Checksum Arcanius

After putting it off for a long time, I finally got around to uploading the bike trip photos. To make the album, I used Gallery, a wonderful piece of free software.

Go take a look!

I’ve been on a recent binge of room cleaning, inspired by everything getting rearranged while I was gone as part of the ongoing remodel. The result is that I’ve found some worthwhile old stuff that, frankly, I hadn’t even thought of in years. Most of it was not quite valuable enough to sell, but I also wanted to overcome my pack rat tendencies and jettison the excess. So what does one do in this situation? Freecycle!

Freecycle is a worldwide movement aided by the rise of the internet. Basically, online freecycling communities for geographic areas are formed and are linked to from the freecycle website. I signed up a while ago after I learned about the concept from Jason, who is someone that I don’t remember how I know. Regardless, I started receiving the emails and even put in a request for a few of the items, though I was always too late. But getting stuff isn’t even where Freecycling is cool. Where it gets cool is giving stuff away.

For example, during the aforementioned cleanup, I found an old Rio 600 32mb MP3 player that I haven’t used in ages. I had mostly forgotten that I even had it. Well, its not useless – but since I have an iPod, I would never use it again. And if I were to go to the trouble to sell it on eBay, I MIGHT get $5 out of it. Not even worth the time. But… when I Freecycled it, I got the following response:

thanks a bucnch!!!!!! i loooooooooooove it! it is sooooooo awesome! thank you thank you thank you thank you THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which to me, at least, is worth a lot more than $5.

I could not stay asleep last night for the life of me. The result was me sleeping in until just now and missing out on opportunities to play ultimate and paintball. Suck.

My friend Creighton has been putting out a web comic for a while now called Trivium Entertainment. It is quite a good read, and much of the humor is quite fabulous, if I could say so myself. Even if web comics aren’t your thing (they aren’t mine), this one’s worth a gander, especially if you are tech-savvy, but even if you aren’t.

Go take a look!

FYI, its worth starting at the beginning to get a better understanding of the characters.

My recent favorties are #88, #91, and #97.

Finally getting back to the bike trip theme, here is a synopsis of our goings-on in the nation’s capital. We arrived Saturday morning via train from Hartford, Connecticut at about 2:00 am. Lew Cramer, who is by all accounts an amazing man, proved again that he is a superhero by picking us up at the train station at that early hour AND giving us a guided tour on the way to his house. We slept in the next day before being dropped off at Ballston Mall, where there is also a Metro (Suway) stop. At the mall, Scott got shoes (his cycling shoes were less comfortable than mine) and I got backpack, shorts, and shoes. We then headed out on the Metro for the Smithsonian stop, and began the grand tour. We visited a lot that afternoon, including the National History and Natural History museums, a good look at the Capitol, the FDR, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials, and the Vietnam, Korea, and WWII memorials. By then it was getting late, so we headed back to Ballston where our gracious hosts picked us up once again.

Sunday, we repeated the procedure, but this time at the West Fall’s Church stop. The line to the National Archives was longer than it had been before, so we skipped it agian and instead hit up the National Galleries and the Air and Space Museum before enjoying a wonderful meal with the Cramers that evening and vegging out to Star Wars: A New Hope that night.

On Monday, the Cramers left for the week, so we let ourselves ou of the house, caught the bus, hooked up with Tim, took the Metro to his place where we dumped our stuff for the day, returned to the mall to chat, drink, and have fun while waiting for the fireworks to begin. The fireworks where on the wrong side of the National Monument, and we couldn’t hear the music at all from where we were sitting, but it was still a pretty good show. Not quite to the standard of a multi-trillion dollar government budget though, in my opinion.

After the show, we braved huge crowds to make it back to Tim’s place, where we picked up our stuff before heading back to the Metro for the ride into Union Station, where we were catching a 3:00am train for New York. Unlike in NYC, where the traisn run all night, WDC’s system shuts down around midnight, so we had to hustle to make sure we would make it, which we did, but just barely. At the train station, we snoozed some before making our way on to the train where we snoozed some more and the train slowly got more full. We arrived in New York before Maneesh left his apartment, and made our way to his location that morning. But that, as they say, is another story.

The (not so) great bike trip of 2005 lasted only about 275 miles, new research has revealed. Previous estimates ranged from 300 to 400 miles, but the new data shows that these were clearly too high. The new research used the program Microsoft Streets and Trips to reconstruct the trip as well as could be remembered by lead researcher Ryan McElroy. Route cross-checking will be conducted with other trip particpants before the milage nubmer is made official. This tally also does not include day trips taken by only one cyclist.

I have been running very low on my disposable contacts for quite some time now. Were it not for the extraordinary lifetime of the ones I am currently using, I would certainly be out by now. Billed as two week disposables, I have actually been wearing these for much longer – I don’t know exactly how long, but certainly over six months, and, I believe, perhaps even more than a year. I have one pair left, and I decided I really probably should move along, since I cannot rely on these guys to hold out forever. Past ones have torn, been lost, began irritating my eyes, and so on. In fact, my right contact is beginning to irritate my eye sometimes, but so far I have usually been able to get it feeling ok again after a while. Nevertheless, all signs point to my need to move along.

So today, I began checking out where to get some more. I went to 1800contacts.com, and was thrilled to find that I could simply enter in the same information contained on the bottom on my current contacts box and get some more. But there was a catch: I needed to enter my eye doctor’s info. The problem this created for me is that I haven’t seen an optomitrist in a long time – so long that the only doctor I’ve ever seen moved to a new private practice. My old prescription is still working fine, and I don’t see any particular reason to have another check-up at this time. But why do they need the doctor’s info at all? When I checked with other contact-delivery stores, the story was the same. All wanted to talk to the doc that I hadn’t spoken to in 3 years. Why would they need that info?

A little link titled “Why do we need your birthday?” led to more information:

A Federal Law passed in February 2004 requires us to verify your prescription with your eye care provider. Many eye care providers use your birthday to find your prescription information.

When did contacts become a controlled substance? Who will be harmed if I order the incorrect contacts? What are their addictive properties? What possible cause could there be to require contact distributors to check in with an eye doctor?

And the simple answer is, of course, that some group of optomirists lobbied to make it so. By requiring that eye doctors be in the loop, they entrenched their own position, making it illegal for people to take them out of the loop. They became another layer of government-enforced oligarchy.

The end result is that I don’t know if I’ll ever get new contacts without jumping through a series of ridiculous hoops to get there. All due to a government that has replaced a love of liberty with a subtle – but very real – tyranny.