I think he broke rap forever

I'm not a big fan of rap, but someone has to step in and save it from Kevin Federline. Maybe he needs a beatdown from Vanilla Ice.

late Monday review of the previous weekend

Friday night: drinks, followed by 7:35 PM showing of Snakes on a Plane. It was badly written, edited, and acted, and enormously entertaining in a theater full of semi-drunk fans hissing and throwing snakes at the screen. It's the communal moviegoing experience of the summer, but I don't think it's going to have legs like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Saturday: a cookout on Staten Island where there was much grilling of beef and drinking of beer. I think I ate and drank for about eight straight hours. The trip out there on the express bus was good, but the return trip via Queens and the F train wasn't so much fun. I did get some good photos, especially the one of my friend's new dog and his post-shave "Johnnycakes" look.

Sunday: riding in Central Park, followed by laziness.

I'm off work this week, and going to visit family in a few days, but before Wednesday I'm hanging out at home and taking care of errands I've been putting off for months, like renewing my passport and moving around some of my investments. And I should probably clean my apartment so I don't come home to a filthy mess or be embarrassed at the nastiness my cat sitter will have to endure in my absence.

Reason #4,327 why I love New York

Every city has a basic odor to it, but only New York smells like New York. When I've been traveling and I come home, I know I'm back in New York when I get out of the cab or enter the subway system. You know it's summer in the city when you can smell the garbage piles on your block AFTER they've been hauled away. In today's Washington Post, David Segal and two experts on scents (a perfume maker and a retired sanitation worker) take a tour of some of New York's most odiferous locations: the Meatpacking District, Central Park, and Chinatown among them. I laughed out loud at some of the descriptions of the noxious smells they encountered. I've been through Chinatown on a humid summer morning, and it's home to some of the foulest stenches I've ever encountered. But I love the fact that no matter how much the government cleans up the city, it's always going to have that dirty, gritty feeling, especially in the summer. It's almost endearing, until I can't stand the stink and have to find some air-conditioning.

another training ride, another long day on the bike

I spent all day Saturday on another training ride for the NYC Century next month.  Today's ride was scheduled for 58 miles, from Williamsburg to the Far Rockaways and back.  I volunteered to be a marshal for this ride, so when I arrived at the bike shop in Williamsburg I got an orange vest, a first aid kit, and the responsibility of helping shepherd 20 riders through Brooklyn and Queens.  There were a few other marshals leading the ride, so I occasionally took point, rode in the middle and pointed out turns, and swept at the back near the end of the ride.  As with the last training ride, we left late and stopped frequently to let the slower riders catch up.  Unlike the last ride, we never really split into slower and faster groups, so we ended up setting a slower overall pace than I would have preferred.  One of the other marshals told us about a pizza place he knew out in the Rockaways, so most of us stopped there before we went to the beach for a rest stop.  A few people went swimming, but mostly we sat on a stone wall, ate, and relaxed for a while. 

We left the Rockaways around 1 PM and for a while the whole group hung together.  But somewhere near the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens we lost about half the group, so we were down to nine riders.  I didn't want to abandon the lost riders; I saw that as a failure in my job as a marshal.  We made a few phone calls and tracked down some of them -- they'd made a wrong turn at the racetrack and ended up by JFK before they turned around.  A few others had already told us they were going to find their own ways back to Manhattan.  We met the "lost ones" about an hour later at Kissena Park.  By now it was 4 PM and we had 15 miles to go to return to the bike shop in Williamsburg.  Somehow we managed to keep the remaining riders together all the way back, with me riding "sweep" at the back to make sure we didn't lose anyone.  We pulled up at the bike shop at 5:40.  I dropped off my vest and rode back to Manhattan via the Williamsburg Bridge.  I turned on Allen St. and rode north onto 1st Avenue, and I got home about 6:15, only 11 hours after I'd left.  So it was a long day in the saddle for not as many miles as I feel like I rode.  However, the weather was excellent, I met some interesting people, and I had some great pizza out in the Rockaways.  And I know that I'm in good enough shape to handle a century next month. 

My stats for the day:

Total miles: 74
Average speed: 11.3 MPH (that's really slow for me)
Total miles so far in 2006: 559

RIP, Cat Detective Fred

Fred, the one-year-old tabby who assisted the Brooklyn DA's office in a sting operation on an unlicensed vet earlier this year, was killed by a car yesterday after he got out of the house. It's a terrible end for a cat who had many years of living large on his police-cat's pension ahead of him. My heart broke a little when I read this news story today.

It's also an argument for why no city cats (or any cats, for that matter) should be allowed outside. My cats stay inside all the time, and they don't seem to mind at all. Starlite in particular has been on the outside, as he was once a stray, and I don't think he's got any interest in going back outside. I used to think I might put him on a leash and try to walk him in Carl Schurz Park near my apartment, but I don't think he'd like that. Just getting the harness on him would be dangerous enough. No, he and Vladi will continue to eat well and enjoy life inside their luxurious Upper East Side digs.

a fire on my street this evening

On my way home from the subway, I heard and saw a bunch of fire trucks and ambulances fly past me on 86th Street. That's a usual occurrence in New York. However, what's not usual is when they stop on 1st Avenue a few blocks south of my building. One of the apartments at 86th and 1st had a major fire, and as you can see from the photos I've just uploaded to Flickr, the fire department had to go in via the roof, the windows, and ground level. There's a pet store/groomer in that building, and the proprietors brought out about half a dozen dogs on leashes and a cat in a crate. The fire department also rescued a cat from the building, and I saw a guy, maybe the owner, tending to it as it was laying on the bumper of one of the fire trucks. (I hope the cat is OK -- it was hard to tell but I could see it was breathing. And of course I hope no one was hurt; it didn't look like there were any human casualties.) Once the fire was out, the firemen began removing burned and damaged items from the apartment via the windows. I didn't know this, but they just drop the damaged stuff onto the sidewalk rather than carry it out. It was actually sad to see kids' toys and blankets being tossed out as trash.

I didn't mean to become a sidewalk gawker, but I wasn't alone so I didn't feel guilty about it. Besides, whenever I see fire trucks in my neighborhood, I usually miss all the excitement and see the firemen cleaning up hoses and packing the trucks. At least this time I got to see them in action.

Water Taxi Beach

I went to Queens on Saturday afternoon to hang out with some friends at Water Taxi Beach. It's an outdoor bar and restaurant that imported several tons of New Jersey sand to Queens to create an artificial sandy beach. It was damn hot, even at 4 PM when I got there, but we had a good time sitting out in the sun (and under the cool water mist) and people-watching. My only complaint would be that the proprietors need to rake the sand more often. Once I saw the amount of cigarette butts in the sand I decided to keep my shoes on. I took some excellent photos of the Manhattan skyline from the beach. Sometimes I'm amazed at what my little camera can do.

By 7:30 PM we'd had enough of the beach and a few of us left in search of dinner. We had all passed Smokey's BBQ on the way to the beach, so we gave it a try. It turned out to be one of the better BBQ joints in the city. I had the Texas brisket sandwich, and it was some of the best melt-in-your-mouth brisket I'd ever had. The chef came out to our table and introduced himself, always a classy touch, and the wait staff was attentive, friendly, and quick. I'm looking forward to making another trip over there.

On an unrelated note, I've started a new project at home: digitally archiving my old print photos. Over the past few months I've dug out several drawers and boxes and found about 20 envelopes full of photos taken from 1995 to 2001, when I bought my first digital camera. Some of the earlier photos are blurry due to the crappy Olympus 35mm camera I had that lacked an auto-focus lens. But the photos from 1999 to 2001 are much better, as I'd moved up to an APS film camera by then. I bought a new scanner/printer on Saturday and I've already scanned in a bunch of photos from a wedding in 2001. If I can scan an envelope a night, I should be done with this project in a few weeks. There's a finite number of photos involved; it's not like I'm amassing any more prints to scan. I'm not expecting any kind of disaster to wipe out my old photos, but since I have all my music on my computer I might as well have all of my photos there as well.

damn book meme tag thing *grumble*

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your Blog/Live Journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

From TCP/IP Blueprints (Burke, Bligh, Lee, et al.) (c) 1997:

If an interface still needs the IP address, it must renegotiate the lease before it expires. The automatic address allocation policy can be implemented by using dynamic allocation, but setting the lease time to be infinite.

Figure 6.1 illustrates the sequence of DHCP messages that are exchanged in order to negotiate the lease. Note that all messages from the client are broadcast because the client doesn't yet have an IP address.

Tag:

Matt
Carol
Josh
David Pogue
Craig

a confession and a revelation

I've been watching Project Runway for the past few weeks. Normally I avoid reality TV shows like bird flu, but I'm watching this one because after over 14 years of reality programming (counting endless installments of The Real World), at long last I know one of the contestants. I went to high school with Angela Keslar, the designer everyone loves to hate this season. She was a year ahead of me: I was in the class of '92 at Westmont Hilltop High School in good old Johnstown, PA, and she was in the class of '91. I don't really remember much about her from school, and I didn't know her well enough to say if she was as bitchy then as the show makes her out to be now. I think she was involved in the theater, but I could be confusing her with someone else in her class. She may have been in the chorus with me, but lots of students were in the chorus. But I did go to school with her. So I've got that little connection to someone who is only marginally famous in her own right.

one year later, and it's another hot ride in the summertime

The NYC Century is about six weeks away, and I'm not quite in prime riding shape. This year, TA is offering training rides for marshals and regular riders, so James and I went on yesterday's 50-mile ride from Williamsburg to Orchard Beach in the Bronx. The ride was supposed to start at 8 AM in Brooklyn and if all went well, we would be done before the hottest part of the day. Of course, I should know better by now, and as you'll see below, it felt like a ride from Hell.

The ride started at a bike shop in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, so I had 7 miles on the odometer when I got to the start. There were about 25 cyclists there, including three or four marshals, and after a quick orientation and marshal introduction, we left around 8:30 AM. It was already hot and humid, but the breeze while we were riding kept us cooled off. We rode north through Brooklyn to the Pulaski Bridge to Queens, then across the Queensboro Bridge to Manhattan. We stopped in Central Park so that some of the slower riders could catch up, and that's where we had our first flat tire. After waiting for about 15 minutes, the marshals directed us to ride to the Central Park boathouse to use the bathroom. We waited there another 10-15 minutes, then they had us ride to the northern entrance to the park. At the top of the park, one of the marshals finally decided that she would take some of us up ahead and that we'd all meet up at Orchard Beach for the return trip. So there were about eight of us when we left the park and took the Macombs Dam Bridge into the Bronx. Up to this point the cue sheet had been accurate, but it got a little harder to follow once we were in the city’s only mainland borough. We kept breaking out the city’s cycling map to figure out where the cue sheet’s writer wanted us to go. We rode around a reservoir and ended up on the Pelham Parkway bike path that led out to City Island. We all missed the turn for Orchard Beach and instead stopped just across the bridge on City Island. At this point it was noon. We were about a half-hour ahead of the rest of the group, as they’d had to stop several times for flats. We decided to stay right there, have lunch, and then ride over to the beach. James wanted to get a lobster roll at one of the local seafood restaurants, but they were all upscale establishments with valet parking and didn’t look like they wanted to seat two sweaty guys in spandex. We got sandwiches from Subway instead. Our group had its own mechanical problems, too: no flats, but one of our riders had a bike seat problem (as in the seat came off the seatpost) and she had to get a car service ride back to the subway. The rest of us went to Orchard Beach and found the rest of our little peloton.

Around 1 PM, with the return trip ahead of us, our smaller breakaway took off for home. We made a few wrong turns and the slower group caught up to us at White Plains Avenue. It was now the hottest part of the day, and every time we stopped at a traffic light, the heat from the roadway was even worse than the heat from the sun. I was dumping hot water from my bottle onto my head and back and drinking hot blue Gatorade from the other bottle. I was feeling all right, but it was just too damn hot to be out there. Our faster group stayed with the rest of the ride for a few miles but eventually we broke away again. We stopped for more water near Yankee Stadium, but since I only had a few miles to go to get back to my apartment, I only took enough ice-cold water to dump on my head. Back in Manhattan, I rode with the group to the Queensboro Bridge and pointed out the bike ramp entrance, said goodbye, and rode home up 1^st Avenue. I got in just after 3 PM, having left around 7:15 AM. I rode 55 miles total, but it felt like 70 with the heat. It wasn’t as bad as last year’s bike ride to nowhere, though it was close. I’m not too sore today, but my face and arms are sunburned. Also, one of my bike pedals has a broken toe clip, so I’ve got to get that fixed today if I want to ride this week.

There are two more TA-sponsored training rides before the Century itself on September 10. I hope that TA can figure out a way to accommodate the faster riders, because it’s not much fun to ride in the August heat, and especially when you have to keep a slower pace for the group. Still, I’m glad they’re staging these rides, as I need all the mileage I can get.

apparently, it WAS a true story

In today's column, Gene Weingarten covers the bad date story I wrote about last week. Gene actually found Darren, who decided that his failed attempts to reach Joanne meant that she was not interested in seeing him again and asked her to pay him back for her half of the meal. Unfortunately, Gene also found that Darren wouldn't comment on the story, and that he has apparently gone into hiding, like Steve Bartman. I suspect that Darren will have to look overseas for a woman to share his life with him. I'd suggest that he try to find someone who speaks little English, so she won't understand the voice-mail messages embedded in the e-mail when she inevitably receives it as a forward from one of her friends.

this might be my first drunk blog post ever

OK, I'm not THAT drunk, but I did go out for a pint or two after work, which turned into a few pints and several shots of unknown alcoholic substances (one had Jagermeister, OJ, and an as-yet-unidentified liquor, but was damn tasty -- we [the group] had two of those). Anyway, on my way to visit a friend and help her with her cats, I remembered that I'd been wanting to try Stolichnaya's new Blueberi Vodka. Kim O'Donnel at The Washington Post reviewed it quite favorably last week, and ever since I'd been reminding myself to pick up a bottle. After my cat medical duties were fulfilled (I held the cats while she applied some sort of skin treatment to them), I went home and put the vodka in the freezer, because we all know ice-cold is the best way to drink the stuff. I broke out the bottle around 11 PM and tried a tiny sample in a shot glass. Oh, wow, that's tasty. I'm currently enjoying a bit of Stoli Blueberi with orange juice, making a sort of blueberry-orange screwdriver. O'Donnel wasn't kidding. This stuff is the best Stoli flavor I've had in years, and I've enjoyed all the varieties they've produced. I may have to pick up a few more bottles just in case they take it off the shelves in the fall.

And now please pardon me while I pass out at the keyboard.

Queens boro power problems

This story hasn't been on the national news, so most of the country doesn't know that some neighborhoods in one of NYC's five boroughs have been suffering without power for the past week. Con Edison has been going manhole by manhole to fix the problems, which have to do with underground feeder cables. Apparently it's not a capacity problem, but a delivery one. The trouble is that even when Con Ed has restored power to some customers, it goes out again when it rains or when the manholes catch on fire. Gawker pointed out this story from a frustrated Queens resident who saw a manhole fire early Sunday morning. All I can say is that if I were living in one of the affected neighborhoods, I'd have turned into a marauding Visigoth by now. As a geek whose many entertainment options rely on electricity, I don't enjoy power outages. And a week without power during a heat wave would be enough to drive me over the edge. Some of my readers know how nasty I can be when I'm aggravated at work. Just imagine me like that all the time, except I'd be wielding my dead Blackberry like a club as I fought my way onto an air-conditioned subway car.

more bad dating experiences for other people

It's merely a coincidence that I've had a few dating-related posts lately. I don't control the news, I just report it.

This story, about a man and a woman who met on Jdate and went out to dinner, is beginning to look like an urban legend. However, there are voice-mail messages that make it sound like it could be true. Either way, it's not a good idea to demand that your date pay you back for her half of the meal several days AFTER the date and then threaten legal action when she refuses to pay. And before I get more comments from online dating fanatics about how their services are better, I don't care. Jdate isn't the problem here. People who think that dating consists of financial transactions instead of social ones are the problem.

Good news for Brian Shackelford

He's not going to be charged with sexual assault after a date with a woman he met on match.com. I appreciate the comments I've received on my earlier post on Shackelford. Somehow it got linked on some other online dating sites, which explains all the unusual traffic on that particular post. I didn't think I was that popular on my own.

Darth Vader: baseball fan, pimp, African king

Screenhead linked to this Youtube video of scenes from Star Wars with James Earl Jones' lines from other movies dubbed in. I don't know why it ends with a Billy Joel song, but some of the scenes are hysterical. I can't believe it took almost 30 years for someone to come up with this idea.

watch out for the private room at DT/UT

DT/UT is my favorite Upper East Side coffeehouse/bar: great coffee, tasty desserts, WiFi by donation, and, when you can find a seat, comfy couches. There's a little semi-private area that's curtained off from the rest of the room. I've never sat in there, mostly because I never bring enough people in with me to feel like I've got the appropriate numbers to stake it out as my territory. And now I might avoid that room completely from now on, after reading this post over at The Daily Dump (love that name, BTW). I don't think I've ever done more than kiss someone in a public place, let alone put on a make-out show complete with pelvic grinding. And at my age (32) I'm way too old to engage in such behavior in public. That's why I live alone. I think once you get to your 30s you should be old enough to know better, and you should be responsible enough that when someone suggests you "get a room" that you have an actual private room in your home to which you can go. Once you get home, if you want to pretend you're 15 again and play "Seven Minutes in Heaven" in your bedroom closet, that's your business. I just don't want to see it.

It's not like I need another computer game in my house

Whenever I read something like this column, the urge to run out and buy a PS2 and a copy of Guitar Hero is almost uncontrollable. I tried four or five times to play "Bark At The Moon" on the intermediate setting at my friend's house back in April, and I nearly sprained my hand. Maybe when the PS3 comes out this fall I'll look for a PS2 on eBay at a bargain price.

Yesterday's big boom on the UES

Since it's not on my normal daily commute, I was nowhere near the building explosion at Madison Ave. and 62nd St. In fact, I didn't even hear about it until I got to work. See, I can't stand much of the "Today" show or in fact any morning TV, so I watch ESPN's "Mike & Mike In The Morning" instead. And they don't cover big stories like this one, especially when they're in Pittsburgh for the MLB All-Star Game. I found out about the explosion when I saw a post on Gawker and another on Gothamist. One of my co-workers actually knows the guy who blew up the building, and he wanted to see it on the way home, so we stopped up there about 7 PM last night. I was able to snap a few pictures before the police told us to move along. Even at that hour there was still a significant amount of activity up there, and the backhoe that you can sort of see in this photo was busy clearing debris out of the street.

In a sign that people in NYC just take things like this in stride, most businesses on Madison Ave. and restaurants on the side streets were open as if nothing at all had happened. I love this city.

another reason to avoid online dating

Brian Shackelford, now a former Cincinnati Reds pitcher (he was sent to the minors yesterday), was arrested for third-degree sexual assault after a date with a woman he met on match.com.

I have to agree with the commenters at Deadspin: since when does a major league baseball player need to use match.com to meet women?