A dorky exchange during a bicycle trip

Me:	[Sends a link to an online store filled with LED novelty items.] Wow, look at all this crap!
Fellow Dork:	That place is a Mecca of uselessness!
Me:	... And yet, it's oddly compelling.
Fellow Dork:	I'm surprised they don't have LED rubber dog "doo".
Me:	PATENT THAT, QUICK. Hey, remember those little paper flags on toothpicks, with George Bush printed on them, that people would stick into dog poops in the park?
Fellow Dork:	No! That's hilarious!
Me:	I gotta get me a few of those, and scatter them across the country.
Fellow Dork:	That reminds me of those anti-materialism stickers that just say "Do you NEED this?"
Me:	Ah yes! That takes me back to 1980's politics. Remember those slap-on stickers that just said "THIS OPPRESSES WOMEN" that you'd find all around Santa Cruz? What a weird era that was.
Fellow Dork:	I need a Mondale-Carter sticker for my car. Oh hey, did I tell you I got my little bimmer up and running?
Me:	Awesome! Is it a Rolls-K'nardly?
Fellow Dork:	It's like a little go kart. I love it. I can't wait to take the piece of crap carb off, and put on the electronic fuel injection. I have an almost-complete fuel injection system sitting in the trunk, waiting for the most important part: The computer. Yes. I'm going to build my own engine management computer for my pre-computer-era car!!
Me:	You are a mad scientist with that thing. All "new parts in the trunk" and shit. Hey, does it take lightning bolts to start? Do you park it on a slab, and strap it in each night? Do you have to fling virgins under the grille to keep it from killing you?
Fellow Dork:	Marty! I need 1.21 gigawatts!
Me:	Oh I beg your pardon sir, we only have JIGGO WATTS here.
Fellow Dork:	Hah! No, she's a nice car. This is not a big mean car like the LeChardoba was. Even the cat likes to sit on the seat and hang out.
Me:	I'm impressed that cat is so inquisitive. She's been through a lot.
Fellow Dork:	She's my buddy, that's for sure.
Me:	Oh, the LeChardoba! Even the name sounds... Too big. Like the biggest hunk of barf that lodges in your throat when you're sick.
Fellow Dork:	Thanks for that image. So you remember that car! It would have gotten better gas mileage if I just stuck an icepick in the gas tank and pushed it.
Me:	I remember a series of cars, sometime after that gorgeous golden tank you drove us around in in Davis... I'm trying to picture it, and all I'm coming up with is a kind of boxy town car, like a Lincoln made of stucco.
Fellow Dork:	In Davis I had the Polara. I miss that car so much. Such a boat, but I loved it.
Me:	If I just go by the name Le Chardoba, I think of a bondo-scarred caddilac, with two-tone paint and a few leafsprings removed. It would go "BOOM-CHUCKA-BOOM" from the trunk, except you couldn't quite hear it over the exhaust.
Fellow Dork:	Here's Ricardo Montalban next to one: [Truly god-awful sepia-toned photo.]
Me:	Oh my god! It's all fender! It looks like a freakin french horn on wheels!
Fellow Dork:	Mine was silver, with a brown fender.
Me:	Wow. "CHRY ... SLER" on the front and everything. Seating capacity: 4. Engine capacity: 4.
Fellow Dork:	Fuel capacity: 30 gallons. Range: 30 miles.
Me:	Goes a little farther if you turn off the hibachi feature.
Fellow Dork:	And the tiki torches! Of course, the pleather top on mine was all cracked and peeled and half gone.
Me:	Hrmmm. Like that firebird that was all green on top?
Fellow Dork:	Yeah. That was a pretty shitty firebird, but it was unnecessarily fast.
Me:	"Unnecessarily fast" is absolutely the correct term. That car was like the Curse of The Pharaoh. All you wanted to do was preserve it, and it was like, "I will kill you and everyone you know."
Fellow Dork:	The fastest I have ever travelled in a wheeled vehicle was in that crappy firebird. Somewhere well over 140, because that's as high as the speedometer went.
Me:	Duh-hayum. Wait, I don't think I can give that proper emphasis without Samuel L Jackson in the room. Let me try again. Dhhh-HAUYM. ... Nope, sorry.
Fellow Dork:	It felt kinda like I was driving a hovercraft, and looked a little like the Enterprise entering warp.
Me:	Well it certainly had enough of a suspension. All part of making it resemble the cursed sarcophagus it was.
Fellow Dork:	I estimate about 160.
Me:	And then you shifted into third gear!
Fellow Dork:	And then third gear fell out on the highway!
Me:	And the trees blurred together, and the sky went dark, and you heard Albert Einstein cussing at you!
Fellow Dork:	In the less than 10 minutes I was doing that, I'll bet I used 2 or 3 gallons of gas.
Me:	But hey, gas was cheaper then. It was probably "worth it."
Fellow Dork:	Yeah, that was back when gas was only $1 a gallon!
Me:	I hit 40mph on my bike yesterday!
Fellow Dork:	Sweeet!
Me:	I was being chased by two dogs at the time.
Fellow Dork:	Not sweeeet!
Me:	Argh, it's 12:17 over here... I was supposed to write about that tonight. I've got to get back to my hackin' here.
Fellow Dork:	All right, dude. Well, it's good to hear from you. I hope you finish your trip okay.
Me:	Thanks! And likewise.

This is blogging

I’m a pretty technical guy, but setting up a personal blog was still much harder than I expected. This is what it was like:

1. Order a printing press in the mail. Set it up in your front yard.
2. Go to a farmyard and steal a tractor. Drive it home, then rip all the controls off. Weld them onto the printing press.
3. Borrow a moving van. Wait until nightfall, then detach all the mailboxes from the houses on your street. Throw them in the van.
4. Rent a flatbed trailer and a winch. Haul the printing press up onto the trailer and attach it to the moving van.
5. Acquire a used houseboat. Knock down some of the rooms, then drive the van onto the boat.
   
6. If the whole thing doesn’t sink, cast off and float around.
7. Fire up the printing press and stamp out 50,000 copies of the first thing that pops into your head.
8. Cram 1000 copies into each mailbox.
9. Drive the van off the houseboat, into the water.
10. Congratulations, you have just blogged.

That sums it up. Except it was even more complicated, time-consuming, and ridiculous than that. On the other hand, I am now having a good time. :)

Day 4 - Ulysses to Dodge City

Today I passed over land that was even more flat and empty than yesterday. I didn't think it could get any more so. Yeeee-haw!

I continue to be a curiosity to everyone I pass. I really don't mind it, and welcome their questions, except for one thing: People in cars who tail just behind me, getting a reeeaaal good look, like they're bulls deciding whether to charge. Creeps me out.

So far there have been two incidents where I got worried. One was a group of teenagers crammed into a car parked on the opposite side of the empty highway, who stared at me as I rode by, then started their car and joined the road a minute later. I imagined I could hear one of them pitching the idea of "let's run that guy off the road, haw haw!" to the others. Fortunately, they drove in the opposite direction, and I relaxed.

The second incident was when an old man and his wife pulled over in the middle of a dusty intersection to ask me a bunch of questions about where I was going and what my bike was like. I was transferring water from my big container to my bottle at the time. The conversation was fine, but after a minute the old man saw a car on the horizon, realized he was blocking the intersection, and began to reverse his truck towards the curb. For a few seconds it looked like he might plow into my bike.

I would have been very upset, but, imagine also how the old man would have felt: He pulls over to make conversation, and ends up destroying my vehicle and ending my journey. I bet he would have felt like a dumbass for years afterwards.



Anyway, I rode all day, finishing up "Methland" (which was an excellent read but definitely needed some editing), then began listening to "On Call In Hell", at 1.5 speed, and skipping the self-indulgent bits where the author tells his life story before Iraq. The roadside was festooned with big snappy crickets and lumbery beetles, trying their luck on the highway. I passed a feedlot, and some kind of radio station with a towering antenna next to the road. The antenna was anchored to the earth with steel cables, and the wind whistled through them eerily.

I made a recording of it, for your eerification!

The books kept my mind working all the way into Dodge City, where I got a motel room, and stuffed myself at a restaurant called Montana Mike's. Nearly 80 miles today. Time for another day off!

Day 5 - Dodging Traffic In Dodge City

This picture summarizes Dodge City for me. It's a Sonic drive in restaurant next to an Arby's restaurant next to a Burger King restaurant next to a McDonald's restaurant next to a Taco Bell restaurant, all in the shadow of an enormous bank of grain towers taller than anything else around.

Today passed quietly. After back-to-back 75-mile days I figured it was time to give my knees a rest. I waded through my email, sorted photos, and caught up on my reading. Then I re-origanized my gear while listening to an old comedy album by Bette Midler, and another by Bobcat Goldthwait.

I stayed burrowed in my hotel room until evening, and then rode out only in search of food. The Thai place I found made an excellent iced tea, but their "pad thai" was made with wheat noodles and their "curry" tasted like it had steak sauce in it. Oh well. I chomped it anyway, and listened to more of "On Call In Hell".

While using the iPad I observed that all the location-aware banner ads were for joining the army.

YOU THERE, KANSAS TEEN, JOIN THE ROTC.  YOU KNOW IT'S BETTER THAN THIS "RAGE COMIC".
AND BY THAT ... WE MEAN IT HAS MORE ... RAGE

Day 6 - An Epic Ride To Hutchinson

11:30am - Out on the road! My first order of business today was to pull in to the local Walmart and shop for some additional sun protection.  I ended up buying a cheap cotton "hunter's hat", made in China, sawing off the front half of the brim, and throwing away the rest of the hat.  I then ziptied the brim onto the front of the sun-visor on my bike helmet, extending it an inch in front and two inches on either side.

Here's a few shots of it from later on:



12:00pm - While I was tinkering with the hat, sitting in the lobby of the Walmart with my bicycle propped nearby, a woman came striding out of the interior doors and stood before me. She was about my age, with a pretty face, and grinning enthusiastically. She was dressed in the official Walmart uniform. My first impression was that she was going to tell me "you can't park that thing in here; go outside, vagrant!"

Instead, she began asking me all kinds of excited questions about where I was riding from, what my bicycle was called, what the weather had been like, why I had chosen to cross Kansas, et cetera. I was caught off guard. I was also in the middle of an operation on my helmet, and anxious to get on the road, and having trouble hearing the woman over the blast of the cooling fans perched in the outer wall of the lobby. I could tell she was a nice person, and I usually welcomed questions from strangers, but the environment and the timing were all wrong. I was probably rather cold to her.

Eventually she ran out of questions, and held out her hand for a handshake. I shook it, finding it soaked with sweat, and suppressed the urge to wipe my palm on my pants as she stood there. That would have really embarrassed her. Then she waved goodbye and went back inside.

I threw away the scraps from the hat and the ziptie pieces, and briefly considered going back inside to apologize for being so standoffish, but ... what would have been the point?

2:00pm - I finished "On Call In Hell" and started listening to "Outliers", by Malcolm Gladwell. About two hours later I quit the book, and will probably not return to it. I found the introduction and the first chapter - about Canadian hockey teams - intolerably slow. The evidence presented, and the conclusions reached, could have been summarized in two paragraphs.

I did have one interesting take-away thought from it, though. Gladwell postulates a "10,000 hour rule", claiming that to achieve mastery in any field of study, one must practice at least ten thousand hours at it. He also emphasizes the importance of an early start when practicing. During my own childhood, I easily put in at least 10,000 hours learning how to make my Apple ][ computer do tricks, which eventually snowballed into a career. But the thing about computer programming, unlike, say, Malcolm's examples of Canadian hockey or playing the violin, is that it's an endlessly expanding field of study. There has been constant, relentless innovation in the computer industry for 40 years, and the fine details of a language or a machine design that were relevant one decade can - and do - become totally irrelevant in the next decade. Ten thousand hours of practice in this industry doesn't get you a foot in the door so much as a spot on the treadmill.

So for me, and for everyone else in my profession, it's a process of working a continuous stream of hours, to adapt our "mastery" into a more relevant form. This makes me wonder: Since five years at Apple is at least 10,000 hours, what exactly have I now achieved "mastery" in? Build engineering? Test system design? Database or web programming? What kind of label could I apply to myself? I suspect that the right label doesn't exist.

With "Outliers" set aside, I decided to listen to something lighter, and began "Sourcery" by Terry Pratchett. It's a ten-hour listen. Little did I know that I would be on the road long enough to finish the whole book.

Some photos from the rest of the daylight hours:



10:00pm - I parked by the side of the road and changed from regular cotton socks to thick hiking socks.  As I sat in the saddle re-plotting my map, a cop pulled over behind me.  He got out and said, "Everything alright?"

We talked for a while about my bike trip, and about the weather.  "Okay," he said, "I was just making sure you didn't need any help.  I'll leave you be."

"Thanks for stopping to check," I said, "I appreciate it.  You did the right thing."

11:00pm - A train passed in the night, 1000 feet to my left, whistling and hollering.

11:30pm - I was biking northeast, past Belpre, and I felt the wind changing.  I wanted to figure out what the new direction was, so I began to zig-zag the bicycle back and forth over the road, feeling for the way the wind affected my momentum.  During one outward swing, I caught the profile of a coyote in the headlamp.  When I swung back, it was still looking at me.  (Coyotes are quite common in Kansas)

12:30am - I saw a grey shape on the center divider of the road, about 2 feet tall.  As I got closer, I saw it move.  The top part swiveled, and I saw two yellow eyes.  It was an owl!  As I drifted past, it spread its wings and flapped up into the trees north of the road.

12:45am - The constant crosswind was making me chilly, but I was still enjoying the ride as I cruised along the open plain and listened to "Sourcery". It was dark all around and the stars were out.  Then, I noticed some odd blue lights on my left.  Two long lines of bright blue lights, on the ground, and something that looked like a lighthouse at one end.

As the rows passed closer I observed that they were at right-angles to the road.  Eventually I rolled to a stop, confused, because I could see both rows of blue lights, one ahead of me and one behind, extending directly away to the north, as though they were outlining the edges of a road. But if this was a road, shouldn't I be in the middle of an intersection? I looked down, and saw that the curb continued without interruption. What was going on?

Some pokery with my phone revealed the answer: It's the Stafford Municipal airport!

Later on I discussed the find with Erika and she explained that the blue lights I was staring at were a taxiway, not a runway.

"Runway edge lights aren't blue. At an airport like that, the runway lights are usually activated by the pilot keying on the radio to a certain frequency - but some untowered airports (which Stafford is) have dusk-dawn lights. Also, it looks like the runways are turf, which is basically grass, cut short."

Ah hah! That explains why there was no intersection.

1:30am ... Picture this:

I'm on highway 50, heading east, being buffeted by a freezing 30mph crosswind.  It's late at night and I'm trying to make Hutchison because the motel in Kinsley was closed and St John is 5 miles north straight into the wind. The stars are out above me, but I can see the glow of Hutchison in the far distance, reflected on a layer of clouds.

I keep riding, and riding, and riding.  I spot field mice running along the embankment of the road. The temperature drops from 60 to 55 to 50, and the highway traffic gets lighter and lighter until it's just me. I'm staring down the highway, listening to my audiobook, plugging along at about 7mph in the irregular wind, and suddenly I see three massive forks of lightning crash down out of the sky, 15 miles ahead of me.

They light up the horizon, and for an instant I see a big round hole in the clouds, where they all came from.  Then the clouds shimmer with thunder, and I see cross-lightning, arcing down out of the hole and into the opposite cloudbank. WHAM! Then lightning starts smacking into the ground, 10 miles to the north, and 10 miles to the south, and ahead of me. Every five seconds, and WHAM, more lightning.

The wind picks up, and begins flicking raindrops into my face. Not enough to make a rainstorm, but enough to make me blink.  The lightning and thunder continue.  For the next four hours I push the bike, getting colder, and colder.  My face goes numb.  My feet go numb.  Hunger forces me to stop and eat my remaining chocolate and peanuts and drink water, sitting with my back against the side of the bike as an inefficient windbreak. I look up and see that the clouds have now obscured all the stars. I worry about being struck by lightning. After 17 hours, my GPS runs out of power and quits.

The road changes and I am forced to turn northeast, directly into the headwind. Gusts of freezing air punch right through my sweater as though it were made of fishing net. My pace slows to 5 miles per hour. I begin yelling at the weather. "Think you can stop me? No way! Nnnnoooo... Wwwwaaay!! GRRRRRR!!!!"

Eventually I struggle my way into town and stop at the first restaurant I see - a McDonalds.  There I devour two egg sandwiches, barely tasting them, and then ride north straight into the wind for another mile to the motel. By the time I crash into my sleeping bag on top of the bed, it is 6:00am the next day.

Erika says: "Here, in honor of your night out, a snippet of poetry.  This is from Hafiz, another Sufi mystic poet, like Rumi."

"I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.
It is remarkably contagious--
So kiss me."