very simple

On Saturday, I rode with the brooklyn by bike crowd out to floyd bennett field. I’ve still got to organize my (very few) still photographs and put a map together, but here’s the video from the ride! (Best to watch in HQ):

Ok, so I’m late to the twitter game – I started an account not too long ago, and…yeah, in a lot of ways a lot of it is kind of pointlessly entertaining, but I have to take real issue with crap like this. Not because it isn’t true in all circumstances, but because it reduces a service like twitter to its most useless part, and then assumes that everyone pointlessly uses it the same way. Sure, I follow some celebrities because I find them entertaining and whatnot, but I also follow several real friends and, quite frankly, I’ve made new real world friends thanks to twitter, in the very short amount of time i’ve been on the service. Here’s how that worked…

A few weeks back, I twittered something about cycling in NY. Someone who was looking for other NY cyclists found me and started following me. So I followed her back (hey, she posted good bike tips). So then…she organized a bike ride to coney island. Which I, at the very last minute, decided to participate in. I had a blast, met some great people, and made some new friends. who then proceeded to follow me (and vice versa) on twitter so that we could keep in touch easily. Today, we met up for another (yes, real life) bike ride out to red hook, and it was another blast (and heck, when a few people got stuck with a flat tire, we actually used twitter to try to find each other). So rather than the alienation that people seem to think is inevitable from each new social networking site, I spent the beautiful day today out of doors, on my bike, with 20 other like-minded people who I would have never in a million years met in any other way.

Each of these things is a tool. How one chooses to use them is really dependent on the individual. People who trend towards loneliness and alienation may continue down that path, but it’s because they already had that propensity. twitter didn’t make them that way.

I’m a loner by nature. When I was a kid, I was often much happier in my room with my nose buried in a book. And many of my closest friends (who I do see as often as we are able to make plans) have kids and stuff going on which makes it a bit harder to drop everything and go get a drink (and they’re certainly not bike fanatics like me). A lot of the “burying in a book” mentality has perhaps transferred to electronic media, but at the same time, if that media didn’t exist, I would have most likely spent my day today by myself. Maybe I would have gone for a bike ride, by myself, but knowing myself better than that, I would have spent half the day vegging out on my couch before I thought to go outside and enjoy the sunny 77-degree day.

I’m sorry, but the catastrophic “[insert latest technology] is destroying all of our social skills and making us all [narcissists/nihilists/sociopaths]” has just got to stop.

so, as I mentioned the other day when I posted stuff from coney island, there was no sound on the video of our ride down there. In actuality, I had added a soundtrack from my iTunes library (Fatboy Slim’s “Build It Up, Tear It Down”), but not 3 seconds after the video got uploaded, I got a notice from youtube that my video may contain copyright-protected elements. So rather than tempt fate (and the RIAA), I removed the music and uploaded a slightly less interesting noiseless version. This morning, due to my “early waking” insomnia, I was checking out my video states, and, while looking at all the buttons, I noticed something called “audioswap”. so I checked it out. My original song choice wasn’t in there, but I found one that accompanied the video pretty well (appropriately titled “bicycle rider”), and I added it in. At the moment it’s still processing, but it should be good in a few minutes. Same link.

In addition to the video I put together last night, I did also take some actual pictures during the stops on our ride. I included a few of these at the tail end of the video, but, due to the conversion process, the quality is not so good. Here they are in all of there originalness.

This past Sunday, I decided to be adventurous and meet up with some folks that I had only previously “met” on Twitter. In particular, brooklyn by bike had organized a ride from grand army plaza to coney island, and since it was such a beautiful day, I decided to join her (and almost 20 other people) on the ride. It was great. I actually biked down from my apartment to grand army plaza before the official ride, so I had 10 miles down before we got started. I also decided to finally experiment with my “homemade” camera mount on my bike, which is essentially just one of those gorillapod tripods wrapped around my handlebars with my canon point and shoot attached. The footage ended up not being too bad, and once I sped it up so that you could see the entire trip in under 5 minutes (and turned the volume way down low so that your speakers aren’t destroyed by the overwhelming wind sounds and our sped up chipmunks-on-crack talking), it’s kind of fun to watch. I was going to set it to music, but youtube has gotten really good at spotting things that need licenses and, well, I’m not creating my own track, so it’s got little to no sound. There are also some still pictures at the end of the group. Enjoy!

UPDATE: new soundtrack added via youtube’s audioscan service. all legal and everything!

and, if anyone’s interested, here’s a map of my trip from the upper west side to coney island. I skipped mapping the trip back to prospect park, since we followed the same route down (having trouble embedding from google maps at the moment, so a static image will have to suffice). Red line was my solo ride to brooklyn, orange is the group ride down to the beach. And I would totally do this again!