Three weeks of Unicycling
I recorded a little video for GeekFit, (the podcast I do with my friend Steve Klassen) showing off my unicycle skills. Check out the video below. You can read about what got me into unicycling again in my previous post: Re-learning to unicycle
[blipit id="2210106"]
Read More
Re-learning to unicycle
Back when I was a kid I did all sorts of things to keep myself entertained, here’s a quick list:
- BMX Bikes
- Mountain Bikes
- Pogo Sticks
- Scooters
- Rollerblades
- Skateboards
- Unicycle
Unicycle?? Really? Tell me more? Somehow in my preteens we acquired a unicycle. It was a Schwinn and it was a pain in the.. well, inner legs to be quite honest. The seat HURT and I mean HURT a bunch, I’d have rashes and bruises in my inner thigh near my groin area due to how crappy this seat was made. It was as if they took the back of 2 Schwinn seats and smashed the fronts together to retrofit this seat. I bent the areas that hurt me as much as I could but it still hurt me quite a bit. I learned to ride the thing by holding onto my closed garage door and ride back and forth. Later I learned to free mount and then I got a bit into jumping bit not much. The unicycle was pretty hard to work on and I didn’t have the proper tools or know how to fix it. Changing the tire was a pain in the butt since none of my friends or I knew how to take the wheel off.
Fast forward 15-20 years later and I’m watching the morning news recently and some guy named Terry “UniGeezer” Peterson was on KTLA morning news showing off his impressive skills [Youtube vids] … and modern Unicycle. After seeing the program I was hooked and started researching out the perfect starter unicycle for my height and weight. The one thing that made me happy was that they redid the seat and that the technology was there to make a unicycle more enjoyable to ride. I searched Craigslist and ebay and all sorts of places to see what the correct one would be for me to get back into the swing of things with a unicycle. I knew I wanted a 24″ Torker LX since the seats are good and they are built tough enough for my price point. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on something I may just give up on 10 mins after failing to ride the damn thing. Me being a cheap bastard I looked and looked and looked and had a hard time finding one for under $100 until I found one on Craigslist stating it was a 24″ Torker LX for $65 and the current owner didn’t know how to ride it and gave up. She said they had one other person interested and “if the hippy doesn’t come through we’ll call you and you can buy it from us”. Days went by and nothing, no call or email. I event emailed them to inquire on the status and nothing. Out of the blue I get an email saying if I want it I can come pick it up in Hollywood. So I headed there located the building and had a hell of a time finding parking. Once I arrived the persons mom I was buying from met me at the elevator with the unicycle. I looked it over and and was pretty happy except that I noticed it was a CX and not a LX it also lacked the handle on the seat I wanted too. I tried it out and thought, for $65 bucks its worth buying to mess with. I took it home and gave it a go and MAN did my legs hurt after doing just 30 minutes of riding.
Memorial day weekend I took the unicycle to the park with Jessalyn and we rode around the tennis court. I on the uni and Jess on her scooter. We raced around the tennis court until she was too tired to continue so we went home and she took a nap. I went out front and tried to free mount the unicycle without the assistance of any walls or other objects to help me I gave up after 45 sweaty minutes not able to mount the uni. We had a bday party to attend and Jen suggested I bring the unicycle since the kids grandparents might get a kick out of me attempting to ride the thing. I think I did quite well so we recorded a bit of video showing my progress. I also talked about me picking up unicycling again on the latest GeekFit Podcast.
[blipit id="2155583"]
Read More
Too many outlets not enough data to output
I had a realization today I’m lacking content for all of my blogs, in the past I had all these great idea for postings (video, audio & text) but never the right place to put them. It all started with abstrakone.com, my personal website. I posted all sorts of stuff there and it became my catch all for ideas and such. I later created jasontucker.us and moved all the abstrakone.com stuff over to there. Later I started my livejournal account and used that for things that I felt were a bit more private. That was lame since I didn’t have the blog set to private or anything. At this point I had 2 places to put things that I wanted to blog about but sometimes I wanted things from abstrakone.com to show up on livejournal and so I found a plugin to do the cross posting for me. I got into podcastings and Jen and I started TuckerTales, a place for both of us to talk to each other openly and rant about our kids. This worked fine but I wanted to discuss some techie stuff sometimes so I started a blog / podcast called EverythingTech.tv where I started to do some tech posts and videos of cool stuff I liked. After that came GeekFit, a podcast I record with my best friend Steve Klassen where we talk about health and fitness with a geek perspective. There are a few other blogs I have that fill a need but slowly but sure they were getting less and less blog posts as time went on. Why is that? One word.. Twitter. For those of you that have been living under a digital rock, twitter is a microblog where you are given a maximum of 140 chars to post to. What’s nice about this is the fact that these tiny postings are great for small brain dumps with little to no effort.
As you can see I have many outlets for my passions, and there are still more I haven’t mentioned. As I’m getting older and accumulating more responsibilities my available time has lessened and all of my blogs are suffering because of it. I think the big thing that has been eating up all my blogging data, like I mentioned before is Twitter. Its just sooo easy to bust out a quick line of text and hit submit and be done with it. I think I’m wasting quite a bit of good content by just boiling it down to 140 chars. By doing so I’m not getting many hits to my blogs and they end up suffering from this. Currently I have all of my twitter postings get posted to my blog once a day as 1 post but I think that’s the opposite I want to have happen really. I’d rather do 1 posting that’s quite meaningful and I took the time to write and have that posting sent out as a twitter for people to read and click on to read the rest of my thought. My blogs run on wordpress and there is a plugin called TwitterTools that will take care of the twittering a blog post subject for you. The only problem I have with doing this is that twitter is good for quick posts, so which do I do quickly and which do I do as a full on blog post? Should I revisit my days twitters and expand on a few key ones or should I do blog postings as a draft and just let them be posted to twitter when I’m done with the thought? I think I’m going to try the latter by using the iPhone WordPress app and just type out a quick posting to it and save as draft then when I have some free time go in there and expand on it a bit.
So there you have it, I’ll write some blog posts as drafts then dive in there and expand on them before posting to twitter. I’ll continue to post the minutia like braindumps to twitter since theres no real reason to expand on them.
Next up is figuring out how to remind myself to do the blog postings that will end up being twitters. Any thoughts? leave a comment.
Read More
About Me
Jason Tucker - Southern California native, Systems Administrator, Podcaster, Wordpress hacker and Social media guy.
