Thefted

I couldn't sleep late last night, so I took my bike to our local 24-hour grocery store where I picked up a few things. Natalie and I have a few family bike rules:

1. Always wear a helmet. I would never let Natalie live it down if she died because of something so stupid as not wearing a helmet, neither would she me.
2. At night, use lights, preferably blinking ones.
3. Keep a first aid kit on the bike. I don't do well with this because I haven't invested in saddle bags or something similar, whereas Nat has a basket.
4. Don't be stupid. Be a defensive rider.

As I parked the bike, one fellow was exiting the store and came to pickup his own bike. He asked me if I was ready for today's game. I laughed and told him about how someone had asked my wife and me who we were rooting for and we looked back at them with blank stares, unaware of any bowls, super or otherwise. I made some small talk about how cold it was for riding bikes, he agreed. I turned off my blinking rear light, bid him farewell (which was returned), and for a reason unknown to me, I carried my helmet into the store with me.

I browsed the cheeses, the deli meats, some frozen chicken, discounted items and checked out. All in all, I was in the store for 10 minutes at most. I returned to the cold and the helmet to my head as I traced my steps to the bicycle rack. I stooped to unlock the bike and noticed the combination was not as I had left it. I had only moved one of the four knobs for easier access, a practice I am now halting, because it seemed as though someone tried to get it open. I didn't give it much thought until I twisted to the back of the bike to activate my blinky light.

It wasn't there. Who would want my blinking red light?

The light module was fastened to the bike by way of a thumb screw. It didn't fall off while I was inside. I looked around, hoping to see a scrambling figure with a flashing red emanating from his grasp. I even rode a sloppy figure 8around the parking lot before deciding to just go home.

Two theories: I was followed to the store by someone who couldn't resist my shiny, blinking light. He saw me on the way and knew he had to have it, much like the Thief from The Thief and the Cobbler (recobbled cut, of course).

Number two: the inquisitive sports enthusiast was so offended that I thought he might try and steal my helmet that he'd avenge me by actually being a burglar. When he couldn't get the whole bike, he'd deliver his message by taking my light.

Either way, I'm more disappointed that I was robbed of my Bishop Myriel moment of forgiveness and redemption, where I would offer the bike itself and the food in my backpack. More likely, Id've used that as an opportunity to convince him to not take my stuff or to discretely notify the police.

When anything is stolen from you, you tend to lose your sense of security. The smaller the item and the further from home, the less your security is threatened. Last night's incident was enough to have me peek out the window every five minutes after I got home to see if my bike was still there. If it had been stolen from the home, I'd be keeping the baseball bat near the door. If something had been stolen from within the home, I'd be buying a gun tomorrow.

I'm glad that I wasn't totally robbed of my security, though. I enjoy being a little carefree and, indeed, careless. I'll have to get a new light though. This time, I'll look into something weatherproof and make it impossible to remove from the bike frame.

New Blog

It's been apparent to me for a couple years now that I should have another blog in which to keep my tech-related epiphanies. Please check out http://technofart.blogspot.com/ if you're here for one of my tech-related posts to begin with.

I'm populating the blog over the course of the next few weeks with info I've kept for the past few years so that I could find them again if/when I needed them. I'm excited to get it all out there.

This blog will continue chronicling my own personal life and interests excluding very specific tech-related information. I'm hoping posts here will pick up now that I'm less confused as to the nature of this blog. I enjoy reading some of the older posts infrequently and I'm amused at how amusing I thought I was (which was sometimes not a trick of perception). My writing skills have gone down the toilet because I lost my main practice. I want to get whatever poor skills I had back.

Look out, 2012. My pen is full of ink once again.

Twenty-five, man alive...

At 16, I was no closer to getting my driver's license than I was to parade down the streets of Mt. Airy wearing a lederhosen, singing "Roll Out the Barrel". I don't smoke, so 18 meant nothing to me. Similarly, 21 was a dry, dry day.

Finally, I have grown into a rite of passage that holds some significance to me. Ladies and gentlemen, I CAN RENT A CAR WITHOUT PAYING OUT THE NOSE FOR IT!

So if you see me driving around with a car obviously too expensive for me, don't be so surprised. Also, don't be so surprised if you don't. After all, I've still got my junky car to drive about.

Specifying a PXE Boot Server on OpenWRT

This was super-frustrating, which I would have written as "uber-frustrating" if I was trying to be a cool geek. I already had a TFTP server setup with pxelinux.0 and the gang. I had this working from a few months ago when I was still using DD-WRT on my router.

Well, I recently switched to OpenWRT and I haven't needed to network boot since then. So when the need arose yesterday, I had to work on getting it setup in OpenWRT. If you're reading this, then you likely searched everywhere just like me and only found references to making OpenWRT itself a PXE boot server. I didn't want to do that. I had everything else set up!

After much searching, I finally found the answer: https://wiki.xkyle.com/Pxe#Using_Openwrt.27s_DnsMasq

Basically, it can't (currently) be done through the GUI unless there's a dnsmasq add-on I don't know about (truthfully, I didn't look). Login to your router via telnet or ssh and navigate to /etc/config. Here, edit the file 'dhcp' using your favorite editor.

Under the 'dnsmasq' section, add the line: 'option' 'dhcp_boot' 'pxelinux.0,,192.168.1.2', where 192.168.1.2 is replaced by whatever your TFTP server's IP address is. Save the file and reset dnsmasq by sending this command: '/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart'

Tada! You may also just send these commands:

uci set dhcp.@dnsmasq[0].dhcp_boot=pxelinux.0,,192.168.1.2
uci commit

The end.

Backyard Innovation

As a kid, there was no greater domain than the back yard. Whether it be my own or if it belonged to someone else, the greatest adventures all took place in someone's back yard. I've built time machines, battled weeds, and have even been a participant in the Gentry Olympics. As I've attended several baseball games and the batting cages lately, I've been reminded of the games we had on Gentry Field (now renamed Simmons Memorial Field). With a total of 4 players on both teams, it called for some excellent, creative innovations.

My personal favorite: ghost on base. One pitcher was required. This left as little as three players for the team at-bat. Should the bases become loaded, the runner on third would call, "Ghost on third!" and proceed home for the next hit. The ghost follows very specific rules and only proceeds when forced by a later runner. If the ghost is not forced, it does not proceed to the next base. If we played with only one hitter on a team (which happened often enough), the bases could be loaded with ghosts alone. Sounds like a Scooby-Doo episode.

Rules to replace basemen: without basemen, we changed the rules to accommodate for their absence. First base was generally the forsythia bush, second, a place-marker in the middle of the yard, third, the green bush, and home a barren spot of earth. Should a ball be in play but uncaught, it can be lobbed at the base itself. This only got a player out if he was forced onto the base and had not touched the base before the ball made contact. Alternately, the ball could also be thrown at the player. This was not a pleasant way to get out, but it also helped to keep runners from stealing bases as getting hit by a ball is in no way coveted.

Home runs: anything in Bobby and Esther's yard.

Everyone could play catcher. Rarely did we have enough people to actually use a catcher, so an untouched ball usually ended up in the Simmons' yard. So it was a common maneuver to slide down the bank, pick up the ball, and throw it back before it got run over by the lawn mowers.

Lastly, any arrival on any base by the method of sliding was encouraged, celebrated, and enjoyed by all. This is the case in any youth ballfield, but grass stains abound when the field is a back yard.

I can only hope my yard will be big enough for my family to play mini-baseball, and if we're truly lucky, we'll create some strange customs and rules to account for our specific situation. If nothing else, perhaps the kids will come up with stipulations that any adults must run on their knees, much to Natalie's chagrin. Later!

P. S. Natalie is NOT pregnant currently, or if she is, it's news to me. I talk about kids because I do expect them eventually. The end.

The Write Stuff

So I'm still coming to terms with how degraded my writing skills have become. Not that they were ever really great, but I was at a point in late high school where I was satisfied with my ability to express myself without killing a reader from boredom.

My last post is very important to me. I ended up trying to make it about two things: feminism in my life and feminism in some popular media. The result: a craptastic post pulling itself apart. I'm rewriting it. Expect a polished post soon detailing feminism in my life, a topic of importance as I enter the late stages of identity formation. G-bye

DVR has allowed me to reconnect with my childhood interest in the Cosby Show and Home Improvement. I think I liked the Cosby Show best because of the laugh track and Home Improvement due to its recognizable running gags. Now I'm hitting them from an older perspective, being a married man with an interest and education in feminism, attributed mainly to my wife's education in Marriage, Family, and Human Development.

Four years ago, I couldn't have told you what feminism is. I could have mentioned something about the women's lib movement of the 70s, my views on Hillary Clinton, or Hollywood's woman's empowerment: all bad examples of feminism. The core ideas of feminism as I perceive them are mutual respect among all human beings as to the abilities of all others. I understand the origins of the ideology's name, but if the term didn't have long pre-existing definition, I'd prefer the term "humanism."

Feminism in me has taken the forms of anti-benevolent sexism, allowing myself to express anger when I feel it, and acknowledging my own shortcomings due to cultural projections onto my personality. Benevolent sexism is by far the enemy with which I am most enraged. Some actions you may claim under chivalry I may call idiotic proclamations in the weaknesses, academically, professionally, and physically, of women. Benevolent sexism takes its form in many ways: holding a door open for a person solely because she is a woman, considering oneself a godsend to dating women (an unusually high percentage of BYU men believe this), "going easy" on female participants in coed sports, basically, considering any favor or consideration to a woman to be considerate because she is a women. Benevolent sexism works the other way, but for my purposes, it need not be discussed now.

I realize some of these examples have roots in reality. Doors, for instance, used to be very large and heavy, such that a female frame had difficulty opening them. The object of feminism is not to claim that men and women are the same, but to recognize the differences and see that they aren't more diverse than differences that exist among populations of a single sex already. Men and women are fundamentally different in some ways and those differences do not affect personality in general.

The Cosby Show and Home Improvement, as it turns out, are both founded from the principles of feminism. The latter is most interesting because it addresses implementing feminism in an over-masculinized culture without really changing the personality of someone immersed in that culture. More on that later, but here are some examples of feminism's disparity with benevolent sexism from those programs.

In the Cosby Show, we see the attack on benevolent sexism when Clair rebukes Sondra's future spouse Elvin for remarking delightedly that he didn't know she "did that sort of thing" when she got up to get drinks for the group. He saw her as a modern women, which meant to him that man benevolently allowed her not to do housework and to play a career. She scolded him, saying that in the Huxtable household, she would sometimes retrieve drinks for her husband and he would sometimes bring the drinks for her.

A few different times on Home Improvement, Tim expresses that he feels the home, car, and other possessions are solely his because he makes the money, and he allows Jill to use them. This is always followed by a cold shoulder, a talk with Wilson, and making up. In the end, Tim always overcomes benevolent sexism by realizing that his desire to feel that he possesses as much as possible is a result of cultural beliefs.

For now, I'll let that conclude my talk on insolence in relation to benevolent sexism. I'll followup with at least two more posts relating to my other two personal implementations of feminism: anger and cultural conditional.