Rich Mintz  

I’ve been wanting to put on some extra miles, so this afternoon I decided to do a Brooklyn loop over two bridges, the Brooklyn and the Williamsburg. You can see my route here:

View Two Bridges Brooklyn Bike Loop in a larger map

This is almost exactly ten miles — long enough to get some real cardio exercise, but short enough to do in about an hour. (Plus there’s excellent coffee at the 3-mile and the 7-mile marks.)

I felt like going for a ride today, so I rode up to Ess-a-Bagel on 1st Avenue, near Stuyvesant Town, picked up a dozen bagels and some cream cheese and salmon salad, and rode back. It’s 5 miles there and back (about 200 calories), and I’m about to eat a thousand calories worth of what I brought back, so there’s a lesson there, but I’d rather not think about it.

Just finished Will McIntosh’s Soft Apocalypse, part of my near-future-dystopia binge. It was a bit softer and more sociological than some of the other sci-fi I’ve ready recently, which isn’t surprising because it’s set about 15 years in the future in a United States that’s recognizable as a place we might be heading toward right now. There hasn’t been an alien invasion, there hasn’t been a revolution. The economy and the social order have just gradually deteriorated, in the way that some would argue they’re already deteriorating now, and the authorities and the elites haven’t been able to keep a handle on it.

There are references to an orderly, well-run consumer society for the very wealthy, who live behind gates more or less the way we live now, but we readers never see those people directly; we spend our time among a dispossessed, squatting uncertain underclass whose members look uncomfortably like us. They’ve been to college, they remember what we remember from the 1990s and 2000s, and yet they live on and near the streets, are menaced day and night, are almost always hungry.

I enjoyed the fact that the book was set in Georgia, in places I recognize, mostly in the pine woods of east Georgia between Macon and Savannah. But I won’t tell you any more; read it for yourself.

One of the most frustrating things about the always-on Internet, at least the way the market is configured in the US, is that I’m currently paying for bandwidth four separate times to three vendors — not counting the bandwidth I use in the office — and I still don’t feel I’m getting what I need.

For home bandwidth (much of which I federate out to mobile devices via wireless), Time Warner Cable gets a piece of me, for a level of home Internet service I would rate as “meh.” I’m paying AT&T twice, for iPhone 3G and for iPad 3G. And on top of that, I’m paying Clear for a Sierra Wireless 3G/4G hotspot that I can’t depend on (the service itself is generally okay, but the device can’t hold either a charge or a connection, and it takes 3 minutes to reboot). My monthly data total, I’m amazed to report, is upwards of $170, and I’m still pissed off at least a dozen times a month.

When I’m in the UK for extended periods, things feel simpler. I carry a 3 Wireless Internet hotspot (a Huawei device, vastly superior to the Sierra Wireless) in my pocket, and run everything (laptop, iPhone and iPad data) off of that. I have to make sure to keep it charged, which is a minor pain, but the device (unlike my Sierra Wireless) runs fine when plugged in, and charges fast.

In that environment, I know exactly how much data I’m using, and can easily top up if I start to run out. It isn’t necessarily cheaper — even without paying for home broadband, my data cost in a month in the UK would be about the same as in the US if I used as much data as I “wanted” — but that’s with much heavier out-and-about use than I experience when I’m in my own city, and in any case I’d have the ability to decide how much to use.

Someone has to solve this problem, and I’m not sure who will, since the core consequence of things as they are is that people like me spend more than we should, and the providers have no incentive to see that changed. On top of that, everyone in the US hates their broadband and wireless providers, for unfriendly customer service, account restrictions, and what feels like illogical pricing.

To a large extent, these customer dissatisfactions are driven by the sales model in the US (which rolls the cost of the device into your monthly fee, and then sentences you to indentured servitude until you pay it off), and by the bundling of access rights with the device (which keeps you married to your carrier forever). As a result of these things, buying a mobile device in the US is more like buying a mattress than buying, say, a lawnmower. The US model is complex and bureaucratic, and the information market is clouded, effectively resulting in a transfer of rents from you and me to the carriers, on top of the actual market-rate payment for services.

Still, even in the US, I could imagine a company that made mobile simpler. There’s no reason why a US carrier couldn’t say “Buy as many devices from us as you want for a fair price, and then you can use a common data pool for all of them, topping it up when you need to.” If someone did, that would be genuinely transformational, and they’d have a line out the door.

In the meantime, we have to content ourselves with half-measures. I just signed up for the AT&T tethering plan on my iPhone (yeah, I know, I gave up the unlimited data). I now have 5GB per month to use, combined, for data services on my phone itself and on my laptop and whatever devices I tether to it. If I go over (unlikely), the overage charge is more than, but not absurdly more than, what I’d be paying per GB on 3 Wireless. So it’s a start.

I thought it sounded crazy too, but this blog post from Velojoy inspired me to try washing my bike in the bathtub, with hot water and the spray nozzle so I could get at the undercarriage.

My first thought was “that’s a terrible idea, you’ll rust it,” but then again I ride around in rain and salt anyway and it doesn’t rust from ordinary use, so probably washing it down isn’t going to hurt it. And indeed it didn’t. The hot water got almost all the loose salt, sand, and muck off, and made a good dent in the various oily smears in inaccessible places that I usually just assume will stick around indefinitely.

I let it drip dry for a bit, gave it a rough wipedown with an old towel, and then lubed the chain, which I always figured would be a messy process but (thanks to the lesson I got from my local bike shop) basically amounts to letting tiny droplets fall from a nozzle onto the edge of the chain as you slowly rotate the pedals backwards. It took about 90 seconds, and based on how well it rode when I was finished. I apparently did it right.

I’ve been busy living my life, as you can see from the dearth of posts, but I will say this: I try to give all my bikes some ride time, and the red Dahon folding bike rotated back into position about a week ago. I’ve been riding it for about a week, and I have to say I remember why I enjoyed it so much when I first got it. It’s nimbler and easier to control than my other bikes, the gearing is excellent, and it folds up (I took it to DC on the train yesterday for the day).

I gave it a bath (in the bathtub), had a broken spoke replaced, and had the hinge tightened (my local bike shop was kind enough to tighten everything else at the same time, so it rides snappier and firmer). I also bought a cable lock for it (now I’ve got four bike lock keys on my ring) — this kind of cable isn’t suitable for long-period or risky-location locking, but for the kind of “5 minutes popping into Duane Reade on a busy street” that I’m likely to do, it’s fine.

And now that I’m used to it again, I think I may give it an extra week.

Because I was curious what it would look like on a map, I plotted my daily bike route from home to work and back again. I tagged a few of the points of interest, and some of the hazards.

View My daily bike route in a larger map

I take other routes from time to time, and branch off for errands and so forth; but after doing this for about a year, all other things being equal, on an ordinary day, I go exactly the same way up, and exactly the same way down — up 6th Avenue, and down 5th.

This route is the most direct, more or less. I used to divert to the bike lane along 8th Avenue (protected above 14th Street) in the morning, and the bike lane along 2nd Avenue and Allen Street (protected or separated almost the whole way) in the afternoon. But I’m a competent street rider, I’m familiar with the route, and I know most of the hazards, so I’m back on the straight route.

The morning ride is harder, both because there are some gentle uphill stretches and because traffic is heavier on 6th Avenue than on 5th. It’s a bit more than 2 1/2 miles each way — 2.6 miles in the morning, and a bit more in the afternoon.

One interesting fact is that on almost all my avenue portions, I’m riding on the left, not on the right. That’s true on 6th and 5th Avenues, and it’s also true on 1st and 2nd and 8th and 9th, because of where the bike lanes are. But even when I’m riding on 7th Avenue, which isn’t a designated bike route, or one of the avenue portions that aren’t marked for bikes, I tend to stay left rather than right — there are fewer buses and generally fewer obstructions.

Almost without exception, if there’s a bike lane provided (protected or not), that’s where I ride. Not only is it possibly required by city law (there’s been some dispute about this); it’s the place where those drivers who are looking out for cyclists are expecting to see us, so it’s where it’s safest for me to be.

And virtually the whole way, in both directions, I’m riding legally, with traffic and on the street. There is one significant exception, and that’s my confession: in the afternoon, when crossing Canal Street near the Holland Tunnel exit, I do something illegal and potentially dangerous. From the foot of Thompson Street (at 6th Avenue), I ride west across 6th Avenue, ride diagonally westward across Canal to the wrong side, do one short block against traffic on Canal, followed by a short southbound block on the sidewalk on Varick (to avoid cobblestones).

Here’s a snapshot of Google Street View facing southwest from Thompson and 6th (the starting point of this maneuver) in the direction I’m about to ride. Imagine me crossing behind the taxi you see there in the traffic, then riding along (toward the right in the frame) on the wrong side of Canal, passing the postal truck on its left.

I didn’t use to do it this way, but because of the way the street grid comes together, the alternative (cutting east to Broadway) is worse, involving more travel on more congested streets. I could, of course, walk my bike two longgggg blocks on the sidewalk, but that’s my fallback, not my starting plan.

Because of the timing of the lights at 6th Avenue and Varick, and the fact that there are usually NYPD traffic officers in both intersections, there’s not actually any traffic coming as I do my riding against traffic. And I’m actually protected by a curb cut ahead of me at Varick, so I’d be hard to hit accidentally. You can see the curb cut here, in the distance at left (live link this time):

View Larger Map

But you can believe I’m exceptionally careful before and during this tricky crossing, watching that all the traffic on Canal, 6th, Varick, and Laight Streets is behaving as expected.

Is there any doubt that Esther C. Werdiger is an awesome cartoonist?

If I could draw like she does, competently and freely and angst-riddenly and good-naturedly, I’d quit my job and just make cartoons about my imperfect but all-I’ll-ever-have life.

This engaging postmortem account by Mark Hendrickson of what went wrong at Plancast got me thinking about our experience at BusyTonight, a late, great search engine technology startup where I was a principal. It was a great career experience for me, but we did a lot of things wrong, spent a lot of money that will never be returned (mostly lent by friends and family), and closed after about two years with no sales and no prospects.

User experience consultant Whitney Hess, who brought the story to my attention, called it a case study of what happens when you don’t do your user research, and that’s probably right. We didn’t either — we went into the development of BusyTonight with plenty of technical knowledge, an understanding of the problem we wanted to solve, a solid approach, and talented staff. The thing we didn’t have (aside from “enough money,” of course, and a host of other things that would have benefited us) was any evidence that anyone would want to buy the thing we were selling. Or, to put it another way, nobody cared enough about the problem we were trying to solve to get excited about our solution. And we didn’t give enough credence to inferior but better-funded and better-marketed alternatives, which eventually ate our lunch.

I landed on my feet, as did my two partners. But it would have been nicer if instead we had made our fortunes, no?

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.