Month: May 2026

Categories
general

New Bike

I’ve been commuting to the office on the BART train for a few years now. This is pretty painless except I drive a mile to the station, then pay $16 a day to park. Recently, they stopped selling reserved parking at the station by my house. They’re apparently tearing up the whole parking lot and building 750 units of housing and 50,000 square feet of commercial property. This roughly coincided with me going back to the office five days a week, so I suddenly need a new way to get to the train.

My first thought was to simply drive to another station. I tried this for a few days, going to the MacArthur station, which only costs $4 a day to park in the new garage. But that added 5-10 minutes of driving in each direction, and another 10-15 minutes of train time each way, which seemed silly. I also tried renting Lime scooters. They are all over the neighborhood, and cost maybe $4 a trip. They’re pretty quick, but after one or two trips, I knew it was when, not if. They’re pretty shaky, and I could easily see getting taken out by a pothole, of which there are many in West Oakland.

I bought a bike when RTO started in 2023, a very nice Cannondale Topstone, with thoughts that I’d ride to the Berkeley office a few days a week. I’ve honestly rode that bike exactly three times since I bought it, and none of them actual commutes. I rode it to the train a few times last month to see what my problem was, other than general laziness. I think the issue is that it’s a gravel bike with drop handlebars, and it’s entirely the wrong stance and geometry for a quick ride to work on the streets with a laptop backpack on.

I also still have the bike I bought in 2005, a Dahon Boardwalk folding bike. I think I’ve rode this bike maybe twice since I broke my arm on it in 2009. That bike has a more upright stance, but it’s also very wobbly and weird, top-heavy with tiny wheels, and it really needs a complete overhaul from sitting for 20 years. So I could pay $400 to redo a bike I don’t really like and bought for $300. Or I contemplated switching the handlebars on the Topstone, which would also require switching brakes and shifters, and I’m maybe $500 in on a project I might not like. Or I could just buy another bike.

So I did. I went to REI and picked up a Cannondale Quick CX 3. It’s a great hybrid bike, with a more upright stance and flat handlebars. It’s a very lightweight alloy frame, and pretty well equipped with the latest hardware. It has hydraulic disc brakes, which are new to me. There’s eight speeds, with a decent range for the city. The front fork has a suspension on it, but also has a quick-locking lever for when I don’t want it. Tires are grippy, but not too fat. There’s a phone mount on the stem, but otherwise the bike is all analog. And I love the color, which they call Rally Red. My Topstone is a matte stealth bomber black, which is cool. But the red is a nice contrast.

I’ve rode the new bike to the train every day last week, and it’s pretty much flawless. I had some fretting with the u-lock mount, how to keep it on the bike as I rode without making a ton of knocking noise. (I got a velcro holster thing that seems to work.) We have BikeLink lockers at the train station, which are secure enough for the day, and I u-lock it to the inside of the locker, too. It’s pretty ideal when it’s 70 and sunny out. What will it be like when it isn’t 70 and sunny? That’s a TBD.

I also went out a few times over the weekend. I’ve got 40-some miles on the bike already. I don’t know if I’m going to become a Bike Person. I can’t do spandex. I’m not anti-car enough. I’m definitely not in shape. I’ll have to work on that last one.

I also need to avoid any more gear acquisition. Work paid for the bike via our gym/fitness subsidy, which is nice. But I now spend too much time browsing forums, wondering if some new-fangled carbon fiber cargo rack will make my life complete. I need to cut that out, and just ride.

 

 

Categories
general

Jetlag, writing, nostalgia, jkwrite, dental drama, etc.

I don’t know why, but my jet lag after the Thailand trip was absolutely brutal. Maybe it was because I was gone longer than usual. Or maybe it was coming from a hot and sunny climate to the cold and cloudy and gray Bay Area spring. Or maybe spending a day in the germ tube gave me a little crud to get over. But I was pretty much knocked out for the week.

I don’t like to get into work stuff here, and I won’t go over my general feelings over this, but we’ve fully returned to office now, so I’m back in SF five days a week now. I know 87% of the country already works every day in the office, but this was a big, sudden shift for me, and it makes the week seem like 17 days long, now that it isn’t interleaved with WFH days. The other bummer with this is they’re closing the parking lot at my BART station, which means either I drive twice as long and then take a train also twice as long, or I figure out some way to ride a bike or scooter or something to the train. But, see above about constant pissing rain and cold here.

I’m back to working a few hours in the morning before I leave, back into the swing of things with Atmospheres 2, I think. I didn’t work on it at all during the trip, and lost a week or two when I was back. But I’m working it. I feel like it’s maybe two months away, if I can keep consistent with it every day. There are a few other distractions, but I’m trying to limit them as much as possible.

One thing that briefly popped up was this idea for a nostalgia-based book about various dead technologies or tools I was around for when they first broke. Like I was trying to install Linux at the end of 1992 when it was still more or less a Minix add-on. Around the same time, I created my first .hyplan file, which was basically a homepage on this thing called the World Wide Web. There are lots of other stories like this from the early 90s, and I spent a weekend trying to brain-dump some of this. But the writing is so wooden and redundant that it wasn’t helpful. And there needs to be some way to wrap these stories up in a gimmick, a hook, a format. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s a series of essays on a Substack, but those become boring journalistic things with no point and end up feeling like evergreen SEO garbage on a tech site full of affiliate links. There’s also the thought of using them as the bones of a Summer Rain-esque novel or set of stories. But I really don’t want to write another book like that. SR remains unpublished for a reason.

I think the biggest conflict with this nostalgia-based writing is it drags me back and makes me think about what I now realize is an incredibly painful era of my life, and I have no reason to wallow in that timeframe anymore. And the neuro-whatever part of my brain gets really locked into this stuff, and I find myself spending all day on newspapers dot com researching things that make me mentally ill. It’s really not worth it. I need to look forward and not back.

I’ve also mentioned this before, but so many of the communities around nostalgia – retrocomputer folks or old toy collectors or classic car hotrods – end up becoming dangerously adjacent to politics and this bitterness about how America was great and it isn’t anymore. I really can’t deal with that shit at all. And I can’t spend my time buying old electronics on eBay and setting up a VAX computer in my house that takes up free space I do not have, when I’ve got a pocket calculator in my desk drawer that has an order of magnitude more processing power. I get that some people love this stuff, but it’s dangerous for me to get into it. So, next topic.

* * *

This is another waste of time maybe, but I decided to mess with writing a Scrivener replacement. It’s not really a replacement, per se. I use Visual Studio Code all day every day, writing documentation in Markdown. And there are aspects of this IDE that I like better than Scrivener, like that the docs aren’t in a proprietary format, and it’s easily extensible. I thought about just straight-up writing the next book in Markdown in VSC, but I knew there were some bits that were missing that I need.

So, I started throwing something together, tentatively called jkwrite. It’s far from functional, and it’s probably not going to be usable by anyone but me, if I even finish it. But it’s been fun noodling on this a bit. The biggest problem, aside from that the more I implement, the more I realize I have way more to implement, is that I’m sitting in the same exact tools I use at work when I’m not at work. So I’m slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs, then getting to work and spending all day slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs. It’s like if I cooked Taco Bell food as a hobby at home, even though I spent 80 hours a week managing a Taco Bell. It’s an interesting distraction, though.

* * *

More dental drama, although this was sort of voluntary. I got another tooth crowned, a lower molar that’s been on the list for a while, and I wanted to burn the rest of this year’s insurance, so why not. This was a two-parter, with them cutting down the top of the tooth, doing some imprints, and putting on a temp crown that I was sure I was going to lose while eating. Went in yesterday and they actually couldn’t get the temp off, had to cut it in pieces to pry it loose. The new crown is on there and feels weird, very glossy and bigger than the old tooth, but the old one had too much metal filling and was lower than it should be, with a sharp edge on one side. It’s fine now, but the painful part was paying for it, on top of the other crown I got done in January.

I still go to my old dentist at Tanforan Mall. I’ve written about this already, but that mall is dire right now. They’re timing out the leases and getting ready to tear the whole thing down to build a biotech campus. I did a quick loop two weeks ago, and brought in a Canon 6D with no problem, since the inside of the mall is almost entirely vacant. It’s extremely depressing to be in there now. The Target is still going. And the Petco is still there. I went to Petco last night, and that’s also very sad to me. I remember going to that Petco on the way home from the vet with Loca in the carrier. We had to get some medicine or something, but I put her carrier up to the mouse cages and fish tanks so she could watch them. So it’s depressing to go there now, knowing the whole thing will be gone soon, replaced by a giant metal and glass tower housing the research team designing and patenting a competitor to Skyrizzi, treating moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. Time waits for no man, I guess.

Working on a new book nook. This one is for Yaowarat, the Chinatown in Bangkok. Kinda weird to be building a model of the place I just visited, but that’s fun. Lots of neon signs.