ghotifish.net

Miles Biked: 23.06
Average Speed: 15.4 mph

Miles Biked: 23.64
Average Speed: 14.9 mph

Sometimes, things are more than the sum of their parts:

• Rock + Track Suits = Olympic Hopefuls

  A great concert, and only $6 + bus fare! I found them to be a pretty fresh twist on the whole apathetic-indie-rocker thing — I think my exact words were “they’re so good it makes their irony ironic.” What the hell does that mean?

• Hacker Activity + Microsoft Inactivity = IE Loses Market Share

  This is covered and commented upon pretty well elsewhere:

  Anything that raises awareness that there exist alternatives to Windows is a good thing for everyone other than Microsoft.

  There’s nothing I like better than seeing a monopoly get a good run for their money. I was never any good at Monopoly.

• Belle & Sebastian + Jefferson Airplane = The Owls

  So much potential! So much instrument swapping! So few bridges!

• New York City + Bicycles = Happy New Yorkers

  I’m still a bit intimidated by downtown Minneapolis, so I don’t know if I’d fare too well in Manhattan. But things are supposedly improving:

  Though calling New York bike-friendly would be a stretch, the frosty relationship between city and bike has thawed. Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner and a lifelong cyclist, told me that one day he hoped to see ribbons of green joining the city’s neighborhoods, a seamless network for cycling and nonmotorized forms of transportation.

  A seamless network, eh? Sounds nice. Call me when it’s done.

• Imprinted Geese + Tenacious French Filmmakers = Winged Migration

  This movie starts at “visually stunning” and gets better from there. If you get the DVD, be sure to watch the “Making Of” featurette for the latest news from the Adirondacks.

Don’t worry; I’m OK. Just needed a quick breather.

David received a book in the mail today — with his face on the cover. America, meet (one of) Carleton College’s new Academic Catalog cover boy(s). Quite a step up from a 1″x1″ thumbnail on the back.

Also: hello from the big, bad, and theoretically unstable world of Gnome 2.8. All in all, I’d say its pretty good stuff. Evolution feels much more solid; new system tools are cool but scary (GUIs for things like init scripts make me uneasy); browsing Windows networks is now stupidly simple — even when “Windows network” means a 5-year-old desktop-cum-headless server sitting in the corner running Samba on Gentoo.

I’m a bit bewildered — and I think even insulted — by the success the Bush camp has had in portraying Kerry’s educational background and general “smart guy” image as a negative thing. In the debate Bush was able to appear generous by conceding that there is “nothing wrong with” Kerry’s status as a Yale alumn, but in the overall campaign I think there remains a sense that Kerry must somehow apoligize for the aberrant act of attending one of America’s most respected educational institutions. America seems to have become obsessed with having an “average” president in the White House.

The problem is, “President of the United States” is not an average job.

The President is privy to information that would make the average American start stocking up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. He has astonishingly direct control over the most advanced military in the world. He is trusted with the responsibility of representing America to the other 95% of the world’s population. These are not tasks that I would entrust to the average American. Shouldn’t we be looking for the best American?