There seems to be no separation between Julien Dupont’s body and his motorcycle. If he can imagine it, he can ride it.
This is parkour with a machine between you and the world. Close-ups of his unusually configured bikes at dupontandco.org.
Seeing more and more of these Skuut balance bikes around – kids learn to balance with their feet from the get-go, and never have to go through the training wheel stage at all. Here’s a higher-end option. Seems like such an organic, natural process to me – wish I had known about these a few years ago. Just watching kids on them makes me jealous — wonder if they make them in grown-up sizes? Should hook up with the gang at woodenbikes, maybe they have a kit? I can just see myself hurtling down Hearst Ave., trying to stop with my feet.
Fun way to get your day started: Biking into work along the Ohlone Greenway this morning, suddenly felt a *thwap* against my teeth, followed a half second later by a stinging sensation in the lower lip. Durn fool bee (wasp? – never saw the critter) had flown straight into my mouth and wigged out when he hit my teeth, reacted by plunging its stinger into whatever it could find nearby. Toxin from the sting spread quickly into my lower gum, and the whole areas now feels like I’ve been visiting a dentist with very bad aim.
Speaking of dentists, heard a great idea for DIY fugu the other day — rather than risking your life with potentially deadly blowfish, just inject a slab of halibut with novocaine. Apparently it tastes very similar, and the anesthetic will give you that nice stinging/numbing/tingly sensation you get from the real deal.
Had a few ideas about ways to present multiple views of GPS data in a multimedia project, part of which involved videotaping my bicycle commute along the Ohlone Greenway from handlebar-eye-view, then speeding up the 27 minutes of footage to a more watchable five minutes. Mounted a camera with a very sturdy professional cam clamp left over from a long-ago project and set off. Hit a bunch of snags, and am not sure whether they might be show stoppers for the whole project. What I had hoped would capture a lovely ride turned into a struggle with the outer limits of the most advanced codec technology, and ended up looking like total dooky.
Problem #1: Because camera is rigidly attached, it picks up every little bump in the road. This mounting method is inherently shaky.
Problem #2: Because camera is on handlebars rather than on my head, the camera view doesn’t track my line of sight, which is very disconcerting for the viewer (or maybe just for me, since it doesn’t match my experience at all).
Problem #3: Video doesn’t account for a human’s peripheral vision, which accounts for so much of the experience not shown here. Again, disconcerting (makes it seem much more dangerous than it actually feels).
Problem #4: The natural side-to-side pumping action of bicycling adds to a seasick, high-motion effect not actually experienced by the rider.
Problem #5: Once the footage was speeded up, pauses at stop signs pass by in a blink, making it look like I ride with total disregard for both death and the law. Not so! Though I do do some rolling stops, I’m actually very careful at intersections, especially because the Ohlone Greenway cuts across streets a ways away from the “real” intersections, so most drivers aren’t in the headspace to be expecting cross-traffic (despite zebra stripes and big yellow warning signs). I wear an orange safety vest and treat those intersections with kid gloves.
Problem #6: Video codecs rely on data similarities between frames, and none of them perform well under high-motion conditions. What could have more motion than shaky footage played back at 5x? Thought I could convey a beautiful morning experience, but this looks completely pixelated and smeared-out, even though I used the usually gorgeous h.264 codec. Of course, YouTube also apply their own compression, but my local version doesn’t look much better than this one. The only version that came out looking passable was the version with no compression at all — and it’s 750 MBs.
The footage is also a bit over-exposed, but that’s operator error rather than endemic. Hope to have access before long to a helmet-mountable lipstick camera, which should help a lot with problems 1, 2, 3, and 4, but will do little for problems 5 and 6. Back to the drawing board.
Music is “High Water” by Bruce Lash – Bruce gave me permission to use his stuff in projects back when I was at Adamation, and he now offers a bunch of downloadable music free for personal use.
