Jayson’s Weblog

The building, as you all probably know, houses our local transportation bureau and has been there at the corner of Gary and Mason ever since the government’s transportation divisions merged with the gasoline companies. The building is actually the standard rectangle garage shape but also rounded on one end where the ramps for vehicles to enter each floor wind their way up. The floors end here resemble a stack of large concrete disks with a thin edge and are supported by large round pillars that appear to pierce a the entire stack, giving the place quite a unique appearance. As with all the new government bureaus, it was once a public parking structure and the offices themselves are all “mo-bispa”. “Mo-bispa”, pronounced “moe bee spay” from the short form of the words “mobile” and “spaces”, are of course the large mobile-home like office vehicles deemed popular on TV, and part of the reason I have this photo and story to share, though the point is the building itself. I have ridden past the building many times and even had to visit it once to renew my bicycle permit the year I tried to skip paying the gasoline tax while renewing on line; after all, I do not even own a motorized vehicle. However not until looking at it while laying on my side with my head pressed against the sidewalk, did I understand where it got its nick name. The locals have always called it “The Slicer” and until today, I thought it was analogy regarding how they slice the people or our pocket books to ribbons or such. However now I saw that at the right angle it quite resembles a gigantic bread or cheese slicer. [to be continued]

This is an ongoing fictional story in blog format, by Jayson Lorenzen.

To read the rest, please see the new site created where these adventure will continue to unfold: http://clog.monjayaki.org/

The other day I used my digital camera to record my commute to and from the office and have one part complete enough to show. This is the commute home from my office, through San Francisco and for this portion I zip-tied the camera onto the handle bars of my bike.


The video starts out in the basement of our office building in the financial district and continues up Market St. through some of the Castro, the lower Haight, the Panhandle area, the Panhandle itself, The Golden Gate Park, and finally The Avenues out in the Sunset where I live. You will see that San Francisco has a wide range or terrain to ride on, and that there are a lot of obsticles. This is only one possible route and eventually I hope to film others; one in particular that skirts the Bay around to the Presidio should be interesting.





The bike in this case is a Cyclocross (Surly Cross-check) and so the ride was a little rough when the road is in poor condition (most of SF) or where I went on trails in the park, but there wasn’t much I could do about it when editing the video. I cut out what fuzz I could while trying to keep some of those sections somewhat viewable. It is also cut down to youTube length by removing any sections where I was going straight for any lenght of time or had to stop etc. So it may appear that I get to the Castro or Park awfully fast; well it is the magic of iMovie’s great editing environment


I shot this with my plain ol digital camera ($200 Panasonic Lumix LC33, from like 4 years ago) that is not very fancy at all, so the quality over all is not the greatest. It only shoots a resolution of 320 x 240 and YouTube’s default video size is 425 pixels wide, so it was tricky to get a Quicktime file from it that would not be messed up by the import into YouTube’s system too. In the end, I hope it gives the viewer some idea of what a typical commute by bicycle through the streets of San Francisco is like.


The music, behind the video, is by a band called Midnight Haulkerton, and is released under a Creative Commons license for us to remix, use, or whatever. I remixed the song a bit for use with this video. See my post about the song for the files and more about that project. I would like to add, however, that I wish more groups were doing this, or if they already are, that there was a Napster type site where their works were collected, including source (track) files. I understand Nine Inch Nails did something like this and released a song in Apple’s Garageband format. If you know of more please comment about it on the post about the Midnight Haulkerton song.


Till next time

I have upload photos of my current bikes in my gallery at Dirt Rag. You can check em out at:

http://www.dirtragmag.com/gal/showgallery.php?ppuser=6918&cat=500