Online Bike Stores

It’s usually better to support your local shop, but here are some Internet bike stores:

Jenson USA
Performance Bikes
Bike Nashbar
SuperGo
PricePoint
Cambria Bicycle Outfitters
BikeMan

Mountain Bike Rides near White Plains, NY

I also did a ride at West Woods Trails in Connecticut. We got lost and accidentally rode big chunks of the yellow circle, yellow square, and purple trails. Apparently they’re not supposed to be open at the present time. The yellow square and purple trails are largely rideable, if you really like slow-going technical stuff. I would keep away from the yellow circle. There are some sections that border on rock climbing, which is pretty precarious with a bike in tow.
I’ve done a good bit of mountain biking this summer, most of it near White Plains, NY. I thought I’d catalog where I’ve been.

Sprain Ridge Park is a small park that has lots of twisty singletrack. There are plenty of difficult technical spots. It’s easy to tailor a ride to whatever length you want, making this park one of my favorites for night rides.

Graham Hills is another small park with a surprising number of trails inside. DirtWorld talks about it here. The one so-called “crazy” descent is steep, but there’s nothing too special about it if you know how to modulate your brakes.
Blue Mountain is a larger park with all kinds of trails in it. There’s a slow technical one called The Monster. Other trails to check out include Upper and Lower SIS, the Yin and the Yang, and everything else. All the trails are of consistent high quality. There’s even a Mountain Bike Festival here during the summer, which I had the pleasure of attending.

Saxon Woods Park is a cool little park on Mamaroneck Avenue, which anybody who has been to White Plains knows is one of the major streets through town. At the south end of Mamaroneck Ave., where it meets the Hutchinson River Parkway, is Saxon Woods Park. The place has some sizeable drops and steep descents. Lots of good behind-the-saddle stuff. Great fun at night.

If you’ve looked carefully at these links, they’re all in westchestergov.com’s Parks section. It’s an impressive website for a government to maintain. I suppose that’s fitting based on the mean income in West Chester County.

Surefire Farm Event Weekend

I spent this past weekend in VA with Kathleen. It was largely dominated by the Surefire Farm Event. I have pictures:

Surefire Farm Event, Philomont, VA, July 23 - 24, 2005

As usual, you can find these and all my other pictures here.

Of note are Bear’s incredible diving board skillz.

Barrett is the man

My old roommate from UVA, Barrett, is the man. First, he was in a tire commercial while he was still in high school. Second, he left me an amazing voicemail, which you can listen to as an MP3. If you listened, you can get a sense for why he might be a good man to advertise tires. Today, he works on the ECOmod project at UVA. It was recently featured on the Charlottesville NewsPlex. Here are Barrett’s comments on it:

Go to this link and click on the link on the right hand side for building the American Dream video. I am wearing the plaid shirt. . . so anytime you see it that is me. . . oh and amy check out the close-up on my watch with the jig saw.

What a man.

Linux Kernel 2.6 Module Programming

I expected it to be much more difficult to program my own kernel modules. It turns out it’s not so bad. I learned by reading The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide.

Death Star Subwoofer

Andy Baker designed a Death Star Subwoofer. It is critical that you look at the pictures where it is in the garage, because then you can see how enormous it is. Obi Wan has taught him well.

Microsoft on 1337

During middle school, as SysOp of my own BBS, I fancied myself 1337. Pity my parents didn’t have this website available then.

Multiple Desktops for Windows and OS X

I use Linux a lot and I like having multiple desktops. For a long time I complained that there was no decent (emphasis on decent) software to enable them on Windows XP or Apple OS X. Times they are a-changin’.

Desktop Manager for OS X

MultiDesk for Windows XP

Multidesk has some issues, which I haven’t tried to resolve. The primary one being that X connections from Linux machines don’t always work correctly. For X I use Xwin32.

Cscope is my friend

Here are some useful references:

cscope for large projects
Vim/Cscope tutorial
Abd-El-Malek on emacs/Cscope

And here’s a website for doing similar, linux kernel-specific, queries without having to have the code on your own machine:

lxr.linux.no.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

I somewhat recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book is a classic for a reason. Go read it.