Archive for category general
My Own Private Road
In several weeks, I know some friends that will be competing in a half-ironman triathlon which starts and finishes a few miles from where I live. The swim is in the James River, the bike portion goes on one of my usual bike routes, and the run goes through some trails I ran this morning. I’m not really a glutton for punishment anymore: a 1 mile swim, 55 mile bike, and 13 mile run sounds brutal, and that’s only half the distance of the standard ironman. In my present condition, I could probably do the swim and bike, but the run would finish me off. Someone wrote into the Virginia Gazette to remind everyone of the race:
Two triathlon races will be held at Jamestown on Sept. 11 and 12. There will be 1,200 competitors from all parts of the state competing. Please be patient and observe the police checkpoints along Greensprings Road and Route 5 toward the Chickahominy River, as the cycling portion will be on the roads and not the path. The race brings local revenue and money for local charities, so please show everyone what respectful citizens we are.
The fact that someone wrote in to say this is telling. I hope for the cyclists’ sake that there is a sizable police presence, for Route 5 is a magnet for road rage against cyclists. I’ve had several run-ins with drivers on different places on that course — even on the backroad portion I had someone yell at me out the passenger window and give me the finger.
Much of the problem on Route 5 stems from the adjacent bike path: before the path was installed, I never had any trouble. However, since many other cyclists and I don’t feel like hitting a pedestrian or getting clotheslined by a dog leash, we stick to the road. While we exercise responsibility by avoiding pedestrians, some drivers don’t feel like driving responsibly and avoiding cyclists, as reported in this Last Word comment:
Riding bicycles is part of living a healthy lifestyle, but ride them on safe roads where there is a bike path. Motor vehicle drivers should not have to slow down to follow behind bicyclists. If we attempt to go around them, we are crossing the yellow line, which is illegal. If we hit them, we go to jail. Ride on appropriate roads where there is a bike lane.
This attitude is very pervasive among drivers where I live: many treat the road as their personal space and are unwilling to share. Whatever happened to defensive driving? Everyone has an equal right to share the road, be it cars, trucks, bikes, or pedestrians. Some are not “more equal than others.” The attitude above makes the road a dangerous environment for everyone, including other drivers. The boilerplate “laws of physics give heavier vehicles priority/roads are designed for motor vehicles” arguments are no excuse for poor driving skills, not to mention the law. If you can’t safely handle slower (or faster) traffic, you shouldn’t be on the road. If you think bikes or pedestrians shouldn’t be on the road, then write to your state representatives to change the law, but I guarantee it will be an uphill battle.
It isn’t just a cycling problem, either: I’ve seen drivers completely ignore other cars and pedestrians, creating plenty of close calls. I’ve seen plenty of pedestrians march into traffic without a second glance. I’ve been on group rides where some people will sail through a red light. It’s time to take some responsibility. Everyone complains about traffic, but if you’re stuck in it, you’re as much to blame as anyone else.
The Fan Mail Returns…
Selling Out
After a year and a half of running my own webserver, I’ve finally sold out to a hosting service. Since I’ll be moving to a new apartment, the new ISP won’t allow me to run my own webserver unless I plunk down $80/month for a three year contract with only 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. Even still, the 15/2Mbps service I signed up for is abysmal compared to the insane speeds I get at my current place. It’s no wonder commercial ISPs are fighting tooth and nail to prevent community and government organized internet service. Get a few thousand people together, lay down some fiber, and get faster speeds and a much lower price. Too bad there isn’t any effort to do this on the mobile phone front.
Rage Against the Cloud
I’ve posted previously about how much control third party and cloud computing services have over your information and how it will only get worse. Guess what: it just got worse.
For well over a year, I’ve imported the RSS feed from my blog to Facebook via the Notes application. This particular feature has been flaky in the past and now appears to be completely broken despite cries to fix it. I’m betting my bottom dollar that the poor implementation and maintenance of the blog import feature is deliberate on Facebook’s part: they want you to stay within their walled garden and keep all of your content solely within it.
Before last week, anything I posted on my blog would take up to three days to show up on Facebook. Occasionally, I would make several posts and they would all show up out of order several days later. To make posts show up immediately, I had to log in to Facebook and manually update the blog import. Several days is an eternity for a service that depends on real time information, especially when I get 20 or 30 wall posts every hour. Why should my blog posts be treated differently than wall posts? Google has real time search for the entire internet, but Facebook can’t keep up with a handful of RSS feeds for new blog posts? It’s obvious that Facebook could easily make an import feature that functions in real time and would allow you to import anything from anywhere. So why haven’t they done this?
Now, however, the Facebook blog import feature appears to be completely broken. After writing a blog post last week and then trying to manually import it, I got the following obtuse error from Facebook: “The blog/rss url you entered is not valid. “ I got no such errors from Feed Validator. I also thought it could be because I had upgraded to WordPress 3.0, but a discussion thread revealed that plenty of people with other blogging services were also having trouble importing to Facebook. After a week and a half, I have a hard time believing that Facebook would allow a bug like this to go ignored without some kind of acknowledgment or fix. What are they up to?
My guess is that Facebook deliberately broke the blog import feature, thinking that those who used it would just forget about it and start posting to Facebook directly. If true, it’s quite the subversive attempt to gain even more control over my information. I’m certainly not going to abandon my blog just because I can’t import it into Facebook. My guess is that the more restrictions like this that Facebook imposes, the more incentivized people will be to abandon their accounts. Changing privacy policies at the drop of a hat may not be enough to convince Facebook users to leave, but I’m betting that restricting users’ control of their own data will be the last straw.
More fun and games on Route 5
The Route 5 story continues, for this little gem appeared on Tuesday in the Virginia Gazette:
“Sooner or later, one of the bicyclists who refuse to use the bike path built along Route 5 is going to get hurt. This time of year the road is jammed with weekend motorcycle groups and other vehicles. Route 5 has a narrow shoulder that provides little room for cyclists when two vehicles are approaching/passing each other. Serious cyclists consider the bike path unsuitable, but that isn’t going to change the laws of physics when an inattentive driver spills his or her coffee while meeting an oncoming dump truck.”
I’ve heard that commercial driving schools emphasize “the laws of physics” by instilling in drivers that vehicles with greater mass have the de facto right of way. This seems to be an excuse to allow some people to drive like morons just because their vehicles are larger. It doesn’t matter whether you’re driving a semi or a tricycle, everyone has to take responsibility not to drive recklessly or hit anything. The above comment was quickly followed up today with:
“I promise to never ride along Route 5 again. Obviously people who drive that route should not be operating machinery, such as a car. Please do not go to the other side of the county since that’s where I live and have children. The thought of someone like the person who commented recently on a road anywhere near my children scares me.”
The problem is that most drivers are like the first commenter: they are more worried about “spilling his or her coffee” than driving safely. Everyone is too distracted by personal items like mobile phones, radios, and in-car DVD players to pay attention, so when something happens (a bike suddenly pops into view), they see it as a violation of their personal space. In driving a manual transmission, I find it impossible to do anything but drive, so maybe a resurgence in manuals will make things better. However, I really wonder if I’ll make it through my life without being involved in a serious car accident. Whether it be biking, running, walking, or driving, I experience more and more close calls every week and one of these days I might not be so lucky.
Wall Computing
Recently, I picked up Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, which depicts an inevitable merge of man and machine. Within 20 years, he predicts that computing power and algorithmic capability will exceed that of a human brain. Well before the end of the century, Kurzweil claims that humans will be able to download their consciousness into a machine and exist as a cyber entity. I have my doubts if these predictions will come true as quickly as Kurzweil claims, but one of his predictions for the short term future caught my eye.
In the book, Kurzweil says that soon computers will be everywhere, even in the walls. Within the sensor network community, I’ve heard similar arguments dozens of times. The real question is: why do we need computers in the walls? What is the underlying motivation for having computing intelligence in your clothes, in your desk, or in your dishwasher? What can sensor networks do to improve your life? Right now, it’s really hard to say.
Another researcher in the sensor network community likened sensor network research ideas as “hammers looking for nails.” That is, solutions are invented before the problems are defined. With emerging technologies, its hard to say immediately what their benefits are. An interesting quote from a guy in the augmented reality community depicts how a new technology can sound cool but has little practical value:
“The first movies that ran could show anything, like an elephant in the zoo,” Meier said. “100 years ago it wasn’t about the elephant, it was ‘that thing is moving!’ Eventually it became more about the content…”
I would say that the current state of sensor networks is much like the above movie analogy. Computing in the walls sounds cool, but what can small, networked devices in your walls do that really matters? Few research papers offer any practical applications, since most sensor network papers focus on small fundamental problems: radio interference and MAC protocols, routing issues, and primitive event detection with sensors. The few applications that exist in research papers aren’t exciting: activity recognition with body sensor networks (e.g. sitting, standing, walking), vehicle detection and tracking, and human health monitoring.
A few of these sensor network applications have made it into the mainstream media. Lightweight health monitoring sensors may sound boring, but could provide motivation to stay in shape when your daily living habits are compared online with your peers. Another project aims to put health monitoring sensors in soldiers’ underwear, with the aim that the underwear can release drugs and treat wounds. One idea from IBM promises to have a computer at road intersections notify cars to turn off their engines and save fuel at lights. Lastly, the smart home concept promises to network household appliances together to notify users of energy usage and to reduce energy consumption during peak time periods.
Whether the above ideas are really exciting or constitute the limits of sensor network capability is another matter. I’m hoping that some really cool stuff will emerge in the future. My bet is on participatory sensing and peer to peer collaboration with mobile phone-based systems, but like most people, I don’t have any specifics.
Your digital life is out of control
Nearly every website and blog has a Facebook fan page, and most of those use the Facebook API to insert a fan page frame at the bottom of their own site. The fan page frame lists the number of fans and the names and pictures of ten Facebook users that “like” the particular site or blog. I had always wondered if the 10 Facebook users in those frames were even real users at all. Yesterday, I found that’s not the case at all:
Out of 746,369 fans, the Facebook API randomly selected my fiance as one of the 10 lucky fans to have his or her name, picture, profile link, and fan status broadcasted to the world on a website other than Facebook itself. Or maybe it wasn’t random, but reloading the page selects a new set of 10 fans, and I don’t think I’ve ever looked at one of these before and noticed someone I knew. How many of these 746,369 fans are even aware that by “liking” PostSecret, this information can be accessible to anyone on the internet and not just from Facebook? Unclear and ever changing privacy policies are just one of several significant problems with the shift to trusting third parties for nearly all of your data.
Everyone is becoming increasingly reliant on social networking sites, cloud computing, webmail, software as a service, and content distribution platforms to handle their data. Fewer and fewer people are storing their data on their own computer and instead are forking it over to third parties in droves. Entrusting a third party with your data raises three chief concerns: reliability, privacy, and freedom. First, how can you be sure a third party web service will always provide you access to your data? Next, how can you be sure your data is protected by a third party according to its privacy policy? Lastly, can do do as you please with the data you have submitted to a third party? The answers to these questions are dubious at best, but there are some steps anyone can take to minimize the problems and regain control of your information.
Reliability
Gmail seems to have a lot more problems than it used to. There’s been several occasions in the last year where I could not log in to retrieve my mail because of some server-side problem. Furthermore, I’ve been getting that yellow “still working…” bar flashing across the top of the Gmail page quite a bit, making my mail experience all the more frustrating. It makes me wonder, what incentive does Google have to ensure the integrity of your mail? It’s a free service, so if Gmail goes down, it isn’t as if they are going to lose revenue due to paying customers pulling out. Indirectly, ad revenue will decrease, but there is no direct motivation for Google to provide you, the user, with your email 100 percent of the time.
Without direct control over my email, I’m more or less living in fear of a sudden and long lasting outage, unable to read, send, or receive email. What if Google, intentionally or not, decides to block access to my account? A similar incident occurred to one Google Groups user who was locked out for three years until finally getting in touch with a customer service rep from Google after upgrading his account to a paid service. With a direct incentive to provide reliable service, Google was able to quickly fix the problem in this case. As with most web service models, users are not the customer, advertisers are, so you get what you pay for.
Privacy
When users submit data to a third party on the internet, privacy is anything but assured. As evidenced by the latest Facebook scandal, privacy policies mean nothing and are changed at will. Information thought to be private is sold to advertisers or suddenly exposed to the internet as was done with Facebook users’ likes and fan affiliations. What would happen if Gmail decided to open users’ email accounts for all to read? Users don’t have much clout to stop such changes from happening, especially without providing a monetary incentive for third parties to keep their word. Incidents such as these show that third parties care little about users and their wishes as to how their data should be handled. Users themselves are probably the only ones that can be trusted with their own data, for third parties see user data only as a commodity that can be bought and sold.
The worst case imaginable is a third party with an ax to grind against one of its users, deliberately ignoring its privacy policies to turn users’ private information against them. Unfortunately, this happens quite frequently. In the Duke Lacrosse incident, an unnamed source, most likely a Duke employee with administrative access to students’ email accounts voluntarily turned over to police an inflammatory email written by one of the lacrosse team members. If a university cannot be trusted with keeping student emails private, than how can anyone expect a free web service to keep its word? Even Mark Zuckerberg himself has been accused of accessing private information stored by Facebook users.
Freedom
While privacy explores the misuse of user data by third parties, another aspect defines the lack of control users have over data they submit to third parties: freedom. While most social networking sites, webmail, and other web services assert that any user data stored on their services is still owned by the user, this seems to be anything but true. Handing over data to a third party effectively gives that third party complete control over how that data can be used. Anyone who has ever attempted to completely erase their Facebook profile can attest to how little control they have over their own information: it’s nearly impossible. Ever tried to export from Facebook your status updates, wall posts, news stories, and photos? That’s impossible, too.
Along with Facebook, the iTunes/Apple content distribution system also provides an excellent case study of how third parties effectively have complete control over user data. As users invest more time, money, and more of their own content into such systems, the harder it is to switch to a competing system or quit altogether. Like Facebook, the Apple/iTunes model prevents data portability and forces users to stick with Apple products even if better products exist. Since users cannot move their purchased apps from one platform to another, they are forced to stick with Apple. To return to the Facebook analogy, Diaspora is billed as a completely open source and distributed social networking system. This social networking service could be argued as being “better” than Facebook, but lock-in will keep users on Facebook. There’s no way for Facebook users to export their friend lists, photos, and wall posts to Diaspora, so everyone will just stay on Facebook.
Any Solutions?
There aren’t really any clear cut solutions to this increasing dependence on third party web services. The best move is to decrease reliability on such third parties. I’ve tried running my own mail server, but outgoing email is blocked by my ISP in fear that I’m a spam relay. Downloading mail with a client is an option so at least I have copies on my own computer of everything I’ve sent and received in case Gmail were to go down. With respect to privacy, I’ve pretty much assumed that everything I post on the internet will be available to everyone, regardless of privacy controls. Anything I don’t want out there, I don’t post. To maintain at least some control over my own data, I host my own blog and ensure that I have a copy of everything I write and submit to sites like Facebook, Google Docs, and Dropbox. My guess is that as the internet evolves, and especially with the new and annoying “cloud computing” buzzword, this reliance on third parties is only going to become greater.
Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04
A few years ago, I was simultaneously running machines with OS X, Windows XP, and Linux. After giving up PC gaming and my Macbook started aging, I switched to Linux exclusively, since it had nearly everything I needed for school/work. I did however, keep a Windows XP partition on my laptop for PowerPoint presentations since I find Open Office to be seriously lacking. Using Linux almost exclusively worked pretty well for the last couple years and I managed never to have touched Windows Vista.
Since the release of Windows 7, I’ve heard plenty of good reviews about this latest Windows version and I decided to give it a try. A month ago, I installed it on my MSI netbook so I could travel lightweight and give a paper presentation using PowerPoint. Shortly thereafter, Ubuntu released its latest version into the wild and after using both Windows and Linux for about a month, I’ve been able to come up with some strong and weak points on both. Some of my comments apply to Windows and Linux in general and not just to these latest versions or distributions.
Windows 7
Pros
- A solid UI. I’m a real fan of the Aero theme, system fonts, and improved start menu. The taskbar really takes the cake by using icons and clustering multiple instances of the same program. Hovering over the taskbar gives a cool preview of each open window.
- Fast. My netbook with Windows 7 feels just as responsive as it did when it ran Linux. Boot times are a little slower, however.
- Robustness. I had no difficulty with the Windows 7 install on my netbook and Microsoft even provides a Windows 7 CD to USB image utility for netbooks. Unlike my Ubuntu experience, there aren’t any weird hacks to go through in order to get your display or wireless connection working correctly following a fresh install. Furthermore, I haven’t encountered any system crashes and Windows seems to keep any malfunctioning program from taking down the whole system.
- Good hardware support. I plug in a camera and it’s automatically recognized and drivers are installed from the internet. I plug in an external monitor or projector and the correct model is detected and my desktop is extended on to it with the correct resolution. It’s great for presentations since there isn’t much fiddling with the projector or Control Panel settings to get everything looking good.
- Software availability. Everything has a Windows version, even most open source software. I find that most developers put more effort into Windows versions since that’s what most people are running. For example, I’ve had fewer crashes and slowdowns with the Windows versions of Firefox and Skype. The Windows version of Skype is also much more polished than its Linux counterpart. Furthermore, many software programs are only available on Windows. MS Office, despite its incredible price tag, is still far superior to Open Office, and of course, only runs on Windows.
- Games. Most of the latest AAA titles are available for Windows, a few might be available for Mac, and I’ve heard of only one or two released right off the bat for Linux. If you’re into PC gaming, Windows is the only way to go.
Cons
- Lack of a centralized software repository. This makes it a real pain to download and install software since I have to go to a separate website for each program I want to install, find the download page, and click through a bunch of installation dialogs. Even worse is that nearly every Windows program I install runs a background process on startup that constantly checks for updates and bogs down my system. Also because of this lack of a centralized repository, programs inconsistently install themselves in many different places.
- Difficult to configure system settings. The Control Panel is a real maze of links, buttons, and dialogs which are dumbed down at the highest level and utterly confusing once I drill down into specific settings. Some settings can’t even be accessed with the Control Panel: for example, I still find myself using msconfig.exe to remove unwanted startup items.
- Windows Update is still very intrusive. A large number of updates require me to reboot and will display a nag timer forcing me to do so. I really don’t like the OS to get in the way and nag at me. Some of the system updates take quite awhile to install and can bring my system to a crawl.
- Libraries. This feature, which wasn’t in XP, is similar to Unix symlinks. A library clusters together files and folders from several locations in the filesystem, making it unclear where the files are really located. I would prefer that all my music, movies, or PowerPoint slideshows be stored in a single location in the directory structure such that I can easily back everything up or find something via Windows Explorer. Windows seems to want you to not have any knowledge about its directory structure and instead rely on searches and libraries.
- Developer Tools. This is the exception to the software availability and quality rule. I’ve been using Eclipse for Linux and Windows and it works well enough on both platforms with plugins for Subversion and LaTeX editing. However, other tools such as a basic text editor, LaTeX compiler, and command line tools such as make are either lacking or nonexistent. I find it much easier to work with the command line than a GUI when creating plots with Gnuplot and documents with LaTeX. I can quickly switch from one thing to the next without clicking through a whole pile of menus and dialogs.
Ubuntu 10.04
Pros
- A centralized software repository. This is the main reason I like Debian and its variants so much. “apt-get install” will give me any program I want and provide automatic updates. Removal is just as easy.
- Fast boot times. On my 3 year old laptop, Ubuntu is up and running in 30 seconds or less from the moment I hit the power button.
- Easy to configure and control. Adjusting a system setting is easily performed from a GUI tool or from the command line. Configurations are stored in well documented text files as opposed to the nasty Windows Registry. It’s really easy to track down where a program’s install directory is located and tweak something.
- A customizable UI. The sheer number of themes available is astounding, with Compiz providing some really cool desktop visual effects that rivals anything Windows has to offer.
- Enthusiastic user base (support). I’ve found that tons other Linux enthusiasts are more than willing to help with problems on message boards and websites. For things I’ve had trouble with, a quick google search or message board post will return tons of answers with other people who had the exact same problem and had already solved it. With Windows issues, answers seem a lot more difficult to come by and the user base isn’t nearly as friendly.
- Developer Tools. Just about everything under the sun is readily available for developers in Linux, including a plethora of compilers, text editors, and command line tools. Working from the command line makes things a snap compared to painstakingly navigating through different dialogs and menus.
Cons
- New software versions take time to be added to the repository. For example, Firefox 3.6 has been out for months but was only recently included in the 10.04 Lucid Lynx release. Prior to that, I had to compile and install Firefox 3.6 from source.
- Installation headaches still persist. With every Ubuntu release, something doesn’t work post-install. With 10.04, it was my video drivers. During the upgrade process from 9.10, the installer whined about my video drivers and supposedly aborted the install. Upon rebooting my computer, however, it was clear that the install had not aborted and my display was completely messed up. After rebooting again, Ubuntu downloaded and installed the required video drivers automatically. Also, Ubuntu now tries on boot to mount a remote drive in my /etc/fstab for which I don’t have a saved key, halting the boot process until I manually override the mounting process.
- Software quality and robustness. Productivity software, such as Open Office, isn’t nearly as capable or as featureful as Microsoft Office. I’ve had trouble with Flash causing browser crashes and other programs crashing all on their own which run stably in Windows. I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out why some fonts are rendered terribly and look blurry in some programs, among other things. More effort should be placed on creating polished products in order for open source software to really take off.
- Lacking hardware support. This goes with the above bullet: I plug in an external monitor or projector and I still have to fidget with resolutions and positioning to get everything to work. Suspending to disk often borks the external monitor configuration and then I have to do it all over again.
In all, I can’t say that either the latest Windows or Linux versions are better. Windows provides a more robust and polished solution, while Linux gives more power and control to its users. I find Linux to be a better choice for development, but Windows is the clear winner for gaming. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 run reasonably fast — Windows 7 does quite well on my netbook, but Ubuntu clearly takes the cake with boot times. Until open source software takes quality up a notch and Windows provides a better development environment, I’ll probably be dual booting, running virtual machines, or using multiple computers with both operating systems.
Facebook Friend Suggestions: How does it work?
Every time I log on to Facebook, the friend suggestion box looms large in the top right corner of the page, prompting me to look at it out of curiosity. Interestingly, the recommendations seem to change quite a bit, especially as of late, which makes me wonder how it works. The Facebook website does say something about using information from your profile, but it’s a bit nebulous.
For most of the time since its introduction, the suggestion feature did what it was supposed to: recommend me people that I knew that I wasn’t Facebook friends with. The suggestion feature occasionally listed someone I knew well, but usually listed people I knew of but was not good friends with. Most suggestions were pretty understandable: people I had a few classes with or people that were track/cross country team members after I had exhausted my eligibility. A few people in the computer science department were thrown in there as well. For awhile it also recommended family members way out on some distant fork of my family tree.
Suddenly, within the past week or two, the friend suggestions have become very weird. Now I don’t even recognize the names of the people it suggests. Currently, the suggestions feature recommends 27 items: 2 groups and 25 people. Of the 25 people:
- I know 0 (again, I don’t even recognize any of the names)
- 1 is male; the other 24 are female (do I not have enough female friends?)
- 13 have a hometown or current city in Virginia
- 2 have Virginia Beach listed as their hometown or current city
- 1 is on a collegiate sports team
- 23 have an affiliation with William and Mary
- 19 are undergraduates at William and Mary
- 12 have friends in common
Obviously, the intent is to try to match me with other people with the same geographic location, school, and interests/activities, but it isn’t working. The school and geographic regions may be appropriate, but it isn’t enough. The gender and undergraduate distributions are a bit odd, and only half have any friends in common. I know there are plenty of better matches than the ones currently suggested to me, as evidenced by the suggestions made over the past months. I do remember that a week or so ago, my profile suddenly changed after some kind of update with the way interests, work, and school items are handled. The recommendation changes may have something to do with that update if some of those items are no longer considered in the suggestions algorithm.
My guess is that Facebook uses something like k-NN or Bayesian classification to figure out the friend/group/fan page suggestions. Given a common set of feature vectors for each profile, Facebook may determine the k closest matches, where k=27 in this case. It may even use the profile features of my current friends to figure out potential friends. Nevertheless, it seems their algorithm needs improvement.
What is it with Route 5 and angry drivers?
Over the last week, there was another round of fun letters to the editor in the Virginia Gazette:
It is annoying, as well as a safety hazard, for bicyclists to ride along Route 5 when taxpayers spent $1 million per mile to have a bike path constructed. Cannot James City have an ordinance that bicycling on Route 5 is prohibited on all sections where there is a parallel bike path?
Yesterday, there was this response:
In response to the person complaining about bicyclists along Route 5, I’m sorry to have offended you. I didn’t vote for the bike path boondoggle, so please don’t crucify me for not using it. I am a competitive cyclist and find that the folks using the bike path don’t pay attention to what is going on in front or behind them. Also, the path is narrow, and riding at speed along it would create high risk. Thus I ride Route 5, which does have enough room for both cyclists and road vehicles, at least for folks who are competent at driving. I have a right to use the road, so please don’t yell out your car window at me anymore. As with many of the topics in the Last Word, aren’t there better things to do with your time?
This wasn’t me, but I have a good idea as to who it is and I completely agree with their statement. While I haven’t been on Route 5/John Tyler in awhile, I have received plenty of grief from drivers in that area. It’s as if the bike path serves only to make them angrier.
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