Blueprint America: Road to the Future

I rode with 9 other crazy bicycling friends (and 8990 strangers) for the 28th annual Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic.

We camped out at the halfway mark in Centralia, WA. We had 3 great support team members who helped us out at the half way mark. Thank you for setting up our camp site! I am definitely doing this again in 2008! I’m sure that everyone will do this again as well (or I’ll keep asking them until they cave in hehehe). Next time, we may want to register a little earlier and confirm registrations, and possibly take the train up.

I’ll post photos when they are all available. Until then, these are the ride details that I was able to record:

Day 1: 102 miles; 6hrs 29minutes; avg speed 16.3mph
Day 2: my computer got reset at mile 140. So, these are the mile 140+ stats:
3hrs 57minutes, 15.24mph; avg cad: 67; max: 31.5; 60.29mi

The annual event did not go with out incident, however. Some guy fell on to my bike and cracked the left carbon fiber crank. The replacement is $170.00 + labor, and will be here in about 2 weeks. The guy stopped between me and Simon and fell onto my bike. This was at mile 25. I didn’t notice the crack until mile 75. I’m thankful that the crank stayed in one piece through the 204 mile ride. There were other crashes involving bicyclists only leaving them with scrapes, bruises and broken bones. On top of that, I am saddened to hear that a drunk driver did a hit-and-run with a bicyclist Sunday morning. The following is an excerpt from the Seattle PI article:

“Gerald Marvin, 24, of Seattle suffered serious injuries when the driver of a sport utility vehicle swerved out of his lane on U.S. 30 northwest of Portland. Struck from behind, Marvin slammed into two other cyclists, who suffered minor injuries.

Police pulled over a 40-year-old driver, an ex-convict with a 1989 conviction for an Oregon murder, eight miles from the accident scene.

Daniel B. Whittlinger was arrested on suspicion of felony hit-and-run, driving under the influence and violating his parole, according to the Oregon State Police.

Witnesses said the driver initially stopped his Jeep Grand Cherokee after the 9:20 a.m. crash, but then sped away, said Lt. Gregg Hastings, a state police spokesman.

Whittlinger is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.”

This is one large win for cyclists. We do fight back.

I just saw Freedom Writers with Troy, John, Katie and Chantelle at Century 16.

Aside from the rude selection of teenagers in the theater, the movie was well done and was one of those movies that focused on the hardships and conflicts that exists between ethnic classes. It also raises the issue about how the educational system is structured.

The educational system classifies and rewards students for their achievements and merits, but then you also have the other side of the story – there are those who don’t succeed in school and these are the students that we push into a separate classroom with a different curriculum and different grading scales because, it is in my estimation, that our teachers have unsuccessfully taught them the true value of an education, or our teachers have given up on them. At my old high school, these were the students who ended up in classes in the basement, almost segregated from the rest of the school for math, language arts, and just about anything that is required for a “normal,” “well behaved” individual to “successfully contribute to society.” I’m not explicitly defining these terms, but I’m sure you know what I mean. These are the kids who hang out on the street corner who think they are thugs, or “hardcore” because of how they dress, walk or who they associate themselves with. Some of these are the ones who carry the attitude to get “respect” they are looking for. It saddens me to know that this is true, and it does happen – even at my old high school. Granted, I graduated 5 years ago, and things were a little better back in the day, but the principle is still the same.

The theater was filled with a great number of high school students that may fall under the description that I just described. These were the ones that were also rude during the movie, and one or two of them even got to chanting “white power” a few times over. Apparently for those select few, the movie was not a wake-up call to get their act together. I’m afraid that it might have been a glue to reinforce their current attitudes, or an outlet to bring out new hate. We even saw it first hand – two groups looked at each other wrong and exchanged words. Not a great way to end a night I guess.

I would recommend that you see the movie though. It was well done.

Friday Jan 5th: We watched Accepted with Chantelle, Christen, Katie, Natasha and Troy.
Saturday Jan 6th: Went snowboarding up at Meadows. I drove myself up there, but boy, it was worth it!
Sunday Jan 7th: Laying low for the day to rest up and prepare for a long week of work.
Monday Jan 8th: Not a horrible Monday at work. One of my test cards work!

I spent new years eve with my friends. We went out to Rock Bottom for dinner, followed by a few bars and rang in the new year at John’s brother’s place out in Oregon City.

Photos will be posted soon. So check back!

I liked the quote where Chris [Will Smith] said “Happiness isn’t something that you can obtain, but it’s something that you must pursue.” I found the internal monologe to be entertaining as well, such as “This is the part of my life where I was being stupid. Trusting my bone density scanner to some hippie girl.” Great movie, but its one of those movies were you only see it once.

Warning… geeky facts about the Rubik’s cube below!

Factoid 1: The Rubik’s cube has approximately 4.21239*10³⁶ combinations. This should break down to (correct me if I’m wrong!):

54!/((8*3)*(9!)⁶) = 4.21239*10³⁶

• 54! (thats 54*53*52*…*3*2*1, or 2.3084*10⁷¹) represents the number of combinations that you can orient all of the cubes (assuming that the Rubix cube doesn’t have the pieces attached to each other)
• There are 8 corners, with 3 possible combinations that a fixed corner can be oriented.
• 9! (that’s 9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 362880) represents the number of facelet combinations (just the visible face with the colored sticker)
• And finally, the 6th power because there are six sides.

When it comes down to it, ThinkGeek has it right:

There are 43 quintillion possible combinations with your Rubik’s cube. That’s 43 million million millions. There are about 30 million seconds in a year. You would need over a thousand million years assuming you could look at a thousand patterns every second just to see all the possible combinations.

So you might want to start with the virtual Rubik’s cube now.

Factoid 2: Leyan Lo, a 20-year-old Cal Tech student, currently holds the fastest cube solve time. His time: 11.13 seconds. Welcome to the world of speed cubing.

Factoid 3: Cubaholics Anonymous was formed in 1980 to help curb people off the cube.

I just bought a cube for myself. I’ll have hours of brain smashing fun :-p. I solved it in 20 minutes.

-Thomas

Borat: “In my country, they would go crazy over these two…. not so much her..”

Next up on the list: The Pursuit of Happyness. Who wants to go see that with us?

Here are some pics of the field:

[ngthGallery year="2006" dir="20061216_winterhawks_vs_tricity"]

-T

[ngthGallery year="2006" dir="20061207_joshs_birthday_at_PF_changs"]