Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Last night, Leslie and I watched “Nerdcore Rising.” This was easily the funniest music documentary I’ve seen since “We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It follows MC Frontalot on his first tour. The tour starts off slow, with small groups in little bars in the south, but it ends in a big way, with a big show at a video game convention. Along the way, they interview fans and others about Nerdcore rap.

Now it’s time for a little braggadocio
while I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio.

This is an obscure little movie, but Netflix has it, and it’s definitely worth watching. And besides, the beginning of the DVD version announces:

This film has been modified from its original version. It has been made more awesome for this screen.

And what could be better than that?

Sunday’s bike ride was over to Griffith Park. It’s a nice route with not a lot of hills. It was cool and overcast, and it never really warmed up.

As you can guess from the pictures, there wasn’t much interesting or amusing along the route today. The two girls riding horses in the park were cute, but aside from that, there wasn’t much else to see.

43 miles.
cycling

But between being a half-time single parent having to ferry Lucinda around, and then having a girlfriend who lives in Santa Monica, I’m really racking up the miles on the the middle-age-mobile. I think I’ll still come in under 10,000 for the year, but it’s a far cry from the days when I drove less than a 1,000 miles a year.

There have been a lot of earthquakes this afternoon. In particular, there have been these three big ones:

M7.3 2009/10/07 23:13:49 -13.145 166.297 33.3 VANUATU
M7.7 2009/10/07 22:18:26 -12.554 166.320 35.0 SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS
M7.8 2009/10/07 22:03:15 -13.052 166.187 35.0 VANUATU

In the Earthquake Notification Service, also known as My Pet Project, subscribers can pick their own location and magnitude criteria for notification, but the general rule is that the larger the earthquake, the more people want to know about it. And anything over M7 will generate a lot of mail. So I went and poked through the logs to see just how many messages it’s sent in the last few hours.

It’s currently not quite 7:00PM here in Los Angeles. I looked at logs back to 2:00PM, which is about when these big events started coming through the system. And the notification system has sent 642,590 messages in that time. That averages out to about 36 messages a second for five hours. No wonder some ISPs with automatic filters have blocked our mail servers as suspected spam sources.

Just for perspective, the system has sent about 775,000 messages in the past 24 hours. And this is not a record. The 24-hour record for the system is 943,833 messages in 24 hours, and that was set last Saturday.

On Sunday, Lucinda and I went down to Carson to watch the final day of racing at the Elite National Track Championships. We’ve been going to this for the last few years, and it’s always a fun afternoon.

When we got there, we saw my old racing friend Cleve at the video camera by the finish line. He and I used to ride races in the New York area, and particularly, the Tuesday and Thursday evening races they used to have at SUNY Old Westbury on Long Island.

The first races we saw were the men’s team sprint finals. And then it was the highlight of the day: The men’s Madison final. This is always a fun race to watch. It’s very hard to keep track of what’s happening, but there’s so much action that it’s just fun to watch anyway. The race is 200 laps, so it lasts a while, which is different from most other track events. So it’s good all around.

The last event of the day was a women’s Madison. This is the first time I’ve ever seen women riding one of these races, and they did very well. In the end, Team Vanderkitten gained a lap on the pack. They rode very well and clinched the victory. I hope they make the Madison an official women’s event in the future. These women showed that they were up to it.

It was a fun afternoon. It was about as much fun as it’s possible for me to have when someone else is riding the bike.