Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Wow

    Not much else to say. Video of a storm super cell. Watch it full screen.

  • Early Access

    It takes money to make money. Imagine paying extra to get knowledge two seconds earlier than everyone else. Today, it’s worth a lot.

  • CitiBike Week

    My girls finished school yesterday and there’s a week before any summer camp type activities start. So they are sleeping in and chilling(well, not Victoria).

    So with no need to scooter them to school, I’m biking to work this week. Today is beautiful out so it’s a nice treat.

    According to the CitiBike blog, the bikes have been ridden over a half a million miles. In 16 days.

    I’m not sure how they calculate it. I’m assuming they track the distance from the origin bike rack to the destination bike rack. But if that is true, then the number they have is the absolute minimum the bikes have travelled. I checked my account and for the 15 or so trips I’m listed as going 0 miles. I’ve done some trips where I dropped the bike back where I started, but not today. So I’m wondering about the calculations a bit.

    Regardless, loving the system so far.

  • I Have a Regular Cat

    I’m not even a cat person (they make me sneeze) but this still cracks me up (courtesy Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal):

  • WWDC Explained in One Photo

    A hilarious take on the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference from Dan Ackerman:

    https://twitter.com/danackerman/status/344139912985059328/photo/1

  • More Sharing

    The NY Times expands on the theme of my previous post:

    It’s Not Just Nice to Share, It’s the Future

    Krugman must have loved writing this headline:

    Nazi Islamic Bikes From Hell

    And New York Magazine has a Venn Diagram explaining why conservatives hate CitiBike so much:

    It is a very slippery slope from sharing bikes to sharing everything. You blink and all of a sudden we’re a socialist dystopia, and everyone’s eating Bloomberg Vitamin Mush for every meal.

    Meanwhile, in the first ten days CitiBikes were ridden over 100,000 times for over 300,000 miles.

  • Learning to Share

    This is not a blog post about my daughters or Kindergarten. My day today has seemed like a collection of shared resources. After dropping my daughters at school I hopped on a shared bicycle (CitiBike) and rode to my shared office space (Green Desk).

    Of course at work I’m using shared infrastructure (Amazon, Google, et al). Today I had to run an errand to our storage place (shared warehouse) so I booked a shared car (ZipCar) online. The garage was a few blocks away so another shared bike ride to and from the garage.

    Later today I’ll ride another shared bike home to our co-op apartment (shared ownership).

    Sharing is a good thing.

  • Slow Morning

    I installed a new hard drive yesterday so I had to reinstall Windows. Overnight the updates arrived.

    image

    Getting off to a slow start today…

  • Death by Bicycle

    The Wall Street Journal has a somewhat hilarious video editorial bashing the new NYC Citibike bike share program. Bloomberg is apparently “totalitarian” (funny, he keeps winning elections by huge margins and unlike Iran voting against him is not likely to involve imprisonment).

    Click here for the video (I’m having issues embedding WSJ video). Honestly, it’s worth a click.

    The reaction around NYC has been what you would expect. People who get driven around in car service pissed off that there are more bikes on the road.

    The New Yorker has a great article about this. The author apparently rode in NYC 25 years ago. His experience:

    In those days, there were few cyclists on the roads, and part of the thrill was avoiding cabs and other vehicles that would suddenly swing into your lane, apparently oblivious to your presence. When I got back to my apartment on East 12th Street, I was sometimes shaking.

    This is actually his argument against bike lane. Apparently shaking is a feature, not a bug. I frankly did this in the early 90’s. The description is accurate. You put your life in your hands. So I’m a tad fond of the bike lanes.

    The whole thing has hit normally dull economics blogs.

    A media blog gets amusingly snarky…

    When Krugman is blogging about it, you know it’s big.

    Honestly, I rode home today on one of them today. I’m pretty sure I caused no massive repercussions. It strangely didn’t turn me into a Stalinist.

    Isn’t riding a bike supposed to be fun?…

  • Betteridge’s law of headlines

    I had heard of this before, but I saw it today on Daring Fireball. It’s a simple adage:

    Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.

    This is the link Daring Fireball was referring to, but I’d be hard pressed to find an exception to that rule.