A Sea Otter went to Santa Cruz to ride the wicked trails

A Sea Otter went to Santa Cruz to ride the wicked trails. After an afternoon of swoopy redwood single track, big drops and killer berms he noticed that his fork was leaking oil. So he heads back into town and takes it into ABS for service.

Chris looks at the fork and says to the Otter: "The fork needs to be serviced and it should take an hour or so. You should check out downtown for a bit and it will be ready when you come back."

The Sea Otter goes downtown and notices Marinis candy and ice cream store. He buys a triple scoop of vanilla chocolate chip in a sugar cone and in true sea otter style he lies on his back and devours the ice cream getting it all over his face and belly. The ice cream was quite refreshing on such a hot summer day and he heads back to ABS to pick up his bike.

Back at the shop, Chris tells the Otter that his fork is ready. "What was the matter with the fork?", asks the Otter. Chris says: "It looks like you've blown a seal."

"No, it's just ice cream."

Thanks to Alex for the origin of the joke and Gary for the Photoshop work.

This is why I switched to the Mac

Because I would never trust an Operating System from the lame people who made this corporate video.


"Vista SP1! Now sucks less!"

Good Karma

Some of you had heard that we had all our luggage stolen from us when we were coming home from a holiday trip from Toronto. Good karma must have been in the ether because I'm happy to report that a lot of the stuff has been found and will be making its way down to us over the next couple of months.

We had gone to Toronto over the holiday break to visit family. On our last day, we went to eat at the Keg restaurant near the airport before our flight. We had left our luggage in the back of my brother's car - a VW Golf with a hatchback. There were signs in the parking lot and in the restaurant to "watch your laptop since thefts have been reported". My spider sense was tingling so I went to my brother's car to get my laptop. My laptop bag also had all our passports and $200 in cash.

An hour later, we went back to Gary's car and the rear window was busted and all the luggage was missing. Jade was upset since they stole "Tiger" - a stuffed toy that she has been sleeping with for years. We felt a little shell shocked about the incident but Eve and I showed a lot of strength about the ordeal. It's just stuff we said. The bright side was that we could get back home to California and I didn't lose my (company) laptop. It also made the plane trip easier without luggage to check. Jade was sad but she was quite brave about the incident. She showed a lot of strength and understanding. People do bad things but most of the time people are good.

We were resigned that we were never going to see our stuff again and had started the process to replace all our goods. We started talking to the insurance company to discuss the settlement.

On Friday, I got a garbled voice mail from the Renaissance Hotel near the Toronto airport that they had found our luggage. I called them back over the weekend and they had found all 5 bags in the ravine behind their property. They went to recover as much of our stuff as they could and try to dry it out. I had arranged for Gary to recover our stuff and bring it back to his place for inventory and he sent us pictures.

The good news is that a lot of stuff like a dental night guard, prescription glasses and especially Tiger has been recovered. However, my iPod, portable speakers, other electronic gear and Eve's North Face jacket is missing. Also, all of our clothes and luggage have been left in a Toronto ravine for 2 weeks and have exposed to rain, snow and a wind storm. Gary mentioned that the bags are pretty trashed and the clothes smell like piss or mold. The books may be ruined.

All things being equal, we are really fortunate that our luggage has been recovered. A big shout out to Joelle and the staff at the Toronto Renaissance hotel. Joelle was the one who noticed the bags and took the initiative to recover our goods. I gave her details about the theft and they will review the night vision surveillance tapes around the time the crime took place. They are going to look for a car, license plates or suspects and hand it over to the police. There is a special place in hell for people who steal from little girls and make them cry.

Tiger is making his way back to California. I'm sure he will have an interesting story to tell.

Xemacs 21.4.20 has problem with Windows network drives

I'm working on a project which uses C and SQL Lite. Normally I've been a Java guy and I haven't done any serious work with C since 1996. I also use a PC and Cygwin to give myself a Unixy environment on the PC.

Since I'm just experimenting with the API I figured I would just add the gcc package. I haven't upgraded Cygwin in a while so when I added gcc I decided to upgrade all my Cygwin packages. Big mistake. Apparently Xemacs 21.4.20-2 has a bug in which it reads files and directories on network drives as read only:

http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-April/011117.html
http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/xemacs-beta/2007-May/011164.html

The solution: use cygwin to downgrade the xemacs package until this issue is resolved. I downgraded to 21.4.19-3 and this worked. I had to troll the net far and wide to find this information and put it together. This post is a service to those who will encounter this problem so they won't have to go though the blind alleys that I did.

This little regression burned about an hour of my time. I definitely can't charge my client for that little digression. Ug!

Lick the Toad?! WTF?!

For years I've had the handle "lick the toad" @ Yahoo or Google for my free email address. Just to set the record straight: I've never licked a toad nor do I have an interest in licking a toad. I know my favorite poisons and cane toad sweat isn't one of them.

When I arrived in California, full suspension bikes were ridden by yuppies and most mountain bikers I knew rode XC hard tails with 65 mm of front travel, flat narrow bars with bar ends and long stems. I met Eve on a ride and we were riding and hanging out together. We would look for new rides and we hooked up with Team Wrong Way and started racing with them. Pretty soon we were taking road trips and we headed up to Lake Tahoe for some riding. The high point of the trip was to ride "the Toad". Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is definitely one of the classic California mountain bike trails. Along with the Flume trail, no Lake Tahoe mountain bike trip is complete without checking out Mr. Toad.

I had ridden Mr. Toad the previous year so I knew that it was a technical challenge for my Rocky Mountain hard tail. Back then it was difficult to ride and I had to walk or dab some sections. For this trip it was my goal to clean the ride. To "clean" Mr. Toad meant riding all the technical challenges without dabbing.

We rode the trail and the carnage was impressive. I was riding with the lead group and rode every section but I would dismount and wait to regroup. Contrary to Mike Gin's account of the ride I did clean the trail. I would ride every section and exclaim "lick the toad" after I cleaned it. When describing the ride I would say I "licked the toad" - with the obvious double entendre.

Soon after that trip I found the need to create a Yahoo email address and used "lick the toad" as my handle. When I got a gmail account, I carried this tradition forward. As I get more engaged in civic life "lick the toad" has become a bit of an albatross. The handle elicits explanation or perhaps not being taken as seriously as I could have.

Over the past few months I have been steadily transitioning away from this handle to something more conventional. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity.

Our brightest minds are working on the problem

Idiocracy is a film about an average guy played by Luke Wilson who is genetically frozen in a military experiment. The program is forgotten about and he wakes up 500 years in the future to find that he is the smartest man in the world.

The premise of the film is that society has been dumbed down by the onslaught of commercialism, trashy media and the fact that human evolution no longer favors the survival of the fittest but rather those who can reproduce a lot. Picture a world 500 years into the future in which everything is broken, there is trash everywhere and the dominant cultural aesthetic is a cross between NASCAR and World Wrestling Entertainment.

You either love the film (like me) or hate it (like my wife) but I think the message is that with each generation, our society is dumbing down as smart people fail to reproduce and dumb people breed like rabbits. After seeing the film I see the signs of Idiocracy everywhere.

For instance in the opening montage, the narrator explains that the
brightest scientists of the present day are not engaged in solving the current problems of the world but rather they focus their time and attention on solving male baldness and erectile dysfunction. The scene shows a group of white coated scientists gathered in room measuring the erection of a very long haired baboon. It seems like this prophecy is coming true. I just read that scientists are researching stem cell techniques to stimulate and regenerate hair follicles on the skin of mice. This could eventually lead to baldness cures for men.

Stems cell research has the promise of curing lot of diseases and injuries. It also has the promise of curing baldness and our brightest minds are working on the problem. Welcome to the future!


Picture of Sy Sperling President of Hair Club for men from Worth 1000