Today I had the longest ride of my life (I think, at least I can remember). I met up with a friend from work and we rode from Crissy Field in San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, dropping in to Sausalito, up the very minor hill Camino Alto, up and around to Tiburon and back. All told, it was just shy of 37 miles, only 13 less than I'll have to ride next week at the Tour de Cure.

I felt pretty good doing it. No major back pain, no shortness of breath or dizziness, no real ill effects. I helped that I stay well hydrated and that we stopped for pannini in Tiburon. There were some tough little hills, especially at the end heading out of Sausalito. And getting over the bridge in the late afternoon with all the cross winds was no picnic, but I felt I could go much further, so I think I’m a decent bet to complete the 50 miles in Napa.

The only real problem I had is that I didn’t put on enough sun block for the 3 hours or so I was in saddle so I came back with a wicked farmer’s burn. That’s something I really want to avoid again.

Posted by andrew at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow! It took me less than 2 days to reach my modest fund raising goal. Thanks Rana, Peter, Michael & Jennifer.

If you still want to donate, please do. I've met my goal, but my company has only reached about 25% of its goal of $125,000. Like I said, every little bit helps even if you can only give a few dollars. Of course, your contribution is tax-deductible. It's fast and easy to support this great cause - you can make your donation online. I appreciate whatever support you can give.

The ride is coming up in a little more than a week. I have to get some miles under my belt if I'm going to make it. Not much time to train.

Thanks!

Posted by andrew at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bitterness of Life is pretty good too, but not really in the same league as Some eCards.

Posted by andrew at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I came across this site, The Superest recently and I think it's amazing so I feel compelled to share. Basically it's a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. Here are the rules: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

The best way to enjoy this is to start at thefirst hero and just click through the Defeated by link. Not all the heros are great. Some are total dogs, but many are incredible and you can really see the evolution both in terms of creativity and quality (both the hero drawings and the hand drawn fonts). It'll make for a nice diversion from whatever is you're doing (and, obviously, you're just killing time, since you're reading this blog.)

This one slays me, especially the dude with the rake:

Posted by andrew at 07:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Take Bill's Advice; Vote for Obama.

Posted by andrew at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got to love the post-modern cardboard reconstruction. It's a genre I'm well familiar with.

Posted by andrew at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Came across this image while surfing the web this afternoon. Pretty fucking cool! Particularly relevant considering what day it is today.

Posted by andrew at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's Earth Day, so what the fuck, go save the planet. I'm a big fan 17, 20, 21, 33 and 47. Number 4 is a joke though.

Posted by andrew at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently accepted the challenge of cycling in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure fund-raising event. The Tour de Cure is a series of cycling events held in over 80 cities nationwide.

The Tour is a ride with different route lengths from a leisurely 10-mile course to a demanding 100-mile journey. 100 miles is a bit too intense for me at this point, but I'm going to push my limits and go for 50 miles (the most I have ridden to this point is around 40). The goal is to have fun and get some exercise while supporting the American Diabetes Association's mission: to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes.

So on May 4th (a mere two weeks from now), I will saddle up and ride along with Team Schwab in our company's efforts to raise $125,000. My personal goals here are very modest. Only 200 bucks. Every little bit helps even if you can only give a few dollars. Of course, your contribution is tax-deductible.

It's fast and easy to support this great cause - you can make your donation online. I appreciate whatever support you can give.

More information on the American Diabetes Association, its programs and diabetes in general can be found at the Association's Web site.

***UPDATE*** [2:28PM - 4/22] Got my first donation from my first cousin Rana (incidentally the First Lady of San Diego). I'm 1/8th of the way there. Please help me get to 200 bucks, MAKE A DONATION TODAY.

***UPDATE***[3:24PM - 4/22] Thanks to Pete I now have 63% of my $200 total. Of course, Pete meant to bribe me to attend our 20th high school reuninion in June. I'm sure you'll have more noble reasons to donate. MAKE A DONATION TODAY.

Posted by andrew at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Life must be tough at the World's New Leader^TM because CNN is selling shirts. Why anyone would want to buy this, is beyond me, but you can fuck with the URL and ''make'' your own shirts:

More here:

• CNN Sucks
• Wolf Blotzer Has Dandruff
• I did not have sex with that woman
• I wouldn't say I've been missing work
• I Don't Recall, Senator
• Lou Dobbs Hates You
• Hey man, there's a beverage here
• Does this t-shirt make my ass look fat?

Make your own. Have fun. And send them to me in the comments. [too bad they won't actually sell you these t-shirts - it's funny anyway]

[hat tip: Signal vs. Noise]

Posted by andrew at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My brother Brian flew in from DC to close out the 2007-2008 season with a few days of spring skiing in Tahoe. Unfortunately it didn't work out exactly as we planned.

It hasn't snowed in Tahoe in about a month, which normally would be no problem, but this weekend was unseasonably cold, it never got above 36, so we're talking ice. Serious ice. Like Ice Capades, ice. And then there was the wind.

When we ddecided to go to Squaw I was hoping for day like this, but it wasn't to be. The tram was closed for high winds as were most of the lifts. There were 4 lifts running. Each had one run that was groomed. Groomed flat into a sheet of fricken ice. The wind was hard, it was blowing over skis and poles in the racks by the ticket window. It didn't look very promising.

We skated around the mountain for most of the morning. If you've never skied on ice, it's pretty horrid. Worse than the sliding around without being able to grip anything is sound. Skis sounds like some kind of industrial wood chipper. Snowboards sound like jet engines. It's nightmaarish.

The best run was off Red Dog. KT-22 was a nightmare, as was Exhibiton. The crowds were miniscule, which was a saving grace. No waiting to risk your life skidding down the hard pack.

Around 11, the sun started to warm the piste and it started to loosen up. The other lifts started to open. First Gold Coast Express, then Shirley Lake, Siberia and finally Granite Chief. The snow was so much better higher up the mountain and we had a brilliant afternoon, that is until the last run. It's always the last run.

The last run of the day, we were crusing down from mid-mountain, basically on a large flat cat track. It was after 3, so the snow was really soft at this point. I wasn't paying attention, clearly, and lost balance while going a little faster than I should have. Once I realized I was listing, it was too late to right the ship and over I went. I lost one ski, probably a good thing, but as I flipped around and the hit the snow with my stomach, a piece of sharp ice got under my jacket and gashed my stomach.

The odd thing is that I didn't notice it until we got on the lift (we actually decided to take one more run when we got to the bottom, so I guess it wasn't really the last run of the day). My stomach was bothering me and I when I lifted up my jacket, Brian said, Holy shit, dude, did you see that? I took off my googles and saw the splotch of blood on my lower abdomen. It was stinging a little, but I thing the cold made it feel less worse than it was. I shrugged it off.

At the end of the day I was left with an abrasion that looks like an apendectomy scar. Pretty crazy, but I'll live.

On Sunday we headed for Heavenly. Again, crowds were very light. I hadn't been in a month or so, and it was hard to fathom the damage the many 60 degree days have had on the bottom of the hill. Gunbarrel was a mess. Exposed trees, bushes, rocks, snow-making pipes. Seriously ugly. Highly up, it was better, the snow was good, mostly, and while it was sunny with gorgeous views, it was chilly and very windy. Not as windy as the night before when it felt like the house would blow over into the lake, but cold nonetheless. We got in about 15 runs, a good day, before we called it and headed home to have dinner with our sister and 3 year nephew.

All in all it was a pretty decent ski season. The snow was fantastic. I got in 15 days at Heavenly, 4 at Vail and one each at Squaw, Kirkwood and Beaver Creek for a total of 23. Not the best year, but far from the worst.

The resorts are still open, but I think I'm done. Time to move on the cycling and put the tyranny of the ski season in my rear view mirror.

Posted by andrew at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the advice from Michael Pollan in his new book, In Defense of Food. The basic idea is that most of what Americans buy at the supermarket and consume is not food, but food-like substances created in the labs of places like General Mills. Most of this crap is sold in the middle aisles of the market, so if you want to eat healthy, stick to the perimeter where you'll find dairy, meat, fruit and vegies. Sound advice.

Comedian Lewis Black, on the other hand, thinks it's all bullshit. You can't believe what the experts tell you because they don't fucking know anything. Instead he offers his wisdom on health:

• The good die young, but pricks live forever
• If you masterbate 20 times a day, you'll never make it out your front door.

Hard to argue with either of those.

Posted by andrew at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Everyone's favorite day is here. It's tax day in America. I'm getting slammed. Mostly, well, almost all, because of capital gains on a particularly inefficient mutual fund. It doesn’t help that I have virtually nothing to deduct: no kids, no business, no mortgage. So I had to cough up about 1600 bucks.

The fund has gone up, which is always good, but the captial gains are really high and since the gains were paid out at the end of last year and the fund has subsequently gone down, it feels like I'm paying tax on phantom income. Sorta sucks, but the fund will come back. It's very volitale but mostly heading in the right direction.

There's a strange psychology in this country. People get really happy when they're expecting a refund and bummed as all hell when they have to make a payment to the IRS. I can understand the second one, but the first one is really nonsensical. Sure, people like getting a check. No getting around that. But the truth is that when you get a refund, all it really means is you've provided an interest free loan to the federal government. I don't get the feeling that many people would be excited about that.

The ideal situation is where on April 15th, you owe nothing and pay nothing. The way to do this is to adjust your withholding amount on your paycheck. If you're getting a refund, simply withhold less. You won't get a refund check anymore, but you'll get a de facto raise and you'll stop being a creditor to Uncle Sam. If you're having to pay, withhold more. That way you spread your tax liability over the course of many months instead of having to write a huge check to the fed and the state. Not that this is anything you don't already know.

Posted by andrew at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

— Alan Wolfe, Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Posted by andrew at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, the Olympic Torch Relay for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics has come to San Francisco. Right now, a few hundred yards from where I'm writing this, the torch is traveling down the Embarcadero.

During lunch I went down to justin Herman plaza which is where the relay iss scheduled to end and there's a sea of people, media trucks and protestors.

Look, I understand that many people in the world have problems with the way the Chinese operate. I do. I want Tibet to be free as much as anyone (outside of the Tibetans and Richard Gere, I suppose) and I think the Chinese human rights record and its treatment of the environment is abysmal.

However, this is the Olympics and the Olympic ideal is that the participants put aside their problems with each other to compete. It's about athletics and the spirit of competition, not politics. Certainly if the ancient Greeks could lay down their arms (see below) and have a cease fire so that athletes could travel to and from Olympia in safety, we can put aside our differencse so that the athletes who have worked so hard, dreaming of competing in the Olympics can go to Beijing.

At this point, the only people who really get hurt by all this talk of boycotts and the many protests of the torch relay, is the athletes and the spectators. We were wrong to boycott the Olympics the 1980 in Moscow. It set a horrible precident where, in the following Olympiad, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries didn't attend the LA games in 1984. Equally wrong. And we'd be equally wrong now.

If people have a problem with the where the Olympics are, they should direct their anger at the IOC, the International Olympic Committe and the many corporate sponsors who facilitate the games. They are ones who decide where the games will take place. Once it's been decided, let the athletes and the spectators enjoy the spirit of competition and the spectacle of international sport.

Today, there's only 120 days until the start of the games. I'm psyched!

Travelling to Olympia involved a long journey across warring territories. Therefore, two months before the Games began, the Hellanodikai, who organized the Games, declared a holy truce between Greek cities. At that moment, all wars were supposed to cease. The truce was also designed to protect the athletes during their journey home, which could sometimes last several months. Evidence that the truce was observed is found in the fact that Olympia was the only Greek city never to build walls to defend itself. During the truce, no prisoners were executed.

The ancient truce was sacred because it was necessary for the free movement of all participants.

The literal meaning of the Greek word for truce, ékécheiria, is "laying down of arms".
(from Peace and the Olympics)

Posted by andrew at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's the best thing about my DVR, you ask? Well, I can now watch PTI when I come home. I don't know why ESPN only broadcasts the show in the middle of the day on the Left Coast, but it doesn't matter anymore. They can show the program in the middle of the fucking night for all I care, because I just record it and watch it when I get home (zipping through all the commercials, of course). Kornheiser and Wilbon yuck it up and keep me up to date on the sports world at the same time. Perfect.

What else do I have on my DVR, you ask? Besides the random movie here and there, here's what I got:

Versus
The Cyclsm

PBS
Frontline
Now
Nature
Globe Trekker
America's Test Kitchen

The Food Network
Boy Meets Grill
Jamie at Home
Barefoot Contessa
A Cook's Tour

HBO
Real Time with Bill Maher
The Wire

Discovery
Planet Earth
Man vs. Wild

AMC
Mad Men
Breaking Bad

Comedy Central
The Daily Show

Universal HD
Friday Night Lights

Animal Planet
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom

The Travel Channel
No Reservations

Of course, I don't watch all this stuff. Who has time? But's it's nice to be able to catch the shows when I want instead of where some pinhead network programmer decides I should. The only down part is that somewhere in the darkest depths of Comcast, they are selling my viewing habits to some marketeers and I'm more entrenched in the information state.

Posted by andrew at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

George Bush loves to say current opinions about his administration don't matter. That history will be the true judge and we won't know until everyone here is dead whether his policies were a success or not, for example:

"As far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don't know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach."

— George W. Bush, Fox News Sunday, Feb 10, 2008

But not so fast. There's a new report about a poll by historians, 61% of whom rate the Bush presidency as the worst ever.

"No individual president can compare to the second Bush," wrote one."Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world''s goodwill. In short, no other president's faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large."

"With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct," said another historian. "When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life."

Of course, as we all know, statistics, polls and historians all have a liberal bias (because they are founded in reality mostly).

Posted by andrew at 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frontline's most recent 2-part documentary on the Iraq War was yet another look into how George Bush got us into the fucking mess we are in the Middle East. The how of it well known, but it's interesting to see it again. Every time I watch one of these things (like No End in Sight), I just can't believe it. I can't believe how fucked the whole situation is. How imminently avoidable the whole situation was and how this fucking war is going to haunt us for generations, even more so than Vietnam because of the nature of the geopolitics of region.

Anyway, in viewing these gut-wrenching documentaries, I've always been left with one big question. Why? Of course, there's been speculation of all sorts, but we've never really gotten the full story of the why, until now, that is. I've been reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. It's one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. Essentially it's the story of Milton Freidman and his neoconservative economic minions at the University of Chicago and how they've used "Shock and Awe" to institute rapacious free-market policies against the will of the people all over the globe starting with Chile in 1970s to Iraq and New Orleans today.

When you look at Iraq through the prism of free-market capitalism, all the decisions and policies start to make sense (in a warped a twisted fucked-up way). Friemanism essentially has 3 tenets: Privatization, Deregulation, Reduction in social programs. The CPA was set up in Iraq to create a free-market Disneyland with the idea that neoconservatives could point to the country as a model of their laissez faire revolution.

How's that working out for you?

Posted by andrew at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Have you seen this guy at work? He makes art out of oreos, peeing in the snow and he can this:

Clearly he's a little touched, in both good and bad ways, but there's no doubt that he's a artistic genius. This one is particularly amazing. More here on You Tube and on Yahoo! People of the Web (which is how I originally found him). Here's Phil's website.

Posted by andrew at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ok, so I must be getting old because I just bought my first recliner. But this isn't your father's recliner. This ain't no fricken Lazy-Boy. It's more like a work of art.

I'd been looking at this chair for months and months. Every time I went down to 4th street in Berkeley to go shoping, I'd stop in at Slater Marinoff, I'd stop in and sit the in the chair. But I didn't buy it, because it was insanely expensive. The name should tell you all you need to know, Slater Marinoff. This isn't exactly IKEA.

The furniture and decor inside is exquisite. The smallish woman who runs the place reminds me of Edna Mode, the pint-sized fashion designer to superheroes from The Incredibles.

Anyway, on Sunday I was riding my bike down 4th street and there was a sale sign in front of Slater Marinoff. I couldn't believe it. This is the sort of place that never has a sale. The chair was just inside the door. I peeked in. There was a sale sign. My chair was marked down about 35%. I brought my bike inside (didn't have lock with me) and went to tell Edna that I wanted the chair, but couldn't buy it now because, well I was cycling and didn't have my wallet, but if she could hold it, I'd be back.

This chair is made by the Canadian company Lind (it's the 920 in case you want to look it up). Edna is complaining to me that they aren't going to carry Lind anymore because the weak ass dollar is making imports from Canada to damn expensive. They decided to liquidate their Lind inventory. Finally. I knew there was one benefit to the anemic dollar.

I cycled home, showered, changed and zipped back to the store to get my chair. It's a good thing I stopped in earlier, because there was some guy complaining to Edna that he intended to buy the chair. Too bad, so sad. It's mine. Paid for it, got it in the car, in the house and have it covered in a blanket lest the Weapons of Mass Destruction tear it shreds. Of course, they love sleeping on it. Pics to come soon.

Posted by andrew at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)