The Problem of Pants

November 02, 2005 by Eric Richardson

With the coming of cold weather[1] it becomes necessary to explore the question of how one goes about biking wearing pants. I'm really not cool with the whole idea of the strap around the pantleg or tucking a leg into your sock, so for me the question centered around short pants. Some people call them capris, others shants and even others manpris. I figured the whole concept of bikable attire (that wasn't bike attire; ie no spandex leggings or anything like that) had to be a fairly solved problem. This thread on bikeforums steered me in the right direction.

And so a week and a half ago I ordered two pairs of "knickers" from Prana: one pair of Mantis knickers and one of Jericho long knickers (pictured). The Mantis pair turned out to be sold out, so I only got the one. Finally having ridden in them today I'm happy to give a glowing report. The length is perfect for just clearing my front derailleur, and the combination of flexible material and a gussetted crotch work together to allow unimpeded riding. In fact I'm enough of a fan that I just ordered another pair, this time in Gunmetal (blue). I also ordered a pair of jeans, but those are for casual wear, not riding. — Continue Reading...

Three Strips are Better Than One

November 01, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So as mentioned previously, Kathy and I went to the Arclight on Friday to see How the West Was Won in Cinerama. It was a full-on three hour movie with an intermission and more than its share of big stars.

Watching Cinerama and the three strips is interesting. One of the articles I linked to in that last point noted that you start getting interested in seeing what creative set dressing they use to hide the overlap lines. It's obvious that the three panels are separate, but for the most part that didn't bother me. Some of the shots were just amazing -- in particular the Indian attacks and the buffalo stampede. The level of detail is kind of absurd.

I also really enjoyed the sound. The whole concept of filming with live surround (literally seven mics set up with placement resembling that of the speakers in the theater) is very low-tech cool.

After the show they let people walk through the projection booths and gave out little samples of film (four strips -- three picture plus one sound). The projectionists (not your average multiplex button-pushers) hung out to tell stories and answer questions. Pictured is one of the projectors (Charlie, in Cinerama parlance). Also interesting are pictures of the camera lenses and the rear of the camera with its multiple magazines.

One More Reason Arclight is Amazing

October 28, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Tonight Kathy and I are headed up to Hollywood to see How the West Was Won at the Arclight. The film is a restored print screening in the original 3-strip Cinerama format.

Now, likely you've never or only vaguely heard of Cinerama. I knew it was a 3-strip process (meaning three film strips -- three cameras & three projectors), but that was about it. A couple articles I read since buying the tickets really left me amazed at the process. This piece written by a USC film grad gets into some technical details, while this 20 year old piece from in70mm gets into some amazing shooting details from this particular film. I found this particularly fascinating:

"During early tests of the Cinerama camera, it was glaringly apparent that the huge format revealed fine detail to an extent no one could have imagined. Machine-sewn costumes were reassembled by hand and thousands of yards of authentic homespun were ordered from India. Fifteen hundred pairs of moccasins arrived from Indian reservations across the country, and an entire studio department was created to handcraft 2300 pairs of period shoes."

It will probably help to see a diagram of how the camera works. The whole setup with three lenses and a single shutter is crazy to think about, but yet it's actually a cool solution.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say after seeing the film tonight.

PHP Wants to Be My Kernel

October 20, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I love Debian, but there are aspects of the package management system that I don't understand. For instance, I'm trying to install the newest php4 in stable so that I can try to get mod_php working again. Simple enough, but apt-get is convinced it wants to delete my kernel:

[eWorld (eric@bit)-([Thu October 20 12:20pm])]
~: sudo apt-get install php4
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libapache2-mod-php4 php4-cgi php4-cli php4-common php4-mysql
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  initrd-tools kernel-image-2.4.26-1-386 kernel-image-2.4.27-2-686
<snip>
7 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 323 not upgraded.
Need to get 6633kB of archives.
After unpacking 62.0MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

I understand that 2.4 is old, but a) you would think php wouldn't care and b) you would like to think it would suggest installing a new kernel at the same time.

I really don't want it to touch that.

The Date Is Set

October 20, 2005 by Eric Richardson

If you've followed my bicycling ticket and the subsequent wonder I had at all the penalties that get added onto a simple fine, you may be interested to know that I have now scheduled a court date. It is -- drumroll please -- January 13th, 2006, at 8am. That was, apparently, the first date at which the computer could schedule me in.

When you select the court date option you're asked for a time preference -- AM, PM, Night Court, or No Preference. I selected AM, an after thinking about it for a bit the computer told me no dates were available that met my criteria. It also gave me no options for "Ok, try no preference" so I had to start the search by ticket process all over again. This time I selected No Preference and it gave me an 8am time. Go figure.