Category: Marginalia

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The Rules of the Road

I was walking to class today, and I was almost mowed down by a guy on a fixed-gear. I was crossing a street, in the crosswalk, where I clearly had the right of way, but he rang his bell and blew by right in front of me, running the stop sign on the corner. I’d already been conceiving this post in my head and that was the last straw. Being a frequent rider of bikes on the streets of many cities, as well as a frequent pedestrian, I have come to realize that people aren’t just inconsiderate (don’t get me wrong, some of them are), a vast majority of us — whether on foot, behind the wheel, or in the saddle — simply do not know what to do when confronted with each other on the road. So, I hereby give you the Rules of the Road.

On a Bicycle:

1. Assume You are Not Welcome: No matter what the signs or laws say, motorists do not want you on the road. Keep this in mind and ride accordingly. Obey the laws, observe the lanes, be aware, and keep in mind that they can kill you.

2. Do Not Switch Roles: If you cross in a crosswalk or “become a pedestrian” for any reason, do it for real: get off your bike and walk it. This simple move could save your life.

3. Respect the Pedestrians: Remember that in most cases, sidewalks are for walking. In areas of high pedestrian traffic, bicycles should react as such (see rule #1).

4. When in Doubt, Get off the Road and Walk.

On Foot:

1. Beware of Bicycles: A lot of people on bicycles don’t know that they’re not supposed to ride them on the sidewalks and in crosswalks. They just don’t. To me, the hierarchy of the road goes Feet, Bicycles, and then Cars, but not everyone agrees with me. Keep this in mind. Also remember that sometimes cyclists are just trying to get away from speeding cars and out of harm’s way. Often the sidewalk is the only (somewhat) safe place to be.

2. Obey the Law: The laws for pedestrians are more clear-cut and better-known than those for bicycles. Follow them and keep yourself safe.

3. Stay Off the Roads Whenever Possible: Cars will kill you. They won’t mean to, but you’ll still be dead. Stay away whenever possible.

In a Car:

1. Assume Cyclists are Idiots: Give them as much leeway as you can manage. In a lot of cases, they know not what they do. Just treat all of them like the loose cannons some of them are and remember that you can kill them with one misstep.

2. Slow Down: In most situations where you’re likely to meet a cyclist or a pedestrian in your car, you shouldn’t be going very fast. As a frequent pedestrian and cyclist, I find cars careening frighteningly fast through neighborhoods, near institutions with frequent and abundant pedestrian traffic, and cyclists in the mix as well. Slow down, especially in these cases.

3. Know the Law: Right of way is a lost art. In most cases, you’re the last in line, but will be yielded to by others (i.e., cyclists and pedestrians) because you’re driving a lethal weapon. Keep this in mind when you mingle with the unprotected.

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These few ideas don’t cover everything, but they do address a lot of the issues I’ve confronted trying to get from A to B on foot and on wheels. Let’s keep an eye out and try to keep each other safe out there.

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I originally scribbled this little piece over on my bicycle site, HEADTUBE.

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Geekend Notes by Raise Small Business Marketing

Hilton Head, South Carolina’s own Raise Small Business Marketing did a brief summary and write-up of my “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk from Geekend 2010. Here’s the run-down:

I was excited for this session, mainly because doing stuff and being happy are two major challenges!  Roy Christopher gave a laid back presentation that basically went through some ideas on how to keep your focus and try and stay happy while actually getting things done.

Roy covers a lot of the information that was in his presentation on his own blog right here so we won’t go over all of that however some of the things we really took away from the session:

  1. Roy was a competitive Rubik’s Cube Player (established geek cred for sure!)
  2. Find people who have done what you want to do and emulate them
  3. Feed and water your mentors- let people know you respect them and why
  4. Save your own story
  5. Keep a journal
  6. Keep a promise file
  7. Get organized
  8. Trust your curiosity

You can read the post here.

Many thanks to the folks at Raise and Geekend 2010.

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R.I.P. Peter Christopherson

With the passing of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson today, we lost a prolifically creative soul.

Christopherson is probably best known as a pioneer of industrial music. He explored confrontation and sound with such germinal outfits as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil. He directed commercials and music videos (including most of Rage Against the Machine’s best ones, a few for Ministry, Van Halen, and Yes‘s chart-topping “Owner of a Lonely Heart”) and was also the designer of some of the most memorable album covers in music history. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), and Peter Gabriel’s early solo records, among many others.

With the help of Cynthia Usery and Jessy Helms, I even attempted to replicate one of his designs.

Peter Christopherson was a truly creative spirit. He and his work will be sorely missed.

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A Small Victory: How Rock Climbing Keeps Me Sane

In my “How To Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, I tell people that everyone should have one “head-clearing activity.” Let me explain that by example. My friend Ben Hiltzheimer used to ride motorcycles. When he started learning how, he said that you can’t think about anything else while you’re negotiating the streets and traffic because all you’re thinking about is not dying. I have equated this experience to learning to ride a fixed-gear bicycle.

I started rock climbing a little over ten years ago, and since there’s a wall on campus at UT, I’ve been going in the last couple of years more often than ever. I didn’t realize it until recently, but this is my main head-clearing exercise. While on the wall, you’re only thinking about your next move, about how to position yourself to make the next hold. It’s as mental as it is physical. I can’t think about deadlines, paper revisions, book chapters, magazine articles, student issues, bills, etc. It’s just me and the wall. I do this for an hour or so three times a week, and during that time, I clear the mental cache and leave to start anew. This is what I mean by “head-clearing activity.” Find yourself one. It’s good.

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The video below is of a climb that took me all of fall semester to figure out. For those that don’t know, the routes are marked off with colored tape, so only specified holds are allowed to be used on certain routes. I’ve been stuck on the last two moves of this purple route for the last two months. Well, I finally finished it on Monday: A small victory. Here I am sending it clean on Tuesday [runtime: 0:50]:

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21C Magazine: This is Your Brain Online

I compiled my thoughts on a bunch of recent books about the internet, social concerns, and brain matters into a piece called “This is Your Brain Online: Recent Books on Cognition and Connection” for 21C Magazine, many of which have been hashed out right here on this site.

Here’s an excerpt:

Regarding public cell phone use, comedian Bill Maher once quipped that if he wanted to be so privy to one’s most intimate thoughts, he’d read his or her blog. Nancy Baym addresses this technologically enabled collusion of public and private, as well as the more traditionally debated clashes, in Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity, 2010). Baym’s is by turns all-encompassing, in that she covers nearly every epistemological viewpoint on so-called social media expressed thus far, and all-purpose, in that anyone can read this book and see how these structures of knowledge apply to their own use of technology. In her study of technology’s influence on social connections, she breaks it down into seven key concepts: interactivity, temporal structure, social cues, storage, replicability, reach, and mobility. Sure, any time one attempts to slice up such a malleable and ever-changing landscape into discrete pieces one runs the risk of missing something. This process, one of closing off an open system in order to study it, is necessary if we are ever to learn anything about that system. Nancy Baym has collected, synthesized, and added to the legacy of digital media and indeed technology studies at large. This book is a great leap forward.

Many thanks to Ashley Crawford for the opportunity to contribute to 21C. Read the full piece here.

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Get Em to the Geek: Geekend 2010

I scarcely know where to start. Geekend is the beautifully geeky brainchild of Sloane Kelly, Jacob Hodesh, and Miriam Hodesh. 2010 marks the second annual meeting of what everyone familiar hopes will be many years of the interactive conference. It has just the right balance of size and intensity.

I didn’t get to Savannah until late on Day 2, so I roamed around downtown by myself Friday night. I stepped into a raucous karaoke session and had the biggest beer I’ve ever seen. No problem not finishing it because in Savannah, you can drink in the streets. To-go cups are a normal courtesy, and I took one and finished my beer, strolling languidly back to my hotel.

Immediately upon arriving at the Coastal Georgia Center on Saturday morning, I was rushed into the geek melée. Swag bag and badge in hand, I sneaked off to the speakers’ green room to finish the final tweaks on my presentation. People always say of SXSW Interactive that the best stuff happens in the margins, that the sideline conversations are always better than the panels and talks. Well, as much as it resembles SXSWi, Geekend is not quite like that. I’m not saying this because I was one of the speakers this year, I’m saying it because Geekend’s organization and size lends itself to round-the-clock stimulation. Sure, the chats in the hallways and at dinners are productive, enlightening, and awesome, but they do not outshine the scheduled talks.

My talk was called “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” and was loosely based on my previous post of the same name. It seems to have gone over well, and I had numerous inspired chats with attendees and other speakers over the rest of the time I was in Savannah: so many amazing people all in one beautiful city for a very limited time. From futurists (e.g., Frank Spencer and Scott Smith) and future-of-music geeks (e.g., Aaron Ford and Jack DeYoung), to indie entrepreneurs (e.g., Noah Everett and Scott Stratten) and big-media programmers (e.g., Oscar Gerardo and Craig Johnston), as well as just plain badasses (e.g., Maria Anderson, Zachary Dominitz, Pete Hottelet, et al.): It’s a pressure cooker of inspiration.

The closing after-party at SEED Eco-Lounge was the perfect, weekend-ending, chaotic spectacle: fire juggling, ribbon/curtain dancing lady (check the photos), loud, mashed-up hits, and literal dancing in the streets. Geek bedlam!

Geekend 2010 was one of those events where saying “thank you” to the organizers, the speakers, and all of the attendees just sounds ridiculous–but I’ll say it anyway: Thank you! See you next year!

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Here are a bunch of pictures I’ve gathered from the event. Many thanks to the camera-wielding folks I borrowed these from (e.g, Sloane Kelly, Jennifer Parsons, Josh Branstetter, and Rhiannon Modzelewski). And a special thanks goes out to Alex Sandoval and Rhiannon Modzelewski for hauling me around, taking me to the fair, and letting me sleep on their couch that last night. You folks are saints!

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Gang of Four Kinect Commercial

I guess it’s logical that the older you get, the more the music you grew up listening to is likely to end up in the last place you’d expect. Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not In It” in Microsoft’s official Xbox Kinect televison campaign. Good friend and ex-bass player Dave Allen seems summarily nonplussed. [runtime: 0:32]

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Sandy Carson: Paradise Has Relocated

Longtime BMX homie and amazing photographer Sandy Carson has a show on display here in Austin at Okay Mountain Gallery. The opening on October 23rd was a bicycle scene reunion. We all gawked at Sandy’s photos, and geeked out on bikes, parks, and trails. A good time was had by all.

Here’s what the Okay Mountain site says about the show:

“Paradise Has Relocated” attempts to capture the lifeless remains and emptiness of a once thriving and historic island devastated by Hurricane Ike in September of 2008. Ike was the third most destructive and costliest hurricane to make landfall in the United States, destroying and flooding 75% of homes and landmass. The project deals with the physical dead space and ghostliness of Galveston- post hurricane. Each image whispers of an ordinary past lost to the ravages of Mother Nature. The everyday objects left behind in haste suggest former human inhabitation. The unoccupied landscapes, fractured structures and mundane interiors I have carefully composed compel the viewer to look beyond cultural stature and financial complexities, and question geographical location.

The geographic anonymity of my photographs prove that such devastation is not reserved for the third world but stand right on our doorstep. This is important to remember given the current state of world climate change. Unfortunately some believe that this may be the final blow for Galveston. With an already anemic economy and population decline that predates Ike by 50 years, survivors who are re-building or relocating, feel that their mythical land never fully recovered from the first Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

Sandy’s book Paradise Has Relocated is available from Blurb (where there’s also a full preview!). A percentage of the sales will go directly towards Hurricane IKE relief, so do good and buy a copy.

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Aesop Rock’s 900 Bats

Aesop Rock, who previously wrote here about breakfast, just launched a new website called 900 Bats — a creative resource for arts, information, and oddities.  It shows the breadth of his interest in art (i.e., video, audio, art, photos, etc.) and as an artist. It’s not his own artist site (try as I might to get him to do one), it goes way beyond something like that.

Aesop’s first post describes the concept:

In an effort to supply a sandbox for what I hope proves to be a multifarious and growing mix of contributors, I, with the help of Alex Tarrant and Justin Metros,  have created 900bats.com.  Original writing, photography, artwork, audio, and video content from varying sources will be posted regularly.

Contributors for the site so far include: Aesop Rock, Alex Pardee, Alexander Tarrant, Chrissy Piper, Colin Evoy Sebestyen, Coro, DJ Big Wiz, Jeremy Fish, Justin Metros, Kimya Dawson, Nick Flanagan, and Rob Sonic. Jeremy Fish did the illustrations for the site, and Alex Pardee supplied the logo. The site was named for the 900 bats that were killed by renovation workers at Bala Fort in Alwar district who put them on fire to avoid disruption in work.