i think i'm shopping for a bicycle. i haven't had one since i moved up here; the bike i had in cookeville spent the winter outside and rusted enough that i didn't want to deal with moving it.

since i'm now gainfully employed and living in a house with a garage, there's no longer a pressing need to automatically default to the cheapest bike i can find.

but i don't have a big budget, either.

anyone have any advice? what features are important if one desires to be a casual bicycling hobbyist? i know i want the quick-release front wheel so i can stuff it in my car and go someplace with less traffic, and i'm pretty sure i'll go for a mountain bike over a road bike since i'm not so much on the racing but could forseeably want to tackle rougher terrain. but other than that i'm kinda clueless. help?

oh yeah, and i can't believe i'm up before 8 a.m. on a saturday to watch sports. (well, i could've woken up a bit later; dave was heading out for crossville at 7, so i went ahead and started the coffee then.) but today's the contre-la-montre in bzak! and it starts in about half an hour...

not only does he pull off a stage victory by half-a-bike after the announcers had already called it for the other guy, he has the leftover gusto to do an interview in french -- without translator -- a few minutes later. they never show that on american tv... knowing my propensity to forget even english at the slightest athletic stress, i'm more impressed than ever. (and for what it's worth, he told 'em pretty much the same things he told the oln interviewer - yeah, he told teammate floyd landis to go for the win today because he deserved it, but he wasn't going to let the other guys walk off with it when that didn't work out.)

of carrie abigail thomas, born about two hours ago. everything worked out pretty well -- both carrie and jennifer (the mom) are doing well, and chris (the dad) got home on leave last night, so he didn't miss the big event. as soon as dave gets off work, we'll head to lenoir city to coo over her.

from http://selectsmart.com/PRO/sel.html?id=8 by way of innerdiva:


1. John Stuart Mill (100%)
2. Kant (98%)
3. Epicureans (97%)
4. Jean-Paul Sartre (97%)
5. Jeremy Bentham (97%)
6. Prescriptivism (73%)
7. Ayn Rand (69%)
8. Aquinas (66%)
9. Aristotle (65%)
10. Spinoza (62%)
11. Nietzsche (43%)
12. Ockham (43%)
13. Stoics (40%)
14. Nel Noddings (36%)
15. St. Augustine (34%)
16. David Hume (26%)
17. Thomas Hobbes (26%)
18. Plato (23%)
19. Cynics (18%)

how the hell did i just sink more than 4 hours into looking up various bits of chilean history?

well, ok, so it helps that i started knowing almost nothing about south american history in general except what i learned in evita... and, well, a few vague ideas like "simon bolivar was important" and "conquistadors claimed everything they could for the sake of the 3 g's: glory, god, and gold." the tennessee school systems have failed me. (i'll also admit that they haven't made me take any history that included that part of the globe since 8th grade.)

all i really wanted to know was why leprosy wasn't a problem in chile... the unexplained comment (again, in the motorcycle diaries) struck me as odd.

i still haven't figured that one out. but now i know a lot more than i did. especially about easter island, strangely... it tends to come up in searches for leprosy and chile; when it was all a big sheep-farm run by evil foreigners, before they discovered the magics of tourism, they had a leper colony... and somehow, from there, i ended up looking up various conquistadors, who-killed-whos, etc. pedro de valdivia's a fun one - went in to help francisco pizarro find and kill diego de almagro (and got payed with a silver mine, mind you, not gold!), almagro's men then got angry and killed pizarro, meanwhile valdivia was taking over almagro's beat and trying to conquer chile and doing a far better job at it, then, oops, lautoro, a former captured-native and personal servant of valdivia who learned all kinds of military strategy from him and ran away, leads a rebellion resulting in valdivia's capture and subsequent (according to legend, anyway) death and staking... then they ate his heart. it's got a certain soap opera-esque allure...

oh well. if i'm going to waste four hours at the computer, at least it was educational for once... maybe i shouldn't try to take notes next time i start to read a book.

oh yeah, and happy 4th. obviously, i'm not doing much. (although the dogs are starting to drive me nuts, barking at the pre-dark firecrackers being set off...) but i hope it's sunny and fantastic for everybody else... off to mow the lawn now!

you can read the first chapter of sean stewart's new book, perfect circle at salon right now. upon reading that, i got a little nostalgic about how i first ran into mr. stewart's work...

[cut to early summer of 2001, when i was just mostly-washed-up as a physics major but well on my way to fleeing the country...]

one day, my co-worker mary and i were playing around with the alice-bot on the official a.i. website. (hey, it was that or fortran... and for gimmicky marketing, it was pretty cool.) she remembered hearing that there was a pretty neat game connected to the movie... and next thing you know, we're finding it. presented as a set of webpages from the future, linked together with increasingly complex puzzles and a good murder mystery underlying them. we got terribly, terribly addicted, obsessively waiting until lunchtime on tuesdays when all the new updates would be up, scrambling to see if we could find any solutions before the many geniuses in the yahoo group dedicated to solving all the riddles...

and then, one day, not long after the movie opening, "the beast," as its creators dubbed it, came to an end. no more puzzles, and all the "puppet masters," as they called themselves, revealed their identities. sean stewart was the guy writing most of the story, teamed up with a computer team mostly from microsoft; i was impressed enough to pick up a couple of his novels... as time passed, most of the fancier webpages disintegrated, and i couldn't really show anyone what on earth i was capable of rambling on so much over.

but in my fit of nostalgia today, i happened to stop by the cloudmakers site today. and just for fun, tried a link. turns out, they've got pretty much the whole thing mirrored in the links down the left side of their front page. i got sucked in for a couple hours again without even noticing... so yeah, there it is, if i've ever tried to ramble at you unsuccessfully.

i saw the terminal the other night with lu and wayne... and shortly afterwards, i just knew - but couldn't specifically remember - that i'd heard of someone being stuck in an airport like that for a substantial amount of time in real life. and i've kept vaguely remembering that every time i step away from the internet, until now. voila, the story of merhan nasseri, who has been living in charles de gaulle airport since 1988. i remember clearly now, patrick c., who once played quiz bowl for riverdale and thus knows mind-blowing amounts of random trivia, told me to see if i couldn't locate mr. nasseri when i was heading out to be an exchange student.

i'm still trying to find happy homes for the last couple invitations that showed up this morning, and it would seem that most of the people who had previously mentioned being g-mail-less already have accounts...

(oh, and while i'm posting... my bizarre muscle ache o' the day: palms of my hands. must be from mowing yesterday. i didn't even notice until i tried to make a fist at karate this morning. this can't be normal, can it? but maybe it'll eventually result in super grip strength and the ability to open pickle jars.)

enough nonsense... off to get groceries and figure out how to plant roses and tomatoes (advice more than welcome!) and clean up the garage and find a new job. i feel so old.

i too now have a gmail account. and it rocks. kaitrin@gmail.com, that's me. for the first time, i'm actually considering moving out of ye olde tntech VAX.