Lukwam

Ever since I got the iPhone sometime last year (okay, I admit, it was June 29th, at 6:25pm), more and more of the tools I use every day have moved to the web.

Email:

I have migrated virtually all of my email to five separate Gmail accounts (3 of which are Google Apps domains): private/personal (family and friends only), public/personal (mailing lists subscriptions, website registrations, etc.), Alienwebshop business, Broad business and an account just for old domains and addresses that are now 99.9% spam. The move to Gmail was made possible when Google finally released the IMAP feature last year, which made it easy to import messages from all of my old accounts.

The benefits of moving to Gmail (from IMAP servers that I managed myself) have been huge!

First, of course, has been the spam filtering, which is amazingly accurate. Then there’s the search capabilities, which are an enormous improvement over my previous mail client, Apple’s Mail.app, particularly when you consider that I have literally hundreds of thousands of messages games roulettemaquinas tragaperras internetjuegos instantaneos pagina webjuegos azar lineacasino virtual portales webcasino en internetcasinos descargas onlinetrampas casinosmebelijugar seguro portales web,juego seguro,juego seguro portal webganar premio portalesjugar interactivo portalessistemas ruletaroulette juegoganar dinero lineala ruleta gratisкомпютри втора употребаpromociones casino portalesruleta europea pagina webonline gamingjuegos instantaneos pagina internetganar ala ruletaruleta paginas internetapostar dinerojuegos la ruletamebelipromocion casino internetjuegos azar portales internetganar dinero verdadero pagina internetganancias casinos portales webcasino gratis comestrategia ruletajuego instantaneo paginas internetjuegos de la ruletajugar apostar pagina webruleta portales internetjugar roulette gratisjuegos casino lineaapuesta portal webjugar paginas webhotel casino,dorado hotel casino,sands hotel casinocasino juegosonline casino pokertop online kasinokeno strategiengewinn spieleroulette strategyroulette systemscasino online testplay video pokerflash casino gamesroulette strategieblackjack spiel going back over 14 years! That, coupled with the custom filters and colored labels makes it really easy to find whatever message(s) you might be looking for with Gmail.

I can still access everything with Mail.app just like I always have, but I hardly ever do except to move messages between accounts. I prefer the keyboard shortcuts that the Gmail interface offers, as well as the search, threading and support for multiple (colored!) labels. Even though I mostly use Mail.app from the phone, I’m getting more and more comfortable with the new Gmail iPhone app, which has several features the built in mail client lacks.

Calendars:

I also started using Google Calendar for all my calendaring needs sometime last year and have totally fallen in love with it!

The best part about it is the sharing. Bailey and I have several shared calendars together. I have calendars for the work softball team and for a music mix club that are shared with everyone involved in each group. I can let some people just see the events (or just when I’m busy) and let other’s actually add or modify events.

With the custom colors you can set for each calendar and the bars in month view for events that last several days, Google Calendar is great to look at. On the iPhone, Google Calendar is much prettier than the built in calendar, though both will let you create new events and neither allows you to modify them.

In order to get all the events into the iPhone calendar I simply subscribe to each of the calendars through Apple’s iCal. Then, all of my Google Calendars are available in iTunes for syncing to the phone. This is a one-way sync from Google to iCal and doesn’t let you create events on the computer or the phone. All events must be created from Google Calendar. To get around this, I created a shared calendar in iCal and subscribed to it from Google Calendar, but I’ve never had to use it.

Todos:

Another important tool that I use every day is a todo list. Unfortunately, neither Apple nor Google offers an application for managing a todo list. Thank goodness for Remember the Milk! RTM is a web-based task list application that employs tags and tag clouds, as well as several great search features and keyboard shortcuts for most of its functions. It also provides offline access with Google Gears.

Integration with Google Calendar adds a little RTM drop-down menu on each day showing which events are due. A Firefox plugin for integration with Gmail provides an RTM menu to the right of your inbox, making it feel like it’s all one application. Integration with Twitter adds the ability to create new events and receive notifications from any Twitter device. Of course, RTM also provides a fabulous iPhone application, which provides most of the functionality of the standard web app as well as a great look and feel.

More:

The list goes on. I’ve been an avid user of Google Reader as a newsreader for a couple of years, now available in a new iPhone version. I’ve recently begun the process of migrating all of my Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents to Google Docs, also available on the iPhone. I’ve also began managing my finances (checking/credit card accounts) with Wesabe, which again, has a custom app for the iPhone.

I’ve also recently started using a MacBook Air, so it’s nice to be able to access everything from that without having to worry about where that file I was working on is stored or which computer has my most up-to-date Quicken file. The more I take advantage of these online applications, the less work it is for me to manage and the less it matters where I am when I’m trying to be productive.

Before I got the iPhone I hardly did anything with my phone other than make and receive phone calls. Also before the iPhone, most of the applications I used every day ran locally on my computer and that required me to always have it with me to be productive. Now it doesn’t matter where I am. I can be productive from anywhere. I’ve finally gone mobile!

I’ve decided to get a second BMX. After a year and a half with my flatland bike, riding it nearly every day, I’ve realize that what I really want for daily use is a street bike.

For the uninitiated, a flatland bike is smaller (shorter top tube), has two sets of big grippy alloy pegs, front and back brakes with a rotor, and is generally several pounds heavier than its streetly counterpart. It’s made for flatland riding, which you do in a nice, well, flat parking lot and which involves lots of rolling, spinning and bouncing type tricks. The bike is never much more than an inch or two off the ground at any time. It a also has a smaller gear ratio, which makes getting going very easy but makes going fast very hard.

Since I only got the bike to do flatland tricks, it was the perfect choice at the time.

A street bike is made for street riding, which involves manuals (think “wheelies”), jumping things (curbs, stairs, ledges, benches, railings, ramps and what have you) and grinding stuff (again, what have you). This involves being in the air at times and sometimes landing on hard things from high places. As such, a street bike is big and strong but tends to be very light. It might only have a pair of pegs on one side (or only one peg or none depending on your riding style), only rear brakes (or none depending on style) with no rotor and a slightly larger gear ratio (though still a small chainwheel for good clearance) which makes higher speeds easier to maintain.

I ride to work every day, even longer distances on occasion, and I absolutely love to jump things, having something light and fast is what I need for daily use.

Rather than build my own dream bike, which could apparently cost me nearly $1500 (yeah , I already priced it out on Dan’s Comp), I’ve decided to buy one of the many fabulous complete bikes that are being released to the market over the next couple of months by so many BMX companies. Of course there are a million choices, including brakes (rear or none?), color/styling, weight, price, etc. But what I’ve been struggling with the most is the rear hub.

The hub is the part of the wheel in the center which connects to all of the spokes. In the front, it’s job is to be strong, light, small and to hold some fast bearings and an axle. In the back, however, it also carries the driver, which is pulled by the chain and ultimately makes the bike go. Over the years, I’ve encountered several distinct kinds of rear hubs.

The simplest kind of rear hub and driver setup possible is the fixed-gear (”fixie”), traditional on track bikes and popular with bike messengers the hipsters of today. This is what the very first chained bicycles used. With a fixed gear, the pedals are always moving in the same direction as the rear wheel is moving, so you can never stop pedaling as long as you’re moving. You don’t need brakes because you can use the force of your legs against the rotation of the pedals to slow it down (think “Big Wheel”) and you can pedal backwards. Of course, a fixed-gear hub has no place in BMX because it would render nearly all tricks impossible (prove me wrong, please).

On my very first bike, a blue and yellow BMX, I had a rear hub with a coaster-brake, which allows stop pedaling while the bike is moving (freewheel), but has a brake which engages as soon as you backpedal (after a very short rotation). When bike rolls backwards, the pedals can stay in place until you apply the brake. However, this type of brake is now mostly only seen on low end kids bikes, beach cruisers and the like. I never see coaster-brakes in BMX anymore, probably because they hard to maintain and they can lock at very inopportune times.

On my second BMX bike, a white 1987 GT Pro Freestyle Tour, I had by far the most popular BMX hub, the freewheel. This is the one that lets you coast without moving the pedals and lets you backpedal without applying the brakes. When the bike rolls backwards, the pedals go backwards along with it. This means you can do tricks rolling backwards but you have to make sure to pedal backwards a little faster than the bike until you’re ready to go forwards again. Most bikes I find have this type of hub and it’s the most affordable.

On my third BMX bike, a custom built 1987 Haro Master, I had ACS RL (Osborn) Edge wheels that had a new-fangled (and rarely seen since) “freecoaster” hub that allowed you to switch it (in less than 2 minutes by turning a couple of screws) from freewheel to coaster-brake. In addition, you could roll backwards as long as you wanted without having to backpedal. This made for a long of really interesting tricks, but was way before its time. As far as I made, this hub was not made past the late ’80s.

My current bike, a dark grey 2005 Haro Master M7, has a freecoaster hub, but today this has an entirely different meaning. There is no brake in a current freecoaster. You have the traditional freewheel but you can also roll backwards without having to backpedal. After a portion of a forward rotation (1/4 or so), the hub engages and you are “back in gear.” This allows for what is now an entirely new and thriving area of BMX street involving backwards rolling tricks (manuals, jumps, grinds, etc.) where the pedals are kept level the entire time. However, it also introduces what turns out to be an annoying lag when first pedaling forward, but I guess you can get used to it. I pretty much have.

So with all that the real choice is between the freewheel hub or the freecoaster hub (though on a totally separate note I’ll be honest that I’ve been regularly drooling over some of the fixed-gear bikes I’ve seen lately and crave one of those as well). I could get a complete bike with a freewheel and replace the back wheel or replace the hub, but that’s a pretty expensive and/or complicated upgrade so I want to make the right choice from the start. I could always decide that I have a freecoaster already on one bike so I’ll get a freewheel on the other, but I really think that the street bike is where I’m most likely to use the backwards rolling the most. I probably won’t regret getting the freecoaster on the new bike, but it drastically reduces the options for complete bikes.

I am now awaiting all the new 2008 BMX completes to be announced at Interbike, which takes place this week in Las Vegas. From that I will make my selection.

Storage has always been a big concern of mine. My mother always taught us to keep everything forever, so despite of my repeated efforts to trim down the cruft, I’ve managed to accumulate quite a few things over the years. Once you have a lot of stuff, where to put it becomes the ever-important question. Granted, an ever better question might be whether you really need to keep it or not, but some of us have trouble answering that one. So we stock up on folders and drawers, baskets, bins, boxes and buckets, label it all and pack it away in our shelves, closets, trunks, basements (or perhaps a $147 per month storage unit if your landlord forbids access to the basement) and sheds.

For those that put some thought into it, there’s a science to where everything goes. Simply, it’s based on having the things you need the most frequently or with the most urgency ready at hand (tier 1), and having things that are just nice-to-haves accessible with an amount of effort that is reasonable for however often or under whichever circumstances you want to be able to access them (tiers 2 and 3). For example, you might keep your flashlight in the hallway closet and keep the rest of your camping equipment at the storage unit, knowing that you’ll probably have a lot more advance notice about needing your canteen while the need for the flashlight might just creep up on you, unannounced.

This problem extends into the digital world more and more. As drives get bigger and bigger every year, the volume of our data grows even faster and becomes ever more difficult to manage. For example, last year we got a fancy digital video camera that we’ve managed to use quite a bit, to the tune of nearly 700 movie clips comprising well over 100 gigabytes of raw footage. Because neither of us has enough space on our computers, we have to get external FireWire drives to store the stuff and since hard drives are unreliable and we don’t want to lose everything in some horrible mishap, we have to back it all up. I have burned nearly 30 DVDs of all of our footage from the last year! Not only is that time consuming, but now we have to find some place to keep all those discs. If we store them at home, then both the original and the copy could be lost in the same fire, for example. Storage unit? Ugh.

At the Broad Institute, where I lead the server/storage team, we have this same problem only our problem is several orders of magnitude larger. Much of the work we do involves running genetic material through fancy instruments that apply some chemistry to the samples to generate high-resolution images that are processed and evaluated for the greater good of mankind (curing cancer and the like). Because we’re constantly refining our processes and because some of the samples are in limited supply and can’t be reproduced, we have to keep much of this raw data around forever in case we want to re-process it. Much like my mother, our scientists have a “let’s just keep it forever” perspective on their data.

When I started at the Broad more than four years ago, this storage problem was measured in hundreds of gigabytes and terabytes. As current sequencing technologies are scaled up and new technologies emerge, the volume of data we generate increases exponentially. Today we measure our storage problem in hundreds of terabytes and petabytes. We have a single application that generates upwards of 50 terabytes a week! It is becoming a common occurrence to receive a ticket with a request like “I’ve run out of space for my research data, can I please have another 10 terabytes today?” Keeping up with the ever-growing demand for storage is currently our biggest challenge with cooling/power/space a close second.

In order to stay on top of new storage technologies, we are constantly involved in extensive product evaluations. Over the last 18 months, I have tried or purchased many of the most advanced storage technologies on the market today. Here are some examples:

• Acopia ARX6000 - Adaptive Resource Switch (File Virtualization)
• ADIC Scalar i2000 - Intelligent Enterprise Tape Library
• IBM GPFS - Parallel File System on IBM servers & storage
• IBM TS3500 - Enterprise Tape Library
• IBRIX - Parallel File System on Dell servers & EMC CLARiiON storage
• EMC Celerra Multi-Path File System (MPFSI) - High-performance File System on EMC CLARiiON storage
• EMC Rainfinity - Global File Virtualization
• Isilon IQ 9000 - Clustered Storage System
• NetApp FAS6000 - Net Attached Storage (NAS: CIFS/NFS/iSCSI)
• Sun x4500 Thumper - Data Server

In addition, I’ve been in talks with 3par, Agámi and BlueArc, as well as one company that doesn’t even have a real website or any customers, but has a very interesting product. On Monday, I will be speaking with Amazon about their S3 simple storage service. It’s a constant effort to know what’s out there and to get enough understanding and hands on experience with the technology to really know what makes sense for our present or future needs.

This problem is not going away. It was sometime in this year that we officially entered the “petabyte club,” with it’s rapidly growing membership, and it won’t be long before we are dealing in 10s of petabytes. Data is our product and it’s very valuable to us, sometimes priceless. Storing and protecting that data is my job and is something I take very seriously.

Now if I could only find that flashlight.

Social networking is (in relative terms) the new killer application of the Internet. This is apparent in the placement of MySpace in Alexa’s top 500 most accessed sites in the United States. In spite of the fact that MySpace could indeed be the ugliest website ever, it still manages to draw more traffic than heavy hitters like eBay, Craig’s List, Wikipedia and Amazon.

Admittedly, that particular statistic may not be as important since last month when Nielsen/NetRatings pronounced total time spent, not number of page views, as the best measure for online engagement. Whichever rating you use, bringing people together is clearly a service people want and they’ll take it any way they can get it.

My new favorite and the recent (since last September when they opened their doors to anyone with an email address) master of the social networking space is Facebook. Not only is the layout clean and easy on the eyes, but it has a highly-extensible platform that makes it relatively easy (and potentially lucrative) to build exciting, new applications for the millions of Facebook users to enjoy.

One of the best things about Facebook is the way that you add external content into your profile, making it the central place you’d point people to in order to see all your stuff at once. Below are some of the other social networking sites I currently have integrated into my Facebook profile.

• Twitter is a “micro-blogging” site that allows users to post short updates (140 characters or less) to whoever chooses to follow them. Users subscribe to each other’s feeds (or not) and post about what they’re doing right now, where they are or whatever is on their minds. Some users may follow hundreds (or thousands) of other “tweeters,” including friends, bloggers, news feeds, or any application someone can think of that might make good use of the architecture. (my Twitter)
• Jaiku is a site similar to Twitter that gives a user the additional ability to add RSS feeds his presence, making it yet another way to consolidate external content into one place. Both sites provide widgets that users can put in their blog or online profiles to display their recent activity. (my Jaiku)
• Last.fm is a social networking site built around music. An easily installed application updates the site with each song played in your iTunes, live, keeping friends and others abreast of your listening habits. You can connect with people based on your musical tastes and test your compatibility with the “Taste-o-meter.” (my Last.fm)
• del.icio.us is a bookmark networking site. Users post their bookmarks, along with options tags and a comment, making them available for all to see. It is possible to make your entries private (not shared) so it can be used strictly for storing and retrieving your favorite bookmarks. However, with sharing comes the social networking aspect. You can see how many people have linked to the same things as you and you can see what else people are linking to. You can subscribe to your friends’ links and keep up on what they’re interested in. (my del.icio.us).
• Digg is another bookmark networking site, focused specifically on news articles, videos and podcasts. Users post their favorite media content along with tags and comments and everyone can see what everyone else is digging. Hot topics can generate comment threads with hundreds of responses or more. As is also true for posting to del.icio.us, many blogs and news sites will include “digg this” links, allowing people to easily digg whichever article they’re currently reading. (my Digg)
• Stylefeeder is yet another bookmark networking site, but built around a person’s own individual style. Users still post bookmarks with tags and a comment, but they include an image with each link and can also specify a gender relevancy (male/female/neutral). (my Stylefeed)
• Upcoming is a Yahoo! site built around events. You post events (with tags and comments) for everyone to see. Anyone can set themselves as “watching” or “attending” an event, so you can see who else might be going (or who might be convinced). You can keep up with your friends’ events and they can keep up with yours. (my Upcoming)

So in spite of all these wonderful sites out there and all the fascinating options they provide to their users, many of my readers only actually see the content as it is presented in my Facebook profile. As Facebook continues to add features and developers continue to build new applications, more and more folks will be focusing on that platform as the focus of their online presence. Look for Facebook to continue to blow up in the coming months.

Also look for future posts about social networking on this site as it is has been a major focus of mine for as long as I can remember and it’s time I started writing more about it.

Yesterday, after each attending our respective company’s beer hours at 4pm, Bailey and I headed to alleyway behind the Underground snowboard, skate, bike shop on Commonwealth Ave for a little BMX event. The Bone Deth Alley Chunk Dad Bone Donation event (flier below) was a fund raiser put together to collect money to buy a permit for a REAL LIFE SIZE MEGA BONE DETH event sometime in October.

The event was a blast. They had setup several makeshift ramps out of pallets and plywood in the alley behind the shop. People were launching off this one huge ramp, flying over the crowd pulling all sorts of tricks. There was several 360s, a tailwhip air, a barspin, an x-up and quite a few unsuccessful attempts at a 180 and at a wall ride that left the crowd cringing as the rider and the bike would slam into the ground repeatedly.

Local BMX hero Sean Burns organized the event and was there acting crazy as usual. See him hear featured on the July 2007 cover of Dig BMX and pulling a ridiculous 18-stair toothpick grind on the May 2007 cover of Ride BMX.

The BMX craziness continued until about 8:30pm, when the real show began, the Wet T-Shirt Contest! When we had arrived a couple of hours earlier, Bailey was quickly recruited by the girl organizing the contest to participate as contestant #6. Though it was her first time and she was a bit nervous, she’s very proud of what she has so she decided to go for it. It was a pretty crazy scene. All the girls were up on the top of the big ramp and a dude was pouring water on them from a 5-gallon Poland Spring bottle (I think a sprayer of some kind would have been more effective). The girls got drenched from head to toe. Everyone was screaming and going wild. Bailey was the obvious best, but at the last second, while the guy had already announced her as the winner and was holding her hand up into the air like a boxer, he changed his mind and let the much more slutty girl get a few more jiggles in front of the audience and then eventually announced her as the winner. Bailey was robbed!

All in all it was a great event. It was fun being around so many people that are into BMX and watching all the ridiculous aerial maneuvers. Plus, you can’t go wrong with the wet t-shirts.

On the way home as we waited for the T to come, two kids asked us if we had caught the wet t-shirt contest. Bailey then pointed out the #6 on the wet t-shirt she was carrying and they immediately went on and on about how she was definitely the winner and that other girl didn’t deserve it. Then one of them asked us what college we go to and invited Bailey to his birthday party next week. Good times.

For a little peak at what a Bone Deth event is really like, check out this PROPS 61 clip on YouTube.

Today as I was leaving work, a train was coming through Kendall square and had blocked my chosen route across the tracks toward Hampshire.  So, I decided instead to leisurely ride up Fulkerson and jump every little curb and stump I could find, expecting the train to be long gone by the time I got to the other crossing.

Unfortunately, I arrived at the crossing as the train was only pulling in, just nearly enough for me to consider if I could get in front of it and across the tracks in time to avoid a collision and then to quickly remember that I can’t jump train tracks and now is not the best time to prove it to the world.

While I waited for the train to pass, four young rascals on BMX bikes rode up.  I never know what to do in these situations.  Perhaps something like, “Hey dudes, I have a bike too and am literally old enough to be your father, let’s hang out!”  I just don’t know if I’m going to have anything in common with these kids or if they’re even going to want to talk to some old guy with a bike or what.

Apparently, all you really need to have in common with kids like this is the BMX bike, because one of them immediately came up to me and said hello.  Then another.  By the time the train passed, we were all heading to behind the A.J. Wright to ride, then over by the loading dock at the auto parts store.  It was kind of cool that these two spots were already in my daily routine and though I had never run into anyone else there before, I knew I wasn’t the only one had discovered them.

It was also cool that they just included me as if I was one of them.  We apparently all spoke the same language.  At 14, 16, 18, 19 and 31 years of age, we could all agree that a bike should have 20″ wheels and perhaps some number of pegs, though I am apparently the only one of the five of us that believes in brakes or a seat post.

I watched as two of the kids attempted trick after trick on the sloped pavement nearby while the other two fawned all over my iPhone.  The younger one also admired my freecoaster hub and has apparently already put $50 towards his, but then can’t get Burger King with the others for lack of funds.  (Watch Ian Schwartz make great use of his freecoaster hub in this Lotek video on YouTube.) We agreed to all see each other again, perhaps at the bike shop or riding around town.

Now I have to go learn some tricks so I don’t feel like such a clumsy dork around these kids.  I’ll show ‘em next time!

I’ve replaced my primary computer at home with the following:

The 2.33GHz/3GB served me well for some time, until the CD/DVD drive stopped reading any discs. The extra 1GB in the new machine is sweet (and I’m sure the extra 70 MHz is going to be really cool too).

I don’t remember exactly when I first fell in love with BMX, but it was probably more than 20 years ago, sometime between the 5th and 6th grades. Kenton, my best friend at the time, had a sweet freestyle bike and bedroom walls covered with hundreds of cut-outs of his favorite freestylers. I was instantly intrigued. I ran home to tell my parents how I absolutely needed to have a trick bike of my own! I collected stickers and put them on everything. I started checking the tore every day for the new issues of BMX Plus and Freestylin’ Magazine, cutting out the photos to put in my locker. I dreamed of meeting Mat Hoffman or Dennis McCoy. I was hooked.

It wasn’t long before my parents gave in to the constant begging and got me my first freestyle bike, a beautiful, white 1987 GT Pro Freestyle Tour Team model (exactly like this one except with white mag wheels and one-piece cranks). This bike changed my life. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I spent riding this bike, but it was a lot. We’d ride every chance we got. We’d ride to school. We’d get together after school to ride.

Ritually, every Saturday morning we’d meet up early to eat a bowl of Kix and watch the movie “Rad” before going out riding. The trip was basically the same every time. We’d zig-zag all over town, hitting every curb-cut, every little jump, going through all the parking lots, stopping at the McDonald’s for some McNuggets and an apple pie. Then we’d stop at the bike shop and hang out for hours. That place was like our second home and Jerry, the bike shop owner, was like our other dad. We’d almost always end up at the Bazaar Mall (redundant?) where we’d hang out until I would call mom to ask her to come pick me up with the family Suburban because I was just too tired to ride all the way home again.

After 6th grade, I spent a week over the summer at Woodward Camp in Pennsylvania. This was a completely amazing experience. They taught us how to do flatland, how to ride ramps, how to ride down a dirt track, etc. We did all kinds of drills and learned a ton. There were Pros there teaching us and performing for us. Spike Jonze would be there taking pictures for Freestylin’ (which later merged with BMX Action to become Go!), taking a break from his main gig at Sassy. Not to mention you had all the cute girls from the Woodward gymnastics camp there to keep things interesting. Good times!

During this part of my life, my bike was everything. I saved up my money to buy parts and did all the work myself. First, there were some axle pegs for the front to complement the fork stands. Then some fancy hot pink Shimano pedals to match the decals. Mushroom bar grips. Barefoot tires that would leave a line of tiny little wet footprints in the pavement anytime you’d drive through a puddle. I eventually made so many changes to the bike, including a new frame (this exact blue/black 1987 Haro Master frame), that it barely had any of the original parts. It was completely built for me, by me (FMBM)! I loved this thing to death.

Unfortunately, as is the case with many hobbies, my involvement in BMX eventually faded. I wasn’t able to return Woodward in the summer of 1988 due to a case of Slipped Capital Femoral Epiphysis that had me hospitalized near the end of 7th grade in order to have pins put in both of my hips. I spent some time in physical therapy recovering and then spent months on crutches. Although that wasn’t the end of the bike for me, but as the years went on and my friends started to get cars in high school the bike and I eventually drifted apart.

That was then and this is now.

Turn the clock ahead to January 2006, almost exactly 20 years since I first discovered BMX, when my brother Niklas, after years of hearing me talk about maybe someday getting a bike again, decided to kick things in gear and make something happen. He called a local bike shop in Somerville and put a down payment on a new 2005 Haro Master M7. I’m back baby!

Since then, I’ve been riding my bike as much as possible. I ride to work every day, except when the weather is bad. I save up my money to buy parts for my bike. In the last 18 months, I’ve gotten a new tires, new front and back pegs, new brake pads and springs, new stem, new head set and new pedals. I even have my actual 1987 Haro Master frame and plan to restore it and build a new bike around it.

I subscribe to BMX Plus! and Ride BMX (I don’t cut the pictures out anymore because now I can scan them). After work, I hang out at the local bike shop, Timeless BMX, and the owner Jody is my new BMX mentor. I fantasize about the day when the new Charles River Skatepark will open and I can finally have somewhere fun to ride! I actually have dreams about pulling off amazing tricks and wake up somewhat disappointed that it was just a dream but all the more excited to get back on the bike and try!

I feel like a kid again and I love it!

We drove down to Hartford yesterday to join family and friends of Gregory’s in remembering and celebrating his life. I’m so glad that we went! It felt really good to be there in that house with all these people who loved him.

Chris, Gabe and Patty were there. We showed up too late to see Becky.

I got the opportunity to tell Greg’s mother Eleanor all about how I came to knew Greg and what he meant to me and to others who knew him. A couple of months before he died, at the California Pizza Kitchen, Greg and I discussed a position at the Broad that I was hoping he would take. Eleanor told me how excited he was to start working again and how he thought this job would be the perfect thing for him. It made me so happy to know that in his final months, Greg was jazzed about the idea of us working closely together and getting to rekindle our friendship. I think we would have had a blast!

On the drive back we passed a bus that was completely engulfed in flames. The police and fire trucks arrived just as we were driving past the bus. It didn’t look like anyone was hurt. Bailey made a little video with my phone.

We’re heading back down to Hartford this afternoon for the memorial service.

A dear friend of mine, Gregory Blake, a.k.a. Snooze, died yesterday at the age of 37. He endured a long battle with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (see also: 1, 2), which left him weak and uncomfortable just about all of the time.

On April 14th, 2005, after years of waiting, Gregory finally got himself a new lung! It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was tough going there for a while. But he was strong. He kept pushing on. A year ago today, this is what he posted in his blog:

Hot Damn - Just now I made it up the stairs from the first to the second floor without using my cane. I never thought I’d be so excited by stairs. The lung is working great still, every bit of exercise makes me feel a bit stronger. My next goal is to be able to walk around the block by the end of the month.

and just six months later:

It’s the little things - Earlier today I paused midstep as I was jogging up the stairs and thought “Holy Fuck, I just jogged up the stairs. Cool!

The following April, right around his one year (re)birthday, Greg posted about how he was going to be going back into the hospital for surgery to fix his acid reflux issues.

I’m actually not that nervous about it. Maybe having surgery as major as a transplant makes one a little jaded.

Then, on May 18th, he went in for the stomach surgery. His system had trouble adjusting after the surgery. They had to put him on an ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxegenation) machine to oxygenate his blood for him. Things were touch and go for a couple of weeks, but he wasn’t able to pull through. He passed away on the afternoon of May 5th. It is a sad, sad day for people who knew him. Greg will be dearly missed.

See also:

• Gregory’s weblog
• Gregory’s health posts
• Gregory’s lung posts