Americans are bad at math.
 

I got my new Oregon Scientific Helmet Camera yesterday, and quickly determined that it didn't come with an "SD Ram" card so I could actually film stuff. So I had to figure out where to get one of those. After thinking about this for a while, I sheepishly remembered that I work one block from Fry's.

So on the way to the train, I stop at Fry's. I am a bit upset that Fry's has an almost completely useless bike rack. There are 5 bikes, surely their employees, all locked by the front wheel only. I finagle a position where I can lock my frame and go inside.

I find the memory section, apparently all the memory is behind the cash register counter and I have to have someone fill out an order form. I say I want an SD card. I see some various tags saying that 2 Gig cards are 11-14 bucks. Sweet. Sign me up for 2 of them and I can have a backup. The guy says "Oh man we have a screaming deal on those! $9.99!" I say "$9.99! Give me 2!" He calls someone and they get into a bit of a discussion about which cards are what, etc... he asks them to look on the 2nd floor (WTF). I start to fidget, I am unhappy with how my bike is locked and I do want to make the train. Finally he turns to me and says "We're out. We have some others but they are $10.99, but Monday we'll have the $9.99 ones". I said "That's 2 bucks. I rode my bike here. The rest of these schlubs spent $5 in gas just getting here, I can fade the 2 bucks. And if I *did* drive, I would LOSE MONEY by making a 2nd trip to save 2 bucks, because I would spend more in gas than I saved on the dumb SD cards".

I don't think he got it, but I got my SD cards.

Amusingly, when I picked them up, the cards which are about the size of a quarter were in packaging the size of a paperback novel. Plastic of course. And of course clearly I needed a bag, despite the fact I had a huge messenger bag slung over my shoulder.

Side note - I ran the helmet cam on the way home. Within 10 seconds I captured a car running a stop sign. Those drivers - all scofflaws, don't they know they have to follow the rules of the road.

Wow, I wish I had a mode of public transit locally. I can't ride the 10 miles to our Fry's Electronics because there is no route from the south side. Come to think of it...last time I went here was over a year ago, I was getting an SD card for my new camera and at the time had a car. I paid $20 for a 1GB...which was a great deal at the time.

What kind of rack was it? The circular "nice looking, barely functioning" or the wavy kind that makes absolutely NO sense? Within 5 miles of my house the only bike rack is at a school. Not a single rack at three shopping strips, including many retail grocery chains.

it's a rack you roll a wheel into, with a wheel slot about 6 inches from ground to top. With my rear wheel in the slot I was barely able to slide the lock through the wheel slot and reach the chainstay.

The rest of the bikes - not only is it dumb to lock just your front wheel (allowing the entire rest of the bike to go walking sans wheel) but if you roll the front wheel into a wheel slot like this your bike is not vertically secure and can fall over because the front wheel can rotate. I learned this the hard way - I rode up Mt Diablo, rolled my bike in the rack the wrong way, it fell, and I broke a spoke. Climbed 12 miles up, hitched a ride all the way down :(

Some of the bikes actually were "secure" because they were using long cable locks that went through the frame. Fry's sells more than a few things that would cut such locks - heh.

May be beside the point, but why not take your bike inside?

What do racks matter anyway? And why on earth take your bike inside? Would any store accept that? Just lock it to a fence, or a lamppost or anything that looks stable.

Snipped OP rant:

Nominate this OP, along with the TV free rants, as a sticky magnet for WTF rambling for the High Horse Tribe.

+1

He sounds like an arrogant nutter.

Sounds to me like your average modern shopping experience, except the fact that there were bikes out front. *shrug*

from REI? is it working well for you? how is the video quality?


a friend and i visited the legion of honor for the annie leibovitz exhibition. after searching for, but failing to locate, a better alternative to the street-side lock-ups, we ended up locking our bikes next to a lonely pair of tourist rentals from blazing saddles which, incredibly, were not even secured to the "rack"! no, they were merely locked together--enough to prevent a miscreant from simply riding off, but not enough to prevent them from being hauled off by some other means.

while we were busy making a pretzel out of our two bikes, we briefly contemplated moving our two-wheeled neighbors a few spaces down. anyway, we opted to leave them be seeing as how we're not dicks. well, i should say he is not.

:innocent:

Apparently, they're bad at logic, too. (Hint: false dichotomy, in this case used as a stepping stool to a high-horse.)

nice cam.

As for the 'bad at math' thing, I think your not finding out that you needed an SD until after you took delivery could be considered a 'bad at reading' thing, eh?

Every time you point a finger at someone, there are 3 pointing right back at you.

True that, its extremely rare to find a bike rack around here, or bicyclists for that matter. Nor do we have a Fry's, though their parent company Kroger has a monopoly on grocery stores locally. That they had the right chips in stock seems to me to be almost amazing too. ;)

Ob: Living Car Free. I had 30 minutes to get from the train station, to REI, buy the camera, and get back to the train station. The cameras are not in stock at REI, but you can order them to the store. This store had one in stock because someone had ordered it, returned it, and now the various pieces were in a plastic bag instead of a box with "SD CARD AND BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED" written on it. Nonetheless I am willing to point a finger back at myself - I did look up the product on the web and didn't research it. Not a big deal, I had to wait 24 hours to use the camera.

Anyway, the camera. I strapped it to my helmet and rode home with it on. The resolution is excellent, I was surprised. I was able to read license plates from various cars I was riding around, no problem. The 2 GB card will take 1 hour of VGA video with 30 frames per second. You can film several hours at lower resolution and 15 frames per second.

Edit: I forgot to add. The velcro helmet strap sucked. The cam was off kilter and I couldn't get it straightened out. There is a rubber strap that you stretch around the base of the helmet, that's for things like snowboard helmets that don't have vents. There is a handlebar mount, but the problem with a handlebar mount is that it's harder to track a license plate with your handlebars than with your eyes (and thus your helmet). I'm working on a solution - I think Noisebeam has one of these but his videos make me think he's mounted them on his bars.

One thing I want to research is if the Camera will accept larger SD cards or if the CPU is only programmed for 2GB and smaller sizes.

You have to remember, this was the Fry's that is down the street from Advanced Micro Devices where I work, and nVidia, Intel, Yahoo!, Google, Applied Materials, etc... Geek Central. Fry's has every electronic gadget you'd ever need from a 200 ohm resistor to a 60 inch HD television. And of course every form of beef jerkey known to man in the impulse buy section as you wind your way to the register. It's amusing, there are 30 registers and you might have to wait a minute or two, but they have a snakeline that is 50 yards long so that you have to walk past the Costco sized candy packages, cokes, beef jerkey, etc...

The bike rack? Probably for the (slave labor wages) employees in the stock room. Your typical customer for this Fry's, in the heart of Silicon Valley, makes $$$$$ and would not stoop to a bicycle, $4.50 gas is annoying in theory but isn't breaking the budget.

That brings up an interesting point - the people you meet in Ohio, Arkansas, Michigan, Ontario, etc... everyone has different arguments for their car that lead to the same point, they drive. This place to me seems very annoying as we have flat roads, good bike lanes, excellent public transit, yet the mode share for biking and transit is not near where it could be. A lot of that has to do with the very high per capita income.

Have you tried the lower resolution yet to see if it is workable or the 15 frames per a second. I have thought about getting one from time to time but 1 hour wouldn't even make the first half of my commute which I'd like to record in it's entirety at least once.

The first thing I am going to try is if I can use an 8 GB card and be done with it.

Ohhh how the high and mighty superior souls have to put up with mere humans.

The ATC3K to be release "soon" says it can take up to 4gb the ATC2k says only 2gb as does a few reviews. Maybe I'll get a nice present for x-mas.
If you happen to have a 8GB card sitting around it would be worth a try though
http://www2.oregonscientific.com/ass..._manual_US.pdf

Anything above 2GB is HDSD, and won't work in a device that wasn't specifically built for it. The Oregon Scientific cam was designed before that standard came out and won't have support. :( It's still fairly rare, but becoming more common.