Uncompatible Systems

There was a FOIA request for the NYPD issue report after the Republican National Conference in 2004. It just came through. It reads as my schedule durring that week. One item is of particular relevance. A workshop I taught on how to edit audio with Audacity was characterized as:

“Indymedia Workshop today, from 2100 to 2300 hours, at 40 Worth Street.
The event, hosted by NYC Indymedia, will offer training to
activits/journalists on the use of a program called ‘Audacity’ regarding
video activist footage.”

Here’s a pic of me in the act of “terrorist training”

400 kilometers is roughly 250 miles. This means the start and end of the ride are in darkness. My start was again in the late evening hours. I wake up from 3 hours of sleep at 12:30AM on Saturday, May 12th. Mix up a protein shake, get my gear on and I’m off to Penn Station to catch the NJ Transit northeast corridor line to Princeton Junction at 1:41 AM. I’m running a little late so I only have 35 minutes to get to the station. As I ride down the Williamsburg bridge I pass many friends of mine coming home from a night of partying. I’m in the full spandex and trying to be inconspicuous. I do a little time trial to wake myself up and get there with enough time to get a ticket and catch the track number.

I get to the station with 10 minutes to spare. Then I notice my rear light cover has popped off. Shit. I’ll need some tape. Since this is the last train until 5AM, it’s a popular one. Everyone else is going home and I feel out of place with a light touring bike and shorts on my way to start a bike race. I get some sleep on the train.

My NJ riding starts with a 8 mile jaunt to registration. It’s warm out but pitch black on Princeton-Highstown road. My lights do their job. I meet up at registration with Grant and Dave, the two friends I made at the end of the 300k. We start together. Grant is doing this on a fixed gear, Dave on a single speed. Both frames are custom made by David Kirk. The first 30 miles are in the dark. It’s very pleasant out. The terrain is flat and a little boring. There’s one hill early on. Dawn comes and we’re riding past cranberry bogs. South Jersey is the home to large cranberry farms. There is even a road called cranberry road. Unfortunately it’s the end of the season so the bogs are just that. Kinda ugly and smelly. I imagine what they must look like in the summer all filled with floating red berries.

After the bogs, we enter the Pine Barrens. They are called this for a reason. Very spooky. Pine trees and long flat roads. We get through the start by telling jokes and chatting. Dave drops his chain like a noob and we all laugh about it. It was an excuse to take a break. When we got back on the road the most meditative riding of the day begins. We keep a quick and silent pace through the whole stretch, about 20 miles. It ends with a tandem passing us at about 20 mph. I couldn’t refuse. I catch it’s wheel and take the free ride all the way to the first controle. We made great time on this one. Got there early and ate a big breakfast.

The next stretch is more of the same. Long flat roads with warm temperatures. We take some wrong turns here and do a little backtracking. I have my GPS off for the two long day stages to conserve battery. This stage leads us into a spooky looking town called Salem. There were abandoned stores and burned out windows on the main drag. We check in at the local pizza shop for lunch. The pizza tastes good at the time but had way too much salt. I spent the next 30 minutes drinking half of my water bottle. Leaving this stage, it was only noon and we had put in 125 miles. Word up.

The next stage was more long flats but this time with afternoon sun. We get very lost and have to ride over 6 miles extra to compensate for the error and are given the gift of a nice steady headwind once we’re back on course. We get organized do 2 minute pulls with a four person paceline. It was hard but we averaged 18 mph into the wind this way. It made that stretch bearable. Arriving at the last controle in daylight, which is the same location as the first it’s around 7PM. We all feel good. After eating a large dinner consisting of all the food left I feel great compared to the end of the last 300k, which is the distance I’m at right now. Only 100k more to go, most of it in darkness since sunset is at 7:50PM.

The temperature isn’t dropping much and my legs feel fine once moving. It takes about 10 miles to get back up to pace, which is around 16 mph compared to the morning’s 18. The day had obviously taken a toll on my legs. Nonetheless we continue on to the last controls, only 35 miles out at Wawa, NJ’s famous roadside convenience store. As we roll in, it starts raining a bit but it’s still humid. I didn’t bring any rain gear but I’m not too worried since it’s a warm rain. I looking forward to cooling off. We get some coffee and little snacks, top off the water and notice the light rain has become a full-fledged rain storm and the temperature has dropped 20 degrees in just 10 minutes. I feel like a dumb ass for not bringing rain gear. I’m not alone since Dave was the only person who packed a rain jacket. Grant and Ben had arm and leg warmers. I had nothing else. I’m stuck in shorts and a jersey. Dave lets me borrow his wool arm warmers and we set out for the last 35 miles.

It’s now 9PM, 50 degrees, dark and we are in the thick of a rain storm that’s getting worse by the minute. The wind picks up and I get really cold. My fingers are going numb and I’m shivering a bit. 5 miles in we get to a hill and the coffee kicks in but my legs don’t. I didn’t bonk but I had to drop to the middle ring cause I was physically incapable of pushing the same gear I was in all day. I stop, take an electrolyte pill and drink a lot of water. All better and back on the road. Moving is the only way to keep warm. Grant is another skinny guy so we commiserate in what is now stage 1 hypothermia. He tells me to breathe only through my nose and make each breath even. This helps me keep warm and stay focused on going forward. I start visualizing a little glowing ball of fire in my chest, which helps a bit too. Each time I get distracted I start shivering quite hard, so I get real determined to stay focused on getting to the hotel.

Right when I feel like I can’t go any further Dave announces that we have 15 more miles to do. At the pace we’re keeping that means one more hour of this kind of exposure. I don’t stop. I’m hating life and cursing this stupid idea to try and get to France. I’m pretty much committed to finishing alive, packing up and calling the brevet series quits. Each time I see a house with lights on I imagine stopping to knock on their door in some kind of storybook chapter. “Hello. I’m lost and freezing, can I totally freak you out by falling unconscious on your floor?”

The last stretch is called Old York Road. It is a 5 mile straight which feels like a 5000 mile straight. I’m in considerable pain in multiple places now and I can’t move much more than my legs. We start crossing turnpikes and parkways. Things look familiar. We’re on the last leg and I sprint as fast as I can to the final checkpoint. I run in, get the brevet card signed and I’m asked to sign it myself. I can’t because my hands are too numb. I feel alert but people keep asking me to repeat myself, saying I’m mumbling. I scribble something on the card and pace around the air conditioned hotel lobby. Great. Air conditioning. Everyone starts to get worried about my violent shivering. I’m handed a towel and I run into the bathroom, take off all my clothes and stand in front of the electric hand dryer for 10 minutes. My hands and feet begin to get feeling back and I’m not shaking as hard any more. Dave has a change of dry clothes. I put them on, three sizes too big and laugh a bit about what just happened. I sit in the lobby and start eating and drinking recovery stuff. Crisis averted.

Once I was warmed up my legs felt fine. I later read about the different stages of hypothermia and figured out upon the finish I was entering stage two, which is characterized by violent shaking and mumbling, along with loss of motor skills of the hands and feet. Yea! After surviving that I felt great about finishing. I take back all the curses and declarations of quitting. I’m still going for the 600k and France. So there. In retrospect, all I needed was leg warmers and a rain jacket and I wouldn’t have been in that condition. Now I know. Even if the weather report says clear skies, expect the worse.

To sum it up, this distance wasn’t considerably harder than the 300k despite the toll the weather took on my unprepared ass. Without rain and detours I would have finished in under 19 hours. Start time was 4h00, finishing time was 23h20, which puts it at 19 hours, 20 minutes. At this pace I think I can do the 600k without sleeping.

Apple gets criticism for the use of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) in many of their products. Notably, iTunes and the iPod. Though I have been using OS X for a little under a year now, I’ve stayed away from using iTunes completely. That is until I discovered the open source Firefly Media Server project. It takes a filesystem of music in mp3, ogg, mp4 and flac formats and serves them up to an iTunes client as a “shared playlist”. It runs on all unix-like operating systems. This is perfect for the home server with a large music library. Who wants to keep their music on their laptop anyway?

So I though it’d be interesting to go one step further. The wonderful program mpd is an open source remote jukebox. Essentially this can replace the iTunes and AirTunes combo for playing songs to what Apple calls “remote speakers”. But what if I want to keep iTunes as the front end to both a remote music library and remote speakers?

Right now the answer is it’s impossible without some more reverse engineering. Apple has used a private encryption key embedded into the Airport Extreme’s firmware to assure that iTunes can only stream music to an Apple Airport. To make things more frusturating (for my goal at least) is that the problem going the other way has already been solved.