Today, instead of a king snake, it was a 5 foot long rattlesnake slithering across the road that I saw. Thank heavens it was on an uphill and I had plenty of time to see it.

On other mountain biking notes, it was a long week of mountain biking. I wrecked about 6 times. My stupid chain kept popping off my big cog into the spokes. Grrrr. I had taken my bike in to have these issues fixed a week ago. I don’t think they did anything other than clean it off, which I can do myself.

So I learned how to become a bike mechanic and adjust my own rear derailleur. And now it is working like a charm. Once again, if you want something done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself.

Park Tool Repair How-To’s

Meanwhile, the bruise that goes from the bottom of my ribs all the way around to the side from where my handlebar tried to impale me on one of the wrecks will take a little more time to heal.

That didn’t take long.

As a patent attorney, I know better than making public disclosures of inventions without first filing a patent application. But who cares? I have an idea and I don’t play to spend my hard earned cash (which needs to go to gas) to pay the application fees. Gas is expensive. For me, it isn’t a bad thing per se, although it reduces the amount of computer equipment I can buy and the clothing the missus buys for the kids. But in a market economy, the only way to really promote a change in the behavior of citizens is by hitting their pocketbooks. If you want them to save water, make water expensive. If you want to promote new energy sources, let gas be expensive. etc., etc., etc.

My idea, stimulated from trying to be a more efficient driver to eek out better gas mileage, is to install devices at each intersection that allow drivers to know how fast they have to drive to hit the next light on green. Because the biggest source of gas consumption in the city is acceleration (I am looking for a source to back me up, but according to the principles of physics this is why you get better highway mileage than city mileage), the idea is to minimize starting and stopping in city driving: The idea:

1. Divide the roads in a city up into a predetermined sets of street busy-ness ranks. For example, a residential street would be classified as a ‘1,’ while a residential artery might be labeled ‘3.’ Main roads would be ‘4′ or ‘5′ depending on how busy they are. The invention would not apply to streets that don’t have traffic lights or intersect with streets having traffic lights, so it might be irrelevant to label residential roads.
2. Create a light timing system based on the business ranks. Where a ‘5′ street intersects a ‘4′ street, the green light on the ‘5′ street may stay green for 60 seconds. The green on the ‘4′ for the same intersection would stay green for ‘45′ seconds, for example. The timing is designed to accommodate the traffic level and prevent bottlenecks. Thus, ideally each light will stay green long enough for all traffic waiting at a red light to make it through the intersection when the signal turns green with a buffer at the end. The buffer might be large if the street is intersection with a relatively low ranked street (such as one coming out of a residential neighborhood). Also, the timings may be variable depending on the time of day and the level of traffic.
3. Attached to each traffic light or on a separate sign posted shortly after, but within sight of the traffic light a secondary display is shown that tells the drivers the speed in which they have to drive to hit the next intersection when the light turns green (or a few seconds after the light turns green) to allow stopped motorists to pass the upcoming intersection before the cars from the previous intersection arrive.
4. At night, where lower ranked streets intersect higher ranked streets, the timing remains. Because some streets are dead during the night hours, leave high ranked streets green and turn the lights for the lower ranks streets into stop sign signals (blinking reds). I.e., we abandon the metal detectors and light sensors for light changing.

The idea here is to allow drives to modulate their speed to avoid starting and stopping. If you hit a green light in 50 zone, the sign may tell you that you have to drive 35 MPH to hit the next intersection on a green. Thus, you never have to completely stop you car and thereby your gas efficiency is improved. Additionally, if you don’t have to wait at stop lights, travel time becomes much more predicable and less frustrating.

So who pays for it? I have no idea. I don’t want any additional taxes (especially in California). Global warming people will hail this as a way to reduce the carbon footprint. Global warming disbelievers will hail it as a way to keep a few hundred extra dollars in their pockets each year. Win/win.

One of the advantages of waking up early in the morning is that you have a lot of quiet thinking time. As soon as my alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, my mind was in gear and I stood in the shower pondering all kinds of issues from gay marriage in California to some of the dumber things that happened at work the last few days to application of my most recent reading of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to wondering why current art is so focused on the basest human nature to whether the Coldplay album released this week was worthy the rave reviews it has received.

Of course, I am slammed at work today with a patent application that has to go out the door tonight, so I had time only to jot down my ideas on the back of an envelope and all of my congitions will have to wait.

I find it really interesting (frustrating) how when one has free time there is nothing to watch, and no good books to read, nothing that looks interesting on the internet, and nothing to do. But when you are busy, there isn’t time enough to accomplish everything you want to do… I think any reasonably motivate person knows exactly what I am talking about.

By the way, we still don’t have a home phone line. And AT&T still plays Muzak.

I have a smallish wooden statue of Don Quixote in my room that my parents brought back to me from Spain on one of those adult and other siblings only trips. As I reread my last post (vain, I know), I reflected back to the assigned read of Don Quixote in Dr. Vogt’s 10th grade English class at my year at Gilbert High School (Gilbert, Arizona).

I couldn’t make it through the text, so Dr. Vogt gave me the comic book. That makes one book and a comic book that I made it through in high school.

And what’s up with all the high school people who take it seriously now? If the me of then were taking high school now, I could get a gas station job, drop out, and be in the same place I would otherwise end up (and in a less verbose fashion).

Like many 5th graders, I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I am pretty sure this was one of the only assigned reads I ever made it through prior to 10th grade (which is ironic because I read fiction voraciously).

I have to admit that I never really understood the mockingbird reference in the title of the book. That is until recently, when I recently realized how annoying mockingbirds are in real life. Each morning, we wake up to the incessant sound of our resident backyard mockingbird making every sound of every bird imaginable on volume 11 (ala This is Spinal Tap ) starting right before sunrise. It isn’t so bad during the winter when the sun comes up at 7:15 AM, but in the summer, which the sun is up before 6 am, I consistently wake the visions of shooting that bird with a shotgun, or less violently, grabbing and tying that stupid beak shut.

And on that note, how can hummingbirds make such loud noises with such a small body. They are running a distant second for obnoxious chirping early in the morning.

In next weeks episode of mockingbird, I will detail how another stupid mockingbird at my parents Santa Barbara house declared the front walkway off-limits to the actual tenants of the house.

Today, I had to call AT&T to get a home phone line. For the last three years, we decided that we didn’t need a home phone when both the Missus and I have cell phones. Why not make it easy on people and let them call the person they want rather than me having to take a billion messages from people who don’t really want to talk to me. However, at the Missus last doctor’s appointment with the obstetrician, he told her she can’t use her cell phone any longer because it will cause our baby to grow a second head or possibly a third arm.

So I placed an new order with AT&T. After filling out an order form online (btw, lest you think I am an idiot, I filled in all the spaces), I got an email today saying I screwed up and needed to give them more info. So I called AT&T. As anybody who has AT&T can attest, they have an entire area code worth of numbers to call to get to the right person, whom I have never actually talked to so I don’t if he or she actually exists.

After speaking to Vicki the Robot, I was put on hold.

The hold music? Yes, Muzak. As I listened to the first refrains, a few "questions" came to mind:

1. Who composes this crap? If I wrote lame muzak, I certainly wouldn’t publish the fact I did it to anybody I know. It is kind like tough-guy sports dudes who secretly read People magazine and know more about the Hollywood happenings than their wives. Or guys who were yell-leaders in high school and are too ashamed to admit it anybody.

2. What genius at AT&T decided that (a) this is good music to put on the hold line and (b) that it would be not be offensive to people? That question might be easy to answer. I suspect that they are trying to cut costs and recent studies show that if you make people listen to the muzak and put them on hold for 5 minutes that your call realization is 50 or 80 percent what it is if you put classical music on the hold line.

The bottom line: Muzak is offensive to everybody. Take notice AT&T, we hate it. Stop being cheap and get something better if you are going to put your customer’s on hold.

One of the problems I consistently have, not just with blog writing, but journals generally is audience and coherence. What topics should go into a given blog or journal? What audience does one write to?

Recently, as it comes to blogs I realized that (1) a successful blog has to have a “theme” more or less. That is, it cannot be all over the place because readers need to know what to expect when they come to read the blog, even if the theme is an all over the place theme. For example, successful blogs I read deal with politics. But I get really annoyed when the blog departs from its main purpose. Other blogs I read focus are intended to be culture/comedy, which is why the Bachelor Recaps gets a hall pass when it departs from recaps of the Bachelor.

(2): a successful blog cannot be “forced.” In other words, entries cannot be nothing more than typing to, well, proverbially hear yourself type. I have noticed that some people try to be witty and they aren’t, which fails. Or some people write just because they feel like they have to but haven’t anything particularly interesting to say.

All these musing said, if it isn’t apparent, I am having a hard time defining the scope of my blog. Do I include family stuff (already decided that goes in another blog)? Canyoneering advnetures (another blog)? Religion? Politics? Crazy stuff that happens what seems like every minute of every day at work?

I suppose my ideas for audience will have to wait. But to tee it up, is one’s journal really a journal if you are writing for others to read? Can you really be honest in a journal if you are self-censoring to make yourself look good? If you aren’t self censoring, however, what is the point in keeping a journal if nobody is to read it?

So I spent the better part of Sunday reconfiguring the sidebar of this blog from an older version of wordpress. Turns out, wordpress developers couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to change all the functions that run wordpress, which automatically renders the old Mecki’s Advice Column template the equivalent of Comidore64.

So I fixed most of the sidebar, but frankly I just don’t care how it looks at this point. That said, I am sure I will be tinkering with it tomorrow, because who really believes that I don’t really care?

OK, so this bluff is called. I am writing now only because I want to fill up some space in this dumb blog.