Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

Very well done video demonstrating the “Idaho Stop” as well as some basic bicycle principles.

It’s about 3:00 PM Sunday afternoon and I’m presently sitting in a very comfy seat aboard the Coast Starlight Amtrak train headed home. I’ve spent a majority of the day with my little netbook working on some process documentation for my job. Periodically taking breaks to look out the window and the rapidly greening spring or to write. I needed to sync a version of a file I had saved on Mesh earlier this week so, as I’ve done periodically since I started this particular venture two weeks ago, I hooked up my phone and got on the network. The Internets must love me.

While I’ve got it all set up and running and we’re running between metropolitan areas of northern Oregon (3G, yeah baby!) I figured I’d update this here blog with a few thoughts regarding this trip.

Bus Travel

Busses are not designed for tall people. This becomes immediately apparent to you if you happen to be one of these people. Leaving from Ellensburg late at night the bus was not very full of people. I started the 1,100 mile journey to Grand Junction seated near the front of the bus heading south through the wet darkness of south central Washington, but I could, because of the lack of riders spread out. All that changed when I changed busses in Oregon. The next leg of the ride was jam packed with people and while the seats are comfortable, I’m much too tall to realize this potential comfort.

It didn’t matter how I sat in my seat, my knees knocked against the seat in front of me. By Idaho my knees were bruised. Utah there was some swelling. And by Colorado, my arrival was at 2:00 AM, I was stiff and having trouble sleeping. Other than that however, the bus was a real bargain and an adventure to boot.

I made new friends and had a great time. There were, from time to time, some creepy folks who tended to the rear of the coach, but mostly everyone was just like you or me … only on the bus.

Connectivity was great! Mostly 3G with periods of EDGE and only a very few outages which meant that while I was getting my butt carted through various and sundry states I was also able to get plenty of work done.

Train Travel

Shortly after I arrived in Colorado the knee thing had me looking for an alternative for the return trip. At least, I figured, I can get up and walk around if the seats are crammed one against the other on Amtrak. Lucky me, they’re not. There’s like a soccer field separating the seat rows on the big western train coaches. That black clad knob on the left is my knee, I could almost lift up my booted feet and stretch them straight before me while seated and not touch the seat ahead of me. This is coach mind you!

Even better the seats really recline. Sleeping was not a problem either night.

Connectivity hasn’t been an issue either. The train coaches are wired for 120 Volt AC (two sockets per row) and I’ve only been in the dark twice that I know of since leaving Grand Junction Friday afternoon. Maybe a little more EDGE than 3G, but all in all I’m getting what I need to get my work and recreation done.

The train takes a little longer to get me where I’m going, but it does so in a style that I couldn’t achieve any other way. Plus the ratio of creepy people to folks-you-wouldn’t-mind-talking-to has been much improved. If Microsoft, Acer, AT&T or Samsung wanted to improve their image on the national theater they would send out more people like me to simply ride around on the train demonstrating these great technologies in action. They’ve gotten this one on the house I suppose.

Getting Sick

Pretty much sucks where ever you happen to be or whatever you happen to be up to. I got sick on this trip and it, somewhat predictably, sucked. First, huge thanks to my parents who took care of me during the 48 hour fever like I was still a child. Being sick would have sucked even more had they not helped me out. I felt like hell for a considerably annoying period of time and I was angry at myself for coming down with the bug right in the middle of when I should have been having a ball. Hell the party was scheduled after all.

Working from Main Street Bagels

Alright, it wasn’t the only place I worked from while I was in the Grand Valley, but it was where I went to most often. I met other tele-workers while I was there and these were people who also tended to frequent the place if that’s any indication of the quality of service which has been achieved at Main Street Bagels. Thanks in particular to Adrian who made me feel like a “regular” right from the start.

So summary, bus is ok, train is way better. Eat bagels and drink coffee at Main Street Bagels if you can. And above all, avoid getting sick. If you can’t, realize that it’s nice to have parents that will take care of your graying, sad, and sorry case despite all the boogers and phlem.

Introduction

We here in central Washington can arguably say that the ground hog was wrong this year because we’re starting to experience spring-like weather in-between the periodic temper tantrums of winter as it is dragged kicking and screaming into recent history. This means that the fire I keep warm under my bicycle touring pot is once again stocked and the pot is now boiling over with plans and potential.

I’ve been inspired to investigate some of the new technologies and services that are appearing at various places on the web. One of these, “crowdsourcing”, could provide bicycle tourists the world over with access to a temporary and much needed labor pool. Imagine for instance you’re somewhere between here and there and you realize, miles into a multi-month tour across some continent or other that you need a part FedExed to the next village post haste. You could call Mom, but what if she’s on a tour of her own? Now what do you do? There’s only so much longer that you can continue to limp along with those pig iron rims and it sure would be better than cheese and crackers if someone would take care of getting the replacement pair to the inn you’re now camped out in before your pocketbook is completely drained.

I’ve been testing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to see if this might provide me with the labor I need to fix some of these kinds of problems as the crop up on longer tours. I’ve started to build a little resource pool of worker credit with the intent of learning what it might take to get a complete stranger to help me complete routine tasks all the way to bail me out if and when the situation calls for it.

Many of the worker tasks I’ve found and been qualified to complete at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been online, but occasionally there’s one that will require more than just a mouse hand and an internet connection to complete. Today for instance I accepted and completed a task to:

• Print a document out twice
• Go around town posting the 16 sheets of the document up in public places
• Take a photo of at least one of them
• And post that photo somewhere the Requestor could see it

It was a pretty straight forward task although the pay is a bit low. Actually, what people are willing to offer for the work they want done doesn’t really make it competitive, but I imagine that this might change over time.

So what is “Turking” and Should I be Offended?

First you should not be offended, even if you happen to be of Turkish descent. There’s nothing derogatory or inflammatory in the statement that would hint at malignant intent. In fact, it’s a oblique reference to the Mechanical Turk; which was an invention of a fellow named Wolfgang von Kempelen in the mid-1700s. The device was billed as a box that contained an expert chess player, but which at first glance appeared to be an automaton of exceptional artificial intelligence.

The idea behind “turking” is that you can use technology to complete tasks that humans are best suited to. Amazon has taken it a step further by making it possible to access large resource pools of qualified humans via a croudsourced model.

I first ran across this idea while reading a novelette by Tobias Buckell called Stoasti-city which is part of a shared creation SF project of many up and coming writers. In the story croudsourced tasks drive the city of Detroit toward a new awakening and the effect is quite profound. Better it all seems to happen on technology and by way of networks that are already in place today. The story itself is an exciting exploration of the framework that I’m sure you’ll enjoy as much as I did.

The reality of turked out networks isn’t quite as grand in implementation today as it is in Toby’s imagination of the future. There are a lot of people trying to get you test or contribute to their projects by way of a mouse and a modem. Step one, go to this web site. Step two, say something about my thing, step three do another thing, et cetera.

What am I willing to do and for how much?

Seems like a pretty easy question to ask yourself before you start asking complete strangers to run all over town for you for what can be arguably tiny amounts of money. How much time should I expect my task to be completed it? How will I find the right person to do what I need at the right time? Other questions abound, but they are all potentially answerable. I figured I’d start to root out the associated answers but acting as the turk for a while.

Last night for instance I accepted a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) that had a considerably more restrictive time limit than was necessary to complete the task. Someone wanted 20 trivia questions, their associated answers, and three plausible answers delivered in 60 minutes all on a single theme. I tried, but the time expired when I had only 13 completed. I never got to submit the task and the requestor lost out on my contribution efforts because the assigned timeline was too restrictive. Lesson learned, give your turk at least the time it might take you to complete the task or maybe a little more.

I’ve passed over other HITs as well because what was being asked of the turk was either very time intensive, the contract did not come with a reasonable compensation, or both. For instance, there have been several article writing contracts that have popped up on in my queue which offered merely a dollar or two in compensation, but would have required an hour or two of my time. I’m not desperate so why bother? Lesson two learned, ensure you’re not too cheap when you ask for complex or time consuming tasks to be completed.

Finally, there are some tasks that appear to have been around since the dawn of time. I’ve passed over these because, frankly, they are boring. I mean like mind numbingly boring. And because there are some tasks that I can accept which are interesting or which represent the potential for a good time these are merely a speed bump on my way to turking success. Lesson three; if you need something done that you wouldn’t want to do yourself because it might turn the contents of your cranium to mush you either need to sweeten the contract with really silly amounts of money or expect that no one will ever complete your task (including you).

Today’s Turk

Today I was paid (albeit just a little) to ride my bike around town putting up posters for someone’s art project. The first thing I want to point out here is that finally someone *paid* me to ride my bike. I mean can you believe it? So what if my sponsorship was only a $1.50 minus paper and ink, I was still paid baby! Yeah! W00t! Daddy got paid to ride his bike!

Ok, just needed to get that out of my system. I apologize to those of you who make vastly larger sums of money anytime you sit astride a saddle and turn a crank. Lance Armstrong, know that if ever our bike riding incomes are compared I will lie and tell them that I made a whole pot of gold. Your bottom line is safe with me, buddy.

The reason I did what I did had nothing to do with the money. This was an experiment in the interest of science! Imagine if you will a situation you could find yourself in should you be capable of putting together a long duration tour across some vast amounts of land astride a bicycle. Maybe you’re helping to pay the bills while you’re on the road by stopping over in various places speaking on the topic of your tour (as it progresses) and presenting digital images of the places you’ve visited to modest crowds at college campuses across the country.

So it occurs to me, wouldn’t it be great if there were posters hung all over these campuses preparing the crowds for your impending visit? You could wait until you arrive there, end up looking around for a printer, and then stumble around an unfamiliar campus trying to find the best places to hang your poster to get said crowd ready for your visit. All the while waiting and camping relatively stationary for a time while the excitement builds.

Or, you could try to turk the task from the road. Days or even weeks before you arrive at your destination.

I accepted the HIT today because I wanted to see what it might actually take, how much time it might cost etc to get something like this done. Even better this is an interesting HIT because I was able to ride around on my bike, poking my head into shops, asking for permission to hang a flyer in the window, riding around campus finding all the bulletin boards, and visiting coffee shops and talking with strangers (while sampling their beans).

Future Turking Experiments

I plan on continuing to build a modest pool of resources by working as a turk when time and availability of interesting jobs allow. Once I’ve built a reasonable reserve I will reinvest the money I’ve earned (plus potential augmentation capital) back into the system to see if I can get people to do some of the following tasks:

• Complete minor or low resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete major or higher resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete minor or low resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete major or high resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete tasks on a timeline
• Use integrated services (such as PayPal) to achieve tasks that exceed the services which can be provided via the MTurk system (e.g. go to a specific location after receiving money from me to buy a thing then send it along. The money would to buy the thing and the shipping would have to be conveyed via PayPal in this instance, but compensation for the task would run through MTurk).
• Help me complete larger scale practical jokes

Perhaps not this year, but at some point in my future I intend to take this show on the road. From time to time I will know that I will need a support resource that I can reasonable count on to get things done for me in my absence. This system has the potential to meet such a role requirement, if I can figure out how best to use it.

I was really hoping to hear two things today at the National Clean Energy Project : Building the New Economy online summit:

• That the lowest hanging fruit on the energy independence tree *is* unquestionably the American home. Improving the efficiency of the American home should be a primary concern of anyone interested in achieving national energy independence. Legislation and incentives need to be offered directly back to the American citizen to accomplish this task universally.
• De-coupling and localized point-source generation need to become the second major part of this dialogue. The days of very large corporations generating very large collections of energy may not be over, but the American people need to the liberty to create human-scale power generation projects. Small is beautiful.

Both of these sentiments were voiced by President Clinton. For this I am grateful. Carbon-caps, using natural gas as a large scale transition fuel, smart-grid technology, and Wal-mart’s efficiency improvements are all nice, but they don’t have an immediate or palpable effect on me or my family.

American’s really need to reach back a little bit in time and realize that they’re part of what ever community they happen to live within. These communities are the basis for a Local Sufficiency movement that could be in the best interests of its constituent membership.

Three days in a row, that’s how many. We’re starting to experience a pattern of weather that’s not, if memory serves, unlike something they call “spring”. Blue sky, warmer temperatures, little growing things poking their little growing heads from underneath last year’s layer of dead stuff. There’s still that undeniable nip to endure when the sun hides behind the horizon, but there’s the very distinct possibility that we’re now headed toward warmer days. All together now, sigh with general relief, winter may be in its death throes.

This year I’m getting back to a saner/healthier kind of living (or at least that’s the resolve). That means many things. I’ve begun to prepare my garden beds so they’ll be ready to host the vegetables I’ll soon plant in them. The house has had an initial “spring cleaning” run-down. Projects, indoors and out, are being addressed as time and resources allow. It also means that it’s time to get Scout out of storage and back on the road again.

Some of the leather looks pretty rough and the paint job has started to show its age, but the bike remains essentially sound. I have a short list of modifications I’d like to make sooner than later:

• I almost never use the drop-outs on my handle bars. Not even when forced to ride directly into gale force, hurricane winds. For that reason I’ve been considering switching to a Nitto Albatross CrMo.
• This would necessitate a general change in the breaking leavers and shifters I currently employ. This time around I think I’m going to stick with simple systems. No more indexed shifters, back to the fraction shifters. Nice compact break leavers are being shopped for as well.
• This year new fenders are a necessity. Ok, not really. But I really want a new pair. I’ll be looking for something that will fit and, as an added benefit, look really groovy. Maybe something in a nice clear maple with a red-ish stain?
• The cantilever breaks on this old girl have seen better days. For cantilever breaks they are extremely compact which means finding replacement parts may be difficult. This may mean I get to spend a really long time sitting with steel wool and a tooth brush, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
• I’d really like to look into a better way to carry my laptop around. Maybe this will be a bag I have to buy, or maybe I can fabricate it for myself? Ideas are still in a very fluid state.
• Last but not least, I need a new lock. I lost my key to the old one when we moved to central Washington and so I’ve got a very heavy piece of steel floating around inside my seat bag that serves no immediate purpose. Chuck the old, find something new (and lighter).

Finally, while Scout is an excellent utility bicycle for getting around town and even taking short (camping) tours up into the hills it’s not really designed for hauling large loads. Once Scout is made road worthy again I’ll continue to look for and/or design a cargo bicycle for myself. Also the human powered expedition vehicle (HPEV) has not been shelved. I’m getting there only it’s taking me more time than initially anticipated. There’s always something else to take care of.

Seattle Metro Bus

One of my favorite mailing lists just got a letter which I really enjoyed. Seems that there are some regional endeavors to help people live car-free/car-light and this city-by-city approach should really help people leverage the experience of the neighbors who may have good methods for dealing with specific challenges in those areas.

Living car-free/car-light in Seattle for instance meant that I had to routinely deal with crowded bike racks whenever I needed to cross Lake Washington. Routinely there was a queue that formed in the morning at several of the west side bus stops. There were several options for bike riders who wanted to get to the east side.

• Wait in line, eventually you’ll get a bike slot
• Buy and ride a folding commuter bike and carry a copy of the Metro policy which allows you access to the inside of the bus with a folded bike
• Ride around the north end of the Lake
• Ride across the I-90 bridge
• Ride a “dead-head” or “EB” bus to the arm-pit of Redmond

All of these options worked for me at various points in time, however, it took me years of riding over the bridge, or around the bridge, to come up with that brief list of options and for me to understand how each might affect the rest of my day.

Each region, each city, has its own challenges and if you’ve just moved, for instance, welcome back to square one.

I wonder what it would take to get something like this for every major metropolitan area and its surrounding region in the US? What would happen if people started exchanging information about getting what they needed from their local and regional transit authorities as well as the tribal knowledge that’s so important to success in this kind of social endeavor? Maybe a regional, state and national scorecard on how citizens are actually becoming oil independent? Some great possibilities.

Bold! Keynote speech by Greg Kolodziejzyk from Greg Kolodziejzyk on Vimea.

Very interesting speach given by Greg Kolodziejzyk. His accomplishments are a great example of the extremes that can be achieved with elegant design and muscle power alone. Very inspired guy who understands what the human body is capable of achieving as well as how to push the limits of experience. Maybe someday I’ll get to meet him.

Bicycle cultures are the next wave of human mobility. We’re going to have to suck tail pipe for a little while longer while we wait for the price of fuel to outpace the average American’s ability to afford it. That’s too bad to be sure, but this is happening and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Add to the above that the bicycle is the *only* readymade mobility solution to-date that can move through all our contemporary mobility infrastructure. We’re not retrofitting busses or clearing land for trains when we ride our bikes. There’s no need for advanced mining or carbon sequestering techniques to make this technology an everyday reality.

I wish, oh how I wish, that there was something like this near me.

Pedal People Move MA

I came across a fine example of a truly American powered solution meeting a specific societal requirement in Make vol 16 today.

The folks at Pedal People have a contract with the City of Northampton, MA to move 70 trash barrels to the local transfer center and a cooperative of 11 humans power this enterprise. Their mission statement follows:

“The Co-op uses bicycles and bicycle trailers to transport things, and is committed to using human power despite the culture of dependence on motorized vehicles. We hope that our use of relatively simple tools in sound business practice will debunk the prevailing belief that more technology is needed to solve problems.

We believe that social change is possible, and we share inspiration and education with people wanting to choose more sustainable lifestyles. We aim to make a living in a fair, noble way, exploiting no one.

We believe in the idea of low-income living as a counter to the work-consume-spend lifestyle common in America today. We also believe that by spending less time making a living, we can have more time to contribute to the community and live life at a human pace rather than a motorized pace.”

I started messing around rendering a few design ideas of a utility/modular velomobiles. In the past I’ve done this work all by hand because I haven’t known enough about any variety of software. Tonight however, I began messing around with Google’s SketchUp 7 and was actually able to make some immediate progress. Still learning how to make the tool render what I want to see, but measureable progress has been made.