SF Cyclocross

SF Cyclocross
Originally uploaded by treough.

Cyclocross is a European sport that was popular with road racers during the off season. The bikes look like road bikes but have cantilever brakes and knobby tyres. Part of the race course is off road, and riders sometimes carry their bikes over difficult sections.Todays cyclocross was in GG Park, with the start/finish at the Polo Field.

You give and you give

You send me a Bag of Crap, and you see fit to give Treough Blog a plug here.
I'm giddy!

WebCam

The webcam is here on this bare website (I need to dolly it up a bit. Any web publishing software suggestions? Contribute 3, Dreamweaver, Freeway 4 Express? Help).

Anyway, today I installed a firewire repeater and a second 10m firewire cable for a total of 60m.

I need the extra cable to move the camera to point down the street towards Golden Gate Park. The move is necessary because otherwise this time of year the sun would shine into the lense.

Here's the image I see with EvoCam. You can see the motion detection in yellow. A new image is uploaded to the server when a certain level of motion is measured.

Jaguar XJR15 vs XJ220

I took this photo of the 1990 XJR15 in 2002. Then I saw the racecar again at the Mallya Collection a few weeks ago. It's small and beautiful with a narrow cockpit. It's a shape derived from the needs of racing.



Behind it in the collection is a 1994 XJ220. This is the Jaguar supercar. Customers paid their deposit on the car thinking they were getting a V12 and awd. The final production car had a 540hp turbo V6 and no awd. The styling was a bit off. Too big with too much front overhang and too much oval styling.

300 West 57th Street

When I was in London in 1976, I was delighted to see new buildings on Oxford St. constructed behind the old facades of demolished department stores. The look of Oxford St was being preserved.

WhatISee.org has some great photos of the Hearst building in NY. Map

WebCam Moves to the Front Room

I like peeking at traffic cams in other countries. So today I've moved the webcam to the front window with a view of the street. You'll see my neighbours parking their cars and walking home. There's more traffic around 5pm (PST) when people head home from work, but there's activity outside all day long and you'll get some idea of what the weather is like here today.

I'm using a 10m FireWire cable to reach the living room, and I notice the image is not very crisp. I'll be working to improve the image quality, add motion detection, and have each new image refresh over the old image. Look for improvements in the weeks to come.

Get your mp3's here!

If we all stole music from file sharing networks, the recording companies would go broke, and bands would have to perform live to make money. And that would probably just leave us with the real musicians who are artists.
Hmmmmm...

Anyway, take a look here. Download songs for a few cents each from this (ahem) legal site. And if you don't like giving your credit card information to the Russian Mafia, they take PayPal!

The Rietveld Chair is Assembled

I've been sitting in the chair today and I find it more comfortable than it looks. I'm 5'12" and 165 lbs. The chair fits me like a wooden glove. It has good thigh, back and arm support for me. But the space between the armrests will be too narrow for a lot of people. The next one I make will be 3" wider to accomodate the average American.
Now I need to putty the holes. Sand and prime. Sand and prime. Undercoat and sand. Paint Black, Blue, Red, Yellow.

Woot! Bag of Crap

For those not familiar with Woot! take a look here.
Every evening at 10pm Woot! puts up something new (usually electronic) for sale on there site. The price is always great, and they often sell out within the hour. The product descriptions are very funny to read. Last week they had for sale a "Bag of Crap". They wouldn't say what the bag contained, except that it was worthless junk! Demand for the bag was so high that their server crashed. But, I waited, got my order in, paid $8, and now FedEx just dropped off the bag. This is what I got:

1 Vinyl bag- good design, but it is vinyl.
1 Sony big button TV remote control. It works great on the Trinitron.


2 DVD+RW. Such a shame. Mac uses DVD-RW. Who wants these?
1 TEC hat. Nice. It's Coolmax with two pockets and loops to hold headphones. This is the company that makes cool clothing to carry gadgets http://www.scottevest.com/

Shop Girl

Saturday we went to see "Shop Girl" at the Embarcadero Theatres. We like to see movies there. They have free parking and if the movie is popular they have it showing in two theatres.

Shop Girl stars Steve Martin (who also wrote the screenplay), Claire Danes, and Jason Schwartzman (whom I liked in "I Heart Huckabees"). We enjoyed it, although I had that tense feeling of impending doom for Danes' character Mirabelle. She is naive and inexperienced. An unkind lover could hurt her.