PAgent’s Progress

Funny stuff

Man, this is really late this week. Mea culpa.

Last Thursday, on my bike commute home, I got completely drenched by a torrential rainstorm. This spectacular little downpour was the first substantial rain of the season, and marks the end of the warm dry summer, and the beginning of the gray and rainy fall. So, the choice of themes for this week’s MVM was obvious.

Eurythmics - Here Comes The Rain Again

Phil Collins - I wish it would rain down

with Eric Clapton!


Prince - Purple Rain

The Who - Love Reign O’er Me

Oooh, ‘Blame it on the Rain’ by Milli Vanilli nearly made the cut. Maybe next time.

Blur is a company that has turned out some amazing animation and motion graphics. They have released some of my favorite CGI animations. If you want, you can find them on YouTube, but that would be a real disservice to the artists at Blur. You should really try to watch the Quicktime clips linked below.

Aunt Luisa

Aunt Luisa is a quirky lady that hears music playing all the time.

Watch Aunt Luisa

Gopher Broke

A hungry gopher will try almost anything to procure some tasty veggies.

Watch Gopher Broke

In The Rough

Man has evolved throughout the ages … Relationships, unfortunately, have not. After being kicked out of his cave, Brog discovers that living a bachelor’s life is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

Really funny stuff. Watch In the Rough.

Rockfish

This is one of the best CGI shorts I’ve ever seen, and is one of my favorites. Not just because it looks terrific (and it does) but because they did such a great job depicting the relationship between the characters, and displaying the technology without killing it with exposition. This is genuine science fiction.

Watch Rockfish

Burley recently announced that they will be “ceasing production of all recumbent, tandem, road and touring bikes effective immediately”.

That sucks. Big Time.

Burley has always been an awesome company. Until recently, they were an employee-owned Co-op, which really made you feel good about buying their products. But what made you feel really good was the quality of their products.

We have had a Burley Piccolo trailercycle, a Burley bike trailer, and most recently, my beloved Burley Koosah recumbent. All have been incredibly well-designed, and well-built. I know that I am truly passionate about my Koosah. It rides more smoothly and more quietly than any bike I’ve ever had. And I’m not alone in that, Burley recumbents have a huge fanbase.

The good news is that Burley will be trying to honor the warranty on bicycles already sold. They have parts in stock, and may try to work with 3rd-party manufacturers if necessary. So hopefully I personally won’t get screwed. But I feel badly for all the folks that would have been able to get a quality long-wheelbase recumbent for less than $1,000, because those are going to be hard to find.

I got back in the saddle again this morning (or in my case, back on my comfy recumbent seat) for my morning commute. Forecasts were for cool and showery, so I wore a shell. Of course, there was no rain, and I got a bit overheated. But if it starts raining this afternoon, I will be PREPARED.

I had a bit of excitement coming into downtown. As you come in on Barbur Boulevard, two lanes split off to the right to go down to Naito Parkway. The two left lanes continue on into downtown and become 4th Avenue. If you are a cyclist, you need to get across those two lanes in order to continue on Barbur.

The more aggressive bike commuters usually just take a lane and charge on over, crossing two lanes of traffic (see Path A below). And, if the traffic is clear and I have plenty of room, I will do the same. But if there’s traffic in those first two lanes, I won’t. Instead, I’ll go down to a crosswalk and wait for a break in the traffic to cross (see Path B below).

This morning as I approached the decision point, the traffic was pretty heavy so I opted for the crosswalk. I arrived there at the same time as a pedestrian who was walking to work. A car in the first lane stopped promptly. After a moment or two, a truck in the far lane braked heavily and came to a stop at the crosswalk. The car behind the truck also braked heavily and stopped. Unfortunately, the third car didn’t start braking in time.

*CRUNCH!*

The pedestrian and I started across the crosswalk, and he remarked to me “I was waiting for that to happen.”

And it’s a recipe for disaster, putting a crosswalk there. But looking back, I wouldn’t do anything differently than I did. If I was going to assign blame, I suppose the fact that traffic is routinely flying through there at 10-15 mph over the speed limit doesn’t help. But most importantly, nobody leaves enough distance between themselves and the car in front of them. If that third car had been following the ‘two-second rule’, I don’t think they would have had that fender-bender. Unfortunately, almost NO ONE in Portland follows the two-second rule.

And of course I can’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet the driver of that third car doesn’t think the collision was their fault.

This isn’t funny. It’s actually more frightening than it is entertaining. But it is important that the public be aware of how easy it can be to compromise electronic voting machines.

Remember, in the last Presidential election, the discrepancy between exit poll numbers and recorded votes was unprecedented. “Polls in thirty states weren’t just off the mark — they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.”

Oh, and the Chief Executive of Diebold is a fervant Republican who in 2003 was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” He has since resigned.

If I had to use a portable computer, this is the one I would want.

Mom always told me I was dropped on my head as a child.

All these years I thought she was kidding.

WARNING: The following post contains an excessive amount of gratuitous whining.

In stark contrast to yesterday’s entry, which concerned a weighty and serious topic that deserved all the respect I could give, today’s entry is just pretty much me ranting. Feel free to skip over it.

Item the first: Commitments and obligations have conspired to keep me from riding my bike to work for the next two days.

Item the second: I have reached a point in Halo-2 where (due to my own poor strategic planning, I’m sure) I am facing two Hunters armed with fuel rod cannons, whilst I have the game equivalent of a slingshot.

Item the third: As an experiment, I picked up a “European Farmhouse” breakfast at a new bakery downtown. The Farmhouse breakfast was supposed to include “a selection of fine cheeses, fresh fruit, and baguette”.

What I got was cheese slices pulled from the sandwich supples, NO fruit, and the baguette was an HERBED baguette, with some funky rosemary/chervil/thyme flavor that did not go at all well with the cheese.

Bastards.