Almost forgot

We had a total communications outage from 2100 Tuesday to 1800 Wednesday here at Casa de El Poeta, because someone ran over the cable junction box a couple of houses down in the alley. No phone, no internet, and no TV for over 20 hours until we could find the bill to get the account number from because Mrs. the Poet threw away the keep for your records part of the bill when she wrote the check for the cable bill. Fortunately we hadn’t put the check in the mail so we opened the envelope to read the other part of the bill because it also had the account number. But still because someone couldn’t keep their car under control I missed the end of the Gander Outdoors truck race race Tuesday and almost missed the rainout of the Cup series race Wednesday night.

But anywho (ever notice I love using that interjection? cause I love that interjection) we managed to get everything straightened out and restored all communication here at Casa de El Poeta. So Y’all keep your heads down when they start shooting and maybe we’ll be there to catch you on the flipside.

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This looks to be an easy(er) day, and the Feed

At the behest of Mrs. the Poet I have been perusing my ISP provider’s website comparing packages and deciding what we are going to be getting in the way of internet and TV after the last of the housemates moves on. The biggest savings will be losing the DVR and the additional set top boxes we needed to have 4 TVs in the house, that comes to $18/mon and dropping the extra shopping channels will save another $10 after spending the extra $10 to get the motorsports access I want. So we are looking at slicing almost $30/mon off our telecommunications bill. That’s $30 more we can spend on things like bus passes or going out to eat once in a while. This has been occupying most of my morning so far because the cable company web site had a massive brain fart and was sending me all over the rainbow looking to log in.

Up first because “why not?” is this tidbit from Bikeyface. UNIFORM Are you wearing your Bicycle Commuter Uniform? Why not (aside from the fact that its only use is in a courtroom, after you get hit)?

Our Daily Ted is pretty good today. Morning Links: Hearing for OC hit-and-run driver, what a bike lane is for, and celeb chefs ride to end child hunger

What would your town look like if it was only defined by it’s bike infrastructure? Mapped: How hard it is to get across U.S. cities using only bike lanes Garland would be one N/S route and a couple of E/W routes, and a whole bunch of detached loops in parks. Garland bike routes on Google Maps Compared to thousands of miles of streets where it isn’t safe to ride.

If your transit agency is this tone deaf on protecting their customer base, maybe you should be standing on some official’s desk. A safety campaign blames pedestrians for getting hit by cars. This response is perfect.

Ans speaking of tone-deaf, here’s another “bike safety” campaign that spends more time on helmets than telling drivers to not hit cyclists, or cyclists how to avoid getting hit by cars. Bike safety The entire second and third paragraphs are pure victim-blaming propaganda.

This could be a major game-changer for SF. Bay Area Could Get 7,000 More Bike-Share Bikes Those added bikes are what we called back in my military days a “force multiplier”. They are not like 7000 bikes owned by regular people, they are constantly on the move sitting in a docking station for a few minutes to go to another destination.

Is car pollution a major problem in your city? Then get rid of cars by making room for bikes. Paris’ bold plan for solving its air pollution woes: Start a biking revolution Obviously you can’t entirely get rid of motor vehicles by this stage, but you can drastically reduce how many are needed by making riding a bike as easy and safe as driving a car. See two paragraphs up for examples of how NOT to do it.

A bit of NYC Lifestyle, that I wish I didn’t need to relate to you. Residents Honor Fallen Cyclists in 10th Annual Memorial Event That reminds me, I should be getting Ride of Silence links here pretty soon.

More e-assist news. Bosch expands to Canada with service partner Live to Play Sports I like this particular assist unit, it’s much more parsimonious of electricity than a hub motor without losing any speed to a hub motor.

And I worry about this myself… Support Group meets here.

And I seem to have run out of links, thank [$DEITY].

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet

Playing another kind of warlock in a new RPG, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I started playing a new character in a new (to me) kind of fantasy RPG based on Palladium’s system. Our DM uses a different kind of character generation for games like this, where we role-play our character’s childhoods to determine our stats. The warlock class is completely different in Palladium in that their warlocks use elemental energy from one of the four aristotelian elements, and the character has to choose which “sphere” of energy he or she is going to use to cast their spells from. If your character chooses a single sphere they get three spells per level, but you can choose 2 spheres and get only 2 spells per level but have a wider variety of spells to choose from. I chose earth and air spheres because I had the best selection of healing spells with those, and because the warlock class was a pretty decent fighter without the use of magic.

I mentioned that we have a T-gurl living at the house, who moved in so that she wouldn’t have to sleep in her car in the church parking lot. Well we had a minor crisis at church tonight. Membership had gone through the name tags and updated them for all the new members we had gotten recently and the old tags were taken from the holders and put in a little file holder made for business cards so that there were enough tags for all the new and current people. The T-gurl was not a “current” member, so the tag holder we had altered to cover her old name with her feminine name was cleaned up and used for someone new and the old tag with the masculine name was put in the file. This caused a minor crisis for the T-gurl because it made her feel like her new identity was being denied in favor of her old masculine identity, which was something that was happening to her at her parent’s place. As you can imagine this was emotionally devastating for her, but we managed to find a way to repair most of the damages before everybody went home, in a way that affirmed her feminine identity as valid. Oh, and one of my old GF who was on disability for being bipolar and dyslexic and more than a bubble off kilter was there too as she had recovered enough to be allowed to drive again (I have never known her when she wasn’t on disability, I seem to attract people like that until they get back on their feet emotionally or at least get stable enough to function at some level in society).

Coming up on the 18th of this month I will finally be doing that ritual to end the spell to reflect the intentions of the guy who tried to kill me back in 2001 and who died back in 2002 after I started the spell to reflect his intentions back on him, but as I didn’t know he had died I kept the spell going through a second publically dedicated tool and that tool (hat) wore out and fell to pieces like the first. Well come the 18th I will burn those hats in a public ritual and dispell that public magic, and dedicate a new hat to creating good, safe bicycle infrastructure for the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell. Just because I can’t ride at the moment doesn’t eliminated the need for infrastructure. I am not the only person riding a bicycle in this city. Expect to see some pictures from that ritual that night or the next day.

When we changed our cable package to include HD we also got a lot more channels that were HD only, which means I have that many more channels to ignore for lack of anything new or interesting to watch, except there are a few that sometimes have decent motorsports programming even this time of year. One of those channels will be covering Formula E racing, a spec series of all-electric racing. Personally for something like this technology I would prefer a spec motor with a maximum weight and volume for the battery and any controller, so that battery and controller technology would be pushed hard to develop as those are the parts of the e-vehicle matrix that are the stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance of EV in the mainstream. For commuting the infrastructure problem has been solved as there is always a place to charge when you’re at home, and there are more and more quick-charge stations popping up across the country for filling up for point-to-point driving that is outside the round-trip from home range of your vehicle. But anyway, this means I will be watching more Formula E, which means watching any Formula E because I did not have access to a channel before.

And I have yammered enough. I need to get to bed.

PSA, Opus