Shralping Shredona (The Weirdest Place to Ride in the World)
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There are a few places in North American that, if you know a mountain biker, will probably hear about at least once. They are places where the riding is so legendary, so obscenely epic (we’re talking Sail by AWOL levels here) that they are worth traveling to the obscure corners of the country that they are usually located. Sedona, Arizona is one of those places.
What is unique about Sedona (besides the amazing riding, I don’t need to dwell on that here) is that the town itself is so strange. I mean the town is kinda… lame (sorry Adam). You look around and all you can see are pink jeeps lugging obese tourists around and trinket shops selling knockoff native American art. Crystals are bigger than Chuck Norris was in 2008. And apparently there are these “vortexes” all around the place. I don’t even know what those are but I think they have something to do with the crystals.
Basically if Walt Disney was into white person yoga and Carl Castaneda he would have invested heavily in “Uptown” Sedona instead of building Disney Land. I always get this strange look from people when I tell them I just got back from there: that look of “Sedona huh? You’re into that kind of thing?” It’s like when your friends come over for movie night and they find your roommate’s copy of Twilight in the DVD player… except more embarrassing.
Weirdness aside, the place really does have amazing riding. Good enough to have brought me back a second time. This time we had a larger crew and we let the cameras roll. Please enjoy the following “edit” I put together of the trip.
Photo Of the Day
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I was on a ride with my buddy Brent Davidson a few days ago when during a break he snapped a quick picture of me.
“Photo of the day.” he said.
“You mean for Pinkbike?” I asked.
“No, my instagram photo of the day.”
Brent takes one photo every day and posts it to his instagram account. He explained that it’s fun, he was taking at least that many pictures before anyway and that his grandma calls him if he misses a day.
I told him I was going to steal his idea. If you go into every day knowing that you’re going to take a picture of something, I bet you’ll come away with some interesting stuff. You go from being a passive photographer (that’s neat, I’ll take a picture) to being an active one. As in you’ll actively seek out photos to take if you have to at least take one a day.
Not to mention a cool history to look back on.
So I created a photoset on flickr and a javascript gallery that pulls from that here on this blog. As of this writing, my first POD is up. In the spirit of the internet, it’s a photo I took of a cat (the internet was made for cats).
Ride Slower Next Time
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Sometimes it becomes far too easy to get caught up in the distractions of being heavily involved in a sport like Mountain Biking. There’s the constant guilt of staying in shape, the ever changing and evolving equipment industry, and of course the big question: “Am I fast enough?”
You know you’re in deep when you go on a ride with someone and it’s a complete sufferfest the entire time. When you aren’t hyperventilating the conversation always seems to be about parts, tires, grams, grams, grams. Is the fact that I notice this a sign of burnout? I don’t think so. I think I’ve just moved on.
It seems our attitude towards riding tends to come full circle after a while. You get started on bikes they get you stoked. Then once you start getting faster it becomes about continuing to get faster. Fancy equipment and training help you along your way. So riding becomes about that for a while. And then you come back.
When you return you remember the reasons why you started. For me it happened in summer ‘13 in Whistler. Tough riding where it was challenging enough to stay up right, much less go fast. It felt like learning to ride all over again - with all the crashing and walking I did. You could say I was riding slow but it was fun and I came away a better rider for it without really having to try.
I think everyone deserves a little time to just get stoked. Turn the Garmin off (or at least forget about it), slow down a bit. Take that line you’ve always been afraid of, or hit that jump you’ve always ridden around. Hell, take a moment to appreciate the wonderful natural world around you. Most people are not so lucky.
Photo by Josh Moberg
Now riding for team Lost Coast MTB
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Thats right, I’m on a real bike team now. I’m not talking about a team like Team Dirtbag I’m talking about a full legit bike team with kits, sponsors and free stuff, bro.
Our main sponsors are Lost Coast Brewing and Marin Bikes - beer and bikes. What more can you ask for?
As part of my joining the team I volunteered to redesign and update the team website. So I set up a Wordpress install on my VPS, did ye’ old free theme search, and set up a few widgets. Importing comments from Blogger was pretty easy, as was making sure permalinks remained in the same format so no links out there were broken. On most days I’ll tell you that I hate Wordpress, but this is one of those perfect applications for it. Anyway, the result is here: www.teamlcb.org.
About an hour or so after switching the domain over I noticed something peculiar: the spam comment count increasing with every load of the admin console. Within just a few hours the amount of Spam comments caught by Akismet had surpassed 100. I took a look at the Blogger settings, le sigh, no comment moderation, no word verification and full access to anonymous users. Looks like I had just messed up a ton of spam bot’s days.
Interestingly, Blogger seems to count bots as visitors it’s blogs:
Whereas Wordpress does not. (The blog gets maybe 5-10 legit visits a day…) I’m assuming many of these bots are programmed specifically for Blogger blogs and are probably failing now. The good ones most likely detect Wordpress forms and are still able to submit comments. Load on the server has also visibly increased since the domain was switched.
But it is still pathetically low. Anyway, moral of the story is: comments suck. Also, I need to start training. Part of being on a team is knowing how to ride.
First Foray into Video Editing: Dusty Sweetness
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Thanks to my wonderul parents, I’m now the proud owner of a new GoPro. And thanks to theives in San Francisco, I’m also the proud owner of a new Ibis Mojo HDR which took the place of my lost Santa Cruz Blur LT.
I finally got the chance to use both over the weekend on a very dry, very warm, January day:
I really enjoyed the process of both filming and editing the video. Stay tuned for more.
Race Resume
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I was recently asked to put together a race resume for a cycling team I am interested in joining. As a web developer, I thought I could have a little fun with it. Take a look
War Bikes
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I can’t think of anything more align with progressive values than the bike. The weapon of choice for the modern day bohemian - with it’s obvious practical use as a means of transportation augmented by the enormous health, environmental and economical benefits endowed to the rider. Not to mention biker’s butt. Nay, it appears there is nothing but butterflies and sunshine surrounding the subject of the cycle.
Except that a bicycle is a machine and a machine’s utility is defined by it’s use.
Cycling saw a huge surge of popularity in the late 19th century. In particular the invention of the safety bicycle and the pneumatic tire suddenly made the machines a practical and accessible means of transportation for everyone.
Military thinkers were attracted to these machines for their obvious benefits: they were easy to manufacture, cheaper than horses, relatively silent and portable. Though it may seem silly now, by World Word I nearly all major militaries had incorporated bicycles into their ranks in some way.
In the 1890’s the Austrian army experimented with folding bikes for their infantry. Looking at these illustrations it is hard not to feel sorry for these men. The bikes were made of steel and heavy rubber, supposedly weighing up to 50 pounds each. They snagged on branches and other obstacles while strapped to the back, and could only be removed with help from a comrade. Unfolding a refolding was a time consuming process, and they bikes were flexy and janky to ride. It quickly became apparent that what seemed practical in theory, was anything but.
Folding bikes (which to this day are still pretty lame) may have been scrapped, but military use of the bicycle continued. During WWI They proved to be an effective means to move troops to front lines quickly and were especially useful as couriers. During the invasion of Belgium German officers made use of bicycle messengers sent in advance of the main invasion to warn the populace of the coming occupation and to urge them not to do silly things like blow up bridges, refuse soldiers in their homes, or any other general showing of resistance.
Another noteworthy deployment of the military bicycle was the 25th Bicycle Corps of the U.S Army, a unit of buffalo soldiers led by the sorta-off Lt. James A. Moss. The corps rode from Fort Missoula, Montana to St Louis, Missouri supposedly as an experiment to see see if the bicycle served a purpose in the US army. However I think that Lt. Moss was simply more comfortable with a bike pump in hand than a rifle:
Again and again would we stop along the road to look at paint pots, pools, springs, geysers, etc. Riding through the Gibbon Meadows we then turned off into Gibbon Canyon, deep, sinuous and picturesque. For miles we fared along the windings of the road, with the ever beautiful waters of Gibbon River at our side, now admiring this, then admiring that. Indeed, this was the very poetry of cycling.
and that the whole expedition was more likely an elegant excuse thought up by a guy who just wanted to ride his bike - but also happened to be in command of a small unit of soldiers in the American frontier.
World War I saw not only small units but entire companies and regiments made up of cyclists on all sides of the conflict. This trend continued into WWII.
Probably the most famous example of the effective use of bicycles in a military conflict came from the Malayan Campaign , fought between British Commonwealth army units and the Imperial Japanese Army. Due to their cycles the Japanese units were able to move quickly through the jungle terrain while evading, outmaneuvering, and cutting off British troops. The battle was a complete disaster for allied forces, who suffered 12 times as many casualties despite having twice as many men.
In a bit of personal history, my Grandmother’s friend Robert Littlefild recalled his experience as a downed fighter pilot in France during WWII in his book Double Nickel Double Trouble. After being found by members of the French Resistance, Lt. Littlefield had the opportunity to go for a ride:
A short time later three men, one with an arm in a sling, called me out of the hay and told me they were taking me to an English speaking lady. Two bicycles were provided for Marcel and myself and we set off down a dirt road until we arrived at a main cement highway. In about 20 minutes we arrived at Chateu le Matre, a large 150 year old, three story building.
Better than walking, eh Bob?
In modern times, military use of the bicycle has been all but phased out. It seems that in the age of stealth bombers, long range missiles and remote control drones, there is simply not much military use for the bike. That is in battle, anyways. The legendary war monger George W. Bush claims to be an avid mountain biker(get off the brakes, George), a fact which still lends him no credibility.
In any case, the bicycle is still the Most Noble Invention, and it’s use in warfare only proves this incredible machine’s versatility.
Scanning with the Digital Anarchists
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Noisebridge. I’ve only been there twice now and it’s already become one of my favorite places to hang out in San Francisco. Noisebridge is a unique place where the anarchistic ideals of my youth and my current love of technology exist in tandem. Not only is there amazing hacking going down but I’ve also found myself once again doing things like trash talking Crimethinc and comparing dumpster diving stories. Ah, it feels good (and smells bad!).
Depending on the kind of “hacker” you are you will either love or hate this place. Are you (A) the kind of hacker that loves technology and learning as an end in of itself? Or (B) the kind of hacker that would do questionable things in the back room of a VC’s office to secure funding for your snapchat for cats app? In this case B stands for don’t Bother.
One of the cooler projects to emerge from the chaos is the work being done on a DIY
book scanner. The Digital Archivists
meet every Thursday in the space and hack away at it. I got to join them this week
and had a stab at getting some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software working
so that we can break some copyright law convert images of pages
into actual text.
Tesseract is some amazing software that takes images as input and spits out text files. In fact the software is so simple (at least by default) and effective that converting an actual .tiff of a page to a text file is as simple as:
$tesseract page0001.tiff page0001.txt
Considering Tesseract is doing all the hard work, all I had to do was write a simple shell script to wrap it and convert entire directories of images to text.
As dorky as it may seem I find it something very satisfying about seeing a physical book go from ink on paper to bytes in memory. Pretty dorky actually. Goodnight.
Best Songs of 2013 With Three.js
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I have to admit my favorite thing about the new year has to be all the awesome “Best Of” remixes and lists that come out just in time for the NYE parties.
I decided this year I was going to make my own. But instead of a boring list, why not make it interactive? So, I present to you:
Best Songs of 2013 with Three.js
You can fly around and listen to each of the 6 songs that I chose while fighting both the controls and epilepsy! Be warned, you should have a modern browser and a decent tolerance for cheesy indie music or you will not enjoy this site.
Obviously, I used Three.js to set the scene
(pun intended) but I also used Buzz.js
for handling the music because the native <audio> element was not holding
up well with so much music playing at once. It was my first time with both
libraries. Three.js has a steep learning curve, but nothing impossible.
One of the coolest things about 3D programming is how much math you have to use. I can’t even remember that last time I got to write code that used Math.sin and Math.cos, and it made me happy:
{{< highlight javascript >}} frequency = .3 h = ( 360 * ( 1.0 + time ) % 360 ) / 360; i = time % 1080 red = Math.sin(frequencyi + 0) * 127 + 128; green = Math.sin(frequencyi + 2) * 127 + 128; blue = Math.sin(frequency*i + 4) * 127 + 128;
partical_material.color.setRGB(red,green, blue ); ball1.position.y =+ time; ball_material.color.setHSL( 0.1, 0.3 + 0.7 * ( 1 + Math.cos( time ) ) / 2, 0.5 ); {{< / highlight >}}
Just for completeness sake, here is the track list in no particular order:
- Alabama Shakes - Always Alright
- London Grammar - Wasting my Young Years
- Trails and Ways - Border Crosser
- Cage the Elephant - Come a Little Closer
- MØ - Waste of Time
- Lady Lamb the Bee Keeper - Bird Balloons
Source code (minus the songs, sorry) is available on github.
Happy New Year!
Who Redirects to HTTPS?
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I was browsing Twitter yesterday, following some people I met at the Aaron Swartz memorial hackathon over the weekend when I came across this tweet:
At @internetarchive on Friday, I think @brewster_kahle said only 54 of top 1000 sites run HTTPS by default. Can anybody verify that stat?
— Parker Higgins (@xor) November 11, 2013
Nobody seemed to be able to verify that number, so I fired out Geany and wrote some python to attempt at a verification myself.
I downloaded the Alexa top 1,000,000 .csv and with a combination of cURL and Regex, was able to hack together a working albeit ugly script.
To my surprise, the number I came up with was even lower than the estimate. When the script finally stopped running (it took about 2 hours to cover 1000 urls) the result was that only 44 of the top 1000 sites that I tested redirected http requests to their domain to https. You can view a table with the specifics here.
To be fair, this script only tested the initial landing page. Many of the sites tested will switch to https once the user starts doing something that involves user input, or dealing with data that may be considered sensitive.
Still, the SSL turnout is less than stellar. Let’s hope for an increase to the 0.44 percent figure soon.