Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

New Toys: Bike Trainer and Airsoft Gun

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CycleOps Fluid2 TrainerMelissa and I have just returned home from a wonderful long-weekend celebrating Christmas with our family in Southern Virginia. We received wonderful gifts from my parents, Melissa’s parents, and other members of our family. I want to thank everybody for all the gifts, and I sincerely hope that you all enjoy our gifts to you as well.

I spent part of this evening getting our new CycleOps Fluid2 trainer set up, which was a gift from my parents. This is, basically, a device that connects to a bicycle so you can use any bike as an indoor stationary bike. I apologize for the poor picture, but I set it up in a place where there wasn’t a whole lot of room ;-). I’m not sure exactly how these things work, but the simplistic version is that the bike is held in place by the frame of the trainer, and the wheel rests against a spinny doojob.

The spinny doojob has a flywheel (to provide some inertia) and another gizmo that provides resistance (for friction). All-in-all, it basically feels like you’re riding on a road—at least as far as raw friction. The inertia is a bit light (so the bike wheel stops spinning a bit faster than it does on a real ride), but overall it’s quite realistic. You adjust resistance simply by shifting gears, which is pretty slick and easy. I did a half-hour ride this evening after setting it up, and I was sweating just as much as I do on a real ride (which is how I judge effectiveness ;-)).

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Israel Targets Hamas Leadership in Air Raid

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Israel launched an air raid on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip today. At least 225 have been killed, including many high-ranking Hamas leaders. The Israeli raid was carried out in direct response to ongoing Hamas rocket attacks on Israel over the preceding months and years. Hamas is recognized by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization, and they act as the de-facto leadership body in the Gaza Strip having seized control of the territory from the Democratically-elected Palestinian National Authority.

Hamas has threatened retaliation against Israel, though it was Hamas aggression and rocket attacks the precipitated this increase in hostilities. In fact, recent Hamas rocket attacks followed Israel’s humanitarian 10-day border opening allowing medical supplies and food into Gaza from Israel.

As is often the case, the mainstream media has portrayed this as a unilateral Israeli attack and there has been widespread condemnation from governments in the middle-east and elsewhere. Media reports have generally failed to provide any context regarding Hamas rocket attacks that set off these hostilities, the humanitarian border opening, or the general context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Before judging the ‘right and wrong’ of the conflict or of this recent flare-up, it i imperative that you learn the context. This requires effort on your part, since the version presented by the media is generally one-sided and inaccurate.

Merry Christmas!

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As you are no-doubt aware, Christians worldwide celebrate Christmas tomorrow (December 25). Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, the divine Son of God, who has had more impact on humanity over the last ~2,000 years than all other men, governments, and movements combined. This is not a time for mindless consumerism. Christmas is when we should spend time with our families, spend time in worship, and celebrate the momentous arrival of the Son of God.

It is important that Christians reclaim this holiday from the secularized monstrosity it has become.

Later today, Melissa and I will be traveling to visit our family in southern Virginia for Christmas, and as we celebrate this holiday I will likely be a bit lax in posting on the site but will be back in time to ring in the new year. I wish all of you safe travels, and a Merry Christmas (or, for my Jewish friends, an ongoing Happy Hanukkah). God bless you, and please remember what we’re celebrating!

Heck of a Water Main Break

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So the DC Metro Area woke up this morning to news of a water main break. That’s not big news; they happen all the time, especially when there are big temperature swings (and we dipped into the teens last night). This one, however, was one heck of a water main break. Big enough that it’s making national news.

A 66″ water main under River Road in Bethesda, Maryland, has burst, turning River Road into a literal river itself. Several commuters were trapped in their vehicles. Rescues are underway, with authorities using helicopters to airlift people out of their vehicles.

With this, and yesterday’s rush hour shootings in Dallas, I’m thinking that it’s  not a good week to be trying to drive to work in America.

An Eee Upgrade

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Kitka 3I’ve been mulling for some time an upgrade to my little Asus Eee PC 4G Surf that I bought back in March. That Eee is a wonderful little ‘netbook’, as they are now called, which is a super-small, low-powered, inexpensive laptop mainly designed for portability at the expense of power. The main problem was the screen. It had a tiny 7″ display with a piddly resolution of 800×480. This required a number of minor sacrifices—shrunken font sizes, compressed interfaces, and lots of scrolling around on web sites.

Well, a lot more netbooks are available now than back in March and most have higher screen resolutions (though the computers overall are roughly the same size). I’ve had my eye out for an upgrade, especially since the old Eee still sells on eBay for just under $200. Well, Best Buy is selling the Asus Eee PC 900A for $279, so that seemed like a great deal and I braved the crowds to pick one up yesterday. I figure, after selling my old Eee in the next couple of weeks, my total cost for the upgrade will only be about $100. (And yes, in light of my post about buying American, I did look at the Dell Inpiron Mini 9. It’s a good machine and was in the running, until I found out they moved the apostrophe key [!?!?]. Way to ruin a great machine with one dumb, little move Dell. I don’t care about the missing function keys, but the main letters and punctuation keys must be in their standard locations for me to seriously consider any machine.)

The 900A has a 9″ display with 1024×600 resolution (much better for web surfing), an Intel Atom processor at 1.6ghz, 1gb of RAM (twice as much as the old Eee), and a 4GB on-board solid-state hard drive. It’s physically only very, very slightly larger than my old Eee and the keyboard is, as far as I can tell, identical. It ships with a mediocre Asus-customized version of Xandros Linux, but with some due diligence it can be upgraded to a standard Ubuntu Linux install or (if you really want) Windows XP. There are tons of guides on how to do these things over at EeeUser.com. It took me a chunk of yesterday afternoon to get Ubuntu installed and get everything configured the way I want, but now I’m good-to-go (and writing this entry on it).

I don’t know what people are going on about with the economy; if you’re in the market to buy things (like gas, Eee PCs, or houses) the economy is going great. Prices are low, and businesses are generally very happy to sell things to you ;-).

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.