Times covers Midnight Ridazz; Estimates 500 Participants

June 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

There's an article on the Midnight Ridazz in today's LA Times.

There were at least 500 of them, wearing angel wings, rubber tentacles, Girl Scout uniforms and other costumes. But in a city where freakish exhibitionism is as about as original as saying you're working on a screenplay, the more startling sight was seeing everyone pedaling a bicycle.

The cyclists commandeered three westbound lanes on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake late Friday night, forming a convoy a quarter-mile long.

The absurdity of the scene drew people out of bars, restaurants and even a hookah parlor. For a moment, it was as though the electricity had been shut off in Los Angeles and the streets had come alive with people wondering where the cars had gone.

I went on the ride Friday night, pedaling over to Echo Park to meet up with everyone. It was nuts. I'm definitely going back next month. The trip was a bit over ten miles each way, but it was a really relaxed ride, so it would have been easy for any level of cyclist to keep up. There was a photographer from the Times with us the whole way, but the pictures aren't online. I guess I'll be stopping to try and pick up a paper copy. Or maybe I'll get lucky and find one on the train again. Pictures posted to the Bike Summer site are here. I took a few, but haven't uploaded them to see how they turned out yet.

Note to Self

June 09, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Note: It's not a good idea to connect a fan into a floppy drive power plug and then let the two wires touch each other.

It will spark, and the computer will shut off.

On the plus side, I now have a fan running air over my new drive.

More Fun With Computers

June 08, 2005 by Eric Richardson

My mouse randomly stopped working tonight. It's a wireless Microsoft Intellimouse, and all of a sudden it just stopped. I figured I had done something wrong, so I rebooted, but still nothing. I went to the living room and grabbed an old SGI mouse to confirm that it was indeed the mouse and not something on the computer side. I think it could just be dead batteries, though. It still glows, but it doesn't change intensity when you pick it up and set it down. I'll have to pick up some new batteries tomorrow to test out that theory.

I used the downtime to install a new hard drive I picked up the other day. It's a 250gig drive intended to serve as a backup for the media server in the living room. Having 112gig of unbackedup content out there was starting to make me nervous. I'm manually running a sync right now, then I'll need to set up an rsync on a cron job or something like that. I also need to start backing some data from this machine up over to that one (plus another drive on here) to make sure I have all of my bases covered -- at least in house. Offsite backups are more than I have a plan for right now.

Bike Summer Kickoff

June 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Friday was the kick-off event for Bike Summer 2005, a month-long series of bike events that is in LA this year. The kick-off party (there are some pictures available from that link) was in Santa Monica, so I met up with the group starting off from the Wilshire/Western Red Line station. We started off with around 25 or so cyclists, and then took a pit stop at Venice and La Cienega to let another group meet up with us (which is where this picture of me and Dave got taken. By the time we got to Santa Monica our group probably had sixty or seventy people in it.

Saturday morning I took the short three mile ride up to the Edendale library for the Town Crier Competition and found out my legs were pretty much dead. Yesterday and today are biking off-days for me, so hopefully they'll be back in shape for my commute ride tomorrow.

Tired, and it's only 5pm

June 04, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I swear I've been going for two days straight. Lots to write about, but no time to do it right now. I came home just a little while ago, sat down at the computer, and realized that I could easily fall asleep in my chair. No time for that either, though; I'm out the door again in forty-five minutes or so. When I get back here after dinner I think I'm going straight to sleep.