They sell new and used Lego parts at really reasonable prices. I’m awaiting some hinge parts right now.

I wonder if there’s a poster version of this for the garage.

Awesome: I switched my mom from IE 7 to Firefox 3.6 on her work computer today. When asked why, I told her, “because the Chinese government hacked Google using Internet Explorer, and using Firefox will simply make you a better person. You want to be a good person, don’t you?”

It’s terrible, but whatever it takes to draw users away from IE, right?

I was struck with some inspiration, and got to work. I’m very pleased with the end result. It doesn’t feel rickety or lame, and it’s always cool to have some Legos on the desk.

When I was about fifteen, I hurt my knee somehow. I truly don’t know what I did to it. All I know for sure is I’ve had to be kind of careful with it starting around then.

About a year and a half ago, I began running in earnest. I started at the CalPoly gym, then started running at the local high school, on the bitchin’ all-weather track. All the while, I’d been kind of favoring my knee, treating it delicate, trying not to really injure myself. I’ve even been to an orthopedist, but the MRI he needs done is prohibitively expensive. Ibuprofen has thus been the name of the game.

One night while running the high school’s track, I hurt my hip. Actually, it didn’t hurt till the next morning. It was the right hip, which happened to be the same side as my trick right knee, so I suspect they’re connected. And that was the last time I ran for months.

Instead of running, I’ve been bicycling and walking the golf course after sunset. The golf course is nearby and lovely and dark and nobody’s ever there. I’ve never known how far I go, though, so started looking for iPhone apps that would use GPS to tell me. I ended up with the free version of the $5 Map My Run (iTunes Link).

Their website is a mess. It looks like nothing so much as one of those fake sites that you accidentally click on that’s it’s chock-full of ads and pop-ups and zero good information. It’s really too bad the site is such a mess, because it actually provides a very cool service with very cool features. They’re just not easy to find, and, once found, they’re on an ugly page.

Here’s what the app does, and why it’s cool. After getting a GPS location, you hit start and put your iPhone into your sock $30 armband, and run. While you’re running, the app fetches your GPS location at whatever intervals fetches it in. You can listen to music while it does this, but you need the paid version if you want to control your iPod while the app is running. Though why you’d want to stop to adjust your music is beyond me; just make better playlists. Once you’re done running and you hit the stop button, it offers to save your route. Once saved, you can view the route overlaid on Google Maps tiles. This here is my run today. I strongly suggest choosing the hybrid map option. It makes much more sense.

My major complaint (other than the overall look and feel of the website) is that when you click on my route, you’ll see a red line, but you’ll have no idea which way I went (once on the golf course, I went generally clockwise). Small arrows indicating the direction of the route would be most excellent. But now I know that I ran about 2¼ miles with a ½-mile cooldown. On a golf course empty of golfers because of the rain. Golfers, by the way, are a persnickety group of people. Heaven forbid they share their golf course with actual athletes. I feel that any sport which involves golf carts can’t be a real sport. The rain kept everybody away today, though, which is how I got to use the course for running during the daytime. The rain was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I had to stop now and again to catch my breath navigate a soaked portion of the path. A curse because my shoes got soggy anyhow.

Also, what the hell was I thinking, wearing a long-sleeved cotton shirt on this run? I should know better. In my limited defense, I was already wearing the shirt, and my long-sleeved wicking workout shirts all have turtlenecks, which I felt would have been too warm today. And my goodness, hills make running hard. I’m used to running on the high school’s track. Before that, I used a treadmill. Running in the actual world is really difficult.

I mentioned that it was the rain that kept the golfers off the course. There was a break in the rain, which is why I went out when I did, but I put a plastic ziplock bag in my pocket in case the rain came again. I don’t mind getting soaked myself, but felt I should do whatever it took to keep my iPhone dry.

So I’ve gotten back into running. Using very cool technology, yet making almost every other mistake I could. Good for me!

It’s ugly, but it meant I was able to bring my iPhone on a run with me on a day it was important to have my phone and email close at hand.

The most genuinely bizarre thing I’ve seen on YouTube ever. (Via Scott Ian of Anthrax)

I’ve been hunting around for a road bike for my 8-year-old. At the moment, she’s riding a Giant MX-125. When we were buying a bike for her, she would only consider mountain bike styled models with a suspension fork. It took forever to get her to ride it. Eventually, it took bribing her with a new set of Legos to get her to buckle down and learn to ride a bike.

Since getting rid of my car, she’s been riding the bike every single day, and her confidence and abilities have grown enormously, and I’m crazy proud of her. Thing is, it’s time to upgrade her bike. Not because she’s grown out of the old one yet, but because the Giant is a heavy mountain bike, and the only off-road riding she does at all is in our driveway. The rest of the time, she’s on pavement and sidewalk, and a lighter bike would get us home faster and with less energy. And because I don’t have a car to pay for or put gas, insurance, or oil into, upgrading our 8-year-old’s bike isn’t a silly extravagant unnecessary expense, but truly a way to make the daily commute better for everyone.

So far, we’ve looked at only two bikes. The bike shop to the north had a Redline Conquest 24 in stock, but it was just a bit too large for the girl. Wish they’d had the Conquest 20 in stock; on the website, that bike looks fantastic. Hard to say if she’d go for the red, though. “Red on bikes is a boy color,” she said.

We also went to Wally’s Bicycle Works in San Luis Obispo, a comprehensive road bike shop. They’ve got a variety of amazing road bikes, single-speeds, fixies, plus all the parts you need to do single-speed or fixie conversion, including tons of stems, chain tensioners, handlebars, tape, and even nine different styles of toe clips.

They also had the Fuji Ace 20 on the floor, and let my kid ride it around.

Not that he’ll ever see it, but I want to acknowledge Wally’s employee Phil as one of the best ever bike customer service dudes I’ve ever had the good luck to run across. The stem on the bike was a little short and put Jaylyn in a weird position. Phil switched the stem out right then and there, and told us to go ride it again. Phil also treated my kid like a human being instead of like a stupid kid. Phil makes me want to spend my money at Wally’s.

Phil told me a very interesting thing about kid road bikes. He said that drop bars don’t work well on them because they necessitate the kid either taking their hands off the bars to reach downtube shifters, or not being able to reach brake shifters with tiny kid fingers. It seems that a flat bar with either a twist shift or trigger shifter just works better for little people like my daughter.

Here’s what I’m learning: the reason most of people I know don’t ride bikes is because they don’t love them. People who love bikes ride bikes. They find a way. They get rid of their second car. And why do most people not love their bikes? Because a high quality bike isn’t something parents want to pay for. “Eh, she wont know the difference,” we think. “She’s just a kid.” Most of the actual parents I actually know who’ve got bikes for their kids got K-Mart or Walmart bikes, and those bikes are crap. They’re heavy, the brakes and gears don’t work right, the parents don’t know how maintain them and wont pay the bike shop to do it. Kids ride these two-wheeled buckets of junk not because they love to, but because they’re forced to: if you’re a kid and you want to go somewhere, you’re on your bike. And if the bike is a pile of crap, it’s no wonder video games are played instead. It’s no wonder kids are so stoked to get a driver’s licensee the second they turn sixteen.

We aren’t making the good choice be the easy choice.

There are a few companies that understand the nessessity of a high-quality kid’s bike. Check out the following from Jamis’ website:

We remember what it was like to be small, and that’s why we’ve trimmed as much weight as possible from our kids’ bikes, with aluminum frames on most models, and as many aluminum parts as we can. A lightweight bike for a six-year-old might seem like unnecessary luxury, but it’s the little ones who really benefit most. It’s tough enough for a 185-pound grown-up to pedal a 40-pound bike, but when you’re a 50-pound child saddled with a 35-pound bike? That can’t possibly be fun.

Ok, Jamis makes fantastic road bikes, but they only have BMX and mountain bike style kid’s bikes, and that weirds me. Still, it’s a great ethos, and I’m stoked that Fuji seems to see it this way, too. We hung the Ace 20 on Wally’s scale; it was just over seventeen pounds. And the skinny tires! Amazing. The bike fills me with a sense of childlike wonder, and my daughter loves it.

Because we’re not made of money, yet I want the best ride I can for my Jaylyn, I’m gonna switch the big, wide, knobby tires out for some much narrower; a set of semi-slicks that Wally’s got hanging from the rafters. At $15 each, it’s an upgrade that’ll make a world of difference until the money’s there to change out the whole bike.

This is a lifestyle choice that will directly affect the her body’s health, her mental health, the amount of money she spends, and amount of car exhaust she puts into the air for her entire life. It directly affects me on our rides home and will extend our range when our family’s single car isn’t available to us.

And, selfishly, it gives me a riding partner most days of the week. That the partner is a beautiful chestnut redhead doesn’t hurt one bit.

Old news, but that’s ok. Because Chrome for Mac and Linux now support extensions (also known as plugins), Chrome can now open PDFs directly in the browsing window, rather than downloading them as previous. This was never a make-or-break feature for me, but it is something of a relief to have it taken care of.

In addition, the installation was ridiculously easy, and didn’t even require a restart of the browser.

The more I use Chrome, and the more I use it for, the more I’m convinced the Chrome OS computer is going to be a hit.

Did everybody miss this? From the Google Docs blog:

We’re happy to announce that over the next few weeks we will be rolling out the ability to upload, store and organize any type of file in Google Docs.

More and more, Mobile Me is becoming little more then Find My iPhone.

Garrett Murray’s Hands-On Nexus One Review for Uncrate, as linked by John Gruber; the thing I’m most interested in is the screen shot. It’s got Gmail and YouTube, but it’s browser is simply called Browser. Pretty odd, considering they made a really good browser called Chrome which they liked so much, they’re turning it into an entire computer operating system. They couldn’t give it the icon and make it sync bookmarks and call it Chrome? I’m sure there’s a reason, but danged if I can figure out what it is.

I’ve been using some flavor of Google Chrome for Mac as my primary browser for the last two months or so. For a long time, I was running nightly builds of Chromium instead of Chrome proper because standard Chrome for Mac doesn’t, as of now, allow pinning of tabs, which is huge for me, now that they’ve invented or popularized it. ¹ 

Another huge thing is that I couldn’t afford to buy a laptop for school, but I could afford a fast USB drive. I run my own browsers directly from my USB drive, including Chrome for Mac and Windows. The advantage here is having my own browser, and not having to worry about passwords or even entering credit card information. Once I close down the browser and remove my USB drive, the data is gone. With this setup, the fact that Chrome itself will sync bookmarks across computers, no problem, saves a lot of time and is very convienant.

Apple’s Safari, which has been around since 2003, is a really great browser. It works well on Mac, Windows, and iPhone, and for me, is the browser to beat. It’s so good that Chrome was built with the same rendering engine. That is, under the  hood, where the browser actually interprets Web pages, Safari and Chrome are the same. It’s all the other stuff, interfaces and features and things you see and click on that are different.

With Safari 4, Apple, like Google Chrome, put the tabs at the very top of the window. Most people didn’t like that very much. I like tabs on the top, but thought that Apple’s implementation wasn’t perfect. Even with the tabs back in their, “proper,” place, Safari’s been my daily browser for years.

I keep Firefox around because I feel it’s always good to have an alternate browser for if things act wrong in Safari, or if I need to use a service I’m already signed into, only as a different user, like Netflix. Firefox is pretty good on Windows machines, but feels like a pig on Macs. Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, but actually behaves like a Mac program (albeit a kind of stupid Mac program). Opera is only worthwhile on crappy cell phones that don’t come with a proper mobile browser. If I’m missing any other browsers, it’s because they’re far too stupid to mention.

Another thing that Chrome does better than Safari is its handling of tabs. If I have a normal, unpinned tab open, and I ctrl-click a link to open that link in a new tab, it opens the new tab right next to the tab I’m currently in. If I did the same thing in Safari, Safari would put the new tab out to the very right, at the end of my row of tabs. This is, of course, down to personal preference, but I prefer what Chrome does.

The only place where Safari really does something better than Chrome is syncing bookmarks to my iPhone. Chrome can’t do it, but Safari can. My workaround here is pretty simple: every now and again, export bookmarks out of Chrome, import them into Safari, and tell Safari to sync to Mobile Me. It’s usually not a big deal, but intra-browser bookmark sharing would be pretty cool.

So what Chrome did, as far as I’m concerned, was to improve upon Safari in the places Safari could be improved upon. Chrome’s got pinned tabs, which I really like; the download bar is flat-out superior to Safari’s download window; it syncs bookmarks across computers; it handles tabs better; it looks and feels like a Mac program.

I have to stress: pinned tabs are, for me,  a make-or-break item. Standard Chrome does not support pinned tabs, but the dev version does. Which is why, if you click the title of this little entry, you will be taken to a Web page where you can download the Mac dev version of Chrome. Frankly, even with everything else it’s got, without the pinned tabs, Chrome just wouldn’t be compelling enough to switch from Safari.

However, there is no feature or interface that’s less good than Safari, and more than a few that are better than Safari. And Safari wont pin its tabs yet.

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This is my good friend Blaine’s bike. I’m doing a bit of restoration for him, as this bike will shortly become his second car. My research into this bike, mostly done at Vintage Trek leads me to the conclusion that his bike is a 1984 model, and cost about $680 new. What’s remarkable is that he picked the bike up for $20 at a thrift store seven or eight years ago. Just wait till I’m done with it: it’ll be sexier than when it was new, and for a mere $50 in essential parts.

Despite most of the characters not being voiced by the original actors, and despite John Williams not doing the music, I thoroughly enjoyed the animated Clone Wars movie, and have the first season shipping to me via NetFlix right now.

The movie did three things I liked. First, it had a beginning, middle, and an end. Next, it had definitive main characters, unlike Episode 1. Also unlike Episode 1, it had a reasonably easy to follow story. Last, it was an animated film and didn’t pretend to be live action. The action sequences could have been better, but they weren’t terrible or a distraction or anything.

I applaud Lucas for finally making a prequel sequence that’s not total garbage. The animated film is much more honest and much less stupid than the other movies, and I look forward to watching the first season with my 8-year-old daughter; It’ll be interesting to see if the reception is much different between us.

In a world full of bikes with brand names positively slathered all over every surface, it’s refreshing to see a plain white bike with one tiny logo on the chainstay.

The bike is pretty cool in other ways, too. It’s got an 8-speed hub, so the rider doesn’t have to monkey with derailleurs. It also sports hydraulic disc brakes and a $1200 price tag. (See the Seek 2: mechanical disc brakes, traditional 3×8 drivetrain, $600.)

Trek has a similarly styled bike. It’s called the Soho S. It’s a single-speed, and goes for $550, and is sexy as hell. I liked the Urban Outfitters bike I linked to earlier this week, but with the Trek, the bike is so drop-dead sexy, you just have to chalk the extra $150 up as date money for this thing.

From USA Today:

Valleys of Neptune, containing a dozen previously unreleased studio tracks recorded mostly in 1969, arrives March 9 to kick off Sony/Legacy’s massive reissue campaign.

The reissues stand to be excellent, but new material? I’m dubious. Will it have actual songs with actual structure, or will it be weird guitar-solo noise?

A Flickr set of the best of the Before photos. It’s not my pride and joy, but it makes me proud, and it’s a joy to work on.

Very cool service: build your own single-speed bike for $400. You get the choice of small, medium, or large, a flip-flop hub (so you can choose a bike that coasts or a fixie), and you get to choose the color of the: frame; saddle; chain; front rim; rear rim; front tire, rear tire; crank.

Makes me wish I a) had $400 and b) were in the market for a single-speed bike. I’d love to try out the whole package, from ordering to riding.

Since before we got married, my wife had a car, and I had a car. My car’s been a bit questionable for the last few years. The most recent problem was that the check engine light came on and wouldn’t go off, so I couldn’t get the car smogged, so I couldn’t get a new sticker on my liscence plate. For about seven months, I drove the car with a bike rack strapped to the back with a bike or two on it, covering up the out-of-date registration.

Finally, when the student loan money came in, we took the car to the shop to get diagnosed. It was going to cost upwards of $800 to fix the check engine light. Once fixed, the car would still have a shot suspension ($325 each for fixing the front and back). So, being a pretty capable bicycle mechanic and big fan of my bicycle anyhow, we donated my car to Kars For Kids, and we are now a 3-bike, 1-car family.  ¹ 

It’s a relief! Eff having a car! Insurance, gas, oil changes, coolant, new tires, pollution, trash on the floor… everything about owning a car is stupidly expensive, even if you don’t have payments!

Riding a bike instead, at least in my city, is great. First, there are no monthly fees on my bike, so it’s free to use. Second, the longest round-trip I can make in my city is ten miles, which is a nice ride. There are expenses, like tires, but they’re only $20 each, every year or more.

For me, the experience of riding a bike instead of a car, even out of necessity, can be summed up by the pin my wife got me for Christmas: “spend less, pollute less, weigh less.”

At the moment, my primary bike is my single-speed. It’s a roughly 1994 fully rigid mountain bike that I’ve put road tires on and took all the deraileurs off of. It’s a cool bike, but needs some parts replaced. I’d love a new seatpost, matching brakes and brake-levers, a new headset that isn’t rusty, and a paint-job. The very interesting thing about all of those things is that they cost about as much as a tank of gas, or three tanks of gas, in the case of the paint-job.

But here’s where the financial side becomes truly awesome: Gas, which costs about $35 a week, goes away, and has to be bought over and over, again and again, week after week. A $35 seat-post is forever. An $85 paint job is a one-time expense. Buy brakes once, never stop stopping.  ² 

Another interesting cost issue with bikes is that a quality, entry level road bike is only about $600, after tax, and sometimes much less if you can find a sale.  ³  For most of us, that’s the equivalent of two car payments. Even maintenance and repair on bikes is cheaper (and generally faster) than on cars!  ⁴ 

I want everybody who reads this to give serious consideration to getting rid of their car and riding a bike instead. There are a billion excuses for it not to work. For some people, it simply can’t work because of the bus schedule or how far away you work. But I still think that most people and families could get by and excel, having a single car plus one bike per person.

Please note that I pretty much just talked about money here. I touched only briefly on health and the environment. I’m trying to appeal to big-ass truck driving republicans here. Generally, they understand money, even if they don’t understand pollution, non-renewable resources, or physical health.

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Would somebody explain why breast cancer awareness is better than Pepsi Cola awareness?

It seems to me that if they put some of (all of?) the breast cancer advertising budget toward cancer-fighting scientists, maybe we wouldn’t need any cancer ad campaigns at all a little faster.

And seriously, where breast cancer get the huge advertising budget from in the first place?

(Netflix link) Awesome little documentary; didn’t teach me anything I didn’t know already, but the people interviewed were fantastic. The guy with the weird Apple museum alone makes the film worth watching. Also, it’s available streaming, so you can watch it on your computer.