Bicycled to the library
Bicycled to a garage sale
Bicycled to the store (solely to buy snacks for the pet rabbits 🤔)
Saw some fitness cyclers
A few kids on bikes
No adults doing any utilitarian cycling
Eight bazillion cars (Nobody walks/bikes in LA!)
Annoyed the clerks in a store asking them where the nearest bicycle rack was (answer: nowhere nearby)
@ai6yr Fortunately Berkeley did that, although those alternate routes aren't always really close to the arterials & since those are where destinations frequently are (e.g., my library branch) sometimes it's necessary to ride a fraction of a block on a busy street to get where you're going: https://berkeleyca.gov/city-services/getting-around/walking-and-biking/bike-boulevards. Fortunately for that library, there are enough lights on the street that there are frequent gaps in the traffic so it's usually not to hard to get there from the closest cross street.
Remarkable how out-of-the-mainstream utilitarian cycling seems to be in my neighborhood. Strong car-centric culture in Southern California, for sure. (yes, I was, until recently, part of that). 🤔
'“This is not what students bring to school,” Sheppard said, holding the chain to the camera. “These are heavy industrial chains that were locked with bike locks, and this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall.”
'But this is exactly what students bring to school, and it’s a bike lock chain that’s recommended to them through the Columbia University website.'
I used to work at an Apple Store and my job title was "Creative" which mostly consisted of doing one-on-one trainings with customers on how to use their computers.
This could be anything from someone learning to use a computer for the very first time up to people learning Final Cut Pro to create movies.
I genuinely loved every level of user because they were there to learn something new, but my absolute least favorite were the cocky preteen boys who would start every lesson with something like "my mom made me come here and I already know everything so just teach me something new" which is really hard to determine when you just said you "already know everything," CHADLEY!
After running through a quick list of all of the software options and cool shortcuts I could think of and being hit with "I already know that" OVER and OVER again, my fallback was teaching them how to use their basic software like Pages and Keynote in weird ways, such as cutting the heads off their family photos and pasting them onto random things to make weird animations and movies.
While I dreaded the initial interactions with those boys, I ended up getting a lot of repeat visitors who would ONLY work with me because "Alice is the only one who knows how to use Pages and Keynote the RIGHT way" which definitely was NOT the way Steve Jobs ever intended for that software to be used, but I still maintain it was the BEST way.
Welcome to the April 12th BikeNite! Thanks for joining, and I hope we all enjoy chatting about cycle stuff! Feel free to answer whenever at your convenience. Anyone can join, now or later. Reply to what you like, and boost for visibility.
We'll start out with our introduction, inspired by comment from @rodbotic:
Q1. Where are you posting from today? What does a typical ride for you look like? Share a photo if you'd like. #BikeNite#BikeNiteQ
@bikescape@moira@ascentale@rodbotic I was riding in the Berkeley (CA) hills a few years ago and a wild turkey flew across the road about 10 feet ahead of me and it was in fact an amazing sight! There are thousands in the area and they're quite fearless around here and are often reluctant to make way for cars and bikes when they're hanging out in the middle of a road. I shoo them out of the way with loud gobbling as I approach and pass them.
"Wall times" in the Conejo Valley (times ambulances need to wait before dropping off a patient at the emergency room) have been 2.5 hours this week. 👀 #EMS#ConejoValley
Stumbled upon some "news" articles predicting gloom and doom about the Eclipse in Texas ("stock up on food and water!") and have decided that there are still humans you might be able to conquer by threatening to take away the sun. 🤔
@tg9541@ai6yr My father was a ham radio operator in the '50s and '60s and maybe even back into the '40s - W6WRX - and he had a telegraph bug I found utterly fascinating. I never learned Morse but he was good enough that he could understand and transmit it pretty well.
@noellemitchell Libby told me today an ebook I'd put on hold was in, the library proper told me a paper book I'd put on hold was in, and when I stopped by to pick it up on the way home from work I also got a book recommended by @charliejane in her recent WaPo review (https://wapo.st/42TqAQq) so my thousands and thousands of owned and unread books will just have to wait their turn.
Lazy ask: Is there a good guide out there on making meetings truly hybrid, maybe with equipment recommendations?
I've been on too many unfortunate "hybrid" meetings where it was impossible for people joining remotely to hear what people attending in person were saying because the organizers were relying on a laptop mic in one corner of the room to pick up all sound. Trying to plan well so my work can avoid a situation like this.
@bikescape@athena@glightly For seminars we've found Owls to work well, but for Qualifying Exams for grad students we switched to a Jabra camera mounted to the top of a TV stand plus a Jabra tabletop mic; that way the in-person attendees are looking at the remote participants rather than at the Owl camera. We had some remote search interviews with a deaf candidate and in which a deaf grad student participated and campus arranged for an ASL interpreter to join the Zoom.