Justin Foell

There’s a valuable resource available to students, starving artists, savvy entrepreneurs and everyone else that often goes unused and forgotten: The Public Library.

Let’s face it, books (and other media) are expensive. While others think of Amazon first for books, I look to the library.

The American Library Association and the Dewey Decimal System date back to 1876. But in the age of smart phones and streaming media, we sometimes forget that we’re paying for this service (via taxes) and we should be taking full advantage.

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Omertà
Noun
A code of silence amongst members of a criminal organization (especially the Mafia) that forbids divulging insider secrets.
– wiktionary.org

With the 2013 Tour de France over, and in light of the doping scandal surrounding Lance Armstrong – I took a dive into Tyler Hamilton’s book: The Secret Race. He tells all in excruciating detail of how professional cycling worked (and probably still works) on the inside.

As Americans, we seem to unanimously despise the use of performance enhancing drugs. We crave honesty so much that we’ll politicize the issue and enlist Congress,the FDA, or any government entity that will prosecute dopers and bring the truth to light.
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The attitude has even permeated into cycling fashion:

dopers_suck_back — Dopers Suck Jersey at TwinSix

Yet it has become clear to me that all professional sports are about gaming the system. The drug testing procedures and policies are open and published. Take the NBA for example. You may be tested up to 4 times per season. But after the 4th, you’re all clear – you can juice all you want. During testing, all an athlete needs to do is hire a doctor who knows how to work the system.

Doping in American Cycling

In Tyler’s book, he draws you in to the scene, explaining how the American cycling team was getting crushed in Europe – getting passed by European teams like they were riding motorcycles. They had to dope just to keep pace. He puts you in his shoes. You sensed that doping was inevitable if only to prevent further embarrassment. Their use of EPO seemed downright recreational, just give yourself a small shot into some fatty tissue.

Transfusions

Then the rabbit hole got deeper: cyclists doing autologous blood transfusions in a sly game to store your own blood and have your body to produce more, and then to re-inject extra later before a race, or in-between race stages. Let’s face it, at-home or in-hotel transfusions are not normal. Transfusions are normally reserved for medical patients who need a transfusion to survive. Clandestine blood-bag operations with anonymous delivery people add an extra layer of confusion that could lead to an athlete receiving a transfusion of someone else’s blood – which may have happened to Hamilton.

The Future – Paniagua?

This term, meaning “bread and water” (from Spanish pan y agua), is used to describe cyclists riding clean – like they’re just fueled by bread and water.

A friend of mine just assumes that all star athletes are juiced up to just below the point where they’ll get caught. Cycling is especially tainted. As Hamilton explains, the Festina affair in 1999 merely shifted the drug carrying responsibility from the team to the cyclists themselves. Teams and riders claimed they were riding paniagua, but Operación Puerto in 2006 showed that things had just gotten more secret and sophisticated.

We can thank Tyler Hamilton (and to some extent Lance Armstrong) for coming clean. Tyler telling all gives insight into the lengths riders would go to get their fix. He broke the omertà so that the sport can start anew. Now teams, besides taking a stance against doping, are sharing their power data. Even without obtaining rider’s power data, it can inferred through well known climbs like L’Alpe d’Huez.

The entire sport including riders, team directors, and doctors, needs to prove that it can ride clean. Some argue that it will make the sport less exciting, but I think it will do the opposite. No longer will you have super-human multi-day efforts. A rider that dominates one day will be spent, opening the door for “fresh” riders to overtake them the next day. I don’t want to see a race where the yellow jersey only trades riders during the first week. I’d like to see it be contested right up until the end.

So is everything clean? Probably not, but it’s heading in the right direction. The peloton is slowing down towards mere mortal speeds. But as an insider, Tyler Hamilton has heard rumors that small autologous blood transfusions are still happening – and he believes it.

While current pro cyclists may not be using drugs – storing blood for a performance boost later is not normal. Transfusions should be used for saving lives, not underhanded winning.

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Skip to Ubuntu 13.04 Update

This post was originally supposed to be titled “My commitment to Ubuntu.” But I couldn’t take it. After 2 years of using Unity and watching it evolve one step forward and then dwindle two steps back, I decided it was time to give GNOME another chance.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m still committed to Ubuntu, and moreover Linux and Open Source in general. I’ve tried quite a few Linux distributions: Slackware, RedHat, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu. I don’t mean I installed and tried them for a week, I’ve used each of those distributions for over a year on a day-to-day basis.
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I have stuck with Ubuntu since 2008 because it seemed to have the most momentum, the most desktop distribution market share (which equates to better support), and the most polished overall package.

As such, I’ve always tried to stick with whatever Canonical recommends for mainline Ubuntu Desktop. That meant using atrocious iTunes wanna-be softwares like Rhythmbox and Banshee (to this day I’m unclear as to the difference between these two). However, I’d stick it out just so I knew what the normal user experience was – feeling the average users’ pain, and reporting bugs along the way.

Why Ubuntu decided to drop GNOME in favor of Unity has always puzzled me. As per my rule, I went along for the ride into the Unity experience. I like the simplicity of Unity, having used it as part of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix / Edition or whatever it is/was called. But I feel it was moved into prime-time a little too early.

No Man’s Land

All of my complaints with Unity are in regards to hardware support (or lack there-of). For my office, I prefer to use my laptop (a huge desktop replacement) with an external monitor in “portrait” mode:

In the beginning (Ubuntu 11.04), multi-monitor support was abysmal. My monitor setup would get rendered as one large canvas. The laptop & monitor are like a backwards “L” and the rest of the area (above the laptop and to the left of the monitor) becomes what I call “No Man’s Land.”

System tray icons that were written for “legacy” GNOME support, like Skype, would be rendered up in No Man’s Land, where no one can see them. The only reason I knew is because you could see a tiny green icon up there when using Unity’s “Expo” feature. The mouse cursor could go up into No Man’s Land (confusing), and application windows could also be moved there accidentally.

Then on a later release all of the system tray icons needed to instead use a different “indicator” API. So every system tray app that was previously working in GNOME and hadn’t kept up with the Unity trend, now had to have an indicator wrapper to make it useful (or even visible).

The Last Straw

So after two years of Unity advancements, you’d think it would be awesome now, right? Nope – 12.10 is the slowest Unity ever. I tried it for a month and decided it was the final straw. I don’t know exactly what happened. Maybe I was previously using Unity 2D or had shut off all of the effects. Frankly I’m glad I don’t have to remember all the stupid minutia anymore. But in Ubuntu 12.10 there is no “giant off switch” for all Unity effects, and my computer feels like everything is “Powered by Java.” ™ Slow menus, slow window switching, slow window moving, slow desktop switching! I thought I had fixed the slowness by turning off vblank_mode for my Intel GM45 graphics card, but when I attached my external monitor, slowness resumed.

Maybe the Unity slowness is caused by the sheer size of my desktop, since it is effectively rendering a 3000×1920 pixel area. Maybe my graphics card is just a wimp. What ever it is, I give up. I found that GNOME is still alive and well in the Ubuntu repositories. I suggest to anyone that is stuck in the muck with Unity, exorcise your demons! Execute the `apt-get install` command from that page. Don’t bother with activating GDM over LightDM – GNOME really only recommends it because GDM is themed to look like GNOME “Remix” (see below). You can also skip the `apt-get remove` in case you want to go back to Unity – especially if you’re a masochist. If your user account was set to automatically log in, turn it off so you can choose between GNOME/Unity when you restart.

I tried the GNOME “Remix” and it was cute, but seemed to be plagued with similar issues that Unity had in the beginning: in-configurable virtual desktop switching, poor multi-monitor support, limited flexibility with system-tray apps/indicators.

Classic

GNOME Classic. Like Coke Classic, this is it. Why did we ever abandon this? It felt so comforting to be using GNOME again. Everything works just as I remember, plus it’s a little more polished. The ironic thing is, GNOME also uses the Compiz 3D compositing system, but it performs far better on my hardware/monitor configuration than Unity. Like I said, I don’t care what magic makes it work, as long as I can get back to work.

Update: Unity in Ubuntu 13.014

I’m happy to report that Unity in Ubuntu 13.04 is much better regarding performance specifically with my Intel graphics chipset. After 2 months of solid use I can report that it’s definitely back in a usable state (for me at least).

Unity, Ubuntu, and all Linux distros (including the Linux kernel itself), have always suffered from 1000 paper cuts. It’s always been useful for me as a tech geek, but I see and can understand how the minor annoyances add up to someone not being able to make the switch to Linux full-time.

My current issue with Unity is a strange bug where if I have a browser maximized on my 2nd display and I try to open a new tab from a different workspace (via Instant Messenger usually), when I switch back to the workspace containing my browser, it has magically moved to the primary display.

It’s not enough to make me abandon Unity again, but combined with something else it might be.

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Once the BNSF railroad passes over the south side of I-694 and expands into the vast Northtown Yard, you have but one option to cross it in Fridley City limits: the 44th Ave. Bridge.

I always had assumed that this bridge is in Columbia Heights, but it lies in Fridley proper. The notion sunk in when I saw a Fridley Police car staking out the bridge – presumably looking for speeders.

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And speed they will. This bridge has a 2-lane road with extra wide lanes and extra wide shoulders. The speed limit is 30 MPH. Who are we kidding? No one is going to go 30 on it because it is engineered like a 45 MPH road:

44th-wide-lanes — Impatient driver, wanting to go faster than 30 MPH

The view from the top of the bridge is actually quite fascinating. You can see the “hump” at the Northtown Yard in action. A train backs up slowly to a hill (the hump) and one-by-one cars are uncoupled and roll down the other side, switching to various tracks so the non-unit train cars get rearranged to move on to their next destination:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/family_man_system/28129427798/

Photo courtesy of Man of Family

Getting up to the top of this bridge is the laughable part. There’s no real entrance to the bridge walkway from the road on the east side. There’s just a narrow, weedy, sandy, decaying section of asphalt that says “trouble” more than “walk this way:”

The path is perilously narrow, squeezed down by the guard rail. Once you get to the bridge it turns to concrete and doesn’t get any wider. In fact it feels narrower since you’re now encased between a fence and a jersey barrier:

I think it would be impossible for two pedestrians to pass without brushing shoulders. Yet automobiles on this bridge are given a extra-wide berth for their whopping 30 MPH:

This bridge is technically a county road (Anoka County Road 2). I understand that the county (and state) sometimes operate with heavy hands. But regardless of who assumes ownership, someone should be ashamed of themselves.

The next time this bridge is resurfaced, the lanes should be narrowed to 10 or 11 feet, to fully reflect it’s 30 MPH speed limit, and the shoulders should be even narrower yet. Then the pedestrian area could be widened to provide actual space for non-motorized traffic to travel in both directions simultaneously without the certainty of a head-on collision which is guaranteed today.

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Date: Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Time: 5:45-7:30PM (leave at 6PM promptly)
Start/End: Fridley Northstar Station west side – East River Rd. & 61st Ave.
Route options: 5 miles (or less), 10 miles (route map)

As part of Bike/Walk Week Twin Cities, I’m organizing an evening ride on the Mississippi River Trail in Fridley. This trail advertises “10 states, 1 river” as it goes from the Mississippi headwaters at Lake Itasca near Bemidji, Minnesota all the way down to the Mississippi delta and the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana.

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Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

The Library

More than books

The Modern Library

Order of Precedence

Omertà is out, Paniagua is in

Doping in American Cycling

Transfusions

The Future – Paniagua?

GNOME sweet GNOME

Skip to Ubuntu 13.04 Update

No Man’s Land

The Last Straw

Classic

Update: Unity in Ubuntu 13.014

Fridley Hates Pedestrians (Part 4) – 44th Ave. Bridge

Discover the Mississippi River Trail north of Minneapolis

Skip to the ride racap

Update

Landmarks

Alternate Route