Humanize the Earth!

bringing in the New Year

I just bought my tickets today for the New Year’s Day Puja. Hope to see you there!

build your own bike class in Chicago

I took this class last summer. It’s awesome! Here is the intro paragraph from the announcement:

During this 8-week course, each participant fully rebuilds a bicycle, learning about each task along the way, ending up with a new-to-you, low-cost, reliable, well-adjusted vehicle. This workshop is for people who are excited to gain confidence in their mechanics skills and demystify the process of building a bike–no prior knowledge is needed. The instructors are Sarah Kaplan, a League Cycling Instructor, and Sam Van Dellen, a mechanic at Rapid Transit. Workshops take place at West Town Bikes, where each participant has the use of a professional bike stand and full set of tools. West Town Bikes also provides storage for your project bike. Participants provide a bicycle and any new parts you may need. We will make a group trip to Working Bikes to help choose bikes, or you can go to Working Bikes on your own or get a bike from another source. We would like to discuss your choice of bicycle beforehand to make sure it will be a good choice. Project bikes must have multiple gears and a derailleur and hand brakes (not coaster). Participation is limited to six (6). Workshop participation is subject to approval by the instructors.

new blogs

There are two new blogs I’m going to be participating in.

One is for my neighborhood within a neighborhood, Marshall Square. It’ll include current events, history, rumors and whatever else strikes our fancy.

The other is worldwide, at Open Space World. That one’s going to be mostly re-posts from other blogs or mailing lists, telling stories wherever open space shows up.

New Year’s Day Puja Party

I’ll be at the Puja Party on New Years Day. Would love to see you there!

admin note about trackback

WordPress seems to use a non-interoperable standard called pingback. This means auto-trackback only works between WordPress blogs (like Michael or Doug, both of whom I’ve already tested, or Diana).

For other blogs, we have to manaually put their trackback address underneath the post, which seems to work [1] [2]. Michael and Doug had a problem tracking back between their blogs. I’m hoping that this post helps them, except that maybe it won’t, because I can’t seem to find the trackback URI for a WordPress post. Is it just the post address? I’ll see if I can find out.

update: The trackback URI for this post is: http://tedernst.com/wp/wp-trackback.php?p=318 (will vary depending your your WordPress setup. I was able to modify my php files to include some code to display the trackback URI whenever someone is looking at the comments. I can’t figure out how to write that code here, so email me if you’re interested.

CTA To No Longer Accept Pace Transfers

Could this be true? This is a terrible decision. CTA To No Longer Accept Pace Transfers For those not familiar with transit in the Chicago area, CTA is our Chicago-focused agency. They run busses and the el trains. PACE is the suburban bus service. When I comute to work from Regula’s house in Wilmette, I sometimes take a PACE bus for $1.50 and then transfer to the el for $0.25. After work if I do the reverse, it’s $1.75 for the el and then $0.25 for the tranfer onto PACE.

Recently I started leaving a bike at the Wilmette Metra (the 3rd of our 3 agenies, they run commuter trains) station in Wilmette and then ride to her place. That’s necessary because Metra doesn’t place nice with the other agencies. Seems CTA is going that route. This will make it much less likely that I’ll be ever taking the el to Wilmette again, since it’s a mile walk to my bike, and I’m sure as heck not going to pay full fare for just that distance, or walk it very often. Much faster to take the Metra in the first place. So PACE loses bigtime with this decision, and CTA loses as well. Ugh.

edited to see if I can ping CTA Tattler’s story about CTA and paratransit which doesn’t mention this Pace/CTA transfer issue.

updateI wrote about this at the Chicago El livejournal and the answers that came back indicate that if a rider is using the Chicago Card (which I am) proximity card, then there is actually no change in policy. So that’s good news for me.

Only If committments

There’s a really cool website called Pledgebank that allows me (and you!) to make Only If committments. I will do X, but only if Y other people do X as well. For example, if someone from my neighborhood needed a bus ticket to their sick mother in another state, I might not feel okay just giving money, not knowing if they were going to raise the amount needed and be able to go at all. And they don’t want the hastle of having to return all the money if they don’t get enough to go either. So the campaign is set up for pledges of a set amount and when the full amount is pledged, we all give the actual money and the ticket gets purchased.

Here’s a real-world example of a pledge I’ve signed:

“I will set up a $10 monthly donation to CatComm (or $120 annually) but only if 399 other people will too, and only if one philanthropist will match our joint donations dollar for dollar.”

CatComm is short for Catalytic Communities, in Rio. I met the director, Theresa Williamson at the Chicago Omidyar Members conference in July. She’s doing some great stuff that I’m happy to support. Maybe you’d like to as well?

bike winter!

Last night was one of my best bike rides of the year so far. It started snowing around midday and by the time I left my downtown Chicago office around 6:30, it was really starting to pile up. It wasn’t too far below 30 degrees so wasn’t icy, just wet. The cars had a really hard time with slippery pavement, and I actually could go just as fast as they were going in traffic, when they were moving. Most of the time they weren’t moving because there were so many of them, however, and I was able to either ride between the two lanes going my direction (in the 4-6 inch deep pile pushed there by the cars), or in the on-coming lanes (mostly wasn’t any traffic there at all, so was able to ride in the ruts of the previous traffic). I sure was wet when I got home. What fun!

When I got home I shoveled snow for the first time in my new place at the Hub Co-op. We have a huge area to shovel, living on a corner (lots of sidewalk) with a big courtyard we use to get bikes in and out of the basement, and then the sidewalk back to the alley. There was probably 6 inches on the ground when I did my shoveling and I’m guessing another 2 when Sam went out later to do it again. Looking now at the unshovelled walkways, I’d guess we got a total of 8 or 9 inches. We’ll see how the snow-riding is today after things have frozen after yesterday. Maybe the roads will be cleaner due to salt and plowing. I’m guessing I’ll have to really ride in the traffic lane and not much to the right because it’ll be too snowy/icy over there.

links and where they come from

I find it interesting how links keep us connected on the internet. I use bloglines to track feeds from my favorite blogs, as well as some wikis and the technorati feed of new links to this blog (either here or at it’s previous location). Today I noticed a link from someone I’ve never met, Emily Gordon at emdashes. Emily writes about the New Yorker magazine and has a wide variaty of links in her sidebar. Glad to have you reading, Emily!

I also see a new link from mng in Moscow, Russia. This is a new blog about Open Space Technology. Welcome!