The Blasphemous Bicycler

So, it’s been a full week since my bicycle accident. Now that I can’t ride for a while, I’m bored out of my skull, and thought I’d do a little over-analysis on how this whole thing happened.

I crashed, in large part, because of poor route selection for my commute. Route selection is a tricky thing sometimes. Here’s the basic overview of the routing challenges on my commute.

Notice that between my house in Marysville, and my job in Summerdale, there is a big honkin’ mountain in my way. I’m also penned in to the East my the great and mighty Susquehanna River. The river, in her infinite benevolence, has seen fit to carve me a nice, relatively flat floodplain through the mountain, in order to make it possible to cycle to work.

There are only two public rights-of-way along this floodplain. One of them is US 11/15 (a high-traffic, nasty highway), the other (Main Street) is a lovely, low-traffic road along the river, with scenic views of the river and the mountains.

Naturally, I ride on Main Street. The problem is that there is only one way to get on Main St, which is through a tunnel under the railroad tracks at the north end of town. Getting from my house to that tunnel is where I ran into trouble.

The basic problem is that my house is separated from the tunnel by a nice big park. I have three options to get around the park.

1. King’s Highway (in blue) — A slow climb up a narrow, shoulder-less road
2. Park Drive to US 11/15 (in red) — Having to cross three lanes of rush-hour traffic twice within a half mile
3. Cut through the park (in yellow) — No traffic to deal with, and there are usually interesting waterfowl in the creek

Normally, I use option 3, and cut through the park, stopping to say hello to the Blue Herons and Egrets in the pond. But on the day of my crash, the footway through the park was covered with snow and ice, and so I decided to use option 2, mixing it up with the rush-hour traffic on the highway.

This turned out to be a mistake…

The Atlanta Citywide Mapathon made the news! Openstreetmap is now one step closer to world domination.

I just saw this article from the Financial Times.

With the Kindle and its sizeable e-book store, Amazon has established itself as the early market leader in the digital reader industry. Yet, it keeps the Kindle system “closed” – it only works with e-books bought from Amazon, and those e-books cannot be read on other e-readers. (emphasis mine)

This is utterly, totally, false, and it’s a lie I see all over the internet whenever people are trash-talking the Kindle.

You can get books from Amazon, you can get books from manybooks or feedbooks. You can read any unencrypted MOBI files. There are all sorts of free utilities available so you can convert from unsupported formats into supported formats.

You can even email a PDF book to amazon, and they’ll send it back to you in Kindle format for free.

I have had my Kindle for about a year and half. I’ve read maybe 40-50 books on it. Less than half of those have come from Amazon. The idea that Amazon is the only place you can get books for Kindle is ridiculous. If the people at FT had spend 5 minutes on google, they could have spared themselves the embarrassment of publishing idiotic rubbish as news.

I was driving around Lemoyne the other day, and I noticed that PennDot has put up signs for a new BikePA bicycling route.

So, I turned on the GPS and followed the signs to see where they went. The route goes almost the whole way to Gettysburg, connecting Route J with Route S.

PennDot hasn’t updated their maps in ages, but OpenCycleMap always delivers the goods.

Once you get out of Mechanicsburg, it’s a very scenic ride. It runs for about 30 miles through farms and apple orchards. There are a couple of enormous hills, so be sure to wear comfy shoes for pushing your bike uphill.

Here’s a GPX file of the route, in case you’d like to put it in your GPS or mapping software.

I was thinking maybe we should make up some spoke cards for people who come to the PCRT ramble, the way those Ride Lugged guys do.

I don’t have their artistic abilities, but this is my general idea.

I blatantly ripped off the design from the sign on the Cedar Run General Store, perspective-corrected it, vectorized it, re-rasterized it, and threw some text on top.

I should probably find a way to work a bicycle into the design somehow.

In 20 years, when the Ramble is a world-famous annual event, other people will be really jealous when they see this card, proving that you were a founding member of the PCRT ramble.