying Mac IT tidbit

2007-07-17T13:31:00.000-04:00

I want to change my default email program in Mac OS X. However in order to do that I have open up Mail.app and then the preferences and then select my email program of choice. Nevermind that this should be a system preference and not an application preference, along with chosing my default web browser.

But here is my big gripe: You cannot open the Preferences for Mail.app until you setup an account with their setup wizard. C'mon Apple that sucks, especially in a corporate environment where Mail.app will not work with the company's email system, like Lotus Notes.

So now I have to put in my personal account and password onto someones computer just to change a setting and then go back and removed all the info I just provided. LAME

Tre(w)oes

2007-07-12T11:16:00.000-04:00

My Treo has been crashing like crazy lately. I havent added any new software or changed anything but its constantly rebooting itself. Last week I pressed the calendar button and the treo crashed, rebooted, then rebooted again, and all my settings were back to default. Luckily my data was mostly still intact. Since then it would crash everytime I pressed the calendar button until I restored it to factory settings. Its been better since then but still crashing now an again when I open differnt apps. But Today we have new first, while its sitting unused next to me on the desk it rebooted itself. No hands required I guess.

Sigh.

Bloglines vs Google Reader

2007-06-12T20:53:00.000-04:00

I used Bloglines for a few months and I was very happy with it. I didn't long for more features. But then I tried Google Reader and I switched to about a week later. I've looked back over my should but I haven't turned back.

I'm happy enough with Reader, but do I miss some things about Bloglines. Like sharing, where a visitor could see a list of the feeds I've subscribed to. But I also really dig that Reader makes a live feed out my shared item. I also miss Bloglines's 'clip' feature, and Reader's Starred items is just not equivalent. I hadn't really been using the share feature of Reader, but now I plan to use it the same way I used clip in Bloglines - As a longer-term save, where I share items I plan to simply read later or again and then eventually delete.

The best of both worlds woulds be the clip of Bloglines, and reader's style of sharing, with live feeds. But I don't want to necessarily mark each item manually that I want to Share. It would be nice to share an entire feed or chosen set of feeds.

I just found that a feature of Reader that I wanted, already exists. I can apply sharing to any item with a particular tag. One step closer...