The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Week 32

I was so ready to pull my 31.37 mile weekdays and 52.28 mile Saturday off this week. It started perfectly, although a little bit slowly. But, a nap on Saturday ran a little long after I was on the dancefloor Friday night until 4am. So much for that.

Riding next week may be slightly difficult on the weekend, since I’m supposed to begin moving to Sunnyvale on Saturday. I guess we’ll see. But, Saturday will mark the one-year anniversary of my ability to ride my bike again (after my crash). Let’s see what that year-to-date figure looks like.

08 Aug:  31.88 mi;  1:40:52 (19.0 mph avg; 31.0 mph max)
09 Aug:  31.69 mi;  1:41:06 (18.8 mph avg; 26.5 mph max)
10 Aug:  31.95 mi;  1:41:43 (18.8 mph avg; 30.5 mph max)
11 Aug:  31.95 mi;  1:41:26 (18.9 mph avg; 29.5 mph max)
12 Aug:  31.96 mi;  1:41:26 (18.9 mph avg; 27.0 mph max)
Total : 159.43 mi;  8:26:41 (18.9 mph avg; 31.0 mph max)

Month so far:  212.13 mi. 2005 so far : 4773.61 mi (95.47% of goal).
2005 goal   : 5000.00 mi.
Remaining   :  226.39 mi (11.32 mi / wk avg)

Aqua Vitae

I’d been looking forward to this party for a long time. Aqua Vitae at the Blue Cube was the party, but it was all about the headliner. Dubtribe Sound System‘s last confirmed show in Northern California was absolutely not a party to be missed. A live set by Hesohi was icing on the cake.

Lakshmana came up from Santa Cruz and was already inside my house when I returned home on my bicycle. While there was some worry from Amanda about the fact we had not purchased tickets in advance, I was pretty confident we could get tickets at the door. So, the three of us headed up to the city and arrived shortly before 11. We walked straight through the door.

Hesohi was already ripping it up when we arrived. His laid-back grooves were infectious and the floor filled up quickly. It had probably been four years since I’d seen Hesohi live, so I particularly enjoyed his sound. If you haven’t heard him, I unreservedly recommend his live set from Imperial Dub (“Live in San Francisco”). I found lots of old friends from the Imperial Dub parties, including Angelica and Angie.

Dubtribe Sound System took the stage at just after one. They played through all of their well-known and some lesser-known songs with a passion that left the entire crowd breathless. The performance was spectacular, aside from a couple of technical glitches, with Sunshine belting out his lyrics with an excited passion that infected everyone on the dancefloor. Moonbeam’s beautiful voice added to the music and brought us to an entirely new level. What a great show—a perfect close to their Farewell tour.

Thank you, Sunshine and Moonbeam, for the years of great music and your friendship.

Fourteen

August 8, 2005. 19:47 PDT.
Sand Hill @ Oak Creek
Palo Alto, California
This marker: 14000 miles

 

Week 31

This week was mostly consumed by a vacation to Idaho, but I didn’t get on the bike on Thursday or Friday for a variety of reasons, including sleep deprivation and general travel fatigue. Also, my Palm refused to power up on Friday, eventually resetting. That lost me 2200 miles of cycling data, including coordinates and timings of odometer marks (even hundreds). Back up your data more than once every three months, kids.

Saturday was the day I remembered that I had taken seven rest days in a row. It was time to ride again. So, I headed up to Portola Valley and Woodside and down through Cupertino for a little over fifty miles.

After guzzling ten bottles of water in only three hours of riding, downing four Clif Shots, and eating an Odwalla bar, I completed my ride with an out-of-shape 18.3 mph average. A week out of the saddle takes quite a bit out of your stomp.

29 Jul:  52.70 mi;  2:52:46 (18.3 mph avg; 40.0 mph max)
Total :  52.70 mi;  2:52:46 (18.3 mph avg; 40.0 mph max)

Month so far:   52.70 mi. 2005 so far : 4614.18 mi (92.28% of goal).
2005 goal   : 5000.00 mi.
Remaining   :  385.82 mi (12.45 mi / wk avg)

Visiting the Family

What a great visit.

On Monday, I went to pick up the kids (mine) from my ex-mother-in-law in Ontario, Oregon, a few miles from Grandma’s house. We ate lunch and returned to Payette to hang out. I brought an extra laptop, my retiring iBook, to give to them, so we worked on cleaning that off a little bit. After a while, my sister brought her three rambunctious daughters over to play. Wow, kids are loud.

On Tuesday, my Grandmother, my kids, and I jumped into my rental car and headed into the deep country of Eastern Oregon to go pick up my brother’s son so that all the cousins could hang out. My nieces showed up again after we’d returned home and, for the first time in a while, all six of the kids were raising hell in Grandma’s house. Six kids between 6 and 12 years old. They were really loud. I am really really old. Heh.

Tuesday night, my sister took her daughters over to their grandparents house and, of course, my daughter, who doesn’t get to see her cousins very often, wanted to go along and spend the night. So, I had the two boys (my son and my nephew) to hang out with. We played with the computers and ate pizza.

I pressed the boys into service on Wednesday, digging through my still-mostly-full storage box full of junk I left in Idaho 6½ years ago, when I moved to California. I started tossing books out while the boys loaded them into boxes. Before too much longer, we had five large boxes of books full. We loaded them into my rental car, headed to Grandma’s for a quick snack, and made a bee-line for the local public library.

I have two books out from Menlo Park’s library. I kept two books from Sunnyvale’s library overdue three months. I felt my soul needed to make amends (not really, but it sounds funny). In the years that I checked out books from Payette’s library, I never returned anything more than a week late. We were all afraid of the head librarian, who frequently was a substitute teacher at our school.

The two boys and I borrowed their furniture dolly and donated about 200 pounds of books on all kinds of subjects. There were weird astrology books (from when I was into that bullshit). There were language manuals in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek (ancient and modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish. There were old science fiction paperbacks, books about mythology, college textbooks, and all kinds of stuff. Hopefully, the library gets some good use out of it.

On Wednesday night, we bade farewell to my brother’s son and my friend, Jay, came over again as I finished up cleaning up my children’s new laptop. Jay and I worked on some music, him on the iBook, me on my PowerBook. Then, he started out a breakbeat track, handed the computer over to my son and said, “Okay, man. When I see you over Christmas, I want to hear what you’ve done with it. We’re collaborators now.”

Right on, Jay.

What a great visit with lots of kids, long conversations with Grandma about everything while the kids were tearing up the world outside, and lots of pizza. I’m looking forward to my Christmas trip.

New Software

While I was in Idaho, I tested out two pieces of new software—one I bought online and one I bought at Fry’s.

The first was Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba, purveyors of audio software that you can’t talk about in airports. I got it to record a radio show, as well as tweak audio, grab samples from other sources, and maybe record some of my own stuff. So, the test case was an FM radio grab.

On KBSU, Boise State University’s public radio station, Arthur Balinger has hosted an ambient music show called “Edges” for so many years that he’d already been doing it for a while when I last lived in the area (in 1991). The show only airs on Tuesday nights and doesn’t broadcast over the internet. So, you kind of have to be there to hear it. I was about 58 miles (as the car drives) from KBSU’s tower (probably only 30something by air). I checked my feed to make sure I had good signal from Grandma’s stereo, jacked a line into the mic jack of my Powerbook, filtered out some static hiss, and set it to go.

Audio Hijack didn’t even hiccup. It snagged the stream perfectly and got the whole show. It was marvelous. The Low Pass Filter cleaned the sound up enough that I am confident now that I’ll be able to digitize and create CDs out of the tapes I recorded from that show almost 2 decades ago.

The other piece of software was PrintMusic from Finale. I bought it to install on my son’s iBook in order to teach him to transpose piano or violin music for his alto saxophone. So, in order to see if it would work on Tiger, I installed it on my PowerBook first. Okay, so I can’t really use the software without an Activation Code. That’s fine. I’ll call the 800 number (having no internet access in Idaho), register it, get an activation code, delete it from my machine, and install it on the iBook.

Oh, no, I won’t. I got the number, authorized it on the PowerBook, but when I attempted to install it on the iBook, the secondary code (whatever it was called) CHANGED. My new Authorization Code is no longer valid on the iBook. After attempting to edit some obscure files that contained the Sales Code (or whatever it was called), I failed to get it to authorize the iBook. Okay, Finale, here’s the thing. This is $50 software you are, ahem, trying to sell to educators, parents, and students. Not Silicon Valley professionals like me. Students. Kids. What the hell were you thinking?

Now, I have to come up with a solution that, hopefully, doesn’t involve me purchasing another copy of Finale. Because it wouldn’t work. Why? Because the Authorization Code is a combination of the serial number and the secondary code. Which is installed on the iBook already. Purchasing another copy would likely prove fruitless because deleting the old one wouldn’t remove the Preference in the library (which I failed to find) that has the number in it.

You make me want to find a crack for your wonderful software with the piece of shit registration system. I did my due diligence. I purchased the software at a store, like a good citizen. If you want your potential customers to download your softare illicitly, make sure you keep this system in place. It works well for families that have multiple computers or for kids who get new computers and have to call in to reregister the software each time they do. Then, they just jump on Limewire or BitTorrent and download your shit for free. I could understand if this was the procedure for Logic or ProTools at $1000 a pop. This is $50 software.

So, big ups to the folks at Rogue Amoeba for Audio Hijack Pro. You guys rock. And the big middle finger to MakeMusic. You guys suck ass.

Arriving in Idaho

After quickly skipping through airport security this afternoon, the flight to Boise was uneventful, except for the aborted landing attempt. I sat next to a precocious eight-year-old girl named Alyson, who was travelling by herself. What a smart kid.

I remembered the temperature being about 79° F when I walked on the tarmac at San José. It felt 30 degrees warmer on the tarmac at Boise. I found my luggage and headed for the rental car venue. Then, I bent over and took it right in the ass.

The price quoted online for my rental car was $11/day. So, that’s about $55 for five days, right? No. The first invoice was for $193. That’s the $65 ($55 plus an airport fee) plus an extra $128 in insurance and all kinds of other bullshit. You have to be kidding me. I told them to take the insurance off. That left that big chunk of “you’re not responsible for any damage to you car” insurance. Even then, the bill was almost $150. Holy shit. I better crash this damn rental car.

The car, a new Mitsubishi Lancer, was anemic, but got decent gas mileage. I’m glad I didn’t allow the woman behind the counter at Dollar to talk me into “upgrading” to the Chrysler 300. The Mitsubishi gets a little better gas mileage than my old beat up Cavalier. I jumped in the car, called Jay, mapped out the route to his house with the software on my PowerBook and went over to hang out.

Jay’s studio is much bigger than the last time I saw it, which was about five years ago (I think). He’s got a few more electronic toys, a decent set of speakers, and we could jack my PowerBook in and listen to how ridiculously horrible my music sounds on his speakers. He gave me lots of great tips about doing various things in Reason that I’d never thought of and hooked me up with some video tutorials. His music has steadily gotten more and more impressive.

After a while, we ate some of the most pathetic pizza slices ever constructed at a new place near the Walmart strip mall in Ontario, Oregon, inappropriately named “Primo’s”. Finally, after a little more messing around with music, it was time for me to head on over to Grandma’s house, where I’m staying until Thursday.

Grandma was, amazingly, still awake at 10:30 when I got to her house. We talked for a little while before it was time to crash. I think I finally fell asleep, after messing around with the new tutorials I got from Jay, at about midnight. What a long day.

Closing Out July

A few skipped riding days, including a couple of crucial Saturday rides, trimmed the mileage this month down to a meager 700 miles. Worries about my living situation, finding new housing on Craigslist, and trying to get ready for a vacation to Idaho were all contributing factors to the missed days, but probably more of them were grumbly don’t-feel-like-it days.

All in all, though, I’m satisfied with my performance. I’d have liked to break my distance record, or at least take a longer ride than 64 miles, but that will have to wait until August. With an average speed of 19.1, this month was my fastest month yet. It’s also the 11th month in a row since last year’s crash over 500 miles.

July: 706.08 mi in 36:55:24 (19.1 mph avg; 45.0 mph max)

Week 30

This week was another four-day riding week. I had planned on six days and just over 250 miles. On Thursday, I spent too much time on the phone after work, arranging my upcoming trip to Idaho, to get my 38 miles by sundown. Today, I woke up late, tried to figure out how to meet up with a possible new roommate, and realized that I have a bunch of errands to run before I fly off to Boise tomorrow. So, Saturday was scrubbed. I guess I should relax on the chart a little bit until I’ve finished moving. Next week will be very short, since I’ll be in Idaho until Thursday, so I’m gonna slide back down to 32 mile days and ramp back up from there.

25 Jul:  38.09 mi;  2:00:42 (18.9 mph avg; 30.5 mph max)
26 Jul:  38.15 mi;  2:02:21 (18.7 mph avg; 25.5 mph max)
28 Jul:  38.02 mi;  1:56:44 (19.5 mph avg; 32.0 mph max)
29 Jul:  38.22 mi;  2:00:42 (19.0 mph avg; 30.5 mph max)
Total : 152.48 mi;  8:00:29 (19.0 mph avg; 32.0 mph max)

Month so far:  706.08 mi. 2005 so far : 4561.48 mi (91.23% of goal).
2005 goal   : 5000.00 mi.
Remaining   :  438.52 mi (19.93 mi / wk avg)

Grumble Day

Yesterday, my coworker who likes to ride sometimes, thought it would behoove him to ride his bicycle the entire way to work—from his house about 10 miles north of mine. He invited me to meet him along the route and ride it with him. He doesn’t ride nearly as much as I do, so I figured I could catch him along the way.

After lubing my chain yesterday and doing my laundry (which, thanks to the neighbor lady took until 11 pm), I got about 5.5 hours of sleep. I scrambled around this morning and realized that I’d forgotten to extract a directory of files from a Windows-incompatible DVD burn of one of the sites I manage at work. It was 7, time for me to click into my pedals and go catch my coworker, but I figured it would be better not to get yelled at by my manager for blowing it off for the third day in a row.

After 1.5 hours of extracting, finding, tarballing, and attempting to email to myself from Mac OS X Mail, GMail, and Yahoo! Mail and failing consistently with all three, I finally uploaded it to a web server, grumbling, and got ready to ride to work.

Well, I better use the bathroom before I go. I went into the upstairs bathroom to take a leak and I dropped my headband into the toilet in the process of flushing it. No, I didn’t lose the headband. I just dropped it into a whole bunch of morning piss. After washing it in the sink by hand, I realized I was not going to be able to wring it out enough to ride to work this morning.

And, of course, everyone driving in front of me wanted to do so at 18 miles an hour. Or, they were green light sitters (you know, people who perform a standing ten count after a red light turns green before they actually touch the gas pedal).

What a way to start the day.