Most of you are probably aware of the events surrounding last month's cirtical mass ride. In short, the ride was stopped by police officers and the end result was unnecessary use of violence by police against a completely unviolent group of bikeriders leading to the arrest of nine (some with felony charges). This month's ride set out with everyone aware of the possible consequences and therefore stronger and ready to have that much more fun.
We started from Niagara square through downtown and into the East side. We rode in a line that must have stretched at least a half mile. Counters along the way put the number between 180-200 total bicyclists! It was great fun with catcalls, songs, and rampant good-natured chatter throughout the procession. The people we passed looked curiously and often inquired what was up, someone would respond and give their own interpretation of what it was we were doing. It was great because everyone's explanation was different, some yelled back, "fun!," others talked about bikers' rights, that's the beauty of it, this event is open to everyone's views and mindsets. Another great aspect that I noticed was that as we traversed streets that would normally be tagged as "bad neighborhoods" (ie.: the fruit belt and later the west side on Grant St.) the people generally responded even warmer than in the so-called good neighborhoods. We even grew in number as many of the residents of these communities, already on their bikes, joined in the procession and swelled our numbers.
The entire ride was without any police interference (though there was one instance where a camera was setup and recorded us as we passed), clearly in response to the harsh backlash in the communities from last week's activities. Critical Mass is still going strong and I encourage anyone with a bike to come on out and have one hell of a good time.

Well I have suffered some major setbacks. First off the trackpad died on the powerbook which had to be sent back in to get fixed. While it was in for repair, the memory chip died. Then when I finally got a new chip, the hard drive died. So you think, why not use the iBook. Well lets just say it went swimming an dthe motherboard got fried like chicken.

So basically, I am now typing this on a firewire drive that I have booting into the powerbook until the new replacement drive comes. I lost a lot of code too. So the new color picker is on hold. However, I have deiced to go ahead with adding little windows to each journal entry.

This will all happend probably some time this week. Right now I am having a funeral for the iBook. On a good note I sold the ti4600 finally and I got a good 186.00 for it which is pretty good.

Last of all I have to go work on thew syllabus for my summer class. I am going to be teaching 3D online cartooing at Canisius College starting June 23rd. I guess I am going to have to make some sort of php cartoon frame uploader script. I only have 6 students so I am kind of excited about the whole thing.