Mambo Taxi

Biking home today, on my regular commute.

Though, not really, because I didn't turn at the usual block.

So I'm biking a street off from the usual commute, and I wonder why I didn't turn.

And I come up and see a bicyclist on the left side of the street, biking against traffic. Wearing a helmet. In his mid-20s.

So I say, "Hey there."

He says, "Hey," in a friendly way. I slow down a bit to match him.

I say, "I hope you don't mind, and I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but did you know it's really dangerous biking on that side against traffic? Because the cars aren't looking for things moving at bike speeds on that side of the road. And that's really dangerous for you."

He stopped and looked confused. "But I thought we were supposed to go against traffic to see them better. For safety." He sounded betrayed.

I said, "It's safer if you're a pedestrian. On foot, you're moving slowly, it's fine to be on that side. But on a bike, according to law, you're a vehicle."

"Oh. Wow. Thanks."

"You're welcome. Yeah, I think a lot of people got told that in school a while ago, that they should bike against traffic, but it's really unsafe for you, and it's unsafe for bicyclists who are coming the other way. Nobody expects bikes to be there."

"Oh. OK."

"Take care."

"Yeah, have a good day."

And I biked on home, with a lump in my throat.


---

Today at lunch, melted_snowball and I were talking about the condition of being a bicyclist or pedestrian in this town, or in many places in North America. And we agreed there is no reason, other than lack of public will, for car/bike/pedestrian interaction to be as fraught as it is (particularly car/bike, but also bike/pedestrian). d. mentioned a friend's post today considering his choice to bike on less trafficked roads and to back away from engaging motorists who are being dangerous. This is come up regarding a recent grisly Toronto road-rage altercation that left a bike courier dead, though it's mostly gotten press because the motorist is a former Attorney General of Ontario charged with vehicular homicide. That situation is sad, but the overall condition of culture around bicycles is pretty damn sad too.

I want to see a lot more public will toward educating both cyclists and motorists about the rules of the road. I want to see a police blitz ticketing cyclists without lights or bells or running red lights; I want to see a lot of blitzes. I want to see a lot more adult defensive-cycling classes. (A national program recently sent a trainer-instructor here, for companies or individuals who wanted to teach cycling classes; I have heard nothing about its success or failures. And only heard about the program in take_the_lane's blog.)

But the status quo is deeply frustrating.

Apparently, cron is deprecated in OSX 10.5.

K, fine. But its replacement, launchd, is a crappy replacement. It has no concept of time ranges (Or does it? Any mac folks with insight to share here?)

I want to replicate this crontab:


0,20,40 8-17 * * * /users/drallen/bin/thing.sh


So, run every 20 minutes between 8am and 5pm 5:40pm.

My preferred answer is to get my crontab entry working, but /var/log/system.log is reporting errors such as Mar 6 10:20:00 scsmac21 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x1000000.cron[64942]): Could not
setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access.

Googling finds reports of this same problem and error-message with no solutions offered.

[Edit to add: that error was actually a warning; hiding a $PATH problem that wasn't emailed to me as cron-job errors should be. :-P But it's working now, no help from the OS...]

Google also finds a pile of howtos for launchd from 2005-2006, saying "well, it's not as flexible as cron, but give it time, it's only 1.0." Apple, fix your software!

...I guess I'm stuck with dropping the "8am-5pm" part of it, and writing a launchd plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>scsmac21</string>
        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>drallen</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/some_program</string>
                <string>param1</string>
                <string>param2</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

There, isn't that so much easier?... :-P

Bleh.

I'm trying to figure out how much money each of dan and me have put toward our expenses since we moved here 8 years ago. In a rough sense, to the nearest thousand dollars. I'm drowning in a sea of data.

And I want to boot Quicken to the curb.

The first problem with Quicken: exchange rates. It doesn't keep historical rates. When we moved here, the US dollar was worth $1.50 CAD. I put a lot of money in then. Now the US dollar's worth $1.06 CAD. Quicken, amazingly, reports it all at the current exchange rate. OK, so between both of us there are only about 25 contributions in USD of a sizable amount. So I can maybe do them each manually outside Quicken, though I wish there were a way to do that and use Quicken as the authoritative data without setting up parallel "translated" transactions. Ugh how annoying and inelegant.

The next problem is partly conceptual on my part, but Quicken doesn't make it easier. I won't be offended if you skip reading this bit; my eyes glaze over when I try to think about it. My hope is that writing it out will help, and maybe somebody else will be clear enough on it to say "yes, that's right." Here are two simple situations and one that wraps my head in knots: [or, did, before I wrote it out...] [ack. but it doesn't work right. ack.]

We have a Cash account, which I've used if someone pays for a joint expense on a personal account (so, otherwise not recorded in our joint expenses). That's straight-forward and the reports Quicken will produce look sensible for our spending. I even realized I can do the Double Entry Thing and zero-out the Cash account by making a balancing entry to the Cash account but with a category of, say, "contribution by DA" so I can see that I made an extra contribution to the joint accounts.

Then we've got instances where one of us paid for something off the joint accounts that's actually a personal expense. So I can make a transfer from the joint bank account to the cash account; then a balancing entry in Cash with a sensible comment and the category of "contribution by DA" and a negative amount, so it's actually subtracting from my contributions.

[This doesn't work properly! Quicken puts the damn cash transfer the wrong way around! It looks like I would've needed to swap every single "Spend" and "Receive" in the Cash account to make transfers work, but then the first case above without a transfer fails!]

The third instance is where, say, dan pays for something that's my expense not joint. Such as when my health insurance was directly debited from his salary. This is a conceptual mess for me. (If I figured this out, I expect I'd probably be more useful when helping settle bills with friends at dinner, too.)

If this were double-entry accounting, I think it would be: a credit to "contribution by db" and a debit from "contribution by DA". It doesn't affect any other joint accounts. The money goes from him to me. That's accurate. Yes?

In Quicken, this looks to me like two transactions in Cash, one with the category "contribution by DA", as an expense, and one with the category "contribution by db" as an amount received.

That makes some sense. And the report comes out OK; but for some reason, for the last decade I've been doing it differently; and I won't even try to explain it because it sounds wrong to me now.

Which suggests what I wrote above helped me figure out that this is the right way to do it.

Right?

I considered just deleting the majority of this post, but I'm not, because it amuses me now.

[And I'm so not amused any more. I still need to know if my logic is correct with the third case; but I also need to know what I should be doing for the second case. Grrr.]

I was charging my way through sorting a big pile of papers into smaller piles, but at some point, the meaning for the two biggest piles got switched. This is bugging me more than I think it should.

Also, either: my laptop screen's contrast has spontaneously reduced; or I'm having a vision problem; or I mis-remember what the screen should look like. I think I've ruled out vision problems, at least. Leaving the appealing possibilities of hardware failure or tricks of memory. Joy.

Thirdly, I had meant to write about last weekend's music adventures, but it's increasingly likely I won't. Boo.

Also, my body's not being terribly cooperative- neck, shoulder. I should be doing my shoulder exercises, but I'm lazy. Boo.

What's balancing these out is that I'm expecting some good news next week. Also, I'm going to my Grandmother's 100th birthday party next weekend. And, and, and.

Happy Spring, anyway.

Our mailbox was stuffed with newspaper ads (delivered by our local paper).

Anyone want to guess how much paper?

3.5 lbs. 1.5kg.

Gah.

Leaving aside that I called them on Monday to tell them once again to stop delivering these ads to us, I'm aghast at how much paper this is. It's over 2 1/4 inches (compressed) tall.

Gah.