Henry Rose

After our bike ride yesterday Peter, Austin and I went to Smarty Pants in Georgetown.

We’d just ridden 70 miles in the sun and were all hungry and thirsty. Smarty Pants has a nice little patio where they bring you food and drink … just the ticket.

This place fits the Georgetown aesthetic just perfectly. It’s all very mod and motorcycle centric with industrial finishes and a pleasingly hip black and red color scheme.

The patio is pleasant, but in a very Georgetown kind of way. It is located immediately next to a busy freeway overpass which blocks much of the sky and provides a steady rumble. It’s also right on the flight path for jets landing at Boeing Field and along a major train line, not a quiet place. But it’s quite clean and they’ve decorated it nicely with some cool art, including a very appealing statue of a motorcycle.

We started out with a pitcher of the Bridgeport IPA, which was a pleasing post-ride beer. The beer came quite quickly after we ordered it and at $12/pitcher it was pretty reasonably priced.

I ordered the Rueben sandwich with beef (I was a bit surprised to have more than one meat option on a rueben …). The sandwich was good, and much appreciated, but a bit light on the flavor. The horseradish sauce lacked any serious kick and the meat seemed a bit washed out. The rye it came on was delicious and toasted however.

The sandwich came with a pickle and some potato salad. The potato salad was delicious and packed with mayo.

All in all it was an excellent experience, but probably not worth a special trip.

Yesterday I took the day off work to make some headway on my training for the upcoming STP. The outstanding thing about our route was how many parks we were able to visit and how much of the route was on bicycle infrastructure. I’d estimate that of the 70 miles we were on designated bike routes for about 50.

I’ll always advocate the right of bicycles to ride on the road, but in some industrial and suburban areas there’s still a lot of work to be done. And designated bike infrastructure makes these kinds of a trips a whole lot easier.

Our route was as follows:
North to Kenmore on the Burke Gilman Trail
South to Marymoor Park on the Sammamish River Trail
South on Lake Sammamish Parkway
West (and UP!) on 34th/35th
West on SE Eastgate Way
West on I-90 Trail to Enatai Beach Park, here we met Peter

We then backtracked a bit to Lake Washington Boulevard
South on Lake Washington Trail to Renton … all the way around the airport
South on Rainier to 7th Ave to some small, unnamed trail
We then hooked up with the Green River Trail that took us all the way back to Georgetown and Smarty Pants, which fed me delicious food and beer.

In the end it was just over 70 miles. I need to ride twice that distance in a single day, less than a month from now.

When did AIM add even MORE aimbots? I just noticed that it’s gone from just “Moviefone” and “ShoppingBuddy” to a whole slew of worthless bots. Although I am a bit curious about this “Prof Gilzot” Bot, i’ll take the bait.

Well, here’s how my conversation with Prof Gilzot went:
12:29:42 PM hreonsrey: Hello
12:29:42 PM profgilzot: Welcome hreonsrey, I am Prof Gilzot and will help you with your SATs. I am a great reason for your parents to allow you to IM even longer than you already do! You can start testing right away by typing menu or learn more about me and my colorful past by typing more.
12:29:52 PM hreonsrey: menu
12:29:52 PM profgilzot: Here is a list of things Prof Gilzot can do. Type in a selection and enjoy!
1. Challenge yourself to a question.
2. How am I doing Prof?
3. Top 10 Results
4. New Questions Alert
5. Email Test Results
6. Refer a friend.
12:29:58 PM hreonsrey: 1
12:29:59 PM profgilzot: Here are the tests you can take.
1. Math Test
2. Sentence Completion Test
3. Vocabulary Test

12:30:01 PM hreonsrey: 1
12:30:01 PM profgilzot: Are you ready to take the Math Test?
12:30:03 PM hreonsrey: yes
12:30:04 PM profgilzot: Here we go and good luck hreonsrey!!!

If x + 3 is an even integer, then x could be which of the following?

(A) -6
(B) -2
(C) 1
(D) 2
(E) 0

12:30:23 PM hreonsrey: c
12:30:24 PM profgilzot: You are correct!

Are you ready for another question?
12:30:28 PM hreonsrey: not really
12:30:28 PM profgilzot: Hm? Type menu or help.
12:30:31 PM hreonsrey: help
12:30:31 PM profgilzot: Here is a list of things Prof Gilzot can do. Type in a selection and enjoy!
1. Challenge yourself to a question.
2. How am I doing Prof?
3. Top 10 Results
4. New Questions Alert
5. Email Test Results
6. Refer a friend.
12:30:37 PM hreonsrey: 2
12:30:38 PM profgilzot: Math Test: 100.0% (1/1 correct)

I can send you the full tests you have taken if you want. Just type 5 to proceed. To go back to the main menu type menu or help.

It looks like AIM is trying to stay relevant by providing some content. Interesting … I also had a fun conversation with Spleak (http://www.spleak.com/) She advised me not to sleep with Lindsay Lohan … thanks Spleak.

I’ll never forget the first night I spent in the dorms at the University of Washington. I didn’t go to a crazy party. I didn’t even drink. I didn’t meet new people or see new sights. I got on the internet … fast.

This was September, 2001 and the broadband revolution was just getting started. I had a slick new Dell laptop that I’d bought for college and had used it for about a month at my parents house, on dial up internet. At the time I was a subscriber to a service called emusic, which provided legal downloads of a ton of music for a flat rate. I would download an album every once in a while, but had to expect that it would be an overnight affair.

That first night in the dorms I downloaded over 20 albums. Going from dialup internet to a 100mpbs connection to a core University network was quite a jump. I haven’t experience an increase in browsing speed like that in a long, long time.

I do have two tips that will help you browse faster today.

Fancy-Pants DNS

This first tip is something i moved over to some time ago. If you’re not familiar with DNS (Domain Name System), it’s basically the system that takes the human readable web addresses we’re familar with (google.com, henryrose.info, etc) and turns them in to IP addresses that our computers can understand. This service is generally handled by your ISP, but I recommend outsourcing the job to a pack of nerds.

The guys over at OpenDNS have worked hard to provide the fastest DNS lookups (along with a host of other features). You may think, how could translating the name of a website a little bit faster possibly make my browsing faster? Well it can, and the effect is amplified when you have content coming from multiple domains on a single page. For example if the site your looking at is on livejournal.com and contains images linked from flickr.com you’re already up to at least two DNS lookups. Complicated pages with lots of media resources can have many more.

Using OpenDNS couldn’t be easier, you’ll just need to change a few numbers in your network setup. The guys over there do a great job of explaining how to use it.

Safari

I hate to be a total fanboy, but Apple’s Safari 3 is a pretty sweet step forward in terms of page rendering speed. While I’m not sure I believe the numbers that Steve Jobs claims, i have noticed substantially faster load times, particularly for pages that use lots of javascript.

Pages such as GMail, Flickr and other so called Web 2.0 services use lots of javascript to make the page feel interactive, like a desktop application (think MS word). Safari seems to be the fastest at figuring out what all that javascript means, and making it work for you, the end user.

So there you have it, with these two tweaks to your browsing setup you should notice a substantial upturn in your speed. Enjoy!

So a while back I was all hott on the plan to make a bike-centric social network, but the market got crowded and I got lazy. But now that Facebook has opened up to third party developers I think i’ve got an opportunity to do it for real.

Keep you eye out for Facebook Bikes!