Bike Summer Kickoff

June 06, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Friday was the kick-off event for Bike Summer 2005, a month-long series of bike events that is in LA this year. The kick-off party (there are some pictures available from that link) was in Santa Monica, so I met up with the group starting off from the Wilshire/Western Red Line station. We started off with around 25 or so cyclists, and then took a pit stop at Venice and La Cienega to let another group meet up with us (which is where this picture of me and Dave got taken. By the time we got to Santa Monica our group probably had sixty or seventy people in it.

Saturday morning I took the short three mile ride up to the Edendale library for the Town Crier Competition and found out my legs were pretty much dead. Yesterday and today are biking off-days for me, so hopefully they'll be back in shape for my commute ride tomorrow.

Tired, and it's only 5pm

June 04, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I swear I've been going for two days straight. Lots to write about, but no time to do it right now. I came home just a little while ago, sat down at the computer, and realized that I could easily fall asleep in my chair. No time for that either, though; I'm out the door again in forty-five minutes or so. When I get back here after dinner I think I'm going straight to sleep.

Conserve By Bicycling

June 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I missed this when the resolution was first made, but a few weeks ago Tom LaBonge proposed a resolution in support of a proposed federal Conserve by Bicycling program. The CLA's report in favor has just come back, so now hopefully this will go through committee and back to the Council to be added to the City's Legislative Program.

Stupid Broken CUPS. Stupid Broken Printing Support.

June 01, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Here's why I absolutely despise printer tools in Linux. I open up the gnome-cups-manager, click the print test page button, and then try to pause the job. The GUI freezes and here's the message I get on the terminal:

** (gnome-cups-manager:29261): WARNING **: FOOBAR

Right. Like I'm supposed to know what that means. Not even Google has seen that error before.

There was a Slashdot thread not too long ago about printing and all these posts were saying "I don't know what they're complaining about. The Linux tools work perfectly with my network postscript printer." DUH! I'd love to be dealing with something simple and easy like that, but instead -- back here in the real world of the home desktop -- we have things like little Epson Stylus Colors. They don't speak postscript, and they certainly don't have a network interface.

It's a New Month

June 01, 2005 by Eric Richardson

It seems a little non-sensical to say this, since I wrote my rent check this morning, but I just realized after I got into the office that this was June 1st. As usual I took the Gold Line northbound, and as sometimes happens there were fare inspectors that checked the train at Filmore. They were perfectly content to nod at my May monthly pass and let me go, which makes me wonder if there's a little leeway on these things, or if they're just forgetful like I am.