Two More Wheels

December 14, 2007 by Eric Richardson

New Bicycle Eric Richardson

Tuesday afternoon I walked into Hollywood Pro looking for bar tape. One thing led to another, and yesterday I walked out with a new fixed-gear bicycle.

Even back when I bought my road bike in 2005, I had already been fighting the little bug in my head telling me that a fixie for around Downtown riding would be a lot of fun. I had thought before about getting an older frame and building one up from parts, but had never shown the follow-through to actually act on that desire. In the end a confluence of a couple different bits of good timing led to this being the perfect time to go ahead and buy one.

A couple relevant bits of info: The frame is a Soma Rush. The bike's running a front brake and 48/15 gearing (relatively high and fast).

Yesterday evening I took the bike out to the Fashion District and practiced on completely empty streets. I think I represented myself adequately, though I have to say that I can't think of anything so jarring as when you forget you're on a fixie and decide to coast. The bicycle will remind you of how impossible that is very quickly.

I took some up close shots yesterday, but don't think it's particularly cool to take a full bike shot inside. My goal is to ride up to Elysian Park -- my favorite spot for bicycle shots -- and take my photos up there, but those hills are going to present quite the challenge.

Oh to ride a bicycle more...

December 05, 2007 by Eric Richardson

IAAL-MAF Eric Richardson

In light of the LA Times article about Midnight Ridazz and its mention of the IAAL-MAF (under sporadic rides at the bottom), it would perhaps be an appropriate time to discuss the fact that I suck at reliably getting on a bicycle these days. I rode tonight up to Atwater Village and back, and the hill on Glendale blvd reminded me just how little time I've been putting in the pedals lately.

Given tonight's ride, two trips to USC and a sidetrip to the Wilshire Library Branch, I've ridden about 30 miles in the last three days. Sadly, I don't know that I could tell you the last time I had done that.

But enough complaining... The simple solution: Go ride a bicycle.

I can start by heading over to the shop to get some new bar wrap to replace the padding on the left side of my bars. It ripped and I've been riding without for a couple weeks.

Bicycle Transportation

November 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Bike Bike Racks at Caltrans Eric Richardson

I took this photo for a blogdowntown post today, and I really love how it came out.

Shot with the kit Sony 18-70 3.5-5.6 at 50mm f/5.6, 1/125sec exposure. Taken crouched in the curbside lane during a break in traffic.

Two Random Rails Notes

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I spent a chunk of the evening getting up to speed on how you're actually supposed to deploy Rails applications, figuring that my method of manually starting a server on some arbitrary point and pointing Apache at it probably wasn't recommended.

For both this site and blogdowntown I've set up mongrel clusters behind a pound balancer, roughly following instructions here and here. I don't currently have the mongrel clusters running out of init, but I think that should be the last step to getting things happy.

I'm been messing around with ambition, a plugin for writing database queries via Ruby. It's not that I think SQL is anything hard, it's just that there's a certain appeal in a query like:

live = Post::STATUS_LIVE
@aposts = Post.select { |p|
    p.status == live && p.users.id == @author.id
}.sort_by { |p| -p.timestamp }.first(3)

So far I'm just using it in a few places on the periphery of the blogdowntown code, but I'm intrigued.

Testing the New Interface

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

After letting this blog sit abandoned for months I've finally gotten around to giving it a bit of love. I've pulled over the code from blogdowntown and basically just stolen most of the design and style. The eventual goal is to merge whatever bits are going to remain from ericrichardson.com into this site and push everything back together. For now I'll try to start with just making a blog post every now and again.

I can't say that in the design process I was really working with the irony of using a No Stopping sign on a blog that hasn't had a post in months, but I'll go ahead and take credit for it anyway.