drewish.com

got back last night from an excellent trip to san francicso with my friend etta. we stayed at spaceman's place an amazing converted warehouse named the hansom devil's hide away (or something like that). he put together the desalvo, you remember, that track bike i ordered almost two years ago... yeah, that one. i actually got to ride it around the block on sunday night. it still needs some more work done on it but that really stoked me out.

we did a bunch of riding around with dan and his (totally insane) messenger friend peter. we went out across the golden gate bridge and then did a grand tour of the city. it was some crazy riding, i finally got to try that whole left hand turn at a stop light into the oncomming lane and then cutting over into the direction you want to be going type turn. dan's got some pictures from that day up.

even the drive back up was good, we stopped at the jelly belly factory and bought a disgusting about of sugar. on the way up i-5 we stopped at lake shasta and took a swim, perfect solution to the central valley heat. the whole things got me ready to finish school and move down there.

i think my editor wants to kill me. i'm a week+ late turning in my revisions to my chapter on rss feeds. trying to sumarize the difference between the various rss 1.0, 2.0 and atom 0.3 and 1.0 feeds sucks. i made a list of the things i did today while avoiding working on the book:

• made a new gtalk/myspace image
• uploaded the attached drawing i'd made last week of the bike-eat-asarus to flickr
• did a bit of chatting with etta about how the sequel to the bike-eat-asarus would totally destroy her etta-tron:

  Etta: nice!
    not as good as my etta-tron blowing your shit up, but good nonetheless
  me: well yeah, but the next one will breath missles!
  Etta: RBM's?
    sweet.
  me: and shoot bullets from it's mechanical eyes!
  Etta: fortunately my death ray renders them useless.
  me: it'll overwhelm your meager death ray with it's MISSLE SWARM!
  Etta: ?
    (i'm giving you a skeptical look right now, FYI)
  me: and then when you're distracted the tail whip will destroy you
  Etta: tail whip?
   yikes...now that's a little scary
  me: and then meca-zilla will pour out an over sized novelty 40oz in 
    memory of the etta-tron

• decided to start a webcomic wherein ?-zilla monsters will battle robots, ninjas and bicycle messengers. mostly so i could have monsters pouring out a giant novelty 40oz
• my bike now has a myspace page
• planned a trip to san francisco for the weekend of may the 12th. if your in that town, start saving up to buy me beers

so, long time no post. just wanted to make sure this thing still worked. had a dandy of a spring break. went back east to new yalk on a free ticket my dad had. had a wonderful stay visting nick and blythe. riding through the crazy mother fucking streets of that city made me wish i was a messenger by day computer programmer by nite. bought some manties at h&m, had some amazing meat sodas at an amazing bar in brooklyn, saw the jewish run b&h photo aned even bought some film. almost missed my flight back trying to show off my friends myspace photo that looks exactly like ziggy stardust. it was beautiful.

last weekend, i went down to harrisburg with eban and holly to ride in the cherry pie. they had a fixed gear class so i figured what the fuck. it was my first road race and i learned quite a bit. the first was not to make changes you your bike the night before. i'd swapped to a smaller cog and wasn't really comfortable pushing that big a gear. i kept up with the pack for about half of it but it was a pretty small pack so when i got dropped there wasn't anyone to draft off so i ended up riding the rest by myself. i passed the women b's and then did my best to stay in front of them. i thought i'd done pretty badly but it turns out i beat out seven other riders.

this weekend i'm going to hit up the jack frost time trial. should be a good time.

for the last week they've been filming a movie at PSU. the movie's about some guy who came back from vietnam with hearing damange and became an activist. he's being played by the lead guy from office space that i always confuse with charlie sheen.

part of it's being shot down at KPSU today. they needed a place that looked like an 1980s radio station and i guess we fit the bill. they came in and built a big fake wall and pulled out a bunch of the old equipment we'd had in the back closet. they're getting ready to shoot now, the funny part is listening to them talk, it's all "hey which movie did i work with you on?" they both rattle off a bunch of titles and then decide on one.

i got an email this morning from a girl looking for contributions for a zine on loosing things. here's what i sent her:

Back in the summer of 2001, my best friend and I rode bikes from Reno, NV to Portland, OR and then to Washington, DC. I had a Palm VII with a modem that I used to write up daily journal entries that I mailed out to friends, family and people we met along the way. After we left Chicago, I started getting behind in the emails. My dad was going to be in DC for a meeting and if we timed it right we'd be able to stay in his hotel. To keep on schedule we were riding more each day and I didn't have time to write. I'd do an outline of each day's events, planning to finish them up when we had some time in DC.

The last 180 miles of the trip we rode on the C&O tow path from Cumberland, MD into Georgetown. The path is follows the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal that was constructed in the first half of the 1800s. The barges were towed by mules who walked on the path. It was a beautiful change from highway shoulders. No cars, easy camping, lots of nice people and wonderful scenery.

The final day, less than 80 miles from DC, my Palm computer fell from my sadle bag where I'd kept it the entire trip. I didn't notice that it was missing for a few miles. We spent almost three hours riding back and forth looking for it. I was pretty bumbed out about the whole thing. Besides all the half-finished emails, I had addresses of people who'd let us stay with them that wanted to mail thank you notes to, statistics on stupid things like the number of loaves of bread we'd eaten and flat tires we'd fixed. I don't think it was the loosing that bothered me but where I'd lost it, that close to the end.

yet again, i'm proud to be a portlander. triment, the local transit agency, has teamed up with google to put together a kick ass trip planner. now if they'd only run the max from the airport to my house in time for the last soutwest flight of the night...

just in case you're wondering, this isn't me. this isn't either. though, this will be.

in preparation for the upcoming poker ride, i just placed a bid for 101 decks of playing cards on ebay. if i get them, i'll have a lifetime supply of playing cards for about $0.50 a deck.

as you may know, my father wrote a book on an country musician by the name of deford bailey. he was the first african-american in the grand ole opry and part of the origin of the opry's name. this week, deford was finally inducted into the country music hall of fame. a year or two back, i helped my dad setup a basic website, defordbailey.info to host some of the photos he'd collected. in honor of deford's induction, i've setup a new website using drupal that looks a lot nicer and should be much easier to update. next stop, content.