Speaking of Letterman, this week is ‘Magician Week’, which prompted me to renew my search for a comedy routine I remember from the late 80’s or early 90’s which I’ve been looking for (obviously not hard enough) for years. 5 minutes of Googling earlier tonight and I’d found it:
Greg Travis as ‘David Sleaze, Punk Magician’.
I hang out in the news group Alt.Fan.Letterman occasionally a lot. Over the years I think some of ‘the regulars’ over there have begun to begrudgingly accept me. Imagine my delight when I received a package (I’m considering it a birthday gift) in the mail from Kath, my favorite Australian.
This may or may not be the last of my posts about Sheldon Brown, the man was a huge influence on me.
This was written by Peter Cole and posted to the Usenet group rec.bicycles.tech (yes, I know I’m a geek, and yes I got his Peter’s permission first).
I attended Sheldon Brown’s memorial celebration last Sunday. It was held in the afternoon in the church across the street from Harris Cyclery. There was a memorial ride before the event, but I was unable to participate.
There seemed to be 200+ people in attendance, the large church was almost full. While there were many from the local cycling world, I’d say we were slightly outnumbered by the community theater and singing folks. The event lasted about an hour and a half, mostly consisting of remembrances delivered by family and friends, some singing, both by performers and the assembly, and some Morris dancing. The Reverend Deborah Pope-Lance gave the welcome and closing as well as some shared remembrances.
Sheldon’s wife Harriet gave the first remembrance. She spoke quietly and warmly about how she met Sheldon at a club ride, where they first noticed each other’s unusual bikes. She recalled their many family cycling trips on Sheldon’s homemade tandems, including one favorite memory when they were interrupted in their tour of Cape Cod by an approaching hurricane and they worked together as a family, helping to get the youth hostel ready for it.
Sheldon’s daughter Tova spoke next. She struggled with her composure, holding back the tears as she described the warmth and affection she had enjoyed from her dad. She smiled as she described parenting Sheldon style, where the children’s rooms had both ABC’s and periodic tables on the walls. Her memories of bedtime stories were not Mother Goose, but things like Galileo vs. the church and how an airplane wing works.
Sheldon’s older brother and sister told us some growing up stories. Arlene laid claim to being Sheldon’s original cycling instructor, remembering how she would sit 3-year old Sheldon on the cross bar of older brother Richard’s bike, letting him steer sometimes while they rode off for day-long adventures hiking near their home by the Tappen Zee bridge in upstate NY. Richard recalled Sheldon’s enthusiastic conversion to communism at age 13, which he claimed to have cooled off by introducing him to Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.
Long time friend and local cycling author/advocate John Allen described his collaborations with Sheldon, including some videos they were producing together, regretting that they had only completed the first of a planned series. He joked about his frustration, during his 30-year friendship, over the way Sheldon could always go him one better every time he thought he had a cycling brainstorm. He gave a graphic demonstration of this by performing a tire folding method he thought he had perfected, then showed Sheldon’s inevitable improvement on it.
The Reverend Pope-Lance had us all laughing when she read a list of some of Sheldon’s favorite quotes — many of which are familiar to readers here. Any misgivings I might have had about the irony of Sheldon’s memorial being held in a church were swept away when she handled the inevitable anti-theistic ones with a graceful chuckle. She then read several tributes posted from cyclists around the world who had been touched by Sheldon. From the hundreds received, we heard voices from every continent, all appreciating his generosity mentoring his Internet friends.
At the end of the gathering, members of the MIT Chantey Chorus sang the “Mary Ellen Carter”, with the congregation joining for the chorus:
Rise again, rise again,
Though your heart it be broken or life about to end.
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.Many of us choked back tears watching Harriet, Tova and George holding each other for comfort as they led the singing of the deeply moving piece.
After the memorial, we made our way to the parish hall. There, on a small stage, several of Sheldon’s favorite bikes were on display. A few laptops had been set up on tables running slides shows of photos familiar from his web site. I mingled there awhile, in the eclectic throng, bikers in jerseys, tights and clompy shoes, Morris dancers in red shirts and (real) bell-bottomed pants; friends, family, bikers, singers, dancers and all, a true slice of Sheldon’s remarkable life.
When I left, I went to retrieve my bike from the 30 or so behind the church. Mine was the only MTB, I rode it over in part because it was the only “whole” bike Sheldon ever sold me. Of course by now it’s a mongrel mix of odd parts, and that, more than the bike, is a tribute to his impact on me. There were many similar mongrels out back, including an obviously home-made recumbent with a sign on the back: “If you don’t like an 80 year old on a bike, think about me driving a car”. That said, there were also a number of elegant vintage bikes, and fixers of course, and more Brooks saddles than I have ever seen in one place.
I pedaled home slowly in the bright cold afternoon, past Harris Cyclery, past Sheldon’s street, past the town field where the fireworks are held, past the old hardware store we both loved, to my home, to my garage full of bikes, thinking about him all the way. Life’s short, and you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Peter “I miss you, big guy” Cole
If Sheldon Brown had been only an excellent bicycle mechanic, the esteem in which he was held, while great, could not have extended much beyond his native Massachusetts. But because of the selfless use to which he put the internet, regret at his death has been felt across the world.
His knowledge of bicycles, from a lifetime of riding them, taking them apart, fixing and modifying them, was encyclopaedic. For more than 20 years he earned a living from that knowledge with the spanners, screwdrivers and tyre levers of a succession of bicycle workshops around Boston, and he could probably have gone on doing so happily until retirement. Then, at 49, he found at his disposal an invention more powerful than anything in a mechanic’s toolbox. He quickly saw that the internet could make his expertise available not just to the customers of one bike shop, but to anyone who wanted it, anywhere. It turned out that a lot of people did. The website he built, sheldonbrown.com, has attracted millions.
Sheldon Christopher Brown was born in Boston in 1944. After his father’s death in an air crash when Brown was 9, the family settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it was in the Marblehead town dump that his career in the bicycle business originated. During high school he built bikes out of parts scavenged from the dump and sold them. Like many in the 1960s he heeded Timothy Leary’s call to turn on, tune in and drop out, not staying long at college or in a series of jobs selling shoes and hi-fi, and driving taxis.
By 1972 bike repair was his career, and he set up the Boston Bicycle Repair Collective, a fellow founder member being Stan Kaplan, inventor of the Kryptonite bike lock. After, as he described it, being “purged by Maoists” from the collective, for a time Brown turned his dexterity to camera repair. But he went back to working on bicycles, and by the early 1980s, in a move towards his ultimate future, he was not just repairing bikes but writing about them.
His audience in specialist cyclists’ magazines, however, was necessarily limited. Then came the internet.
In 1990 Brown had joined Harris Cyclery, a shop a few minutes’ bike ride from his home in Newtonville, a Boston suburb, as a mechanic. As the internet developed, he became a contributor to cycling newsgroups, and in 1995 Aaron Harris, his employer, let him set up a website in association with the shop. Initially it was intended to sell specialist parts, but soon Brown took it far beyond that. “Aaron let me spread my wings,” Brown said in 2001.
The website certainly flew. Last year sheldonbrown.com had more than half a million visitors a month. They came for everything to do with bikes, from advice for timid beginners on how to mount a bike to instructions for the daring on how to build their own tandem. The site has a glossary of almost 1,000 terms from “A and B chainrings” to “Zzipper”.
If you couldn’t find what you needed on the website, you e-mailed and asked, and “captbike” usually replied the same day. Answering 200 e-mails most days, he was courteous and informative, but hadn’t time to be wordy. One correspondent, told that replacing his 20-tooth back gear with a 22-tooth would make climbing hills easier, asked how much. Back shot a classic captbike reply: “10%.”
Brown did not charge for access to the site or for his e-mail advice, but the site was a vindication of the internet freeware credo that putting up free content will bring its own reward. It brings in about half Harris’s business.
But sheldonbrown.com was, and is, about more than commerce. Nor is it just a compendium of technical information. It includes a blog that started before the term existed, recording the personality, the philosophy, the likes and dislikes, and above all the family life, of the man who built it. In 1979 Brown married Harriet Fell, who teaches at Northeastern University, Boston. A daughter was born in 1981, and a son in 1983. The blog records his devotion to them, his pride in their accomplishments, and such family adventures as touring in France on two tandems when the children were 6 and 8.
Given his lifelong delight in cycling, it was particularly cruel that in the past two years multiple sclerosis gradually robbed him of the ability to ride a two-wheeler. His response was characteristic — he got a recumbent tricycle and kept pedalling, still riding it to work until shortly before he died. And he wryly put a page titled “The Bright Side of MS” (easy parking with a disabled sticker, jumping airport security queues) on his website.
The response to his death has been a fitting combination of bicycles and the internet. From Melbourne to Missouri, cyclists have held or are planning memorial rides — co-ordinated, naturally, on the web. The London ride is on April 6.
Sheldon Brown, cyclist, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of a heart attack on February 3, 2008, aged 63
Apparently four transoceanic communications network cables have been mysteriously severed. The result of this is that internet traffic in the Middle East has been severely hampered and, according to some reports, completely halted to and from Iran. Even more interesting, what little traffic still exists is being re-routed through the US and UK, but I’m sure there’s nothing fishy going on, it’s probably just a massive series of completely unrelated coincidences.
Here’s more from Monday’s episode of Rocketboom (the pertinent part begins at about 2:15).
Also, on a completely unrelated note, here’s Wikipedia’s page on the USS Jimmy Carter, which says, in part:
Carter is roughly 100 feet (30 m) longer than the other two ships of her class. This is due to the insertion of a section known as the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP), which allows launch and recovery of ROVs and Navy SEAL forces. The plug features a fairing over a wasp-waist shaped passageway allowing crew to pass between the fore and aft sections of the hull while providing a space to store ROVs and special equipment that may need to launch and recover from the submarine. The MMP may also be used as an underwater splicing chamber for tapping of undersea fiber optic cables. This role was formerly filled by the decommissioned USS Parche (SSN-683).
Jimmy Carter, Iran… I’m sure it’s all just a massive coincidence.
…is that you then become, by default, tech-support. My hair stands on end when she calls on the phone and says, “I’m having trouble with my computer”.
Recently she made that very call. Her computer was making a noise (which she couldn’t describe) and, more troublingly the motherboard’s protection software had popped up a warning “something about heat” just before it shut down. Let me just pause here to say, my mother is an amazing, extraordinarily intelligent woman. She doesn’t, however, know nor does she have any interest in knowing what makes her computer work.
Analyzing the facts at hand, I determined that the most likely culprit was the fan on the CPU heatsink. I pulled up the emailed invoice, checked the Intel website, and determine that it is still under warranty (two years old, 3 year warranty!)
I call Intel, hopeful that with the info from the invoice I can get a new heatsink on its way. No such luck, they need specific info from the fan and from the processor itself. Ok, this isn’t a huge problem, and I at least have jumped the first few hurdles with Intel and have a case number. When I handed the computer over to mom, I had nested all of the component’s boxes into the larger boxes and had her save them, so it shouldn’t take long to locate the CPU box and get the serial number and such… in theory. In reality, a few phone calls later, it’s obvious Mom isn’t going to find the box.
In a scene reminiscent of a 70’s disaster film, wherein the control tower talks the sweating passenger through the landing of a jumbo-jet, I (looking at photos and diagrams online) manage to talk my mother through removing the heatsink from her CPU. Jubilant with her success, she gets off the phone with me to call Intel.
Far too soon, my phone rings, they’re closed for the night.
The next evening, she calls Intel, everything goes swimmingly, and Diego (whom she was quite impressed with) assured her that the heatsink should be there in 2 - 5 days. She gives my email address to send the confirmation and tracking info to, as her computer is (obviously) down.
The tracking info comes shortly after midnight and it says that it was shipped next-day air. The next day I check the tracking status and discover that it was delivered at 9:30 AM! Just over 13 hours after she’d gotten off the phone with them!
So, I call Mom that evening and tell her to look on her porch for the package, then we repeat the control-tower, nervous non-pilot, reinstallation process.
I’d give anything for a picture of my mother’s face when she got it back together and it worked without a hitch. Just the joy in her voice was reward enough. She was (understandably) proud of herself, and I was proud of her. Graciously, she complimented me for doing such a good job talking her through it.
My lovely, amazing mother and Intel’s customer service both earn a resounding:
As I’ve mentioned here before, I am colorblind, and as I said then, it’s not really something I like to bring up.
I’m mentioning it now because I’ve found an awesome shareware utility that is absolutely indispensable. I don’t know how Ive gotten along without it! Years ago I found eyedropper, a handy utility that lives in your system tray, ready to tell you the color value of any pixel on your screen in RGB or Hex. Handy for matching colors and such, but less so for actually identifying colors.
Now I’ve found What Color, a tiny little utility that tells you the color not only in RGB and Hex, but also in plain english. For me “166,204,227″ is much less helpful than “LightBlue”. Optionally, it can also display the color’s position on a color-wheel; also quite helpful.
‘What Color’ will be a permanent resident of my system tray. If you, or someone you know, has some level of color blindness it’s worth a look.
‘What Color’ earns a resounding:
Here’s the really crazy part of the whole sordid mess: At the same instant that I discovered that the importation process into WordPress was not going to work, and I began to curse Google/Blogger for raining on my parade; I smelled smoke.
Acrid, burning plastic-type smoke. As I sniffed the air, searching for the source, I saw smoke wafting out of the top of my file server, which promptly shut down. Pulling the cover off and peering inside, I wasn’t immediately able to find the source of the smoke, but there were traces of the thread-like soot that is characteristic of burning plastic scattered here and there inside the case. I disconnected the power, grabbed a flashlight, and searched for the culprit. Several minutes later, I found it. At the edge of the motherboard, hidden from view between a PCI card the edge of the case, two plastic jumpers had melted down and, evidently, caught fire.
Here’s the really, really crazy part: After I pulled the charred remnants of the jumpers off, I warily powered the computer back up… and it booted right up and ran (and continues to run) as though nothing had happened! Crazy! (And not exactly confidence-inspiring.)
Naturally, even though there’s absolutely no evidence of any involvement, I blame Blogger/Google.
Bastards!
So, earlier I punched up my DSL modem’s IP and checked out the connection information just to see what my theoretical connection speed was and I saw:
Cool, they at least have the line ready. A quick visit to the Speakeasy Speed Test confirmed the good news:
Wow, they threw that switch in a hurry! “3 business days” nothing! How about today, sometime before noon?
So, I was perusing the SBC/Yahoo/AT&T website the other day, for no particular reason at all. There I saw that they were offering their “Elite Package” DSL (3.0 to 6.0 Mbps Down, 384 to 608 Kbps Up) for $27.99 a month (with a 1 year commitment).
Dang! I’m paying $36.99 for their “Pro Package” (1.5 to 3.0 Mbps Down, 384 to 512 Kbps Up). I generally connect at just under 3Mbps now and overall I’m pleased with their service, but more speed is always good. More speed for less money is even better. To illustrate my penchant for speed; recently I’d even been contemplating getting Cable internet to augment the DSL and combining both lines through a Linux box set up as a load balancer, additional cost be damned!
Anyway, as per usual, I digress; I went ahead and signed up to upgrade to the “Elite Package”, so within 3 business days I should be seeing a big jump in my internet speed, and next month my bill will be ~$10 less!
Life is good.
So, I was clearing out the “bulk” mail folder on my ISP and one particular sender caught my eye:
Does that actually fool anyone? “Oh sure, my old pal Pocketful R. Vomits; from college!”
At least they got a smile out of me as I summarily deleted the message, unopened and unread.
So, the other day I was blogging about my satisfaction with WD’s customer service, right? Well, as Paul Harvey would say, here’s the rest of the story.
They shipped the replacement via UPS second day air, it arrived on time and I happily prepared to install the new drive. One little problem, though. They had shipped me the wrong drive! This was immediately apparent, the replacement drive was a WD1600JB (EIDE interface); the drive it was replacing was a WD1600JS (SATA-II interface). After a bit of handwringing and grumbling, I called their customer service folks to inform them of the error. The girl I spoke with had a peculiar cadence and lilt to her voice that I found very difficult to understand (though nothing like the poor stuttering engineer from ATI I got tech support from a few years ago!), so I hung up not exactly sure what she had said, other than that they would email me a return shipping label and another drive would be on its way. A couple of days passed, no packages arrived, and the RMA information page on their website was still only showing the original shipment, so I called again. Amazingly, this time I got the same technician I had spoken with the first time, Grant. He seemed as mystified as I was that the drive hadn’t been shipped yet, made sure I had gotten the return shipping label, and assured me that the correct drive would be on its way immediately. It was, it arrived promptly 2 business days after finally being shipped, and so far it’s working just fine.
So, Western Digital has been downgraded from an enthusiastic “Crazy Greg’s Seal of Approval” to a qualified “CGSOA”.
And now you know the rest of the story.