Bicycle Air Horn

On the topic of bicycling with an air-horn. I might buy an Air Zound, which is mentioned in the comments. It refills with a bike-pump and doesn't use cartridges, and the control mounts on the handlebars. And maybe one of these days it will save my life. I've relied on my voice to shout at drivers in situations where my safety is at risk, but I don't think my voice is loud enough because occasionally the driver has no reaction. But 110db? Yeah.

[bike odometer: roughly 50mi when I put it away for the winter]

Six interests

This is a meme where you ask about people's Interests (from their LJ profile). Comment on this post, and I'll pick six of yours, and you explain them on a post you make. Then you post this on your journal and it becomes a never ending spiral... and good fun.

chickenfeet2003 asked me about:

zeppelins

Airships have always fascinated me; partly of course for the romance, and also for their appearance of luxury and adventure as opposed to speedy travel. I remember that I added them to my interests list this spring after my IRC channel discussed what a wide-travelling bunch we were; someone said maybe we need a private jet and I briefly googled the option of private zeppelin rental (and would that not be awesome?)

spamassassin, kwiki

I appreciate well-written software tools. These are a pair of perl-based tools that do a remarkable job at difficult tasks: the first, identifying spam on my mail-server. (since I've used the same email address for over a decade, my main address receives over 700 spam a day. On a bad day, I'll see 20 in my inbox. That's still too many, I need to tweak the rules-sets). Kwiki provides a Wiki (like wikipedia) but with a very clean user-interface and developer hooks (at least for the version I prefer, 0.18; newer versions unfortunately have a more complicated developer interface).

dim sum

Pan-fried turnip cake, steamed octopus in curry sauce, broccoli greens with oyster sauce, and steamed shrimp dumplings. MMmmmmmMMM. My first dim sum experience was on a visit to Seattle, and while I enjoyed the experience, it wasn't until d&I discovered the local dim sum place that dim sum became one of my favourite brunch restaurants. The reason? They give you a menu to check off your choices, instead of getting the luck of the draw with the carts; and the food is very high quality.

cheapass games

A board- and card- games company that publishes $5 packets instead of $60 games. They work on the philosophy that game players probably have all the dice, counters, and play money they will need. One of my favourites is "Falling", a real-time game that supposes that all of the players are thousands of feet in the air (Why? Who cares?) and they are falling to the ground. The last person to go splat wins (Wins what? not very much. But it's fast, and quite fun). Another excellent game is "Kill Doctor Lucky" which is much like Clue, but ends with a murder, instead of starting there. "Doctor Lucky" has gone through revisions and is now a gorgeous board-game that costs much more than $5.

carcassonne

A strategy board game where you lay out the map as the game progresses. I like the balance in the game, between quick resource-grabs and long-term plays. Unfortunately, we bought a few expansion sets and the game became too slow, and we haven't gotten around to splitting out the basic set again. But I enjoyed it a lot when we played it, and it reminds me of good times with our friends lee_ellen and flydi in Ithaca.