Back From Work on Two Wheels

I was proud of myself today for riding my bike in to work. I didn't even feel all that winded afterward.

And so, tonight, I thought "why not?" and proceeded to ride from JPL to Downtown. bikemetro gives a route that's 14.43 miles long for that trek, so I'm sure that's about what my ride was. I made it in about 70 minutes, which sounds a lot more impressive before you hear that I had 837 feet of elevation loss to push me onward. Still, though, it was a good workout.

The first five miles or so are along the Arroyo Seco, which makes that by far the best part of the trip. After that I sort of meandered through South Pasadena, Highland Park, and finally Chinatown. I generally picked whichever route looked like it was heading downhill.

bikemetro says the average cyclist would have burned 566 calories on my trip, which really doesn't seem like that much, but I guess every little bit counts.

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Controllable Power

I could really use some sort of a cheap power box that's controllable via serial. When the internet goes out in my apartment, 99% of the time it can be fixed by just cycling power to the DSL bridge. I'd love to have some way to let my server ping out every five minutes or so, and if it sees the connection go down let it try cycling the bridge. If that doesn't work it could just hang out for someone else to fix it, but it would be a good first line of defense for when I'm not around.

In fairness, I haven't done any googling to see if anythiing exists for a reasonable price. I'm just writing while it's fresh in my mind.

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A Very Mobile Connection

I just wanted to brag that I'm posting this from my seat on a Gold Line train, travelling back from Pasadena to Downtown. I had to go up to Pasadena to pick up a document from the city transportation department, so I grabbed the laptop and my bluetooth adaptor and hopped on the train. My connection through the phone has worked perfectly for looking up the facts I needed while writing a paper whose draft is due this evening.

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A Month of Fun With Numbers

So far in the month of March my three main sites (this blog, ericrichardson.com, and blogdowntown have served a combined total of 23,884 pages and used 723.86MB of bandwidth. Not a ton, but I can't hope for too much and still serve the site from my living room ceiling. I'm sure the site could be a little snappier on a better connection, but I haven't noticed any peaked bandwidth spikes. And since everything goes through the server, I still have quality of service things I could do to prevent apartment Internet usage from interfering with the web if it comes to that. For now, though, I'm satisfied.

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LAist Spurns LA News, Looks to Desert for Info

It's not that I set out to take issue with LAist, though obviously it does happen. Today "we" look at "their" coverage of Chico State, in the aptly named post, "What's Up at Chico State?."

While everybody else tries to figure out where the severed foot came from, we've got our eyes a little further east. KESQ in Palm Springs reports that Phi Kappa Tau has been suspended at Chico State for participating in a porno film.

Issue number one: Chico State is west of Los Angeles, and really more distinctively quite a bit north. Perhaps "they" are just indirectly looking at Chico through the lens of Palm Springs, but I still find it to be sloppy writing.

Maybe we should worry a little less about the sex and a little more about the violence.

Perhaps if "they" kept up with more traditional news sources, such as the oft-maligned LA Times, LAist would know that the news is doing exactly that.

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