There's nothing quite like a bike accident to make one's bones tremble in their
sockets. The speed, the lack of padding, and the hardness of the paved earth all
chip in to make for a raw, powerful impact. I've had two bike accidents so far,
and they have definitely contributed to my own (still underdeveloped) sense of
mortality.
Luce and I went to see "Public Enemies" last night. Normally, being such a
relativist, I give experiences in my life a wide berth of judgment. But this
film, directed by Michael Mann and starring Christian Bale and Johnny Depp, this
film was just plain terrible.
This week I've found myself often thinking of the garden at our house in Idaho.
I was wee when we built its three terraces, dragging huge, fallen trees into the
backyard with the Kubota. But some pieces of it still loom large in my memory.
The past few weeks I've been nerding around with a subset of the Twitter
follower graph. It's hard to visualize this graph, because it's really, really
large, about 5MM nodes and 50MM edges, and the tool that I've been using (neato)
can really only handle graphs in the thousands of edges. And it takes forever to
sample randomly from my edge database (MySQL). But I've been poking at it
nonetheless, and I came up with a pretty neat little image this weekend.
I got the chance to see Richard Stallman speak on campus yesterday ! I've never
seen him speak in person, so I was quite pleased that J Moore and the university
gave us the opportunity. Stallman spoke for about two hours in front of a crowd
of probably a couple hundred citizens from the university and the greater Austin
community. Even though he had no supporting materials, I found his talk to be
well-delivered, focused, and informative---and perhaps somewhat less
inflammatory than I'd been imagining.
Wasn't I just sitting here writing about time passing quickly ? Well, as the end
of the semester approaches and I find myself increasingly stressed, time just
zips right along !
This week has been a good mix of hectic, stressful, and exhausting. Today I
turned in a progress report for my computational linguistics project, yesterday
I saw an RPE, and over the weekend I played disc golf and saw Itzhak Perlman
play his violin.
The weather in Austin is a constantly changing and fascinating phenomenon. I
wrote this little commentary one day after spending pleasant mornings walking
down to campus from my house, inspired by the simultaneous lightness and
atmospheric presence that surrounded me.
Time feels like it passes so quickly when life is filled with repetition. For
years---who knows how long, really---I would wake up, go to work, come home, eat
dinner, watch a movie or something, go to sleep. The days bled into each other.
Time flew. Ideas and inspirations went unrealized, and weeks and months passed
in a flash. Until 2008. In 2008 things changed just enough to clue me in to the
possibility of change, and now here I am, for the first time reflecting on the
passage of a year in thought and writing.
In August of 2004 I finished a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this post when I
arrived back in San Francisco, somewhat unable to conceive of what had just
happened. In fact, it's taken me several more years to digest that ride, and
it's fascinating to me to re-read these brief messages and relive what I
experienced every day for eleven weeks that summer.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I stopped writing updates for
a good while as I focused all of my energy on making it through the Rockies. In
all, I pulled off several hundred-mile days riding through Montana, which is
just about the only way to get through a state that big on a bike. Northern
Idaho and Central Washington are a bit more familiar to my mind, so I was
feeling somewhat less astute in observing these places as I rode through them.
But as the last mountains of the trip rose up in front of me, I started feeling
the pull of the goal ... the Pacific !
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this post just as I
was about to leave Great Falls, Montana, and head back into the mountains. I had
really busted my butt to get across eastern Montana, so the incredible span of
Big Sky Country is somewhat blurry in my mind (must have been the curvature of
space-time due to my high riding speed !). It could also be that I just have a
special place in my heart for Montana and all the raw space that it encompasses.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. Pete and I were on a mission
as we left Sioux City, and I didn't write any updates until the day after he
left to rejoin society. As it happened, that day was also a dreary one, but
riding through Nebraska and South Dakota had been unexpectedly beautiful, and I
was feeling empowered by the growing line of ink that I drew on my map each
night. The trip was starting to feel like something of an accomplishment by now,
so I had an increasing motivation to see it through to the Pacific.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this from the Sioux
City Public Library, during a frustrating rest day that involved Pete recovering
his wallet from a Dairy Queen without the help of a ride in a car.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I sent this post out to the
mailing list from somewhere in Iowa, when I was struggling with the effort from
the ride. Iowa, I have to say, turned out to be one of the most difficult states
to bike through ; the endless rolling hills are maddening !
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I sent out this email, I
think, from somewhere in Illinois.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. After leaving Kentucky and
discovering the flat flatness that is Indiana, I arrived in one of the strangest
towns I've been to, New Harmony. New Harmony is strange in its own right, being
the somewhat touristic remnants of one of the many failed utopian experiments in
nineteenth century America. But it's also strange because of what it has become,
sort of a New Age centrality for labyrinths and outdoor chapels rendered in
abstract architecture. And, finally, it's strange because somehow I've been
there, in the middle of Indiana, twice already in my life. Sadly, the place
where I stayed on this trip, definitely one of the highlights of the entire
adventure, has now closed.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this post in the
middle of Kentucky, just after visiting one of my favorites, Mammoth Cave
National Park.
In May of 2004 I embarked on a summer-long bike ride, from the Atlantic coast of
North Carolina to the Pacific coast of Washington. I wrote this mailing list
post when I got to Middlesborough, Kentucky, after a disheartening ride through
several days of intense storms, steep climbs, and crippling loneliness. The ride
would improve later, but my journey through the Appalachians was difficult in
nearly every way.