…especially when two minutes of work and a postage stamp brings in an $8,000 credit.

Time to go buy house stuff.

Last night PBS aired a new episode of Blueprint America entitled Road to the Future. I’d caught a promo for the show a few days earlier and thought I’d like to check it out as Portland was one of the cities featured in regards to it’s transportation infrastructure.

So I looked it up online this morning and skipped right ahead to the Portland segment where much to my surprise, I saw myself riding my new 36″ unicycle through downtown. Super fun.

Watch Online (I’m just a minute or so into the segment on Portland)

It’s been about two months since I signed up for Reach the Beach, a 103 mile ride from Portland to the coast, which I’ll be completing on unicycle along with three other bastards. Among commutes to work, random errands and longer recreational rides, I’ve traveled just over 400 miles on my new Nimbus Nightrider Pro 36 ISIS. And all that “training” is really paying off. I’ve increased my comfortable cruising speed to about 13 mph (pretty fast for uni) and given my groin plenty of fair warning of the saddle soreness to come.

As of Monday I’m officially tapering (riding my bike to work) so all that’s left to do is wake up really early on Saturday, jump on my uni and turn the pedals 57,733 times.

Traded in this:

and one of these:

plus some $$,

for this:

Good deal if you ask me.

It’s been a couple years. Time for another tour of Utah.

If you need to find Anna or I next week, this might help a bit. If you’re still looking for us two weeks from now, this will probably help a lot.

(Click image for full size)

Watched Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, this morning. Two minutes into the film, a car chase sequence nearly had me walking out of the theatre (our basement). 

High speed car chases along mountainous cliffs featuring fancy BMW’s and lots of guns are pretty exciting for most of us. I can’t even remember the last time I fired a weapon from a moving vehicle, let alone a sub-machine gun from a sports car. So when a director decides to include such a scene, I can understand why. What I can’t understand is what might compel that director to present that scene in a series of rapid clips, each lasting no longer than two seconds and most spanning only a small fraction of one second. That’s supposed to be reserved for trailers as they have only two minutes to sell the movie.

Our brains are not wired for connecting events across angle changes because our heads don’t move like that; especially not at that pace. If one split-second shot shows Bond driving really fast and the next tenth of a second shows a car crash, I might legitimately assume that Bond had just crashed. But when the next three angles, spanning all of one second, show Bond still driving, a car flipping off a ledge and someone getting shot, I’m left wondering what car crashed two seconds ago. 

That was pretty much the high point of the film. The rest of it sucked in the way that season 7 of 24 is sucking. Office politics and legal difficulties are not action.

Is it just me or is everyone else also seeing web ads on nearly every site, featuring the before and after photos — widely known to be falsified — of people having lost some large number of pounds in an astonishingly small number of weeks?

I guess it is good to know that should I ever need to shed some extra weight, there’s no need for diet or exercise. Rather, I simply have to follow three easy steps.

Arto Inkala, a Finish mathematician, claims to have created the world’s current most difficult Sudoku puzzle (link includes the puzzle if you’d like to try). He even went so far as to name his puzzle ‘Al Escargot’. What a nerd.

This guy spent three months creating it. I spent 30 seconds solving it. 

Well to be fair, I spent about a minute inputting it to this program I wrote to solve it for me. The program solved it in about 30 seconds.

I bought a Voodoo Wazoo cross bike. It’s shiny, fast and as proven on its first off-road ride up at Scappoose yesterday, durable. And it has two fully functioning brakes; which I’ve recently learned is a good thing to have on a bike.

Went out for another ride this morning on Mt. Tabor. There are a lot of people who see me and others mountain unicycling and react as if we’re borderline suicidal. Having gotten back into mountain biking, I have to say that its way scarier and potentially far more dangerous, especially on a cross bike. Super fun though.

In the past few weeks, frequent ‘training’ rides up and, more importantly, down Mt. Tabor lead me to purchase a set of Magura hydraulic rim brakes. In addition to the added functionality, the contrasting colors look pretty sharp. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone is sporting the exact same look.

My wheel can now cease rotation at an instant. Unfortunately, my momentum will still be adhering to our universe’s inherent physics.