Month: July 2006

In an earlier entry, I talked about one of my favourite presentations from the RailsConf conference, Paul Graham’s The Power of the Marginal, a talk about the upside of being on the outside.

I linked to the text of his keynote earlier, and now I’ve got something better: the video of his keynote, recorded by ScribeStudio.

While the talk was delivered to an audience of programmers who use the Ruby programming language and the Ruby on Rails web programming framework — both of which are small, “indie” and “outside” compared to commercial offerings like Java and Microsoft’s .NET — it is applicable to anyone who creates, whether it’s by entering code into a computer, making music, painting, making buildings, and so on. The drummer for the Thirsty Cups (a band who performed after Paul’s keynote) isn’t a programmer, but he found that the keynote relevant to him as well.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of his keynote:

One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that there’s so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything. If the number of outsiders is huge it will always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few do per capita. But I think there’s more going on than this. There are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of work they can outweigh the advantages.

Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided to commission someone to write an official Great American Novel. First there’d be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose. Most of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one side or the other. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition. The committee would choose one at the height of his career– that is, someone whose best work was behind him– and hand over the project with copious free advice about how the book should show in positive terms the strength and diversity of the American people, etc, etc.

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he’d play it safe. This book had better command respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that’s what it would have to be about. Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of strength and diversity. When finally completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels– roughly Gone with the Wind plus Roots. But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host’s autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

It’s a great presentation. Go check it out.

When providence provides you with a theme, you run with it. Since the two previous posts have been about evil cats, I thought I’d see if I could carry on with an “evil animals” theme today. With that in mind, here are some clever ads I found for Knaz chocolate-covered peanuts:

[Found at NeedCoffee.com]

Blogging about your cat is an act that’s stereotypically bloggy that Ross and I managed to make a little mini-event out of it called “Blogacatmas” (traditionally celebrated on the first Friday of October). What Jeff Killed is a blog that takes cat-blogging to the next level: it chronicles the kills made by Jeff, a large orange cat from Shadow Hills, California.

What’s interesting is that Jeff isn’t the blogger’s cat. The “about” page explains:

Jeff has adopted our back porch and yard as his home. He uses our dog’s house when it rains, but mostly he likes to sleep on our patio chairs and keep watch over his domain.

Though he doesn’t really belong to us, we provide Jeff with food and water; however, this does little to lessen his killer instinct. To humans, Jeff is an exceptionally good-tempered and friendly cat; to rodents and other small animals, he is death itself.

It could be that Jeff likes to bring us gifts to repay our hospitality. Perhaps he is simply a hardwired killing machine. All we know for certain is that he hunts down a wide variety of small animals and disembowels, decapitates, and dines on them. Often.

The expected birds and mice appear on his list of skills, but what is truly extraordinary is the rabbits that Jeff captures, kills and ate, save for the hind legs. Jeff isn’t that much bigger than the rabbits, which makes the feat rather impressive (if gruesome).

If you’re the squeamish type, you’re not going to like this site. It’s got plenty of gore, what with pictures of Jeff enjoying his grisly meals, and the heads and entrails he leaves behind. The only exception is the entry about the steak that Jeff attempted to steal from their barbecue.

If you’ve got a cat unfortunate enough to the wrong combination of white fur and of black spots, perhaps you can submit its photo to the Cats That Look Like Hitler site. Mind you, your Hitler-lookalike cat — they call them “kitlers” — will be up against some pretty stiff competition, like this furry fuhrer:

Some of the cat pictures on the site have been Photoshopped, which probably means that the site is probably responsible for creating the largest group of people who aren’t white supremacists or Mel Brooks who are dressing things up to look like Hitler.

In case you’re looking for a new idea for a cat-based website, may I suggest starting Cats That Look Like Tojo? I thought that he and Hirohito never got the full level of vilification they deserved. In case you need a reference photo of ol’ Toe Jam (as I like to call him), here’s one:

I checked — as of a couple of minutes ago, catsthatlookliketojo.com is still available…

I thought I’d start this article with a photo of my bike, The Scorpion King. I was inspired to give my bike a name after Deenster had named hers.

Keeping a photo of your bike — along with records of identifying things like serial numbers — is one of many suggestions offered by Eldon in his comment to the Bike Thief post. I thought his comment was quite good and worthy of elevating to the main page of the blog. The full text of his comment appears below. Enjoy, and keep your bike safe!

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I have to agree with the “under my butt or under my bed” philosophy for preventing bike theft.

I think the only thing a bike thief needs to be successful is nobody to stop them in the time it takes for them to break the locks.

This can be in broad daylight where they are either quick or subtle about it, making it look like it is their bike, or it can be in your garage, building bike room, or condo storage locker where they have all the time in the world with no one to bother them.

Two approaches I have found successful to preventing bike theft are the “you can’t steal what you can’t see” approach and the “sacrificial anode” approach.

The first one is just a variant of the “under my bed” approach. This approach seems popular with most bike nuts as we seem to prefer to share our bedrooms with our bikes anyway. Keep your bike out of sight when near your home or work. Don’t leave it out front, on the porch, in the hallway, or in the garage with the door open. Don’t leave it in sight of any windows that people can look in.

As a rule of thumb, in any situation you can’t keep the bike in sight, no one else should be able to see your bike either. A lot of bike theft comes from spotting the bike and then coming back for it later.

If you have to lock it up outside for work, don’t always lock it up in the same spot everyday.

If you have a car don’t leave your bike on the roof rack of any longer than you have to. Put it on your car the last thing before you leave to go riding and take it off first thing when you return. This should be second nature if you have underground parking. I’ve heard anecdotally that there were thieves that would cruise Toronto neighbourhoods looking for houses with cars in the driveways with bike racks on the roof. Then they would come back later and break into the garages and steal the bikes.

If you have an automatic garage door opener, check to make sure that would-be thieves cannot reach through the gap at the top of the door and trigger the manual release to open it. I’ve had this happen to friends twice. Take the manual releases toggles off. Also if you have to keep your bike in your garage, lock it down to something solid. In one place, we set rebar hoops in concrete in the garage wall to lock the bikes too. Fortunately, at night, the noise from jack hammers is still pretty conspicuous.

It is probably universal that the Velorution guys and I have similar views on thieves. I think thieves come in two flavours: the ones that know bikes and know what they are doing and the desperate or stupid ones that grab them for a quick score. For the first kind, make your bike hard to find, for the second kind make it hard to move.

I agree with them again that I don’t think disguising your bike is useful. Again, the first type of thieves can identify bikes in their sleep and the second don’t care. I think it can be helpful to make your bike really unique. If you have the only bike in town with a trucker girl mud flap and “fueled by Jagermeister” sticker on the frame, people will recognize it.

I do disagree with them about buying a more expensive bike to prevent theft. Their rationale is to stop the stupid thieves. I think they are giving the stupid thieves too much credit in being able to value the bike or worrying about the suspicion they may raise in selling it.

Last summer in Victoria, BC, police found a stash of stolen disassembled bicycles in a nearby forested area. It turned out that the fiddling and disassembling of bright shiny objects seems to calm drug users coming down off of meth. They probably weren’t too worried about the value of the bikes they were stealing and the more shiny expensive parts the better.

There is also another case a few years back in Vancouver where a thief stole a mountain bike from outside a sports store and tried to sell it at a bar downtown that night. Nothing too unusual about that, except in this case the bicycle happened to be a one of a kind factory racing prototype for Alison Sydor, a world champion racer. This kind of blows the smart enough to worry about raising suspicion argument.

I also think the bike chopping and fencing market is evolved enough to digest anything at any price point. I think it is better to try and prevent the theft and if you can’t, at least, cap your losses.

For these reasons and a couple more I use the “sacrificial anode” approach for my city bike. This approach is the exact opposite of their suggestions.

The first one is I took a look at what the deductible is on my home insurance and, knowing that I would have to pay that amount if I had to claim a stolen bike, I set that as the most I am willing to spend on my “sacrificial anode” bike.

From there I casually kept track of how many trips I made on it that saved me transit fare, cab fare, gas, parking, or shoe leather. Using this method it doesn’t take very long to realize you are riding a free bike.

The second reason I use the “sacrificial anode” method and hence it’s name, is that I’ve found since moving back to Toronto that the ridiculous amount of salt this city uses has caused serious damage to a couple of nice bikes I’ve had, whether they were on a roof rack, ridden on a dry warm winter day, or just too early in the spring before the rain washed all the crap away.

So as long as my sacrificial anode bike doesn’t get stolen or rusts through before it has paid for itself I really don’t care what happens to it. I can lose an awful lot of cheap bikes for the price of a nice one.

Another reason this works for me is I have to admit I am personally not a big fan of having to lug around a lock that weighs as much as the bike or having to disassemble it every time I park. I also don’t like looking like I just got off a bike when I arrive at something toting the parts around with me. There is a point where this is too much of a hassle and transit wins. The peace of mind that you have capped your losses is nice too.

One other approach Velorution suggests that I agree with is getting a courier style, single speed road bike. They are right that some of them are difficult to ride but I think it is more useful that there seems to be an unwritten rule that you don’t touch a courier’s bike so if all the bikes downtown looked like courier bikes it could bring theft down. If the police used bait bikes more regularly it could create the same sense of fear. Apparently this is starting to work in Victoria, BC.

If I am caught in a jam where I have leave my bike unattended for a moment I either leave it in the biggest gear so it is really hard to get started, or drop the chain off the rings and disconnect the brakes. This way if something happens, I have a chance of catching up to the person and they have a chance of cashing in on some extra bad karma.

Although it would help a lot, I don’t advocate approaching someone that looks like they are up to something sketchy on a locked bike and confronting them. You don’t know what you’ve got on your hands. At most, if I see something that I think is off, I ask in a really friendly manner if I can help, being the kind of bike nerd that I am. If it is the owner, they are usually friendly back, and it isn’t they usually take off.

Finally, if your bike does get stolen, the police’s biggest complaint is that no one reports it and if they do, they do not have a picture, make or serial number or other unique identifiers that allows them to return the bike to you and lay charges. Police are recovering stolen bikes every day and can’t return them and can rarely lay charges for them. Crap, just take a few digital pictures, write down the serial numbers of some of the bigger parts or get ones engraved in the bike. There are also lots of bicycle registry databases available. If you don’t, then the next time you see a squeegee kid on a $3000 bike you will know why the police couldn’t do anything.

There are economies in the world of bike theft. “How easily can I steal this bike?”, “How quickly can I get rid of it and for how much?”, “What are the chances that I am going to get caught?” Increase the cost of any aspects of these and the amount of bike theft will go down as it becomes less viable.

Here’s an art project that you old-school videogamers may like. Guillaume Reymond, who lives in Switzerland, has recreated the classic arcade game Space Invaders in stop-motion animation using the seats in an audiotrium as the screen and people in green and white t-shirts as the “pixels”. Here’s a sample:

You can see the video at Guillaume’s “Space Invaders” page.