Checksum Arcanius

Initially, I thought that both the driver and the cyclists who assaulted the driver after the driver ran over a cyclist should be charged and tried for the crimes they each committed. I even thought that the cyclists who attacked the car after the incident were really just shooting themselves in the foot, because without the damage to the car, the driver couldn’t have claimed that people were beating on his car before he drove over cyclists. However, based on the hugely biased police report that the Seattle Police Department appears to have no intention of correcting, I have grown pretty certain that even with no damage to his car, the driver would have avoided any charges.

The City of Seattle’s refusal to hold the driver accountable for his actions has, in my opinion, legitimized the vigilantism pursued by the cyclists. The City can’t expect its citizens to shun vigilante justice while the city itself shuns justice altogether. Maybe the cyclists who attacked the driver knew, from previous experience, that the city would not hold the driver accountable, so they knew they had to do it themselves. Or maybe the cyclists were just thugs looking for a fight. Regardless, in my mind, the cyclist’s actions have been justified by a government unable or unwilling to perform its most basic duty.

Just a friendly reminder that Seattle’s Ride Civil bike ride is this Friday, on the coolest date all year (08/08/08). The gathering will begin at the Westlake Center at 5:30, leaving around 6:15. I’m planning on showing up there around 6:00, leaving Amazon about 15 minutes before that for a leisurely, law-abiding ride up to the Westlake Center.

Don’t forget your helmets, bikes, or hand signals.

The more the merrier, so plan on showing up and invite a friend!

Ananth hosted another of his famous and wonderful LAN parties yesterday. Despite telling myself that I wasn’t going to stay up all night (as I had a pretty full day today), the party was a lot of fun and I ended up staying up all night anyway. The games of the night were the ever-popular DotA, Theo’s excellent, if buggy, alpha release of the galactic dominion game Concurr, and the best games of SupCom that I have ever played.

Fortunately, I have most of the day’s activities still in front of me. Church was pretty much a lost cause by the time I broke the 5am mark, and I managed to miss the Blue Angels show for the first time in a number of years (I’ll make it up next year!), but I’m still looking forward to a wedding, a visit with the folks, and a home theater movie night.

…Facebook is dumb again.

The correct move for Hasbro and Mattel, if they want both control and goodwill, would be to buy out Scrabulous. With their lawsuit, they may gain control, but they will not gain my goodwill. In other news, these forever-long copyrights are out of control.

I hereby state that I will never play the officially sanctioned online game.

I finally got around to cleaning up the Arcanius 2.0 theme a little bit, tweaking some little bits that were bothering me, and trying on moving the menu to the bottom. At some point, if I decide to keep the menu at the bottom of the page, I will divide it into two or three columns.

After the Critical Mass debacle last week, I spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and writing about what went wrong and what I might have been able to do to prevent it. One of the more interesting things I read about was a Critical Mass counterpoint ride that stressed legality while taking over the streets. It has been called various things, from “Courteous Mass” and “Civil Mass” to “Critical Manners.”

It just turns out that there is such a ride in Seattle, and it’s called “Ride Civil.” Not quite as catchy as what we came up with at Amazon before we heard about Ride Civil (C3M2R, see below), but it gets the point across. Ride Civil happens on the second Friday of every month, meeting at Westlake Center at 5:30.

For me, this is mostly an experiment. What will it be like riding with a group (who knows how large?) through an urban environment with lots of traffic, while following all of the rules, and even being extraordinarily courteous to our two-ton brethren? For this ride, I’m even going to wear my helmet. Yuck.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here is a very worthwhile article by Brad Templeton about some of the myths we hold about transit. Seeing empty buses roam around the Eastside most of my childhood, I always suspected that this was the case, even though it flew in the face of “common knowledge.” Its good to see that I wasn’t so far off in my suspicions.

The same guy also does a brief analysis of walking versus driving, with surprising results.