Democracy Now!So far so good.
We made it safe and dry until now.
Today started light rain with wet tent.
It’s let up over breakfast mostly
so we are hoping hoping for a break
Today and crossing our fingers
Today’s highlights are Santa Barbara,
Hopefully dolphin coastal sightings,
And an ice cream stop — it’s
Normally super hot today!
Yesterday’s day 5 “red dress day” was
A blast even though it was a bit of a
Hard finish with hills and headwinds
Thanks all for your support, interest,
And comments!
We finished day three’s ride today. I an feeling very strong still and enjoying the unbelievably pretty inland agricultural “salad bowl” of CA and then the dryer wide open grasslands too. The weather has been quite good – not too hot and not too cool. The colder mornings are offset by the rather unseasonly humidity
Hunter is doing well too. Each day seems to get more social and more fun. We know and keep meeting more wonderful people
What a fantastic event!
Hunter and Tracey finish up their season of being
Training Ride Leaders
and share a little of what they’ve learned
tracey bike accident -- walks away scraped but OK
ouchie!
A steel cruiser bike roared blindly out of a blind drive and ran into me. The impact “taco-ed” (crumpled) my wheel and pitched me over the handle bars and the 2nd bike. I hit the pavement, but managed to not break anything or hit my head. I scraped up my fingers, tore up 4 fingernails, and scraped my elbow and knee. Later we’d learn it was all surface stuff and only my front wheel needed replacing. Amazingly lucky to have had so little damage!
I was prolly doing 10-15 mph; other rider maybe 7-10. All of this happened right in front of Hunter’s horrified eyes!
Amy Goodman, Tracey, the Kahles
Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, is on tour this month across the country. She visited San Francisco for two days this week. My boss, Brewster Kahle from Internet Archive, knew that I am a raving fan of Amy and her amazing show of independent journalism. He was kind enough to invite me along to a long breakfast discussion with Amy.
Brewster and Amy found a common interest on issues of the potential monopoly of Google books, so she scheduled a followup discussion the next day with Brewster on Amy’s show “Democracy Now!” (for likely broadcasting Apr20-25). In person, Amy is an incredibly sweet and inquisitive individual. She is brilliant as well as thoughtful, generous and full of grace. I was thrilled to meet her in person and see how a part of her day goes. I look up to her tremendously as an award-winning pioneer in the field of journalism.
Oh this made me sooo happy! 8-)
ffmpeg v0.5 just came out. it’s the bomb. it’s got tons of fixes and massive amounts of new codecs that it can read. for example, it can now decode my professional filmmaker brother’s “DVC ProHD” highly proprietary (and massive bitrate!) format! it can also decode flac and 24-bit flac. (encoding flac is disappointing though).
at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)
So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:
step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php
sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg
[May update] I think the packages are improving so some of the above steps may not be necessary, depending on your Mac model, xcode version, and such. So I’d suggest just trying “sudo port install ffmpeg” first to see if it works and try some tweaks above if that doesn’t work
This is the debut of my first and only purchased domain/website!
How do I feel? See this
clip from Hunter’s ALC7 Video
WE DID IT! We did our first AIDS charity bikeride and raised over $20,000 as part of the $11.6 million raised by the 2,500 riders plus 500 “roadies” for this weeklong event.
It was 7 days of biking (every day) to go from San Fran to LA in 545 miles (averaging 78 miles/day). We biked *every mile* and had a fantastic time.
I edited the best 100 great photos from the week.
When my local bike store set me up with my new great ride, I agonized over getting the easier-to-shift double (2 ring) front gearset vs. a triple (3 ring) easier-to-climb option. Turns out, you can have your cake and eat it, too!
I used this amazing gear resource
and customized it to help me compare options to see if a different rear cassette could bridge the gap. It could! I get a higher top speed/ring now with a double and my easiest gear is now only about 66% harder than my old bike’s triple. So yes, climbing is a teeny harder, but it’s nothing like how much harder it would have been with the standard cassette!!
Ladies and other bikers — don’t fear the double when you can get a compact double and larger rear cassette!
After about 45 days of training for the big 7-day bikeride in June, I got a new bike to help me get through the long repetitive days in the saddle. The training has been going well, and the last week with my first 100 miles with this new bike were even better! I am a believer that a good carbon bike makes a world of difference. Best of all, my bike is now on only about 1/4 pound heavier than Hunter’s (so watch out, boyfriend!)
You can donate! My ALC page.
Hunter and I got to hear Naomi Wolf speak about her new book, along with
Daniel Ellsberg (pictured left), the leaker of the “Pentagon Papers” (which helped
end the Vietnam War). The event was sponsored by KPFA and featured a moderator and another journalist.
All parties agreed we need to impeach Cheney impeach Cheney ASAP!
Torture is illegal under domestic and international laws, and the Geneva Convention. Warantless wiretapping is illegal. For these two reasons alone (but many more), Cheney should be impeached and tried for high crimes and misdemeanors!
Take action now!
From The End of America – Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot:
Ten Steps to dictatorship — happening now in America:
… on a twelve foot diagonal screen, muhahaahaaaa!
Russ found a government auction site that disposes of lots of surplus
and other equipment.
I picked up two *geenormous* BARCO LCD rear projectors for only $75
plus my own shipping and handling by showing up to a “high alert” and
checkpointed military base just outside of Sacramento.
It tooks us many months to finally get around to mounting it, seeing if it even would work for us, and converging it.
But when we did — wow! The one we use displays HD signals (we bought 3 professional-grade BNC cables and connectors for the receiver-to-projector connection for under $50).
Both our TV box and DVD player line double a progressive signal.
I think we may have the best looking home theater that I’ve seen — not bad
for 10 year old equipment, eh? 
Hunter and I saw this on our morning commute over the bay bridge.
I’ll bet that’s a popular detail to volunteer for in the morning meeting,
tee hee.
Hunter and I are buying a place in Oakland together!
It’s in Montclair district of the Oakland hills.
More pictures can be seen here.
A little hummingbirdie slammed into my picture window as Russ was watching. We went outside to find the poor little guy nearly unconscious and stunned. We tipped him upright and waited a few minutes for him to regain life, yay!
Just watched Oliver Stone’s JFK for the first time last night.
I’d seen the recent Discovery Channel JFK programming that was excellent.
The *really* amazing thing was that when JFK movie came out, most of the media and Prez Ford (who was in the Warren Commission which did the post-assasination cover-up, er, I mean, investigation) denounced it. Now that more is declassified, most everything has shown to be true. Multiple shooters!!
I’m progressive.
and i vote.
and i volunteer.
and i’m helping to take down the Bush Crime Family.
Feb21: Woot!!
Stage 2 of the brand new world-class cycling “Tour of California” went right by my house!
I made a cute little time-lapse film of the riders going by that you can see here.