The Blaſphemous Bicycler

Last week, I got myself a neutral density filter for my camera, because I was tired of having so many overexposed pictures. It worked out pretty well last weekend. Everybody seemed to like my wheat picture.

So, today, I went into the woods, all overconfident in my new equipment. It was pretty much midday, which means shafts of white-hot sunlight stab into to the deep, dark shadows all over every picture I took. Basically, all my stuff is simultaneously overexposed and underexposed, all in the same shot. Maybe there is come combination of equipment and technique that can counteract this sort of thing, but I don’t know what it is.

Anyhow, here’s some pictures.

I think this deer escaped from the military base on the other side of the mountain, and is actually wearing some sort of top-secret military cloaking device. You might think I’m just a bad photographer, and that the picture is out of focus, but she was out of focus in real life, too.

Honest.

This little waterfall is the first picture I’ve ever taken with my camera set to fully manual mode where you can actually make out what it’s a picture of. I guess I should be thankful for small miracles.

Today: 25 miles
June: 25 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 182
2008 Total Miles: 297 miles

I am now a card-carrying GNU/Linux Freedom Fighter!

¡Viva la revolución!

My boss recently got his own office, and nobody is using his old cubicle, so now my bike has it’s own cubicle.

It was a nice day outside today. I snapped this picture of Harrisburg on my ride home.

Today: 10 miles
April: 47 miles
2008: 139 miles

_{My development on a Garmin eTrex Legend — click for big}

It’s pretty easy to do, just follow the instructions.

I added my development to the map just 3 months ago, and now I’ll never get lost on my way to the mailbox.

There’s a brand-new website from the evil geniuses who brought you the world famous Ride Lugged blog:

The Dirt Road Database is a gmaps-mashup type thing to share the locations of dirt roads that are nice to ride bicycles on.

I like the idea. I’m not thrilled about using gmaps-mashups generally^[1], but OSM isn’t quite in a state where this would work….yet.

Anyhow, if you are looking for dirt roads in your neighborhood, or want to tell the world about your favorite dirt roads, check out the Dirt Road Database.

_{[1] Richard Fairhurst’s talk, Why Mashups Suck (and Cartogrpahy matters) is an excellent discussion about this.}