doylebrau.com

Part of being a ‘blogger,’ aside from the feeling of towering superiority you get over others who don’t blather all over the internet (or at least do it anonymously), is obsessively checking the stats of your site to see if you are actually making a dent in the big beautiful orb we all call 127.0.0.1.

I have a tracker called Awstats, one of the basic tools that comes with my hosting package. One of the many features of Awstats is tracking of search phrases. In my own limited way, I can actually track who googled what. Pretty cool, eh? So when I pulled up my stats for the past few days, I was astonished to see item number three in the top ten list.

What happens when you sniff Smarties? Really, you gotta google that? I get a little angry when I see things like that written down. What happened to the good old days of being an idiot thirteen year-old boy? While a small part of me wishes I knew what would happen if I if I ate an entire box of Fruit-by-the-Foot, or drank too much Gin & Sprite in a tent in my friend’s back yard, or ate three pounds of questionable ground beef, I’m pretty sure I got a lot more out of those experiences than I would have if I had read about them (for dog’s sake, you certainly would).

So, Smarties boy, whereever you are, here’s some advice. Leap before you google. You’re only young once, and other people’s capacity to deal with your idiot decisions declines sharply as you get older. Trust me, this I know…

P.S. I’m kind of inspired by item five in the list… Stay tuned!

Took me forever to get around to posting this, but I used the built in camera in the monitor plus a program called Gawker that takes still captures at predetermined intervals (every 5 seconds for this) to make this video of me striping and then rebuilding my new fixie. The explosion sound at the end is when I popped my inner tube while inflating it. Damn thing sounded like a gunshot when it actually happened.

I’ve had the bike working for about three weeks now and aside from the weekly trips to the bike shop to buy parts that I should have replaced when I first put it together (axle, ball bearings, etc.) it’s been working like a charm. Now I just have to find some time to learn how to ride it properly…

I was coming into the city yesterday morning and as I rounded the curve on the Brooklyn Bridge bike path, I was greeted with a fog bank the likes of which I’ve never seen in New York City. It reminded me of waking up on a cool fall morning upstate and looking out the window at the morning mist coming off the creeks behind my house. Only this time, it was a fog bank covering the entire East River and there were bridges disappearing into it.

On the Brooklyn side I couldn’t even see the bridge.

Once I got closer I started to make a few things out, but only on the side closest to me.

The Manhattan Bridge was fairing a little better, but was still stuck in it’s own little fog-bound world.

I had a dream last night about my friend Jeff. In it, Jeff and I managed to win some sort of prestegious science and innovation competition (which means he did all the work and I came up with a fancy name for our creation). Anyway, we won the competition and were gifted several million dollars for our efforts. Sweet, right?

So I came in to his house to congratulate him and I was already spending the money we’d won. I’d parked my hovercraft in the lawn, was distributing lawn santas to neighborhood children, and I think I was wearing one of those big metal diving suits with the air hose out the top. Jeff was sitting at the kitchen table and when I clanked up behind him, I saw that he was writing a check to his mother for the remainder of the mortgage on the house. The sad thing is, if we’d really won money like that, that’s probably how that scene would have unfolded (though most likely without the diving suit, they’re too tough to get up the stairs).

It’s nice to see that even though he’s been dead five years now my mind still likes to remind me that Jeff is the greatest human being I’ve ever known.

As the writers’ strike enters its second week and many of America’s favorite daily programs remain in rerun mode, there seems to be no end in sight to this quandry of a dilemma.

“I’m speechless, literally speechless,” said a young television executive on his way into NBC headquarters in Rockefeller Center as he waded through the throngs of angry picketers. He declined to elaborate.

Striking over such issues as internet royalties, end credit placement, and complementary buffet access, writers across the country collectively pushed themselves away from the proverbial typewriter at midnight, Halloween night.

“It’s a shame that the timing worked out like this,” said Grevis Chitsworth, lead writer for the popular Public Access television show This Week in Twine, “I was this close to finishing up a prequal for Herbie: Fully Loaded when the clock struck twelve. Man, I was on a roll, too. When you’re hopped up 3 Musketeers bars and Tang like that, it’s tough to just put it down. And sure I was in the final scene, but what was I to do? Become a scab? Never!”

It’s solidarity like this that kept the ‘88 writers’ strke going for 22 weeks. In the dark days of twenty years ago intrepid wordsmiths banded together, burning half-finished scripts for heat and investing in communal pencil sharpeners and jumbo boxes of quill pens straight from the factory.

“That strike was the best thing that happened to me. I met my wife around a burn barrel full of Saved By the Bell spin-offs,” said Roger McCalister, a rather rotund rosy-cheeked man, bedecked with “Royalty Rights, Write Now!!” buttons, and clutching a “Fight for Your Writes” picket sign.

The ‘88 strike resulted in 10 percent fewer viewers coming back to network television after all the dust settled, which was bad news to both sides of the conflict. It also resulted in a number of movies being greenlighted for production, including: Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, Fletch Lives, and Weekend at Bernies. With the advent of cable television, these gems are quickly becoming the Chernobyls of the film industry.

“I can’t even begin to describe to you how this will cripple Hollywood, and thus the world,” said Thomas Flapyack, a creatively challanged management employee of Comedy Central.

With each side prepared to take the strike into the new year, both camps are digging in for a long, tough battle. The writers armed with lawn chairs and thermoses of coffee. The executives with multiple seasons of Flavor of Love and a Survivor spin-off titled Last Accountant Standing: Trenton.

In a statement released by CBS executive Richard Duthurd on Thursday, he said, “It is impossible to put into words what this strike has done to the CBS family. We are very unpleased.”

Indeed, with many of Hollywood’s honchos hobbled by the strike, it seems that many more will be unpleased before this is all over.

I love when actual reseach brings me to cool stuff that I bookmark. I was doing a project for class about green IT and I stumbled upon a review of an EPEAT rated PC on livepaths.com. After checking out the review, I clicked around on the site for a minute, cause it looked interesting. Turns out, the entire theme of livepaths is making money by saving the planet (yes, it can be done, it very easily can be done). Sweet! I’m adding this site in with my other two green faves, treehugger and autoblog green.

While on there I found this site. If you can get past the big green penis on the about page, you’ll see that it’s a great way to mobilize people across the world and to prove that we’re already taking action. Basically, every month the viewing population has a task to complete. The task is always to conserve or reduce, or otherwise shrink your carbon footprint. This month’s task is to do something in the dark (that you might normally do with the lights on). Dunno about you, but I’m going to take a nap.

(Written: Saturday, October 27)

Midnight rides are generally fun. Generally. Which is what I thought when I set out twenty minutes ago. Despite it being actually midnight, and thus dark, the full moon was directly over my head, bathing the entire road in a nice blue light. As I set out I felt refreshed, I felt exhilirated. Here I was, gliding down a dirt road with nothing but the moon to guide me. I’d spent almost the entire day (rain and shine) in the garage tearing parts off, afixing others, and generally being crabby and pissed. But now it was all paying off. I’d cleared the last obstacle before “rideable” and I wasn’t going to wait for Sunday morning…

My bike was eerily silent as I pedaled up gentle grades and then down into the fog banks collecting in the lowlands. Having a simple one-gear system makes for a very quiet ride, and I felt like a ghost gliding up and down those hills. Like something out of a Washington Irving story… Aside from the steel and rubber thing I was pedaling on, I really could have been drifting through the moors of colonial times. It felt so completely surreal.

Coming down the final hill, approaching the main road, I noticed a slight disturbance in the harmony that was man and machine. My left crank was pulling a little strangely. Odd, I though, as I approached the train tracks that represented the boundry between my own fantastical world and the modern one of macadam and reflective paint. My crank was pulling very strangly now, like the metal axle had suddenly warped. I slowed, I’d better check this out.

As I was pulling my left foot out of the foot strap I suddenly felt my entire foot go free, but not the kind of free I was used to. I looked down. Crap.

The entire left crank was hanging from my foot and swinging freely in the night air. And suddenly I saw my midnight ride for what it was: On a dirt road that sees one car an hour after midnight, if that. Away from my friends who were all going to sleep when I quietly sauntered out of the house, not even telling them I was leaving the house. On a bike that I’d just put together two hours earlier, that obviously had not gotten any type of inspection or anything before I rolled up my pant legs and took off into the darkness.

I was at least a mile from the house when I finally wrangled the bike to a stop and turned it around. Sadly, the hills didn’t look quite as enticing as I trudged back toward the garage.