The Blaſphemous Bicycler

Because I am a flaming nerd, I tend to read a lot of books. Some of them suck in such spectacular ways that I feel it is my civic duty to warn the rest of you, in case you were thinking of reading them. So far this week, I have read two such god-awful stinkers.

Suck ass book #1: New Rules by Bill Maher

I usually enjoy Maher’s stand-up routines, and I even agree with most of his politics, so I was astonished at how badly this book sucked.

Reasons this book sucks:

1. It’s not funny. Maher is first and foremost, a comedian, and the jokes are lame.
2. It took only 2.5 hours to read the whole thing
3. It cost $25.00. That’s $10/hour for entertainment. Not a good bargain.

I give it zero jihadis (and I can’t even be bothered to make up a graphic for that).

Suck ass book #2: Raving Fans

This one sucks so hard that it makes me sad that humanity ever invented writing. I was made to read this book by my mangement at work. That fact alone has me contemplating a new career. Most bathroom-wall grafitti is better written than this piece of shit book.
Judging by the writing style I’d say the intended audience is lobotomized hamsters or maybe MBA students (assuming a meaningful distinction can even be drawn between the two.)

The basic story is that you should do all sorts of over-the-top extra-special nice shit for your customers.

Fucking genius.

It does not, however, discuss how you are supposed to finance all this fancy extra crap. Maybe you are supposed to raise your prices or lower your profits, who knows.

This book is so bad, it should get negative jihadis. Since the opposite of a jihadi is an infidel, I give it 5 infidels, only because anything lower would require use of imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry. And I can’t be bothered to make a graphic for that.

In summary, these two books are utter dog shit, and nobody should read them. Ever.

I went to Stony Valley today. It was cool. I did 30 miles on the Diamondback. The trail isn’t in all it’s scenic glory just yet, there still aren’t any leaves on the trees.

_{The Trail}

I was only about a mile in when a flock (gaggle?) of about 20 wild turkeys flew over my head. That was pretty cool.

_{My bike from the perspective of a turkey}

I had to stop to let some air out of the tires. The gravel road was vibrating my bike and bouncing me all over.

_{Pit Stop}

I came up on this pond/wetlands kind of place. Two ducks flew away before I could take their picture. I think they were Mallards, but thier wings were a funny shade of blue.

_{There were ducks here a minute ago.}

Going 30 miles on a fire road is alot harder than going 30 miles on pavement. I was ready to celebrate every milestone. Crossing the county line calls for heavy metal devil horn fingers.

_{Welcome to Lebanon County.}

One of the nice (and kind of unsettling) things about this valley is that there is absolutely no cell phone service.

_{Nobody’s Home}

The turn around point at the Appalachian Trail crossing wasn’t nearly as photogenic as I had hoped, so no picture of that, but I did stop to party when I came back into Dauphin County.

_{Welcome to Dauphin County.}

You can’t go for a bike ride on this trail without pointing out that the army wants to make this place into an artillery range. Fuck that.

http://savestonyvalley.com/

The Ents are wearing signs of protest, too.

_Help!

I went out for a slighly longer road ride (10 miles) with the moustache bars today. I think they’re starting to grow on me. I have big hands, and I wish the curves had a slightly (maybe 10%) larger radius, but all in all, they worked out pretty well.

I think we are going to have nice weather tommorow, so I am planning to take them on a longer (30 mile) ride on the Stony Creek Rail Trail.

I found some really nice PDF topo maps of State Game Lands 211 (which contains the trail)[east center west].

Much nicer than DCNR’s state forest maps.

Sometimes I like to romanticise my hometown, and then something comes along that makes me wonder what the hell I was thinking.According to the local paper, some goofy pervert got all dressed up in a purple skirt and was lurking about in the mountains, exposing himself to Amish people in buggies, and “engaging in inappropriate sexual contact with himself.”

This happened on the road I like to ride bikes on!

What an asshole. I like the Amish. After this whole peak oil thing plays out the Amish will be the new aristocracy. Just you wait.

His Holiness Reverend Ted Haeger has posted some nice videos of the upcoming Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.I think I might migrate the laptop to SLED 10 when it comes out. I installed Suse 10 on a snazzy IBM x336 today. It’s very nice. I still don’t like YAST, but the mono integration is pretty slick. I want to try to get Netware running under Xen.Novell is podcasting like mad these days, too. The show is a good bit more corporate-sounding than Lugradio, but it’s good anyways.

Novell is doing cool shit again! Woo Hoo!