Urban Adventures & More

I hesitate to file this under “Excursions” as it was more “exploration” than a trip someplace. Nonetheless, I went and explored Harvard Square on my bike, and rode down Mass Ave past MIT, and then back. Some observations:

• Most important, this is a real bike town. Unlike New York, where the bikes hide in parks, and only bike messengers, delivery boys, and the fearless/mentally unstable venture onto streets, people are going in all directions here. It may be partly a weekend thing, but it is truly much more bike friendly. Less car volume, less speed, better acclimated to cars. Fun. Apropos of my previous post, I think the way in which the streets are totally nonsense dissuades driving in Cambridge to a large degree.
• There aren’t any bke shops in Harvard Square. Why is that? Local residents (the three I polled) only directed me to ones a mile out along Broadway or Mass Ave (either direction).
• There are a damn lot of pubs.
• Memorial drive is not a good path to take; it is a narrow little sidewalk with lots of people and other bikes on it.
• There are not many interesting buildings to look at in Cambridge.

We’ll see how these observations evolve. I would like to take my bike out to work at some point (in Acton), although it is far and I don’t want to be sweaty all day.

Jane Jacobs makes an artful case in The Death and Life of Great American Cities against congestion pricing. The crux of the congestion pricing plan is to reduce the supply of vehicles indiscriminately. It vilifies trucks, and makes allowances for cars.

However, this is backward; trucks and other commercial vehicles have no alternative, and are the most needed of vehicles, and cars are the most destructive to pedestrian and transit alternatives. When the private automobile is allowed to thrive, it steals those marginal users from mass transit, lowering bus and train utilization. Streets are widened, made one-way, and streamlined to promote rapid car transit at the expense of pedestrians. Parking becomes an imperative at the expensive civic density. Trucks may be in nearly perfectly inelastic demand, but business will simply pass those costs on to their consumers in the city and lower quality of life and vitality within, something we can agree is totally counter-productive.

The proper alternative is one Jacobs proposes, and it makes inherent sense: make the city inhospitable to car traffic, and alternatives will be promoted. Reduce demand for private transportation. The core observation, and one that bears repeating is that transit is a nonlinear problem. This means that there is no fixed number of cars or even visitors to a city. There is no one story. Some come to shop, some to work, some to visit, some to make deliveries. The magnitude and frequency of these uses is a function of the city’s vitality, and the manner in which these activities are carried out is not predetermined for all.

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A few weeks go I finally got fed up of picking out which music to listen to. I don’t have the biggest music library, and since I moved back to Windows, I have been at a loss to find something that displays it in a way conducive to listening to all my tracks. (Somehow, Amarok on Linux did that job very well. Awesome player.) As a result, I started using Pandora, and really liked it. At first it played my “seed” songs too much, but a little nudging caused it to branch out, and now I have a couple of really enjoyable stations with a good variety of music.

Now for the inevitable problem: my computer is loud and it’s a waste of energy and a distraction to turn it on to listen to music. The solution: listen to Pandora on a stand-alone device. As a secondary requirement, I wanted a device with an iPod dock, since I have felt a similar problem with not being able to listen to the iPod.

The only device I found out there was the Grace Digital Audio IR3020. It has quite a bit more features than my basic requirements; it plays Sirius radio over the internet (with a subscription), Pandora, iPod, any of a number of streams (podcasts, terrestrial radio over the internet), and music files shared over your local network. You can also set an alarm clock and a sleep timer. It has a remote, and you can set 99 presets (haven’t explored that feature).

Out of curiosity and interest, I have tested most of those features, except for the podcasts (although I’m checking it out now), and the Sirius. Here are some thoughts on each of them and the device.

• Pandora. Works as advertised. All your stations show up in a list, and you bookmark, thumbs up or down, and skip tracks. The Quickmix is available, but you can’t select which stations go into the quickmix (I’m not sure if your configuration from the website holds over.) The big downside is the remote is completely ineffective for this. They don’t have the “Reply” button on the remote, and so you can’t give feedback or skip tracks.
• iPod. You can navigate with the iPod wheel to pick music as usual. Similar to Pandora, you can’t really control the iPod with the remote. Shockingly, I couldn’t even change tracks; I could fast forward and pause. Unlike the radio stations, you can’t set iPod as a preset, so you have to be able to see the screen to play the iPod.
• Streaming Radio. Thousands of stations from around the world are available to stream, and you can add them to your player through the website. This web-config option is one of the coolest things. Change a setting on the internet, and the option appears on the player. This doesn’t have many controls, so there’s nothing the remote can’t do.
• Network Music. I actually did not expect this feature; it can play music from a Windows share, as well as from a Universal Plug’n'Play server. I haven’t been able to get the former to work (very frustrating!), but Windows Media Player 11 sets up the latter with ease, and if my computer is on, I can access my entire library through the radio. And to really placate me, it allows you to navigate through your music either by artist, etc. according to the ID3 tags, or through the filesystem. I am really organized, so the latter is generally a very good choice for me. If you have a home media server, this would be a really sweet feature.
• In general, the interface is very poor.  I have harped on how the remote doesn’t really do anything. The turn-wheel on the front of the player, used to navigate menus and make selections, has so much resistance that when you try to push it, you slide the radio across the table. The screen is too small for its functionality–showing only 3 lines of information and a line of status–so you are constantly scrolling and discovering easter eggs because you didn’t know certain menu items exist!
• It has both an ethernet jack and a wireless b/g antenna. It was a little annoying entering the 16-digit (or however long) key for the router in there using the scroll wheel, but it was a one-time exercise. One cool thing is that it sets the time automatically when you get online, so it pays you back in effort right there.
• For completeness, I’ll tell you that it (apparently) has 2 20-watt speakers, RCA and headphone out. The equalizer has a half-dozen presets.

Overall, it is a very good device. It meets your needs, but on its terms. That, of course, is the story of consumer electronics.

I have been dreaming about the almost-completely-separated bike paths from the Upper West Side to Orchard Beach, in the Bronx, for months now. Today I tried to take them there, and failed. I am much less excited about the route now; it is very haphazard going through the Bronx.

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I went to watch the ships come into harbor yesterday at the beginning of Fleet Week. There were about a dozen ships from the US Navy, Canadian Navy, and the Coast Guard, along with lots of little harbor police boats. I also went looking for the aircraft carrier that usually shows up; I recall last year it docked out in the main harbor, but this time they took the ship in a low tide and docked by the Intrepid before the rest arrived.

Click on the pictures for bigger versions. If you click again, be warned that some are very big files and may be slow to download!

To clarify what I wrote in my previous post about safe street riding, consider this passage  (taken from the California DMV code), a bike should stay as close as possible to the right unless,

When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge, subject to the provisions of Section 21656. For purposes of this section, a “substandard width lane” is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

So, when there’s no shoulder, you should take up a lane. It’s that simple.

In typical Urban Adventure-fashion, I went on an unplanned trip to New Jersey today. The route is basically this one, or, more precisely, the one given on maps 10 and 11 (about page 34) of the New Jersey Greenway Guide. Also seen easily on the New York City Bike Map route.

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There isn’t much to it; this post explains it all. Make sure you use the driver version they tell you to download, not the one off the linksys website.

You don’t get the Linksys interface this way, but the built-in windows software works as well as I recall linksys working; I am getting a signal from 3 stories down and 30 linear feet away.

I was totally not expecting to do yesterday’s ride. I just went out for some fresh air, and found myself a couple hours later in Red Hook. However, along the way, I realized I have been developing what I am tentatively calling “New York’s Most Beautiful Spots”. Currently on the list is Roosevelt Island (in the “Places to Be” Category) and Inwood Hill Park (in the “Seclusion and Beauty” Category). New entries:

• 25th Street Pier in the Hudson River Park, for its view in all directions, including the Empire State, Starrett-Lehigh, Jersey City, Verrazano, Statue of Liberty, and George Washington Bridge, as well as being a great addition to the park itself.
• East River Bridge Pedestrian Paths, for the vistas, perspectives of the city and the bridges themselves. (See below for more.)
• At the foot of the Brooklyn Pier of the Manhattan Bridge, for vistas. You can see all three of the southern east river bridges, midtown, downtown, and the waterfront. It would be a beautiful spot to be as well if not for the constant rumbling of subway trains over the bridge. (See below for more)
• Red Hook Waterfront, particularly the Lous J. Valentino Park Pier, for vistas. Here you feel as though within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty; Manhattan rises behind Governors Island, and the entire area feels like a sleepy seaside town (on the weekend at least, when the port is closed).

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This post on the dropbox forums says exactly what to do: you can either install an old version of dropbox (I couldn’t figure out how to make it run properly in Linux), or you can use that guy’s Python script. He even provides a Windows binary.

To use the script in Linux, note that you have to change a few lines to manually input your dropbox.db file loation (since the APPDATA variable will not be set). Also, when entering your new dropbox location, don’t use a trailing slash. It worked perfectly for me; now I have Windows and Linux syncing from the same directory!