crschmidt

crschmidt, 23 days ago to random

There are 295 people signed up for public comment at the Cambridge City Council tonight, most of whom will be speaking on a policy order to delay the city's implementation of bike lanes.

crschmidt, 8 months ago to random

A Better Cambridge has announced their endorsements for City Council. Incumbents Burhan Azeem, Marc McGovern, Sumbul Siddiqui, Denise Simmons have been endorsed; newcomers Adrienne Klein, Joe McGuirk, Frtanz Pierre, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, and Ayesha Wilson have also received the endorsement.

If housing is your number 1 priority, these are the folks you want on your ballot this fall.

crschmidt, 11 months ago to random

Good morning. I arrived at Porter Square station this morning to find a train arriving in just two minutes, and my carriage for the trip to South Station a new Red Line train. Perhaps a good omen for the week.

crschmidt, 1 year ago to random

Overall, using Bluesky provides an experience that is better aligned with my experience using Twitter. This is because:

• The client looks exactly like Twitter (ie, I have sometimes not realized that I am looking at Bluesky rather than Twitter at a glance)
• Because it's a single instance/service, it has none of the weirdness that mastodon federation creates in seeing content
• Because it's a single instance, it has features like "reply counts"/"like counts" that work.

crschmidt, 1 year ago to random

Google today announced that the board has approved $70B of stock buybacks.

Stock buybacks are not considered a universal good: "Some economists and investors argue that using excess cash to buy up stocks in the open market is the opposite of what companies should be doing, which is reinvesting to facilitate growth (as well as job creation and capacity)."

At Google that might mean things like (for example) "Choosing not to fire 12,000 employees."

crschmidt, 6 months ago to random

Quick Cambridge election outcome thoughts:

On housing, this is a great Council. Jivan is a big step up, and I look forward to what we can do this term.

On bike safety: This is a soft-but-not-worst-case result. Pickett is a big step down over Mallon/Carlone, and protecting the CSO will require constant vigilance and pressure, especially on Wilson (to be good)/Nolan (to stay good). Significant expansion this term seems unlikely (but so does major rollback, imo).

crschmidt, 9 months ago to random

Cambridge is pursuing a sidewalk charging pilot for EVs. The requirements include using ADA compatible ramps for ground-situated cords, and a limit of 12 hours of charging at a time; everything must be removed when not charging.

Will involve a fair amount of work, but better than the alternative of "leaving a cable naked on the sidewalk".

https://twitter.com/CambMA/status/1688580411536838657

crschmidt, 7 months ago to random

The only way to normalize the use of bikes is to use them for things that aren’t currently normal, like biking to the airport.

image/jpeg

crschmidt, 11 months ago to random

Looks like Cambridge just published (today) their Mass Ave rebuild "Why does this cost $50M?" document. While it's helpful to some extent, it still sets a baseline of $10M/mile for surface road improvements, which seems impressively high.
https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/publicworksdepartment/Engineering/cityprojects/MassAve4/2023_05_26_MassAvePC_50MFINAL.pdf

crschmidt, 8 months ago to random

Rad is running some pretty decent sales on their bikes for the next couple days (through the end of August).

• RadRunner 2: $1349 ($150 off)
• RadRover 6+: $1400 ($700 off)
• RadWagon: $1600 ($400 off)
• RadCity 5: $1600 ($400 off)
• RadRunner Plus: $1749 ($150 off)
• RadTrike: $1899 ($600 off)

The Rover in particular is a terrific savings if you're considering the bike. For any of these, you can save an extra $50 using my referral code: https://rwrd.io/wkgsn4x?c

crschmidt, 9 months ago to random

Some things I need to do:

• actually set up the camberville e-bike library website
• make the overview e-bike library website linking to others
• write up the “things I look at in an e-bike” post.
• write a blog post version of my “why don’t businesses integrate with the bike path” thread
• figure out what I want to do for bike trip reports
• find my tripod
• write a blog post version of my EV charging experience
• send rad a formal complaint about them not paying out referrals

crschmidt, 7 months ago to random

I have a question about the proposed "Buffer" width in this image.

crschmidt, 6 months ago to random

My impression is that Cambridge does not use presence detection to adjust signal timings in any intersections, preferring fixed timing even when no vehicles are present. (This includes preferring to not use pedestrian actuated signals.)

Is that perception of mine accurate, and if so, does anyone know if there's a reason why they have that preference?

(CC @sofio @bikepedantic who may have thoughts/info!)

crschmidt, 4 months ago to random

briefly had hope that my management might not be feckless assholes; turns out that hope was short lived. (The first two levels of management do get new respect; unfortunately, they're the levels of management than I'm being forcibly moved away from due to Corporate Decision Making(tm).)

crschmidt, 11 months ago to random

I don’t expect this to be relevant, but any instances that plans to block Meta or Project92 or whatever is not an instance I will stay on.

The Fediverse is not improved by walling off participation in it.

crschmidt, 4 months ago to random

I think a lot of people think "tax write-offs" explain a lot more than they actually do.

crschmidt, 10 months ago to random

I'm travelling to Mountain View this week for work (for the first time in 4 years or so). Upon seeing the weather forecast, I described it as "perfectly Californian" and bemoaned my lack of a bike. But I checked and Stanford's Student Center rents e-bikes for $165 for four days, so now I have reserved an e-bike for the week! (Hopefully they'll have one available; they're closed on Sundays.) I am super excited to explore the bike routes around Mountain View!

image/png

crschmidt, 11 months ago to random

Watching a livetweet from a local politics watcher of tonight's "public hearing", which appears to be a long grievance train, largely set against the idea that Somerville should have any development at all.

And like, I get it. Almost no one is excited about having more $6000/mo homes to rent. So maybe we should have done something about this problem over the last 20 years we've watched it fester and get worse.

Feels like a death spiral with no way out.

crschmidt, 10 months ago to random

apparently EJMR, the 4chan-like forum for economics phd shitposters, used a hashing algorithm for their identifiers which was sha-1 of topic ID + IP address. (for 13 years)

in related information, apparently computing 3 quadrillion sha-1 hashes takes about 240 hours of GPU time on an A100 GPU.

These two facts are not ideal for people who believed they were anonymous in posting to this forum, especially given ~8% of posts are classified as toxic by toxicity-detecting-software.

crschmidt, 7 months ago to random

The 2019 Blix Aveny e-bike assist configuration is bad.

On most bikes, the level of assist controls the power the bike will drive you forward at (cadence sensor) or the torque response curve (torque sensor). On the cadence sensor Aveny, it controls that... and your top speed.

So at assist 1, your max assisted speed is 10mph, assist 2 12.5mph, etc.

Which means you have to choose between "having a modest amount of assist" and "going faster than 12mph with assist".

crschmidt, 5 months ago to random

So, I'm looking at travelling to NYC in late March.

Amtrak tickets on March 18th are $20. Amtrak Tickets on April 8th are $20. But Amtrak tickets on March 25th are $184, and on April 1st are $139.

I can't tell if this is legitimate demand (e.g. everyone wants to be in NYC the week of March 25th), or if this is something weird with Amtrak scheduling + pricing.

crschmidt, 10 months ago to random

I think that I'm going to set a new goal of riding all the rail trails in MA over time. (Other people prefer to summit NH's 4000' peaks, but having done 5 or so of those, I can say that for me, personally, the experience is not what I'm looking for a lot more of.)

Since the weather + Air Quality mean I'm not riding a bike today, I'm futzing around on Strava and building route maps.

image/png
image/png
image/png

crschmidt, 3 months ago to random

Some minor NYC biking notes, having ridden about 75 miles there over the past few days:

• NYC has a lot of really great protected infrastructure.
  • The level to which that infrastructure is effective varies highly from neighborhood to neighborhood.
  • The fact that most of the Manhattan bridges have good bike infrastructure on them is really great. (And a lot of that is pretty recent afaict.)

crschmidt, 2 months ago to random

I'm a strong supporter of Carrying Shit On Bikes. Doesn't have to be big shit, though it can be; but having places to put things is good.

image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg

crschmidt, 7 months ago to random

jesus christ people are self-righteous about mastodon being better than bluesky.