Jeremy joined us for the Tour de Farms last Saturday.

It poured almost the whole day, but it was warm. Once I got soaked I really didn't care about the rain.

Although I've seen the urban farms 3 times now, and the ride is slow-rolly. I think I'll just skip those for the lunch and end party in the future.

The food on the ride is amazing. Some sort of califlower mash, a purple and green bean potato salad, the best corn on the cob and a tofu burger.

(e:paul) and terry took the bus back with Jeremy, but I rode with some of the other bikers. It rained even harder on the way back.

We rode through Alden into Lancaster, down the heritage trail, down to Como Park Boulevard. Como Park has huge 10 ft bike lanes on each side.

At this point we stopped at Hotel Bellevue. No good beer but a Yuengling was $1.75!

Still pouring but we continued down to Union, where a rail trail took us all the way to William. So now I know you can get to country roads avoiding almost all traffic. I think I rode about 75 miles for the day.

I use Firefox and heard about Firefox Hello and pocket a while ago. I always ignored them in the browser because I assumed they required an account or were some third party plugin paid to get to the browser.

Well I guess I underestimated Mozilla because Firefox Hello is pretty cool. You just hit the Hello extension button and a link is generated on firefox's site. You can share the link with any WebRTC supporting browser, and it lets you text, voice, video chat, and web browse, with no other plugins or accounts. It's also all peer-to-peer, and end-to-end encrypted.

Meanwhile Google Hangouts is still not end-to-end encrypted, and still wants to use a Google Talk plugin in Firefox.

Unfortunately they took it out for version 49 of Firefox and never added it to the Android version.

Luckily the source for the server is still available, and written in Python.

It would be cool to integrate with the Patient Portal at work or here on (e:strip) for any sort of video work, especially since clients can just be JS.

Pocket needs a Mozilla account and I don't really like that.


In other random internet things I found amazing artsy pictures from the Honcho Campout (e:joe,60626). NSFW if you can't see furry naked junk at work.

Today was perfect for a hike in the gorge.

While we were down there we:

• saw the devily hole

• slithered in a small cave with (e:terry)

• almost got overtaken on the show by the jetboat's wake (I first thought the driver was being dramatic when she yelled at us to get away from the water)
• went up the newly repaired stairs to trail 5

But the best part was probably swimming in a pool by the rapids. (e:paul) got in and I joined him.

It was down by the rapids below the cable car. The rapids behind the pool were actually higher than it, so it looks pretty terrifying from some angles. But it was very sheltered compared to the flat rocks upstream. Water was cold but the movement of the river constantly drained and refilled it through cracks in the rock.

In the Niagara bro tub with (e:paul)



The bubbles from the rapids really made it look like a hot tub.


Hoping it will cure my scrody paws

Now I know to go before it's night. Not only was it not rainy then but there were probably about 5 or 6 different tents with good dance music. Drum and bass, Jungle, house, everything.

Paul and I need to remember, don't take candy from strangers

By the time (e:uchina) and (e:terry) got there to meet up with us, huge grey storm clouds were starting to roll in. We saw the beginning of (e:czarkasm)'s set and then it poured.

They shut all the music down except for a stage underneath the stone bridge. Everyone was huddled down there while the huge tarp sagged more and more with water. Eventually it soaked the guys who set up the tarp like some sort of water park ride.

(e:paul) and I saw (e:metalpeter) at the end while we were grabbing our bikes.

When we decided to leave it was still raining so we slow rolled ourselves home with Masumi. The water in the Gates Circle fountain was warm and clean (it comes straight out of the water main and is constantly drained). I wish I didn't have my phone. e;uchina agrees, if there's a way to go it's by a lightning strike to the tall water.

I tried catching up with the Thursday night ride.

I thought I could count on the ride leaving late from Essex, but they were gone and I had to text find out where they were going. While I was waiting I ran into my mom's friend Leslie. She was taking out a cyclist who was staying at their house from warmshowers.org. It's essentially couchsurfing but for people who are traveling long distances by bike. I want to put our house on it.

Anyway I found out from Alex the ride was going to Dalmatia hotel in Old Town Tonawanda. So I raced up there to meet them, but it turns out I beat the ride.

I didn't want to go in yet so I sat on the curb with my bike. These three guys were arguing outside the bar, threatening to kick each others asses. They break up for a few minutes, and one walks down the street. Then a few minutes later, this 40ish year old guy comes back with a bag around his shoulder and starts yelling at one of the guys he fought with before. Almost 100% sure it was a gun bag, it looked like this: . The other guy starts yelling he's going to call the cops and runs down the block.

I never thought I'd be nervous to be of Tonawanda but there you go.

Obviously I went inside the bar, when the rest of the ride gets there. It turns out this bar is amazing. There were a ton of friendly bros, a CBW beer was $3, Hamburg double IPA was $3.50 (sounds like a lot but it was a full 16oz and 8%, which is amazing for a bar) and a bunch of drafts were only $2.

They even had a black bean burger but i didn't try it.