Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Six of us showed up for the ride today, even though it was cold and wet and drizzling at the park. Since our usual leader Gene wasn’t there, we just decided where to go. I suggested going south or west to get away from the mountains. A lot of times we get weather like this in Pasadena when it’s perfectly nice everywhere else. So we headed west.

We went past the big Federal Court building on Grand Ave. I recently read that that building used to be the support center for the Los Angeles area Nike anti-aircraft missiles.

As we crossed into South Pasadena, the drizzle stopped and from then on it was dry, although still gray and dreary. But we still got a laugh from the bus ad for Spay and Neuter Month. Sort of reminiscent of the Ron Jeremy PSA for the same cause.

We went south through Glassell Park, passing the old Van de Kamp’s bakery. Then we crossed the L.A. River and got on the bike path. We took the bike path all the way up around Griffith Park to Riverside Dr. Along the way, we could see that the trees in the river bed were all bent over and covered with debris. It’s just more of the effects of all the rain we’ve been having this winter. Then, after the bike path ended, we took streets the rest of the way to Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake.

After the stop at Priscilla’s, we were all complaining about being cold. It took a few miles to warm up. We came back by the southern route, since we thought that it was probably still raining up closer to the mountains. We came back across Glendale and Eagle Rock on Yosemite Dr.

We took a short detour in Eagle Rock to make an attempt at climbing Nolden St. I thought it would be good practice for Fargo St. next week. Four of us made the attempt. Matt, James, and I all ended up slipping on the damp pavement and had to stop. But John made it all the way to the top and was therefore the Hero of the Day.

After that bit of fun, we headed back into Pasadena, whereupon it began to rain again. On the last street we saw someone trying to give away a treadmill. I guess that’s just one of those New Year’s resolutions gone bad. But maybe he thought that giving away the barbecue with it would somehow make up for it.

When it was all done, it was actually a pretty good ride.

42 miles.

cycling

I’ve been at my job for 10 years now. This is a first for me. I’ve never stayed anywhere for that long before. So I got a little certificate and the boss took us out to lunch at Hooters. (Sadly, there’s not a real strip club that serves lunch anywhere near here, so Hooters had to suffice.) Anyway, it was a fun time, even if today was otherwise kind of a bear. The air conditioner in the computer room broke down, and I had one other computer die today, so I was busy fixing stuff.

Still, I like my job. I realized recently that this is the only job where I’ve ever not used all my vacation time, and the only job where I’ve never called in sick when I wasn’t really sick. So I guess that says something. When I first started, I figured that working in the earthquake business in Los Angeles pretty much had to be an adventure. During the time I’ve been here, we’ve changed from using VAX and VMS to using Sun and white-box commodity PCs with Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux. Computers that used to cost $50,000 now cost less than $1,000. We’ve had one M7.1 earthquake out in the desert, but nothing big in the city, and the long-awaited Parkfield Earthquake happened. It’s been tremendous fun, and I’d be quite content to just stay here until I retire.

The Caltech Women’s Center had a lunchtime screening of “Tupperware!” today. The film covered the rise of the company in the 1950s and the role of Brownie Wise in building the Tupperware empire. It was a very interesting and amusing story, complete with lots of old archival footage from the time and interviews with people who were there. If you’re a big ol’ documentary geek like me, that made it a true must-see.

Ultimately, though, it was a sad story. Brownie was ousted in 1958, ostensibly so that Earl Tupper could sell the company and retire. Still, what she did was impressive by any measure, and it was a very interesting story.

There is an egret who sometimes hangs around the Caltech campus. There are a few little pools that are stocked with frogs and mosquito fish, and apparently the little fish and tadpoles are very tasty. So the egret hangs around the ponds and eats. It’s an interesting bit of actual nature, red in tooth and claw, in the middle of the big city.

I just read that Hans Bethe has died:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14079-2005Mar7.html

He was one of the giants of 20th-century physics. When I was in college, his name came up often in the quantum mechanics and nuclear physics textbooks.

One day not long before I graduated from college in 1982, I stopped by the Bonner Nuclear Lab at Rice to talk to my professor, Dr. Phillips. While we were chatting, his secretary buzzed him:

“Dr. Phillips, I have Hans Bethe on the phone for you.”

So he excused himself and picked up the phone:

“Hello Hans! How are you?”

I thought it was really amazing that I knew someone who was actually on a first-name basis with one of the legends of physics.

Today’s ride was to Glendora. Gene found a new bakery out there and he wanted to get a loaf of olive bread, so off we went.

The first part of the ride was a bit of a blur to me, since there was a problem at work, and my phone was ringing. There was a M5.4 earthquake in Quebec this morning, and the computer that does the Community Internet Intensity Maps (a.k.a. the “Did you feel it?” maps) was having a problem. It’s a bit of a challenge to talk on the phone while riding.

Today’s new entry in the Flat Tire Gallery is Matt.

After that excitement, we continued on through Irwindale, passing the low-rent Irwindale Speedway. I always refer to it as the ‘low-rent racetrack’ because while a lot of racetracks might have events like the “Purolator 400” or some such, I’ve seen the sign at Irwindale trumpeting the “Food-4-Less 150”, which just sounds a whole lot more downscale.

Continuing on, we passed a place to take a leak and the hot rod mailbox before heading into Old Town Glendora. We stopped there for a little snack at the bakery. Gene pulled out a backpack and stuffed an enormous loaf of olive bread into it for the trip home.

After the stop, we headed home across the San Gabriel River and then back through Monrovia and Sierra Madre. I snapped one picture of the town square in Sierra Madre, since it was a major filming location for the 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

Gene carried that olive bread all the way back, and the extra weight and wind resistance didn’t seem to slow him down too much.

40 miles.

cycling

I did some CSS tweaking on my Tattoo Artists Database, so I’d appreciate it if people could have a look at it and give me some feedback on it. Is the search interface intuitive enough? Any new features it should have? When I look at my site statistics it’s usually one of the most-requested pages, so I’m trying to improve it.

Also, today marks 10 years since we moved back from Texas. Yay.

Here’s a link for the Googlebot to follow: Online Poker

I got this from frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2005/02/19/bloggers-of-the-world-unite. The basic idea is that if we all put a link to the Wikipedia page about online poker, then that will become the #1 match for the phrase in Google. All the comment and trackback spam we’ve been getting lately is all in pursuit of page rank, so this is a way to try and prevent them from getting what they want.

Dunno if it’s going to work, but I thought it was a funny idea.

I was looking at my site statistics and I noticed a big spike on Thursday. Turns out a news site in Argentina had an article about the Pomona Body Art Expo, and they had a link to my tattoo convention photo album. So where we usually serve about 80-120MB a day, on that day we did just over 1GB. That’s the equivalent of about two weeks’ worth of normal traffic. So I guess this is where I stop and be glad that I moved our site to PHP Webhosting last summer. There is no way our little DSL-based home server could have handled this load.

Today’s ride was to Larchmont Village. This is a small-town-like shopping district just south of Hollywood in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. We were also very happy to have Matt along on the ride for the first time in months. Matt is in the Navy, and is just back from Iraq, so we were glad to see him back in one piece.

We started out going through Pasadena and Highland Park, where we passed the LAPD Historical Museum. This is definitely on our list of things to see one of these days. From there we took Eagle Rock Blvd and Fletcher across the L.A. River in to Los Feliz. Then we went past the Silver Lake reservoir. This was where we got into the ‘gritty urban cycling’ part of the ride. We rode through Koreatown, where we saw the ’98 Cent Discount Store’. Glad to see that the 99 Cent Store has some competition. We also saw the LAPD in action near there.

After we crossed Western Ave, we went into the mansion district of Hancock Park. When we got to Larchmont Blvd, we saw the house where Adriana Caselotti lived. She was the voice of the original Disney Snow White, back in the days when voice actors in cartoons were not the big deal they are today.

We stopped for a bagel at Noah’s Bagels on Larchmont. That was where we saw the ‘Party in a Box’. We all had different ideas of what should be in the box.

After the stop, we went north past Paramount Studios to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The recent rains made the pond there overflow, so there were squished crayfish all over the roads there. We stopped to see the statue of Johnny Ramone, as well as Dee Dee Ramone’s grave, which are both in the same area of the cemetery. We also saw another monument that looks like an Atlas rocket. We don’t know who is buried there, but we were all curious, since it was a unique monument.

Continuing north, we passed the somewhat creepy Scientology Celebrity Center, and then took Franklin Ave east to the Shakespeare bridge. From there it was the standard route home through Highland Park and Eagle Rock.

44 miles.

cycling