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Last fall I sold my duplex and moved in with my partner, her partner, and their kids. It’s a small house but in a very nice neighborhood and while I miss many of the things about living alone it is really nice to be living with family again.

One of the downsides of moving into a very small house with four other humans, three dogs (at the time: the eldest, Toby, unfortunately died a week and a half ago), many rodents, and assorted insects and arthropods is that there is not much room for one’s existing very nice recumbent exercise bike. We finally did find a space for it sometime around February but I have yet to get it out of storage and move it into the dark and cramped basement to find out if that space will work or not.

The reason the exercise bike exists in my life at all is that during my divorce I knew I needed to do something to stay active and I fondly remembered my high school days when I would go out and spend time by myself biking 10-30 miles around the countryside so I got the aforementioned recumbent. That first winter and the five subsequent years it was a simple reminder and easy task to just get on and do 15-30min with easy access to watching TV or even playing Xbox from it. Two years ago I borrowed my dad’s mountain bike to test the theory that if I had a real bike I might make use of it to even get around town and while the experiment was not an unqualified success it did essentially show that Have Bike, Will Travel. With finances showing more positive aspects than they had in years, April was the time to finally invest in the results of that experiment.

I knew from the borrowing experiment that a mountain bike was not what I needed. While the front shocks would sometimes be nice, more often I found I was too mushy a ride and absorbed too much energy. Likewise when I replaced the knobby tires with decent road tires half way through that summer the effort required to bike to work was reduced immensely and the reduced vibration in the handlebars improved ride comfort in the handlebars by a frankly immeasurable quantity. So I knew I didn’t need a mountain bike or really just about any of it’s features except for a nice wide handlebar. I also knew from past experience that the head down posture of a road bike was a sentence to back torture so it was time to head out and look into cruisers and hybrid styles.

I stopped first at the Roseville location of Erik’s Bike Shops and after looking through the racks and getting the attention of a really very friendly and helpful sales person pretty much ignored the cruisers and went straight for the hybrids. The Giant Cypress was a good start but felt a bit too much like the mountain bike, albeit with more grace and more trim profile. The Cannondale Quick series seemed to be about the best match of price and features but still didn’t quite feel right. A third option that I don’t remember the make or model had a really nice gearing system internal to the rear axle but didn’t really seem to be worth the $200 price premium. Having done enough car shopping with my parents in my youth it was time to get a quote for a Quick 1 and head out to my next stop to see what else was available.

The plan had been to move on to a local independent and then over to REI as a final stop, but my search ended at that local independent. The Bicycle Chain at Larpenteur and Lexington in Roseville (in the same strip mall as Key’s) turned out to not only have exactly what I was looking for as well as having a really top notch staff, but also to have everything cheaper then Erik’s and the prices at REI that I had checked online. It’s not a big store but they make good use of their space to carry a pair of wheels for just about everyone and everything, and even have some unicycles for the daring. I rode a different model of Giant that I found as unimpressive as the Cypress and then tried a closeout 2009 Specialized Sirrus Elite and fell in love. It’s light. It’s smooth. More importantly it’s fiendishly comfortable even when cranking really hard up the long hills endemic to my new neighborhood. Better yet I spent the same amount on this bike with a huge slew of accessories and upgrades (new pedals with ultra-smooth bearings, fancy computer, bright lights, and a car rack) as that quote from Erik’s that was summarily recycled when I got home.

Now that it’s home I have been pretty uneven about actually using it. Commuting to work from here in anything but a car is completely different kind of exercise: In frustration and fear of life and limb. 16 miles isn’t really so far except when it’s through some of the most bike un-friendly portions of this otherwise very bike accommodating metropolis. Sure I could add another 15 miles onto that trip and do it in great comfort along a whole series of trails but, like the mass transit system around here, if you are going anywhere but one of the downtowns you are screwed and 31 miles in one direction to get to work is a bit much. Thankfully my partner came up with a better idea for more exercise.

She and her partner have been sending their kids to classes at Circus Juventus since the kids have been old enough to do so. Seeing them learn the circus arts has been amazing and incredibly fun so when J suggested that we sign up for the summer session of the Circus Arts for Adults class, I thought about it a bit and said yes anyway.

Three classes into our 8 class session I can say that I am thankful they are honest in the print description of the class in saying that pretty much everyone is accommodated no matter experience or ability. I am not precisely the most agile or dexterous person I know and I never learned to do such basic physical tricks as climbing a rope or doing a cartwheel. But for all that I am having a blast. So far we have done Triple Trapeze, German Wheel, Globes, Tumble Track, Tumbling/Acrobatics, Mini-Tramp/Vault, Spanish Web, Low Wire, Pyramid, Trampoline, and Low Casting. Of those I have found that flips and rolls are the easiest, which I’m partially thanking early experience playing goal in soccer and later experience with Aikido, while just about anything involving the use of my arms is the hardest. I have also probably done more push-ups and crunches/sit-ups/whatever they’re called these days in the last three weeks then over the course of my entire lifetime. It’s hard. It’s incredibly exhausting. I can not always raise my arms above my shoulders afterwards. It is worth every penny and very highly recommended.

Of the changes that have occurred in my life in the past year, one of them gives me the opportunity to make the drive between the Twin Cities and Madison every month or so. While the trip is by no means short I do look forward to it in part because it gives me a chance to be by myself and really listen to music which is something that the rest of my excessive number of hobbies do not always allow much time for.

This past weekend I bought BT’s new album “These Hopeful Machines” and listened to it almost exclusively on both legs of the trip. I’ve been listening to his music for nearly a decade after a friend had recommended a couple of particular tracks from one of his earlier albums to me and it has been interesting to hear the slow change of style and technique over that time. The All Music Guide calls his early style “Epic House” and I would be hard pressed to argue with that particularly apt description, but as they note after his early albums things began to change. Instead of the huge, contiguous slabs of sound the music began to become ever more jagged and full of surprising textures that were both challenging to the casual listener but left enough harmonic accessibility for even a modicum of attention to pay off with grandiose sonic landscapes. At this point it appears that “This Binary Universe” was the apogee of that trend with it’s glitch ridden orchestra of sounds providing a seemingly endless tapestry of deep introspection.

“These Hopeful Machines” is an interesting work in that it feels like a blending of those first epic sounds in “IMA” or “ESCM” with the rhythmic sensibility of Universe’s more successful pieces. This is undeniably an album made to sound good to the ears of the dance floor set while leaving more than enough depth for those of us who listen in less active ways and there is a lot here to listen to with a run time over two CDs of nearly two solid hours and a relatively well put together through-line between tracks. (I found it particularly telling that the version available for purchase through Microsoft’s Zune music store was just two tracks, one for each disc.) I personally found most of the music to be very good with the only thorough disappointment being the final track which is a mediocre and, frankly, over-produced cover of The Psychadelic Furs’ “The Ghost In You”. From the abrupt and powerful entrance of “Suddenly” to the blippy fun of “The Rose of Jericho” to the epic pop drive of “The Unbreakable” this is excellent music with typically enveloping emotional depth.

As much as I have been enjoying the album there are definitely elements that take away from the experience and make me wonder if this isn’t a good view of the back side of a particularly tall mountain of a career even aside from the aforementioned final track. With the rare exception of the occasional nice turn of phrase BT’s impenetrably feeler-y lyrics have never been something to really write home about and none of those exceptions show up here. The lyrics in the chorus of “Suddenly” are particularly baffling though I’m certain that several people will have very good and entirely contradictory explanations about what “And I love it when you fall… to me! Suddenly.” actually means. The sudden chorus in “Forget Me” sung by his young daughter also comes across as simply odd rather than any possible intention I can think of.

However the most striking failing that is present all through the album is the one I alluded to in the title for this post: BT has gotten to the point in his career that he obviously doesn’t see the need to allow an editor of any sort meddle in his art and the result is the poorer for it. I feel a bit awkward saying that with the evidence of my own bellicose text and the knowledge that some of my favorite pieces of music are long winded ramblings through sound that by any other measure are the most egoistical of embellishments in the Ambient, Trance, or Contemporary Orchestral genres. The comparison that keeps coming to mind is with Sufjan Stevens’ recent “The BQE” which I had a chance to listen to in some depth on a similar Madison trip last fall. Stevens’ has never been known for having an economical notion about his music but where he succeeded in “The BQE” with his just so movements, BT manages to overstay his welcome more than once and in the particular case of “Every Other Way”, and to a lesser extent “The Light In Things”, he makes the middle of the first album turn into several opportunities to wonder why he didn’t just cut out the five or six decent fragments of ideas and just keep them in a box until he had time to fully develop them into something worth listening to. The biggest disappointment is that the core of “Every Other Way” could be one of the better tracks if not for all the tacked on aural wankery.

All in all “These Hopeful Machines” is hardly an unheralded triumph but it is certainly a great work by a mature master of electronic music and I will always remember driving through the rolling hills of west-central Wisconsin and watching the sun peek out behind the rain clouds and slowly flood the land with the same radiance that was peaking at about the 1:30 mark of “The Emergency” and spurred my way home with it’s intrinsic feeling of good and connectedness.

As part of my moving effort I am culling things like books and clothes, but I also need to trim down my game collection. If you would like any of the following games, please contact me before 9/25/2009. I am not willing to ship and you must be willing to pick up in South Minneapolis. Thanks!

The Awful Green Things from Outer Space
Sagarian
Cathedral
Mama Mia
Mancala
Bean Trader
Settlers of the Stone Age
Wiz-War
Warhamster Rally
Starship Troopers
Ork and Squat Warlords (Warhammer Epic 40k set)
How to Host a Murder: The Class of ’54

Update: Awful Green Things, Bean Trader, and Cathedral have been spoken for.

After reading a theory about how #amazonfail might have happened it is a bit tempting to try and test the theory directly. If the theory is valid and Amazon has not changed their alleged feedback/delisting mechanism then it should be a fairly simple test to run.

I think it would be pretty tempting to initially target something that was similar on the other side of the political spectrum. In the #amazonfail debacle GLBT oriented works seemed to be the primary focus and the obvious knee jerk response would be to target something like ex-gay manuals or other strongly christian or right-leaning publications. I think this would be exactly the wrong target however for some pretty simple reasons.

The first and most obvious is that we don’t know if the theory is actually valid or not. It certainly sounds reasonable but there is no actual proof that I’ve seen yet and several people who seem to think there is evidence against it.

The second and best reason though is that there is no way to currently know who to go after. Flailing about at random targets is only really likely to reinforce any existing persecution complexes that seem to be so common on the other side of the fence. Any authors that might be randomly targeted because they wrote a book you don’t like may be in the exact same position as several of the people impacted by the alleged Bantown that happened with #amazonfail and would really just be censorship on a different group.

I think instead the ideal test target would be for volunteers to publish something via Amazon’s print-on-demand division CreateSpace. One of the options on that service is that for a 40% share of the list price Amazon will list the item in the main directory. Having a volunteer submit a target is really the only way to ensure that someone is not a victim of virtual mob violence. Next step is to get a small number of people to purchase the item thus ensuring that the item gets into the sales ranking system. I don’t know how many would be needed but one would guess that somewhere between 10-100 would be a good starting number. Since this would involve actual purchases I would think that donating the remaining %60 of the price to a charitable organization (The ACLU, EFF, EPIC, or CBLDF would be ideal recipients) would be a reasonable action.

Once the test item has established itself in the ranking system the next step would be to then have a staged attempt to remove the item through the feedback system. While it would be simple to just have everyone hit it at the same time, it might be more interesting to set up a simple ticketing system like a website where people enter an email address and when the test is ready a randomly selected set of the participants would be notified to go submit feedback and then notify the ticketing system that they have done so. Once some amount of time has passed the item’s status could be checked to see if the total number of feedback attempts has delisted it yet or not. If not, run the next batch. Heck, you could even use Mechanical Turk to source the feedback attempts. )For some reason I find it perversely funny to use Amazon’s own systems to test other parts of their infrastructure.)

The obvious downside would be that Amazon would still be making money from the initial purchases of the test item. Good research costs money though and the result might be worth the attempt.

I scored big at a garage sale yesterday. Matt, a fellow TwinLUG member, had mentioned there was a huge number of sets available at a garage sale in New Brighton and that there had still been many left when he went back on Sunday. Since it was pretty close to J’s house I figured I’d take a few minutes and take a look. I came away with a large tub full of mostly LEGO monorail parts for not nearly as much money as it should have cost.

I was thinking of things I could do with my newly acquired monorail parts and ran some interesting calculations. At Micropolis scale the Vehicle Assembly Building is 58 bricks and 1 plate tall, 99.5 studs long, and 69 studs wide. The Crawler is 2 bricks to 3 bricks high (can raise and lower a bit), 17.5 studs long, and 15.2 studs wide. The tracks are 1 stud wide, and there are four pairs of tracks at the four corners of the vehicle with the motor for that corner between the pair. The Mobile Launch Platform which sits on top of the crawler is 2 bricks and 2 plates high, 21 studs long and 18 studs wide.

I’m wondering about the feasibility of putting together an oversized module with the VAB and a length of monorail track that runs a Crawler vehicle out to a launch gantry. I think if I took some liberties with the crawler design I could disguise the monorail motor as a rocket on top of the Crawler.

I think I am going to have to work on this virtually initially just to get an idea of how many parts I’m going to need for the VAB, since while I have a lot of parts these days I don’t have that many actual bricks and those will be needed most for that building. That and an awful lot of plates for the rest of the module.

Had been intending to post this for awhile, but I’ll just clip down a bit and get this chunk out there at least.

In the last big snowstorm I ended up with a pretty hefty ding and honestly had a great experience with Progressive getting it repaired. The whole thing was fast, easy, and relatively cheap. Bonus: due to the nature of the ding it didn’t even mess with my insurance rates.

The only downside of the insurance thing was that I had a 2008 Pontiac G6 GT for 6 days while my car was in the shop. I think the most positive thing that I can say about that thing was that it sure did go fast in a straight line. Otherwise the controls were just all around bad, especially seat adjustment. Badly placed, bad quality (felt like I was going to break the seat height adjustment just touching it), and just over all irritating. I also just couldn’t get comfortable in the thing. The seating felt like it was designed to have me lying on my back the whole time and resisted any effort to sit otherwise. Don’t even get me started on the enormous blindspot caused by the front right pillar.

I’m playing around with the recently massively upgraded MOCPages site and with the exception of the total lack of RSS or Atom support have found it relatively useful. This past weekend I re-photographed a number of my Micropolis modules and posted them. If you want to see more, take a look at:

• Micropolis Construction Site
• Micropolis Water Tower (Rev 2)
• Micropolis Apatment Building (Rev 1)

At some point hopefully the feed support will come so I can just have new entries over there automatically picked up over here.

I saw a post on The Brothers Brick the other day with a new vehicle meme that looked pretty interesting and today I finally got the chance to sit down and build something and came up with “Pug”.

The cockpit for Pug is where my design diverges from the meme spec which calls for it to be sealed. I’ve been looking for a good way to use the angled trans-blue window parts from an airport set that J and I won a few years ago in a contest and finally figured out a good use for it. It took me quite awhile to figure out the SNOT techniques required to get it mounted properly, and honestly the parts are not as secure as I would normally like them to be in a MOC, but I think it looks damned good.

I’m also quite pleased at the track design. I’ve been playing around with interesting intersecting angles with Technic lift arms and was able to put it to very good use. The combination of angles on both the exterior and interior parts lends both stability and some neat lines to an otherwise somewhat boxy look. Having the third wheel mounted lower also makes for a cool raked angle for the vehicle as whole.

All in all it’s not perfect but was quite satisfying given that I was working with J’s enormous bin of parts rather than my own neatly organized collection.

It is quite the coincidence that over the last week two of my creative projects have appeared in large public spaces. It’s a little weird honestly since unlike some of my friends pretty much I do almost nothing with the express purpose of getting broad public exposure and by and large it all hides in entirely deserved obscurity. The few times that I have attempted to elevate my work to more public status has failed entirely which only makes these next two items all the more strange.

The first, and strangest, is a project that I put together on a whim for a room party at Icon 27 in 2002. For some bizarre reason I had the thought that it would be cool to do Stonehenge, or at least standing stones, in rice krispie treats. The results were actually fairly good, though the photography of the project was only so-so. Fast forward to a couple of months ago and imagine my shock to have someone from The Smithsonian Channel contacting me about getting rights to include one or more photos in a small project they were putting together to highlight the various ways that people have payed homage to the best known standing stones in the world. Bring that forward to last week when they sent me a link to the finished segment and mentioned it was going to air this past Sunday (9/21/2008) and today, lo and behold, here it is:

The second project is one where there was expectation of public display, but I don’t think it ever really occurred to me quite how much fun it would be to see the completed work. If you have been hanging out with me recently or been following my Twitter stream you have probably heard me mention my resurgent interest in LEGO and starting to get involved with the local LEGO enthusiast community in the form of TwinLUG (Involved enough to volunteer to host and maintain the group’s website). At he August meeting one of the other members proposed that we work on a group project where we put together a city built entirely of LEGO parts. We eventually agreed on some basic common design specifications and the initial results were assembled at this month’s meeting and then taken to the LEGO Imagination Center at the Mall Of America and installed in one of the displays that is reserved for community projects. Yesterday evening J, S, M, K, and I headed down to take a look at the installation and I am really happy about how oddly proud I was to see my contributions sitting in that case among the other great models. One of the really great things about a group project like this is that it’s the perfect showcase for different building styles and techniques since a real city is so often such an eclectic agglomeration of materials and styles from the imaginations and influences of so many different people. If you do have a chance to go and see the display it is in the NE corner of the store on the outer wall of the Duplo section. Since it’s on an outer glass wall you can see pretty much everything even though it’s configured to be best viewed from inside. I built the dark gray memorial, construction site, and (mediocre) apartment building sections.