Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘bike-taxi’ Category

Instead of making resolutions, I’m writing down plans…well, not plans exactly, but stuff that I want to do.

I think most of these ideas are feasible. What do you think?

1. Finish the house we started in 2009. I’d like to incorporate green technology, but we’ll see.
2. Get back to running my favorite seasonal business, The Buffalo Bike Taxi Co.
3. Go to more pro baseball games than we did in 2009. I’d like to see my first major league game. In Toronto. I know what you’re saying…someone my age has never seen the MLB in person? Nope.
4. This one is related to #2 above. I will lose a little weight and continue to improve my cardiovascular health. Riding The Buffalo Bike Taxi Co, it would be nearly impossible to gain weight.
5. Do more writing, even if it just more-frequent posts on this blog. I do want to get back to real writing, though.
6. I’d like to learn to speak another language. I studied French in high school and college, so I remember some of that, but “Quiero aprender a hablar español de este año.” (Without having to use Google Translate.)
7. I have a bunch of audio cassettes that I want to convert into digital files, so that I can actually listen to that music. (Younger readers may want to ask their parents if they have any audio cassettes in the basement that they could look at.)
8. I say this every year, but this year is different (partly because of the divorce). I want to spend more time with old friends. I have not ever visited my friends Jesse, Rich, Craig, or Greg at their houses.
9. I’d like to buy an electric car. A Tesla Roadster would be nice, but I would “settle” for a a hybrid Fusion.
10. We live near a lot of water, so I’d like to make sure we get the canoe wet a lot this summer. The Buffalo River is a lot more scenic than you’d expect.
11. Another thing I’ve wanted to do for years, but somehow haven’t found the time to do, is ride my bicycle across New York State. The Erie Canal is a great way to go.
12. I want to take the boys camping, somewhere that they’ll never forget. I think the Adirondacks would be great.
13. We’ve been attending church more regularly, but this year, I would like to make it such a standard part of our life that the boys don’t resist going, when they are at my house on a Sunday. But here’s a problem I haven’t figured out how to resolve: I like three different churches, but I can’t go to all three on the same Sunday morning. Ultimately, I think it will be better if I am more actively involved with one of those three churches, doing things besides just attending morning church services.
14. Many of these things can be done, and some should be done, with family. Baseball, bicycling, and church, for example. This year, I would like to have time to visit my family members at their houses, but also to make the house we’re working on large enough for everyone to gather here for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

What about you? Will you be doing any of these activities?

For the past couple days, people have been emailing me about a new search web site called cuil.com (cuil is supposed to be pronounced “cool” btw), so I checked it out.

Yep, it’s a search web site.

I don’t know what else to say. Except maybe this: I claim first coinage props for making cuil into a verb, as in, I cuiled my bike taxi business and found a ton of hits.

(color viciously enhanced by iPhoto,
so NO, this is not conjunctivitus)

Saturday night, as that wicked storm rolled into Buffalo, I was riding my bike taxi and got a big fleck of something in my eye. It was irritating my eye all night Saturday, into Sunday morning, but, sometime in the afternoon Sunday, the irritation stopped, and I thought my eye had expelled the offending mote.

Well, this morning I woke up with a log in my eye instead, and holy cow is it driving me crazy. I can barely keep my eye open. That’s okay for typing, but for anything that requires some depth perception, I’m in trouble.

UPDATE: My eye is no longer feeling irritated. When I ate the wasabi-flavored almonds my co-worker gave me today, my eyes and nose watered themselves clear. I hope this is permanent.

At work (both my day job and my bike taxi business), the opportunity to make a first impression comes often. At my day job (computer guy at a college), I meet a lot of new students as I hand out their username forms and tell them about the computer-based services we offer. On the bike taxi, I ride past hundreds of people every day.

From the very beginning of my work on the bike taxi, I recognized that when I smile, people are more likely to want to be passengers, so whenever someone was facing the bike taxi, and I was facing them, I would try to smile and make eye contact. (Oddly enough, this habit started to cross over into my regular bicycle riding, when pedestrians have no idea why I would be looking at them and smiling.)

One evening while I was pedaling the bike taxi up one of Buffalo’s slight inclines that passes for a hill, a person who knows me from my day job saw me. The next day, when she said that she had seen me, I asked her why she didn’t say hello. Her answer changed the way I ride the bike taxi. She said something like I looked like I was working hard, that my facial expression gave her the impression she should let me keep riding instead of stopping me to chat. Now I assure you, I’m not bragging about my hill-riding ability, but Buffalo is pretty flat, and with an empty bike taxi, I can’t imagine I would have had anything like a strained look of effort on my face. But that’s apparently what my neutral face looks like.

From that point on, I’ve been trying to smile all the time, not just when I see that someone is looking directly at the bike taxi–because obviously there are times when I don’t see who is looking.

I hope my smile doesn’t look like one of those fake smiles. You know the kind, when you’re sitting for a family portrait, and 13 of your nieces and nephews have to sit still for waaaay too long, so you have to hold the smile until your face feels like it has gone through a workout. When I’m riding the bike taxi, I really am having fun, so I hope that comes across to potential passengers.

Well, one day recently, it dawned on me. Duh, how could I not have thought of it sooner? When I get home from work, I usually have a plain face, not a frown or a smile, just neutral. But my neutral face doesn’t convey neutrality, as my co-worker observed that time she saw me riding the bike taxi. And that same neutral face is what I usually have at my day job, too, so I’ve also made an effort to greet new people with a more friendly face. So why not make an effort to enter my own house with a smile, so that my family knows I’m glad to see them?

The effort so far is paying off. Right away, any trace of a neutral mood is gone, as I laugh at myself for the simple effort of smiling. And when I walk through the door, no one has to ask how my day was, because they can see from my smile that I’m just glad to see them. It sets a positive tone, and it helps me take a more patient approach with the kids. I may have ruined Fathers Day, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of many other good days.

It almost seems disingenuous, putting a smile on your face when you may or may not have anything in particular to smile about. My attitude as an adult and a professional has been that I will just smile when there is something specific to smile about, and at all other times I’ll be a serious adult, a serious professional. Blah blah blah. If we wear nice clothes to work, or out with friends, or to a family get-together, why not wear a nice face?

As I do more research for the new bike taxi tours I’m planning to offer in the 2008 season, I am enjoying the process and have found a lot of interesting stories about Buffalo’s rich history. I even found an archive of old photos online, and I spent an hour just looking at old pictures last night. Great stuff.

So now I’m thinking, I should be taking notes, because I might like to write a bit more than the booklets that I give out with the bike taxi tours.