because it's there

Google is talking Dutch at me.

2008-08-14T21:34:48Z

So, I have been in Amsterdam a week and a half, done a lot of riding around, sight seeing, and working at the bike shop as a fietsenmaker. That's bike mechanic. I unfortunately forgot the battery and charger to my brand-new camera, so all I have is my phone, sadly. Still though, gotta share these:

This is where you catch the ferry back to Noord-Amsterdam, from the Centrum.

Amy Joy and I rode to the Library, but then Ferris fell asleep in the bike on the way there. Crisis was averted by making sure he woke up near a steady supply of cookjes and applesap.

And this is a three-picture montage of the bike parking outside Centraal Station. Three stories of bike parking never ceases to amaze me, plus this poor picture doesn't show the masses of bikes parked in every nook and cranny around the station. My photoshop skills are poor, and it's a cameraphone (DAMMIT!) but you get the idea right?

Saturday morning I leave on my tour, two weeks with my bike and a sleeping bag.

I'm a little scared, but more excited.

pack

2008-02-25T04:12:16Z

hincapie

2008-02-25T04:11:50Z

where did they go?

2008-02-25T04:11:07Z

jesus it's been like 9 months.

2008-02-25T03:53:50Z

But I've been busy. This was yesterday, great times sitting on top of a mountain for 3 hours waiting for 40 seconds of race...

I also do not understand how to post photos properly, apparently. hey are too small blow... too big above individually. sorry to those of you with slow connections. Mostly for having slow connections.

haleluwah @ 2007-04-28T08:17:00

2007-04-28T15:20:18Z

ok, that was fun.

go media.

ethics... I guess.

2007-02-12T01:18:48Z

Hey, so the LA Times did this article on how kids were shooting video with their mobile phones and posting it on youtube... Stuff like, you get a teacher riled up and then tape their bad behavior. So much that a lot of schools are now blocking youtube at school and very strict cell phone policies.

I went out on youtube today looking for that sort of thing, I work at a local private k-12 school, so I went looking for our kids. Now the ethics.... I'm not a teacher or an administrator. I am the Facilities Supervisor. Head maintenance man, if you will. It's not my job to deal with the kids, really, in any way.

So I found this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZHOdjWQ9lw

Watch it, tell me what you would do. I am trying not to be hypocritical here...

I'm thinking I'll just sidle up to the kid and tell him I saw his video. He uploaded it a year ago, so perhaps it's old news. It would also be really powerful to bring it to one of the heads and let them handle it. I'm sure shit would go down.

Also, I am so glad in a way that we didn't have the internet when we were in High School.

digital

2006-12-29T21:49:37Z

I digitized some old tour videos.

haleluwah @ 2006-12-01T17:31:00

2006-12-02T01:31:35Z

So I made an album for nasoalmo but I ended up having to use a couple of older things. But I worked on them, and I think it's not half bad. You can have a listen and download if you want here.

And if you have any friends that you think would like this sort of thing, especially ones that live in LA and play music, please send them this way as well.

I play by myself by default.

BTW, "Grarageband.com" won't let me put my songs in the proper order, so IF you download them and IF you want to hear the true vision, they go...
hvac jam
dont change
fuckin hornds
new try
new beatz
sunday night
oct 23rd

Enjoy!

Letters to Chili's

2006-10-15T16:13:43Z

This survey was really long. I just wanted to talk to you guys about the NACHOS. I mean, come on. Also, the left stall in the ladies' room was out of TP. Also, the whole esthetic with the margaritas in a beer mug isn't working for me. I don't really like drinking a margarita with a straw. But let me get back to the nachos. So... do you have like, a chip-coating airbrusher in the back or something? Is it hard to clean the beef out of the lines? And another thing, why did my NON-MEAT nachos cost the same as Random Guy's Beefy Plus Nachos? THat doesn't speak highly of your beef. I mean, I know that the bulk of the cost was the napkin.

haleluwah @ 2006-07-22T12:56:00

2006-07-22T19:57:52Z

I've been on a vacation, like a real vacation where I only got 2 work calls and got loaded every night. It was good but I'm looking forward to coming home to my lovely wife and taking it easy. And moving. Hopefully. I made a stupid little movie using the Macbook built-in camera and imovie (need to install Final Cut when I get home, imovie is really fucking annoying sometimes.) that you can see here.
It's kinda big, took about 30 secs to load on cable so if you have dial up this film may not be for you.
Giant Baby is playing at the Know tonight so if I haven't seen you yet please come out, it's at 2026 NE Alberta St

And it's free. And yes, that whole thing links to our spupid myspace page that hasan't been updated in god knows when. But since we're not a band, who cares?

Dood, computers are stoopid. See ya in the real world.

Los Angeles...

2006-07-10T00:22:07Z

Commuting stats from Wikipedia... (in Los Angeles) 1,494,895 out of the 1,690,316 workers are 16 years or older, 982,735 drive to work alone in a motor vehicle, 220,408 carpool, 152,435 use public transportation, 53,386 walk, 2,474 use a motorcycle, 9,052 use a bicycle, and 12,710 use other means of transportation to commute to work. 61,695 work at home.

original link here

Now, that is sad yes, but my real question is how do the 12,710 people get to work (other means of transportation to commute to work)

Any ideas?

haleluwah @ 2006-06-24T15:34:00

2006-06-24T22:35:08Z

This afternoon is brought to you by manowar

Strike While The Iron Is Hot
Steel Is Strongest So Say We All
And If We All Were Not Brothers Of Metal Would We Fall? - NO -
They Tried To Test Our Spirit
They Tasted Steel Before We Were Done
Grinding Their Bones Into The Dust Of The Past
All Blown Away Like A Shot From A Gun

We Cast Our Lot Together Four Still Stand As One
Here We'll Remain Forever Till Our Kingdoms One

Brothers Of Metal
We Are Fighting With Power And Steel
Fighting For Metal Metal That's Real
Brothers Of Metal Will Always Be There
Standing Together With Hands In The Air

Let Us Drink To The Power Drink To The Sound
Thunder And Metal Are Shaking The Ground
Drink To Your Brothers Who Are Never To Fall
We're All Brothers Of Metal Here In The Hall

Our Hearts Are Filled With Metal And Masters We Have None
And We Will Die For Metal, Metal Heals My Soul

Brothers Of Metal
We Are Fighting With Power And Steel
Fighting For Metal Metal That's Real
Brothers Of Metal Will Always Be There
Standing Together With Hands In The Air

Let Us Drink To The Power Drink To The Sound
Thunder And Metal Are Shakeing The Ground
Drink To Your Brothers Who Are Never To Fall
We're All Brothers Of Metal Here In The Hall

Brothers Of Metal
We Are Fighting With Power And Steel
Fighting For Metal Metal That's Real
Brothers Of Metal Will Always Be There
Standing Together With Hands In The Air

four things meme

2006-06-22T14:26:24Z

At bitterbyrden s request...

4 jobs you’ve had:

Custodian with the back-pack-vac (x3)

Walking advertisement for a costume rental warehouse (I was Death, my buddy was a cow, and he got really annoyed with everyone always trying to grab his teats.)

Prep cook, line cook, sous chef, dishwasher, busser, all that shit.

Maintenance man

4 movies you could watch over & over:

Ferris Buellers day off

And three other movies that I can't think of right now but are totaly awesome.

4 places you’ve lived:

Sacramento, Ca,
Olympia, Wa,
Portland Or,
Los Angeles, Ca

4 television shows you love to watch:

Entourage

Law and Order

Americas Funniest Home Videos (I don't know why, it is on for like 3 hours when I get home from work and I chuckle at it if I'm not playing my vid)

Marc Marrone and his fantastic animal family

4 places you’ve been on holiday:

All of the states except Alaska and Hawaii

Montreal, Canada

The Netherlands/Benluex

Germany

4 web sites you visit daily:

Live Journal

Cyclingnews.com

Los Angeles Craigslost

BBC news

4 of your favorite foods:

BBQ ribs

Mac n Chez

Gravy- what it is on is secondary.

Those little pepperoni pizzas from Trader Joes

4 places you’d rather be:

On a nice warm beach with a beer
Amsterdam
Visiting with my grandma cause she makes the best pancakes
Endor

4 "lucky" people to tag:

galatian

gorecore

laughingfreeman Ha! Yr. wife started it, so here ya go!

heatherq

I'm always on East Coast time.

2006-06-03T14:51:42Z

OK, first of all, I need new icons. Bad. I have been using the same (3) icons for over a year.

Secondly, I got a sweet new compy...
And I have a built in webcam! How stupid is that? No one I know has a webcam!

So, AIM me if you do, mainly cause I'm curious how it all works.

metro

2006-05-29T14:33:26Z

Yes, I am "that" guy.

Good morning-

I am writing to complain about the audio portion of the “transit tv” programming. I fail to understand how it is I can’t play my boombox on the bus when my entire one hour bus ride to work , from 6am-7am, I am bombarded by commercials, news, weather, “extreme” videos (with the appropriate “extreme” soundtrack) all quite audible through my headphones with my ipod turned all the way up. It’s rude, annoying, and invasive.

It makes the act of riding the bus, already difficult what with the standing room only on the 304 on the AM, almost intolerable. If you can explain the reasoning behind it I would be very interested. To me it is no different than some guy with a boombox playing obnoxious music.

Hey, and also, when is the east-west line (specifically 4/304) getting those super cool stretch busses? Sure would be nice to have some more seats.

Sincerely,

White guy with a bike

haleluwah @ 2006-05-28T07:40:00

2006-05-28T14:40:25Z

Ivan Basso, holding a photo of his newborn son aloft as he wins the second-to-last stage in this years Giro d' Italia.
He basically has the race sewn up, today's stage is flat and short and therefore matters very little.

Man, I love watching bike racing. I signd up this year with a paid internet service
where you can watch the racing live, from 5:30 am till about 8 or 9am. I've ben watching it in the mornings at work, and it works pretty good on the PC. At home on the mac, not so much. It's the player it uses som proprietary windows media player bs and it just looks crappy on the mac. But hey, it's better than nothing...

I have to figure out where to watch the Tour de France in LA. They show it every morning on OLN, so you can't gt it on the internet. There's a coffee shop in NW Portland where they showed it the last few years, very cool to arrive somewhere at 6am and find the cafe full of other bike dorks just like yourself. Where is it here?

ok, who wants to go in on the u.s.s. Warehouse with me?

2006-04-16T04:32:48Z

I mean seriously. It's even got a machine shop built in, fer christs' sake.

12 people, 50-100 thousand dollars each later, and we have a warehouse on a ship.

Better in my mind than buying a $400,000 condo in Canoga Park. Cause thems my options right now. Not that THAT is happening anytime soon.

Talk to me people.

quiz from bitterbyrden

2006-04-09T18:04:46Z

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you five questions of a very intimate and creepily personal nature. Or not so creepy/personal.
3. You WILL update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

So here are mine...

1. If you were on that stupid fucking island and knew about that sequence of numbers and John Locke told you to push the goddamned button every 108 minutes, would you? If not, why? It's not like you have anything better to do. And what do you think happens if you didn't?

I probably wouldn't because Charlie and I would be too wasted on dope and if not I'd be busy making a motherfucking RAFT. Or teh sex with Kate. Those people have the least amount of sex I could possibly imagine a bunch of people stuck on an island together ever have had. I mean, when the hotties are running to Hurley you know they're desperate...

I wouldn't push the button just cause I'd want to see what would happen when I didn't.

2. What's the worst thing that someone has ever said to you?

That's tough...
Possibilites include: "It's too late for you to go to college", and "I got drunk and fucked somebody else and now I'm pregnant but I really think it's yours."

3. Tell me about your dream vehicle. Plane train helicopter car bike rollerskates. Whatever. I vote for teleportation, obv., but that's still problematic.

Dream vehicle might be something like the Doctor Who phone box, or a starship. Millenium Falcon sized, I guess, basically a rv/box van of space. With hyperdrive, or warp drive, or whatever to eat up the light-years of space. More realistic wise, my dream vehicle might be the bicycle. But the catch is that there would be whole roads devoted to bicycles only, no cars. Like that commercial that actually makes me tear up a little because it's so beautiful when they show the empty freeway and it has hundreds of bikers on it.

4. As with someone else's question, please to describe your Happy Place to me. You know, the place you go when you're sad or mad or hurt or in pain or scared.

I don't really have one. Is that a problem?

5. What is your dream job? Be specific. Don't tell me "make rock music" ... tell me about what kind of label you'd be on, how often you'd record an album, what kind of tour schedule you'd have, what level of self-management you'd have over the band, how many members it would have, etc., etc.

You know, I don't know if make rock music is actually my ideal job. I think really I'd be happiest owning some kind of company/buisness, doing something I believe in (like bicycle advocacy, transit, alternative energy, etc) and of course I would have plenty of time off for touring. It would be a small company, like 30 people, and we would be working to change conceptions and wean people off the petrol teat.

It never gets easy, does it?

2006-04-06T21:44:16Z

It finally happened, my 20 year old bike broke this morning, derailleur went into the spokes and took part of the frame with it. Boo hoo now I have to buy a new frame. Might as well look at new bikes!

In other news, Mark posted some new songs on my bands myspace, check em out here if you want- http://myspace.com/kidtoucher

I go drool at titanium beauty now.

Bikes AND laptops.

My life is boring, that's why I haven't posted in a while.

2006-03-16T20:34:31Z

I mean, really.
I get up at 5am, on the bus by 6:03am, ideally.
At work by 7am, put on my steel toed shoes, walkie talkie, phone, leatherman, and maglite.
Check in with my guys, probably deal with some bullshit.
By noon most of the work is done and it's waiting until the afternoon when we can do set-ups for meetings and special events.
leave at 4pm, ride my bike past miles of stopped traffic. Like miles and miles, from Centinela all the way to Highland, basically, for those of you that know LA. For those of you who don't, thats about 7 miles, out of my 12 mile trip.

I was very insulted that the textbook Kate is editing at the moment (Hot Jobs) has jobs like "holographer", "artist", and "inventor" but doesn't even mention Maintenance, or Facilities. All the buzz in the (facilities manangement) industry is the hiring crunch we are starting to find ourselves in, as the baby boomers retire and the next generation comes up. The problem is that each succesive generation actualy knows less and less about how the world works. How does a toilet flush? What makes an outlet work? What does the inside of a door knob look like? etc. If you can deal with the crappy hours and sometimes less-than-ideal work enviroment (today I found myself on my back under a drinking fountain, while my partner pushed the button, splashing me with water each time till we got the valve adjusted right) you basically are guaranteed a job anywhere, anytime.

Sewiouswy.

Blowing your mind, for reals.

2005-12-23T19:42:44Z

So I dunno if this will be especially interesting to anyone else but me, but this blew my mind. A little background: When Kate and I were still in Portland, we for some reason got "extra" cable, i.e. we paid our ten bucks for basic along with the internets but got up to channel 71, when we were only supposed to get up to 33. That meant we got the Discovery Channel, and my favorite show, Mythbusters When we moved to LA we got basic cable, but sadly only got up to 40 again. No Discovery Channel. A couple days ago, for some reason I started punching in channel #s and lo and behold, we get HELLA channels. Stoked, cause I have the next week and a half off work and all our friends are out of town. Back to mythbusters- We were watching it and one of my favorite arguments came up- should the owner of a pickup truck drive with the tailgate up or down? I always thought tailgate down was probably better, but considering the age of most of the trucks I drive, the strain on the tailgate hinges outweighed any possible gas savings. So.... turns out tailgate up is best for gas savings as well, complex aerodynamic explanation is better as pix-

VERSUS

Note the drag on the lowered tailgate vs. the buffeting effect of tailgate down, forcing the air OVER the truck.

I can't wait to tell my father in law.

Anybody else totally shocked?

I am a crazy motherfucker

2005-12-20T20:55:04Z

But it just might work...
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/zip/119350683.html
I bought it for two hundred bucks, swapped out the carpet, seats, light covers, tires, heater core, dashboard, tailgate, doors, for our car and now we need to get rid of it. Cross your fingers for us...
Because I am lazy and don't give a shit about html, here is a link. Click it, and go to the bottom, there are good photos of the smashed car "before". The craigslist ad would be "after"
http://homepage.mac.com/thefriend/PhotoAlbum2.html
Sure is nice not to worry about rain...

update

2005-10-10T02:56:11Z

I was embarassed the other day when I loked at my userinfo and last updated was 3 months ago. We've been busy man... We moved from Portland to LA with a uhaul and our volvo on the back and our cat in a carrier between us in the uhaul and he didn't take a dump or piss for like 4 days. If you know our cat that's scary. So we put our stuff in storage and went to stay with our friends Zee, Nick and Hazel. That was fine, we stayed, we drank, we looked for a place and I looked for jobs non-stop. This private k-12 school http://www.newroads.org hired me as Facilities Supervisor which was cool, almost twice what I was making in Portland, and we got a place sorta in a grungy area that's convenient to everything but sketchy after dark. So here we are, my commute is 12 miles each way, it used to take me 3 hours in the car I've gotten it down to 2 hours on the bicycle, and I gotta tell you, so far riding a bike in Los Angeles rules. No looking for parking, no sitting in traffic, at least I'm constantly moving. And bless their hearts, so far LA drivers have been good to me. My theory is that since they have to be extremely aware at all times, they notice when I signal and it shocks them for half a second at which point I'm in their lane and it's over. Got honked at once last week, and passed too close on a couple times. There aren't really any bike lanes here, and there's gonna be assholes. But compared to Portland, it's just the same but denser. One difference is that here busses kinda slow behind you waiting for their stop because they know if they let you go you will never see them again, vs. Portland where you'd play cat and mouse with them for miles with the no traffic. Here it's so clogged that they know they are slower than you.
We're big advocates of the public transit here too, it's just that i see this city which isn't really that big just strangling itself with all the solo drivers. Just driving because it's the easiest and most immediate way to get somewhere. The bus here is fast compared to PDX and the drivers are badasses. I'm currently pushing my public transit/bike agenda on anyone who is willing to listen. I got so obsessed with figuriong out the LA take on public transit I made a poll. http://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=581135
And it was intersesting. Read and learn. These are the idiots I live in the same city with. But it was the same in PDX with damnportlanders, so whaterver.

So there, I updated, I bought myself bike shoes and lycra shorts with the crotch pad for myh 31st birthday, fuck you.

haleluwah @ 2005-07-16T17:51:00

2005-07-17T00:51:09Z

"

More of the same at the Know (2026 ne Alberta)
tonight, starting around ten. We play either 2nd or 3rd, dealers choice...
FREE!!!
w/ Paper Tiger and Swords are as Straws against the Wisdom of Darkness