I could put this on a loop and watch it all day.
via Animals Being Dicks which along with ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS accounts for most of my internet LOLs these days…
and remember, high cadence, low gear.
Woke up this morning singing Kung Fu by Ash. This version of the video is an edit of the outtakes that appeared during the credits of the 1995 film Rumble in the Bronx. Maybe it’s just how old I am now but just watching this makes me wince in pain.
Steal the MP3 here.
It’s 2012! Happy new year kids and fuck you Mayans.
Around the the last week of September, when the rains in Goa ended, I finally quit procrastinating, got on my bike and lugged my camera around North Goa to photograph the many interesting lions that people had on the gate posts of their houses.
They had piqued my interest forever it seemed and I finally did what I had been planning to do for months, cycle around Moira, Nachinola, Aldona, Assagaon, Carona, Olaulim, Pomburpa and Britona and photograph as many of them as I could find. It turned out to be a hugely rewarding day and I came home tired, sunburnt, with a sore ass, back and neck but I ended up with many photographs I am actually pleased with.
Click on the picture to go Flickr and see the complete set of photographs.
Since I will be leaving Goa in about a week and don’t know when I will return I have been trying to make the most of the time I have here. One of the things that I have enjoyed the most this year has been to rediscover the thrill of cycling and do it on a regular basis like I have never done before.
I’ve been cycling at least 50 K a day and on many days as much as 120 K or so during a couple of trips to Sawantwadi in Maharashtra and many trips to the Maharashtra border check-post.
The rains though put a major damper on my habit and after a few weeks of cycling in a downpour everyday and coming home like a drenched rat I tired of it and the cycling got sporadic. A week back though the monsoon disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived in Goa. I woke up one morning with the sun shining brightly at me through the window and not a cloud in the sky so I decided to do my early morning cycling trip to the lighthouse at Fort Aguada. This is a 48 K or so trek I was doing every morning for the first few months in Goa but the monsoons threw a spanner into the works of my well maintained habit.
It was the morning after I had booked tickets to Mumbai and then to Delhi so I decided I ought to get back in the saddle regularly and make the best of the few weeks left. So here’s a description of my daily ride from this morning. This may only be interesting to other cyclists at best and will surely be thoroughly boring for pretty much everyone else but I’m writing it as much to put down the memory to savour later for myself as for anyone else to read. So here goes…
For the first fifteen minutes or so my knees are always sore and my hamstrings cramped up from the previous day. For the next few kilometres, after I am warmed up, I feel good but then about 10 km. or so into the ride my back starts to hurt. The grips on the handlebars rip up my palms and they are now covered with thick, ugly calluses from being rubbed raw for hours everyday. A few fingers on my left hand are often completely numb or tingly.
If it’s sunny it’s so hot that I’m dripping wet with sweat about half an hour into the ride. If it’s raining, I am soaked to my skin within minutes of leaving the house and bitterly cold and uncomfortable for the rest of the ride. Each day I return so tired that my vision is blurry.
Motorists think I don’t exist. Whether it’s at a crossing where I’m trying to switch down gears fast enough to keep going and a truck decides to cut across me anyway or on a wide road, a bus overtakes me only to brake hard, just a few metres ahead of me or some scrawny Goan mother-fucker on a scooter, who threatens to kick me over because I didn’t let him pass quickly enough.
Today, an auto-rickshaw side-swiped me and my pedal got stuck in the auto. I was dragged along for a few metres. He didn’t brake, he didn’t slow down. I finally got thrown to the side of the road and my foot got caught between the spokes of the front wheel of my bike and the front fork. Considering the violence of the crash I got off pretty lightly: one badly mangled foot, one destroyed shoe, one really sore ass and one scraped up elbow. The rear dérailleur on the bike is shot. Also the the front wheel is bent but I did that, while yelling in agony, trying to free my trapped foot. I got no apology and little help.
So, I ask myself, why do I do it? Why do I go out every fucking morning, whether it’s in the pissing rain or the blazing sun to push pedals for kilometre after kilometre, torturing myself and pushing a cycle to the point that it is constantly falling apart? Why do I want to be out on the road at the mercy of the elements and of feckless motorists sending text messages from their cellphones while driving SUV’s?
Maybe it’s because once in a while, not everyday, often when I least expect it, when I’m close to passing out, soaked with sweat, my lungs and my legs on fire after cycling up a steep hill, I go over the top of the hill and start cycling down the other side, free-wheeling down the slope, fast as the wind, with just the right song playing on my iPod and blasting into my head… and for just a few minutes I experience the closest thing to ecstasy that I can ever imagine.
This morning I woke up whistling this tune from Jamiroquai’s album ‘A Funk Odyssey’ from 2001.
‘Picture Of My Life’ is the last track on an album packed full of some of Jamiroquai’s best work and it makes listening to the album from start to finish truly worthwhile; a beautiful, melancholy song to end an album full of energetic, upbeat music.
This is the acoustic version of the song which is perhaps even better than the one on the album.
Get the MP3 here and sing along to it or do yourself a favour and go listen to the entire album. You can thank me later.
So I found a gem of a little App in the Mac App Store that really simplifies my workflow and saves me time everyday. The App is called Cloud. I know, the most generic name possible that is made even worse by an icon that looks just like the icon for MobileMe, Apple’s short lived and much hated service. This will get worse when Apple starts their new iCloud service. But apart from that little problem this App is absolutely brilliant.
To illustrate the utility of Cloud let me give you an example of a situation most people face many times a day. You are chatting with someone on iChat, Skype or your IM service of choice and you want to show them a file on your computer whether it is a picture or a sound. Most people (myself included) don’t use the file transfer options on instant messengers because they tend not to work most of the time.
So you find the item in Finder and either drag it over to Mail or open a browser tab and log into your Web based mail account and upload the file. You then type in the mail address of the person you are trying to share the file with and if you don’t have it you have to ask them for it in chat.
Once the file is sent they have to log into their own mail and find the message you just sent them and view the attachment. All of this takes about five minutes or so and is a pain to do if you have to repeat it many times a day.
This is where Cloud comes in. You install it from the App store and it shows up as a cloud icon in your menu bar.
Now, say you are chatting with someone and you want to send them a file or just show them a picture or share a screen-shot of your Mac.
You highlight the file in Finder and hit Ctrl+Option+R and Cloud automatically uploads the file to the web in a few seconds. This works for files in iTunes and iPhoto as well. You don’t have to right click and locate the file in Finder first. Just select it in the App, hit the shortcut and you’re done.
Once done Cloud gives you a Growl notification and plays a sound to say that the file is ready to be shared and it pastes a URL for the file right into your clipboard so all you do is hit Cmd+V to paste the link in your chat window and the person clicks on it and sees your file.
If you still aren’t convinced you should try using it for a few days and see how much easier it makes sharing files from your Mac with others.
Also, did I say it’s free? You can’t argue with zero dollars.
Some would say that they use DropBox for this but I think DropBox is nowhere as simple to use for file sharing. Even though I use it constantly it is mostly as a means of having a web based backup of the most important files I am working on for when the shit hits the fan. <Dead computer>
It’s the most well thought out App I have used in a while. Your mileage may vary, caveat emptor etc.
Here is a link. Enjoy!
