Chicago

I've been a Chicagoan for 1.5 months now and here are the conclusions:

Pros:

• being able to walk to places is awesome
• Lincoln Park Whole Foods - sells herbs by the pound (including basil), cheese island the size of a regular WF, and beer on tap you can sip while shopping
• people (most of them, or at least all the ones we met so far)
• Brugse Zot on tap for $4 as a seasonal monthly special, or always available in a bottle (Kyle and Carly, are you reading this? we have an inflatable bed)
• WIDE variety of reasonably priced good food (Styrofoam containers everywhere, see Cons)

Cons:

• Transportation is a mess (traffic is BAD, public transportation is unreliable, bike lanes are far and few between, streets are in a horrible condition, where does the tax money go?)
• Recycling doesn't exist (all blue bins are either always empty or full of trash and there is no scheduled pickup time, restaurants serve everything in styrofoam, canvas bags are endangered species)
• Weather - not much we can do about that, but it's amazing people chose to build such a big city in a place where the weather is so shitty

Bike miles

My bike computer finally died yesterday. For the non-contiguous period it was working I biked a total of 2,276.7 miles. Most of these miles were biking to and from work. If I were to drive instead of bike, say at an average 27 miles per gallon, I would have burned 84 gallons of gasoline and produced 1635.8 pounds of CO2. Question is, how many pounds of CH4 and H2S I produced while biking the above mentioned miles?

Recession - how is this graduate student staying afloat?

Mint.com is the obsessive compulsive's best friend. This free website monitors all your bank accounts and credit cards, keeping track of all your finances. It is entirely secure becasue you never plug in personal information (like account number) of the cards, but only login id and password to your bank. Below are my expenses for the past 8 months. During this period I managed to save about $1000, which is not much, but at least I can brag about staying within budget.

Here's a boring analysis of the categories, in decreasing order of their amount:

• 21% - Home - mostly rent, includes some home furnishing and home supplies. Not much to save here.
• 21% - Food - about half of this is groceries, a quarter restaurants, and the rest alcohol and fast food. Deffinitely a place where I could save a little by eating out less and cooking at home more. Overall I don't think I am spending way too much on food, as it adds up to an average of $317 per month.
• 12% - Education - grad school fees. Period.
• 11% - Gifts and donations - mostly Christmas gifts, but includes charity donations and such. Technically not a gift, since I received presents back. Saving here would make me a Scrooge.
• 9% - Health and fitness - last portion of my ACL surgery bills, dentist and optometrist visits.
• 6% - Bills & Utillities - cable, internet, phone, water, electricity - not much to save here.
• 6% - Shopping - clothes, camping gear, computer parts. Some if it's necessary (tennis shoes), some of it can be trimmed.
• 4% - Pets - Chevy & Sedona are hungry beasts.
• 4% - Auto and transport - Mostly insurance, a quarter is gas, and then some oil changes.
• 4% - Entertainment - Netflix movie rental, movies, concerts, shows. I wish I could afford to increase this category.

Bottom line: there's not much room to wiggle. I am a poor grad students and I should at least be thankful that I am not getting in debt.

In Lubbock TX justice gets YOU!

Here's a very common story of a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. In this case the real perpetrator came out and confessed, but the Lubbock justice system did not want to own to its mistake.

"Then, in 1995, Johnson wrote a letter to the district court in Lubbock in which he confessed to raping Mallin. He got no reply. So he wrote another letter asking for an attorney so that he could legally confess. Again, he was ignored. Johnson eventually wrote to the former Lubbock district attorney who prosecuted the case, Jim Bob Darnell, and asked for his help. There was only silence in reply."

Who cares if an innocent man died in prison because of this? By the way, his only fault was to be black, which directly implied "brash, slick liar" in the words of the defense. Yet, here comes the best part, scumbag D.A. Jim Bob Darnell is now a judge. I hope no one will ever have to seek justice in Lubbock Texas.

Family Of Man Cleared By DNA Still Seeks Justice : NPR

Boulder fire

Wednesday and Thursday we had a wildfire in Boulder, just a short distance from our house. It all started because of the sustained high winds (60 mph or 100 km/h) which downed a power line onto a structure at a llama farm. The farm caught on fire and because of the winds the fire spread quickly. Below is a picture from the aftermath. (click for newspaper article). It's amazing how close the call was. Thank you to all the firefighters who did such a great job.


And here is a google map of the fire. I live South of the green evacuation area, close to where the 36 highway sign is.


View Larger Map

My Earn-A-Bike from community cycles

Community Cycles is a non-profit organization in Boulder that collects old or abandoned bikes, takes them apart and then puts together and sells fixed up bikes. All this is done with a few permanent employees and a bunch of volunteers. The main incentive for the volunteers is the Earn-A-Bike program. When you volunteer for 10 hours you get to work for another 5 hours building a bike that's yours to keep. The red Schwin below is the bike that I built for Kristen. I started with a very old bike and ended up keeping just the frame. After a new derailleur, wheels, handlebars, brakes, shifters, etc, and more then 5 hours of work the new European style townie is quite comfortable.

Why I love Colorado.

This weekend I finally climbed my first fourteener, Long's Peak. There are only a few weeks in a year when climbing Long's is non-technical and we lucked out with the weather on Saturday. We left the parking lot at 3:20am, made it to the Keyhole by 7am and summited at 8:15am. We were back down to the car by 1pm after a very exhausting day. The adrenaline rush of touching the summit was totally worth it. Click on the photo for more pictures.