digitalized’s blog

Yes... still training for AIDS/Lifecycle 7, which is less that 3 weeks away now! (Hint... hint... it's not too late to make a donation... http://www.aidslifecycle.org/1545)

I left too late on Saturday to make it down to Mission San Juan Bautista from my home in San Jose. I only made it to Gilroy because I needed to buy a Mother's Day present. I have to admit, that was a nice ride down Monterey Road. The most difficult part was getting to Monterey Road down Tully Road from the foothills east of San Jose. Went down Tully, dodged cars trying to get on and off 101, but had quite a few cyclist-sympathetic drivers (thanks!) who made it easy for me to cross.

After mapping things out, riding to San Juan Bautista would have been about 55 miles. I'll do that another day...

I went down Tully, to Old Tully by the SC Fairgrounds and on to Monterey Road. From there, it's a breeze, albeit a bit grimy of a ride with dust and particulates strewn by cars as they flew by. Interestingly enough, the "15 Mile Spot" is 15 miles from my house (according to my GPS and bike computer). Overall, I'd have to say Monterey Road is VERY bike friendly down to Gilroy! There are a few rough patches in South San Jose and through San Martin, but overall, not bad.

Once I got onto good road, I was able to sustain 21 mph for a couple of miles. It suprised the cr*p out of me. Low rolling resistance, 120psi in the tires and a little bit of a grade in my favor are possible factors contributing to this:) I'm not complaining.

Once down there, got a bling purse for my wife at Michael Korrs and hit Pearl Izumi where I got new cycling shorts (mtn bike style, not into the crotch revealing road shorts and some socks).

I think I found my regular weekend ride!

I'm a Mac-head - people who know me already know that. Despite all the negative things I hear about Vista, I've been using it regularly for almost a week now and it's extremely stable. My daughter has been running Vista on her laptop since last summer without a hitch...

So I'm not quite sure what all the mumbling has been about. Personally, after the initial "cool" factor, I feel like I'm using XP with a hacked interface. There really isn't that much of a difference between the two.

However, Office 2007 is a huge improvement over Office 2003! It's a much more pleasant application environment to be in. That's something that I think has been missing in Microsoft apps since the global acceptance of Windows 3.1... and that's only because Win 3.1 was a much more pleasant environment than DOS.... :)

The new PC

So I realized that I can't quite live without a Windows PC. Go figure. My tower got zapped when the power went out a few weeks ago. When the power went back on, I tried to power up and the tower simply would not boot. The power supply appeared to be okay, but I'm guessing that the BIOS got fried. The error I get is some BIOS checksum error. Even manually clearing the the CMOS did nothing. Bummer.

I was originally going to get another tower to replace the zapped one, but figured a laptop might be more convenient. Along with various software that I used regularly on my XP box, there's a handful of GPS apps that I couldn't take along with me to run on my Macbook Pro (yeah, I could have gotten virtualization software, but with 80 gigs of HD space, that doesn't leave a whole lot of space for data once the apps are isntalled).

So I got a Compaq Presario F755 - I got it at an excellent price, and was just a tiny bit more than the tower I was looking at. Convenience over power won. Anyways, this thing has a 160gig harddrive with 2 gigs of RAM. Far better specs than any other laptops I looked at within the price range (less than $550). I refuse to purchase a high end PC anymore... they're such commodities these days that commanding a high price doesn't seem to make sense. Anyways, I noticed that the prices of notebooks have gone up over the past year. I'm guessing it's due to the same reasons there's an increase in consumer goods.

He's apparently moving to EMI as a president of some sort to figure out future business models.

It's funny considering he graced the cover of March's Fast Company...

I just came across a link to San Jose's NBC11 link to a documentary they produced on the Japanese Relocation Camps during WWII. While I haven't seen the entire documentary, I think educating people on the fact that Japanese-Americans, a majority of whom called the United States their home, or who were naturally born Americans, were forced to relocate for "their own safety" after Pearl Harbor. While many did so willingly, as a way to help their country, the reality is that most lost their homes and their possessions... not to mention their dignity.

A few weeks ago, my MacBook Pro started shutting down all by itself when on battery power.... kinda sucks when you're working on something and the system doesn't go through the normal shutdown/save-your-stuff routine when battery power is low.

Thanks to WR Hearst, the sound-byte has come to rule the media, whether it reflects reality or not. The philosophy is to ignore context and provide a sub-context to a fraction of a quote... in order to sell newspapers. In today's world, creating controversy sells.

If you've been trying to find Bill Clinton's "McCarthy" quote -- here it is:

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who love this country, and were devoted to the interest of this country, and people could actually ask themselves, who's right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics"

It doesn't sound like McCarthy to me -- it sounds more like someone who's observed what everyone but the fanatical have been seeing for as long as the politicking engine has been around... political games turning personal to steer folks away from real issues. While it's easy to single Obama out since Hillary is Bill's wife, his statement has more strength outside of the context of the presidential campaign.

My guess is that this will be one of the memorable quotes about the state of political campaigning for generations, but whose immediate meaning will be lost to our own...

With criticisms of Bill Richardson being launched from all sides, I wonder if the super delegate endorsements for the next President of the United States has more in common with high school student body politics than being good for the People. These unpledged delegates can endorse and vote for anyone -- maybe the one seen as the "winner". The unfortunately reality is few people want to be associated with the loser of a campaign - supporting the "winner" certainly won't hurt.

I just read that one of Obama's co-chairman for his presidential campaign compared Bill Clinton to Senator Joe McCarthy because Clinton said, "you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country..." Talk about taking a sound-byte totally out of context!

After nursing an injured foot and ankle for 3 weeks, I'm finally back on my bike. It was amazing how much muscles atrophy when not used for short periods of time. Things were a bit rough the first 1/2-mile with pains in my right foot and ankle, but after stopping and doing a couple of more stretches on the side of the road, everything was much better!