Urban Assault Charlotte

Urban Assault was a blast.  I would probably do something like that everyday if I could.  I guess I do to some extent, but it makes an impact doing it as a group.  The Ski Team, (Chris & I) came in 104th out of 340 or so participants.  But we captured all the bleeds, and that's what counts!



To see that many bikes at one time in Charlotte makes me appreciate this city a bit more.  And if the solar powered sound system, and wind-made brew were irrelevant to my cohabitants, then at least no one complained.  And I'm sure a lot of people, like Ski Team, actually rode to the event ;)




The last obstacle was a BigWheel track which held me back as I had to retract to collect my phone which I had just rolled over...


View UA traversal in a larger map

All in all, it turned out to be about 26 miles.  And it felt like 95 degrees.


  
For some reason I'm not as excited as I should be about free food.

Fun times!

***UPDATE***
Some pictures I forgot to post...



    The calm before the cycling storm.



The first wave run for their rides.  We were resigned to the end of the line.  Either too slow (in registering) or too stupid (to pass the quiz).  And then we didn't even know where we were racing to!  Probably should have let us go first...



Sweet bike.  Functional.



Chris demonstrates how light the bike is.


These crazy people wanted me to take their picture.  Note - everyone is protecting themselves, post-race, from the scorching action of the midday summer sun by hydrating themselves with tasty beer.  Oh yeah, and there exists a picture of a dude wading in that green swan poop water.  [Seriously, they have to pressure wash all that excrement off of the sidewalk into the water.]

I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural occupation as building his house. -Henry D. Thoreau

A love story for capitalism

I finally got around to watching Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, and you've already formed your opinion about what you're about to read.  Every fiscal Conservative should love his argument, but it's dismissed as quickly as sentence one.

As his Vizzini says: The guy who makes the best ice cream gets the customers, and the guy who doesn't fades away.  There you go.  We all want the best ice cream.

What Moore argues is that we let the crappy-ice-cream-making-guy cheat and serve us pus.  People let themselves be swayed and spoken for by media and commercials rather than asking where the milk came from.

When people can work together in a Democracy with Capitalism, they can win.  Divided and unquestioning they're at the mercy of the few in control -- for better or worse.

On his argument that Capitalism is to blame for corporations profiting on the death of their Peasants?  Is it the gun that kills the people, or the people that kill the people?  Obviously it is people who kill, but I don't own a gun.

But you might say that Moore has a thing against guns.  It doesn't matter: his whole point is to get people to wake up and pay attention, already.

Android tethering for Puppy

How do you tether an Android Motorola Droid to a Linux Puppy?

I have an old Pentium III laptop, running Puppy 4.31.1 (Macpup Foxy 3) and a Droid phone.  Using the phone to supply internet connectivity to the Puppy is easy using USB tethering - provided you can add some functionality to the kernel on the phone.

The easiest way to do that is to root the phone and then install the Clockwork ROM updater (from the Marketplace) in order to install Cyanogen's ROM.  This of course voids your warranty and whatnot, but it's fairly easy to do and allows for a bit more functionality.

With the phone prepared, you'll need to:

• Turn OFF USB SD drive access
• Turn ON Settings-> Applications-> USB debugging
• Turn ON Settings-> Wireless & Network-> Internet tethering
• Connect the USB cord to the Droid and the Puppy
• Launch Network Wizzard on the Puppy.   You should now see USB as a network option.  Verify the network, DHCP, and you're good to go.

Verizon allows 5G/mo transfer on their "unlimited" plan.

I did have a bit of difficulty connecting through WIFI and BT.  The WIFI problems I suspect are due to the ad-hoc nature of the WIFI programs:  Barnacle, WIFI Tether for Root Users.  My WIFI card may have limited support.  My Bluetooth adapter may also have limited driver support or functionality.

I also had difficulty utilyzing methods employing the Android Development Kit Tools.  For some reason, my Puppy seemed to behave flaky -- most of the time the command 'devices' yields no results.  This prevented me from attempting various proxy methods.

And the popular PDANet was out because of an apparent lack of Puppy support.



Thanks to all the folks on DroidFurums.net, Alldroid.org, and Murga-Linux.com!

I'm very impressed with both Google's and Archive's implementation of privacy considerations.  Upon marking a site private, I am immediately presented with this:

Robots.txt Query Exclusion.

We're sorry, access to http://murrayhillroad.blogspot.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.

You may want to:

Read more about robots.txt

See the site's robots.txt file.

Try the page on the live web: http://murrayhillroad.blogspot.com

Search for all pages on the site murrayhillroad.blogspot.com/

Try a different page address, at top

See the FAQs for more info and help, or contact us.

Snipets are still available in Google search results, but requests of the cache are denied.  Bravo.  I'm sure records are still kept forever, but they at least require a court order.

Google MyTracks

I tried out the Google GPS tracking software, MyTracks, and it worked flawlessly right out of the box.

Here is the first track.

I did the Smelly Cat Circuit, since it turned out to be an OK day today.  I stopped off at the Common Market on the way back, which is the waypoint marker.  Google's My Maps even shows the statistics, if you click on the "end" marker link.  If you check out the altitude, you can see why they call it "Uptown".  I guess before cars, people had to haul stuff up-to-town.

The best new feature that Google brings, I feel, is the ability to automatically save it to Google Docs, where it throws your stats into a spreadsheet so you can compare them.


Update:  Here's a picture from North East of the city (looking South West).  That's one of my favourite parts of this ride -- actually riding up to the city, rolling underneath the skyscrapers, and then seeing it fade into the distance.  Here is the spreadsheet.

Charlotte Radio is Awful

As I read Nsenga Burton's column about Charlotte's lack of a black music scene, I'm reminded that this city seriously lacks quality radio.

Radio is a dieing media, and in Charlotte it's practically dead.  TV is more exciting, and the internet, cellular included, is the wave of future.  But it's a shame because radio as a technology is cool.  It's fairly easy to broadcast it to a large number of people.  It's actually "analog", at a time when even TV is digital.  And don't even get me started on the HD-radio-oh-I-have-the-letters-"H"-"D"-in-my-name-so-I-must-be-better trash.  Radio IS local.  It IS part of YOUR community.

What do we have?  Commercial Corporate Crap and Christian Channels.

WFAE looks great compared to everything else on our dial, but compare them to a WBAI or a WMNF.

A couple remote college stations come in when the atmospheric conditions are right...

Can anyone tell me the frequency of ONE pirate radio station in Charlotte?

Radios are cheap.  Your car has one.  You can probably figure out how to build one yourself if you never have.  (Try to build a device that can receive and decode a cellular internet stream from scratch.)  I'm reminded of the imbeciles in Idiocracy that watered their crops with Gatorade.   Technology is great, but only if it solves problems -- not creates them.

We have this excellent technology - radio - that's being unused.  Why?  Is it because Charlotteans love to listen to the same stale music that Nsenga was referring to?  And then go out and buy junk from the advertisers so they can stay in business?