Nelz's Blog

Last night I had an idea. I want to support the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I don’t have the time to actually fly out to NYC to sit with everyone. But, I do have enough discretionary cash around that I could buy the flight. Why not find someone (or several someones) how is either flexibly- or un-employed, and I can send them to represent both their voices as well as mine?

I went about casting a net on my Twitter account, and I already have two potential occupiers lined up. But, from that post I also received encouragement to scale this up and accept donations.

I’ve never done this before, but I signed up for an account on WePay. I am now accepting donations if anyone wants to add their support sending people to sit with the #OWS movement.

This blog post serves as a way of providing the social proof of who is behind the donation page. If you donate and you don’t like how your money got spent, I am the guy you’re going to come talk to.

So, if you want to help have your voice, as a part of the 99%, to be heard but you don’t have the time to spare, please consider donating.

At one point in my life, I was a volunteer Firefighter/EMT. During my time working in paramedicine, I learned a valuable concept: the pertinent negative.

Let’s say you’re examining someone who fell from a height. In your report you node that yes, they had a laceration on their hand. But it is also important to note that you examined them and found no evidence of any other broken limbs. Not noting your investigation into broken limbs could mean one of two things: either you didn’t check their limbs, or you did and found nothing of concern.

By noting the pertinent negative, you clear up that ambiguity.

I find this concept incredibly useful in software. Frequently, I need a pertinent negative to do my job well. (Did that script complete without errors, or did it not even run? In a report, a 0 entry tells me that the item did fit my search criteria and it had no requests. Etc.)

I have to say that this concept of pertinent negatives keenly reminds me of how important an ‘invention’ zero was.

I recently went to my second South by Southwest Interactive (SxSW or SxSWi) in Austin, TX. If you’re not familiar with the conference, it is a 5-day internet and technology subsection of the greater SXSW conference which also has Music and Film components.

SxSWi has a long history of being a great place for cutting-edge technology makers and creators to mingle and share ideas. I personally saw, felt, and benefited from this great tradition. However, people who have been attending the conference for more than 3 years say that it has changed substantially as its influence has been recognized, and there are continually growing populations of the ‘business-y’ (read ‘douchebag’) hangers-on: marketers, salespeople, and those I think of as ‘traders in idea derivatives’. (Luckily, for my part, I was able to find a tribe of people who are actually creative and engaged in what they do, so I was able to minimize my exposure to the unsavory, financially-motivated elements.)

But not fully. There are several blog posts I’m sure I could write about the interactions between ‘the Makers’ and ‘the Sellers’, but one aspect of our differences really calls out to me for comment: business cards.

Some people can be really, really intense about business cards. (Check out this guy.) In some business cultures, not treating the business card exchange with the proper respect can end up costing you potential partners.

My impression is that at SxSW, people think of business card dispensing as a quantity-over-quality proposition. Some members (with whom I am friends) of the “How Not to Be a Douchebag at SXSW” panel (2010, 2011) panel even give advanced warnings that there are people who approach business-card delivery in this manner.

The whole business card thing is so ripe for mockery that @scottyiseri and I created a fake ‘Angel Investment’ firm, just so we could give out the fake business cards you see at the top of the post. (I ended up dispensing these cards out to friends, so they could in turn use them as a way to avoid giving their actual information to someone who was being egregiously douche-y.)

But it wasn’t the blatant card-distributors that got to me, it was the nuanced ones. After one session, I ended up with a card from a recruiter from North Carolina, and another from a small-business efficiency consultant from New Jersey. These cards were handed to me while I was having actual, pertinent conversation about the session with the card-givers. Twenty minutes later in my hotel room I was tearing the cards up and throwing them away. I had zero need for these cards.

On the plane ride home I got to thinking about those cards. I realized that every single unwanted card that ended up in my possession was a symbol of laziness: my laziness in protecting my integrity. (And I’m pretty into my integrity.) If I have absolutely no interest in your business card, and have no intent of ever trying to contact you ever again, why accept the business card? (You may say ‘politeness’, but I don’t buy it, because any ‘good’ marketer will politely bully their way into your wallet if you give them the chance.)

Going forward I have a new resolution. I will no longer passively accept business cards, I will either actively accept (less likely) or actively reject (more likely) any business card that is offered to me.

Will you join me? (Why not?)

So, I go to check some traffic stats on one of my silly sites, and I find some wierd referrers:

Both of the the Bit.ly referrers (like “forexmarket”) just resolves to this URL “www.plus500.com/SiteNotAvailable.aspx”.

It’s just a stupid banner page with a big GIF built to look like an actual web page.

What the fuck is the point? Yah, I was interested enough to investigate it, but only forensically… There is no way I would ever do any business with this place.

The other thing that frustrates me is that Bit.ly let the redirect through, even though they know it’s a spammy thing. (A couple of weeks ago when I first found these types of referrers, I tried to follow the link, but Bit.ly warned me about not-above-board behavior of the link. Why no longer?)

Also, the landing page is using Google Analytics. Does this mean all the good tools that those of us who aren’t devil-spawn are being used by they outright shitheads? I guess I know the answer, even if it does hit me right in my idealism.

For the past few months I’ve been commuting from San Francisco to Palo Alto via CalTrain, which was the impetus for me to finally get a Translink card ClipperCard. (I actually got my card right at the tail end of stock of Translink-branded cards, just before they renamed the whole system. At that time you could either order the card from the website, which was an ineffectual joke, or you could cough up five bucks and get just get a new one at your local Walgreen’s, which is what I did.)

Not that I have a whole lot to hide nor do I wear a tinfoil hat, but every once in a while I like to do a personal audit of where my privacy could be (or is) getting invaded. So, I’ve been collecting informal data points about my experience with the ClipperCard, which is what leads to this post.

What They Expect

Here is my daily paper trail (all times are approximate):

• 0800: “tag on” an inbound #14 MUNI near Duboce & Mission
• 0810: “tag on” an outbound #47 MUNI near 11th & Mission
• 0840: “tag on” at the CalTrain station at 4th & King
• CalTrain conductor scans my ClipperCard on the 0844 Southbound train
• 0926: “tag off” in Palo Alto on the Southbound side of the tracks
• 1700: “tag on” at the CalTrain station in Palo Alto on the Northbound side of the tracks
• CalTrain conductor scans my ClipperCard on the 1706 Northbound train
• 1744: “tag off” at the CalTrain station at 4th & King
• 1746: “tag on” to an inbound #47 MUNI at 4th & King
• 1800: “tag on” to an outbound #14 MUNI at 11th & Mission

Ways to Mess With the System

1. I have a monthly pass for the CalTrain. I’ve realized that my pass doesn’t ever require that I tag on and tag off, as long as it responds appropriately to the on-train scanning by the conductors.
2. The only times I’ve gotten away without being scanned by a CalTrain conductor is when the train is packed to standing-room-only because of a baseball game in the city. You might be able to sneak past the conductors, but I wouldn’t count on it.
3. Similarly to CalTrain, I don’t really need to tag on to the MUNI busses, as long as my monthly pass resolves itself to a Fare Inspector. Most of the drivers will either look at you funny or explicitly require you to least flash your card by the reader. However, you can get a beep out of the readers by placing your card on the reader, but then removing it quickly. The reader realizes there’s some kind of card in front of it, but I’m assuming it can’t figure out exactly whose card is there, so it gives an error-sounding beep. This usually satisfies the drivers. (Only once in a month of doing this did a driver shame me into fully tagging the reader.)

What They Can (Still) Learn

If I didn’t take the pains to mess with my own data, you could have a pretty good idea that I live somewhere near Duboce & Mission and that I work somewhere in Palo Alto. With further analysis (and further data that I didn’t provide here), you could also notice that on alternating Wednesdays I don’t go to Palo Alto, but I seem to take the 14 to work somewhere in downtown, probably near 3rd and Mission.

I was able to mostly obfuscate my whereabouts with regard to the MUNI surface busses, except for the occasional pedantic driver. Plus, there’s a built-in obfuscation because they don’t require a tag off. However, this obfuscation doesn’t hold if you are trying to get into one of the underground stations downtown (or BART, for that matter).

For CalTrain, I was able to obfuscate the specific stops where I get on and off, but since my monthly pass is specifically identified as a Zone 1 (SF to San Bruno) to Zone 3 (Atherton to Sunnyvale) and I use “Limited” or “Express” lines (which only service certain stations), they can still get a general idea as to where I’m located.

Additionally, if you look at the records of the conductor scans, you’ll find that on my return trip I am repeatedly found within 2 or 3 scans of specific other customers. You might be able to deduce that since I am likely coming back from work, these other people are highly likely to be my coworkers. And if these people explicitly tagged on, there’s a high probability that you now know where I got on, even though I didn’t tag on myself.

Other (Potential) Problems With the System

To use the website to add cash in addition to the loaded passes, you had to do some configuration. I didn’t recognize it as a problem at the time, but it required that you have a valid credit/bank card. A friend of mine (who had to cut up her credit cards to pursue a debt-free lifestyle) said she was basically left by the wayside with regards to the ClipperCard and the benefits of its use. (Which is becoming, more an more, mandatory for monthly pass holders.) I do not know if this is still the case, but it sounds like something the ClipperCard implementers would do.

Another thing to keep in mind is that all my travel is also hooked up to my Credit Card via the ClipperCard website. You’d have to talk to other black-hat-ier people than I to learn how vulnerable the ClipperCard site is. (As a none-too-impressed end user of the website, I am sure the implementation has plenty of security holes.)

One last thing to keep in mind is who has access to your ride records. A co-worker said he was able to get a CSV file of all his ClipperCard tag ins, just by calling the Customer Service line and the rep running a quick query to get all his activity. This means the reps probably have access to everyone’s records at their whim. I have dealt with Customer Service at ClipperCard, and I’m sure it’d be pretty easy to socially engineer one of them into giving up a whole bunch of information.

Do I Care?

What does this all mean? Well, with a little bit of effort, you could figure out where I am likely to be at several points during the week. Why do I care about this? Imagine a universe where I am a vocal proponent of a measure that takes aim at MUNI drivers’ pay, and people within the union want to find me at some point to change my mind for me… Is my data easily obtainable, especially to those within the public transit system? I think so.

Conclusion

In this exercise, I’ve tried to show just how vulnerable your personal location data can be, and how it could be used to gain some further bits of knowledge about you.

In reality, the biggest risk to the average person in the ClipperCard system are the potential for a third-party (hacker) to get your credit card and personally-identifying information. A far smaller secondary risk is having your historical transit records and patterns made vulnerable, specifically because access to this information is a lot less regulated than access to your personal financial information.

At Widgetbox, I sometimes get to play around with interesting technologies that are outside of our regular stack. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to use Google App Engine‘s Java environment (GAE/J) to prototype a resizing image proxy.

At first, I just developed the prototype in the default GAE/J Eclipse environment until I could deliver a functional POC. After finding the GAE/J capabilities more than adequate for what we wanted to do, I was challenged to bring the project into our standard IntelliJ + Maven development environment. For the rest of this post, I’ll share a couple of tips and tricks for getting your GAE/J project to operate in this environment.

Basic POM File

There’s some funny business and frustration around the Maven community’s adoption of GAE/J, but I’ll skip that part of the story for right now. What I found is that the maven-gae-plugin project is the best place to go to for help Mavenizing a GAE/J build.

I have to say that it’s not ‘use the archetype’ easy (their archetype failed for me), but with a bit of elbow-grease and rummaging through their documentation I was able to get a decent and functional POM file built. Here it is (with some of our proprietary information scrubbed to protect innocent servers):

 <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
   <groupId>com.widgetbox</groupId>
   <artifactId>image-proxy-webapp</artifactId>
   <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
   <name>Widgetbox :: Image-Proxy :: Webapp</name>
   <packaging>war</packaging>
   <properties>
     <gae.version>1.3.0</gae.version>
     <gae.app.name>qa-image-proxy</gae.app.name>
   </properties>
   <dependencies>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>javax.jdo</groupId>
       <artifactId>jdo2-api</artifactId>
       <version>2.3-eb</version>
       <exclusions>
         <exclusion>
           <groupId>javax.transaction</groupId>
           <artifactId>transaction-api</artifactId>
         </exclusion>
       </exclusions>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>javax.transaction</groupId>
       <artifactId>jta</artifactId>
       <version>1.1</version>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>com.google.appengine.orm</groupId>
       <artifactId>datanucleus-appengine</artifactId>
       <version>1.0.4.1</version>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>org.datanucleus</groupId>
       <artifactId>datanucleus-core</artifactId>
       <version>1.1.5</version>
       <exclusions>
         <exclusion>
           <groupId>javax.transaction</groupId>
           <artifactId>transaction-api</artifactId>
         </exclusion>
       </exclusions>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>com.google.appengine</groupId>
       <artifactId>datanucleus-jpa</artifactId>
       <version>1.1.5</version>
       <scope>runtime</scope>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>com.google.appengine</groupId>
       <artifactId>geronimo-jpa_3.0_spec</artifactId>
       <version>1.1.1</version>
       <scope>runtime</scope>
     </dependency>
     <dependency>
       <groupId>com.google.appengine</groupId>
       <artifactId>appengine-api-1.0-sdk</artifactId>
       <version>${gae.version}</version>
     </dependency>
   </dependencies>
   <build>
     <plugins>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>2.0.2</version>
         <configuration>
           <source>1.6</source>
           <target>1.6</target>
         </configuration>
       </plugin>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>net.kindleit</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-gae-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>0.5.3</version>
       </plugin>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>2.1-beta-1</version>
         <configuration>
           <filters>
             <filter>${project.build.directory}/version.properties</filter>
           </filters>
           <webResources>
             <resource>
               <directory>src/main/external</directory>
               <targetPath>WEB-INF</targetPath>
               <filtering>true</filtering>
             </resource>
           </webResources>
         </configuration>
       </plugin>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
         <version>1.3</version>
         <executions>
           <execution>
             <phase>compile</phase>
             <configuration>
               <tasks>
                 <echo file="${project.build.directory}/version.properties">
                     friendlyversion=${project.version}
                 </echo>
                 <replace file="${project.build.directory}/version.properties" token="." value="-"/>
                 <replace file="${project.build.directory}/version.properties" token="SNAPSHOT" value="snapshot"/>
               </tasks>
             </configuration>
             <goals>
               <goal>run</goal>
             </goals>
           </execution>
         </executions>
       </plugin>
     </plugins>
   </build>
   <repositories>
     <repository>
       <id>maven-gae-plugin-repo</id>
       <name>maven-gae-plugin repository</name>
       <url>http://maven-gae-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/repository</url>
     </repository>
   </repositories>
   <pluginRepositories>
     <pluginRepository>
       <id>maven-gae-plugin-repo</id>
       <name>maven-gae-plugin repository</name>
       <url>http://maven-gae-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/repository</url>
     </pluginRepository>
   </pluginRepositories>
 </project>

(FYI, we’re not actively using any datastore functionality just yet, so if you are going to use this template please forgive me if those dependencies are a little bit wonky.)

Since Google hasn’t (yet) decided to publish their development environment in a Maven-friendly way, there’s a bit of dependency wonkiness involved in getting the maven-gae-plugin to work. I included the repository information required by the plugin (lines 121 – 134), but if you use a repository manager (like Nexus), you’ll want to remove those lines from the POM and add a proxy for the maven-gae-plugin’s repository.

To get the development environment working the plugin also requires access to the unzipped SDK as packaged by Google. The plugin tries to help you set this up (“gae:unpack”) but that failed for me. I was able to get stuff working by manually unzipping the SDK artifact downloaded directly from Google to the following directory:

~/.m2/repository/com/google/appengine/appengine-java-sdk/1.3.0/appengine-java-sdk-1.3.0

Incremental Improvments

Initially, I had kept the appengine-web.xml within the WEB-INF directory, but I realized I could make our Release Manager’s life a bit easier if I added a bit of build-time substitution.

Here’s our appengine-web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0">
	<application>${gae.app.name}</application>
	<version>${friendlyversion}</version>
	<system-properties>
		<property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties"/>
	</system-properties>
</appengine-web-app>

And you’ll see that I put it into a new source directory called ‘external’:

At build time, I use the AntRun plugin (lines 97-118) to create a small file under the target directory that holds a ‘sanitized’ version of the standard Maven version. (I.e. “1.0-SNAPSHOT” becomes GAE-friendly “1-0-snapshot”.) I then use the Maven filter functionality available in the WAR plugin (lines 80-96) to copy the appengine-web.xml into its proper directory with the version substituted in.

You’ll also notice in our appengine-web.xml that we substitute in our application name. By default this comes from the properties section of the pom.xml file (line 11). I did this because we’ve actually got 2 different applications up on GAE’s servers, the QA version and the Production version. By default we build using the QA server’s application name, but when our Release Manager is building to upload to Production, all that is needed is an additional command-line argument of “-Dgae.app.name=<prod-name>”.

Running, Debugging, and Deploying

The two most valuable targets that maven-gae-plugin provide are “gae:run” and “gae:debug”. These will assemble your code in the standard Maven webapp target directories and run your app. (Note: “gae:debug” didn’t actually work for me until the 0.5.3 version of the plugin.)

There is also a “gae:deploy” target that is supposed to invoke the Google-supplied shell script that will upload your application to the Google servers, but it failed for me several time. Since then, I’ve defaulted to using the shell script directly to deploy my app once it has been built:

~/.m2/repository/com/google/appengine/appengine-java-sdk/1.3.0/appengine-java-sdk-1.3.0/bin/appcfg.sh \
    update \
    ./target/myApp-1.0-SNAPSHOT

Results

So, this is how we got up and running with GAE/J in our standard development environment. Hopefully this post ends up helping people out to reduce their bootstrap time when evaluating/investigating GAE/J for their own uses.

So, I’m doing some stuff at work that has me looking at HTTP headers. As a reference, I looked at the feed URL for this blog, and I noticed the following header:

X-hacker: If you're reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.

I think this is a pretty cute and subtle way of looking for technically adept potential employees.

A few months ago, I was approached by a representative from Packt Publishing to do a review of their book “Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation”, presumably because of my frequent posts about Maven.

They gave me an electronic copy of the book to read, and asked for a 300 – 350 word review about the book. I’ve gotten it mostly to the point of ‘completion’, and any more changes would just fall under the category of ‘tinkering’.

Maven. I hate the word, as I hate hell, all Montagues, and MAKE.

Maven is a powerful Open Source build system which is becoming a de facto standard in Java development circles. Like any powerful tool, Maven has its own proponents and detractors, benefits and drawbacks. For example, one of the consistent issues that plagues the Maven ecosystem is a dearth of quality documentation.

When I heard about “Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation”, I had hoped that it would be the One Book to rule them all, the One Book to find them, the One Book to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Unfortunately, this is not that One Book.

“Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation” is yet another effort by a Maven contributor to provide some clarity to Maven’s user community about how exactly to use Maven correctly. But much like the rest of the Maven documentation ecosystem, this book provides the type of documentation that only its author could love.

The author is obviously knowledgeable, however I can’t recommend this book as anything more than an incremental addition to the Maven user’s arsenal. Having been a Maven ‘believer’ since the late 1.x days, I would say that ALL the documentation I’ve seen on the subject has been no better than incremental. In most cases, like this one, the authors falls into a classical trap of technical documentation by explaining what to do, but rarely explaining why. (Nor, more importantly, explaining how to figure these things out for yourself).

I did find a few helpful tidbits of new information in the book. However, I’m not sure I would have been able to quickly find them again in a reference situation because the logical flow was all over the place. Example: Chapter 4 had ten pages of fundamental reporting information, which is great information to have; but maybe Chapter 5, which was titled “Reporting and Checks”, is where that information rightly should have resided.

Unlike some of the best technical books I’ve read, my ability to stay awake while reading this book was challenged because it is so very dry. I had no delusions of it being as compelling as the “Encyclopedia Galactica”, but the prose was completely wooden. This blandness and the previously mentioned problems render the book altogether forgettable.

I actually had a couple of people help me with the editing and/or proofreading of my review, and I’d like to thank Jennie-Sue, Eli, and Starchy for their offers of help.

If you haven’t noticed, I have ZERO advertising on my site. It only costs me a couple of bucks a year to keep this site going, and I didn’t want to spoil the relationship with my readers by trying to commodify their viewing. So, when I was approached to do the review, I was very specific that I would not pull any punches just because they gave me a free book. Packt also tried to sign me up with an affiliate link to the book, which you’ll notice is nowhere in this (or any) post.

As you can tell, I really didn’t use the kid gloves with this review. I’m not very happy with the general quality of Maven documentation (as I’ve noted before), and I wasn’t going to give this book high marks for being just as bad as the rest.

I did manage to sneak in (or are they clumsily manhandled?) 3 different literary fiction references, which I hope spices up the review and adds a bit of character. Let me know if you can name them.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently took a “where the wind blows me” vacation in France, and I’m gonna tell you about that wind.

I started out my trip in Bordeaux, where I found a pretty nice hotel to be my ‘base of operations’ whilst I tried to work out my motorcycle rental. I managed to find the website and then the physical location of Bordeaux Scooters, and this is where I rented the motorcycle for one whole week.

For the first day, I just rode around the city of Bordeaux a very little bit, trying to accustom myself to the Yamaha Fazer 650 (since I normally ride a Kawasaki Ninja 500).

On my first full day on the bike, I got out of Bordeaux and hit a bunch of secondary (C and D) roads. I hit places like Biscarosse(-en-Plage), Mimizan, and Léon, before I stopped for the night in Hasparren where I stayed at a cute Hôtes de Chambre (Bed & Breakfast). I was feeling pretty good and confident, both in my motorcycling ability and my language ability to operate in the hinterlands of France.

For my second day of riding, I figured I’d take some more scenic roads, and even cross over the Spanish border for a bit. I made it through the border just fine, and was cheerfully enjoying the nice big sweeping roads on the way to Elizondo, and then turned on the road towards Erratzu to make my way back into France near Saint-Etienne-de-Baïgorry.

It was just after a hairpin turn, not more than 1km from the French border and the summit of the hill. I noticed the old stone barn on the left side of the road, then I looked uphill and contemplated that I should be careful because of all the mountain mist that was probably making the road slippery. I brought my attention back to the road, and was alarmed to find that I had drifted close to the side of the road. I started to panic. I was so worried about the side of the road that I couldn’t look away, and motorcyclists know that’s exactly where I ended up.

Now that I was on the edge of the road, I made a snap decision to bite the bullet and take the bike off the road and try to stop before anything untoward happened. Something untoward happened. The mist I had been worrying about mere milliseconds before was coating the grass I was on and the front tire slipped sideways, dumping me and the bike onto our left sides.

I am lucky because I had just recently come out of a tight turn and I wasn’t going all that fast. I landed face down with my torso on the pavement, and did only about 1 1/2 horizontal pirouettes before I came to a rest. While the helmet I was wearing was scraping across the pavement, I remember thinking “Boy, a helmet is a really good idea!”

I was up in an instant, just in time to see that the hard case (holding most of my possessions) rolling down the hill. In my adrenaline-addled mind, I decided that I really needed to get my stuff back. So, I went careening down the side of the mountain in my full gear. I found the case 1 1/2 switchbacks down. I brought it up to the road (1 full switchback below the motorcycle) and only then did I decide to take off some of my gear and inspect for damage. Other than a little bit of scuffed up skin, I was actually fine.

As I was walking back up to inspect the bike, a younger French guy in a car stopped to give me a hand. He helped me turn the bike over, and point it away from downhill. He told me he expected insurance (assurance in French) could be found in any town, and that they’d have me set back up in no time. I thanked him for his help and advice, and sent him on his way, while I figured out what I needed to do.

After I got all my stuff assembled, and took a couple of pictures, I sat down and tried to call the rental shop. I ended up calling Ryan (in the U.K) for some research help because I didn’t know what the country-code is for France. After we got that figured out, I realized the rental shop was on their stated lunch break until 2PM. (It had just turned about 12:30PM.) I sat there for a bit trying to keep myself calm and counting my lucky stars. After I changed into some less-sweaty and warmer clothes, I decided that I should try to get to ‘civilization’, preferably on the French side of the border since the motorcycle was rented from France.

Eventually a nice (German?) couple on motorcycles stopped to give me a hand. We were formulating an elaborate me-plus-my-stuff-on-their-bikes plan, when I realized it was a bit soon for me to be riding on a motorcycle again. I got them to help me flag down a passing carpenter, who agreed to take me and my stuff in his truck to the mechanic’s in Saint-Etienne-de-Baïgorry. The local mechanic was of no help, other than trying to help me call the rental shop again, which I knew was still closed. After he basically told me to go away because he didn’t deal with motorcycles and he was on his lunch break, I walked towards town center and sat on the steps of a hotel/brasserie that was also closed for lunch. I decided to wait out the remaining hour or so until the rental shop opened up by chilling out and reading my Kindle on those steps.

Once I did get the rental shop on the phone, they told me that I needed to get the bike transported back to Bordeaux (250km) by whatever means necessary. The shop owner offered to see if he could find someone to do it, and I said I’d look around at my end. After our conversation, I had no idea if I would be stuck in the town of Saint-Etienne-de-Baïgorry overnight, but I figured I’d check into the hotel until things settled, and if I had to leave early, I could just lump one night’s charge.

As I was checking into Full-screenHotel Juantorena, I mentioned (or whined) to Mélanie (who I later found out was one of the owners) that I had just been in a motorcycle accident and needed to find a truck to bring the broken motorcycle back to Bordeaux. She said that her husband might be able to help me out. Bixente came out from the kitchen, and called around to some truck services in Biarritz, and found me a quote of €1,200. I thanked him and said I would call back to Bordeaux to see if the rental place had found me a better quote. The rental place said to call back in a couple of hours because the friend they were going to ask was out at the moment and it would be a while before they got an answer.

It turns out that Bixente is also a motorcyclist, and offered to take me (after he finished setting up his kitchen for the evening) to pick up the motorcycle on his motorcycle trailer to bring it down (the 10 km) to his hotel parking lot. I was kind of amazed at this, but just went with it after the day I was having. About a 1/2 hour later, after I had washed off some of my road rash, he called me down to the front of the hotel where he, his truck, and his motorcycle trailer were waiting for me. He drove me up to the crash spot where we loaded up the wreck, and brought it back to the hotel.

The ride up and back could have been horrible. But after figuring out my French skills needed just a bit of annunciation and a slower pace, Bixente actually took the time to get to know me. We had a really nice conversation, and I’ve come to look back upon that conversation as one of the nicest moments during my time in France.

After getting back to the hotel, I called the rental shop to tell them that the bike was now in the parking lot. In addition to the location of the bike, we had some (mis-)communication where I thought they said to wait several more hours to verify that the truck from Bordeaux would be interested in the job. So, I took a little nap, then read some more whilst having a beer in the bar. I was really surprised when Bixente told me the truck driver was at the other end of town and would be arriving soon. (Evidently, when I thought the rental shop was telling me that I was waiting for confirmation, they were actually telling me that I was waiting for the arrival of the truck.)

The truck driver, myself, and Bixente loaded up the bike into the truck. It was now about 8 or 9PM, and the driver hadn’t eaten, and neither had I, so we had dinner at the restaurant. The driver was kind of gruff, and not all that friendly, but I managed to get some small-talk in. After dinner, using Bixente as a patient go-between, we established that it was best if I went with the truck driver back to Bordeaux with the bike. (I didn’t realize there was more for me to do there.) So, I checked out of the hotel. I tried to convince Mélanie to keep my room charge, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that if I weren’t staying overnight they wouldn’t even think about keeping my money.

The driver brought be back to Bordeaux, and dropped me off at midnight at a hotel right near the rental shop. The next day, I went to the rental shop to find out that we were waiting for a verdict from the motorcycle repair shop. When I remembered that I hadn’t yet paid the driver from the evening before, the rental shop owner called him for the price. Since I was paying in cash for the truck ride, it only came out to €500, which is a great deal compared to the other quotes I had received.

Later that afternoon, the verdict came down that the bike’s frame was bent and therefore “totaled”. I went back over to the rental shop to sign the credit card slip for the €1800 security deposit that I had now forfeited. And thus ends my motorcycle adventure in France.

Looking Back

Now, people say all sorts of horrible things about the French. In general, I can tell you that much of this is wrong. In specific, I can tell you that Mélanie and Bixente are some of the warmest and most caring people I’ve ever run into in my travels. They took the time to patch up and help this stupid American with bad French and even worse motorcycle skills, and not ask for anything in exchange, other than an email greeting at some time in the future. I hugged Mélanie and Bixente fiercely, and I left their hotel with tears in my eyes because I felt really fortunate to have met these beautiful people.

I realize that I directly benefited from what I refer to as the Motorcyclist (a.k.a. Motard) Fraternity. Without knowing me, but because I spend time on two wheels like they spend time on two wheels, both the German couple and Bixente went way out of their ways to make sure I was taken care of. I guess it’s a similar thread amongst motorcyclists to help out your fellow motorcyclists.

Doing Them A Solid

In addition to adding Mélanie and Bixente to my Xmas card list, I have decided to send as many people as I can to them. So, if any of you readers are ever interested in a quaint village in the beautiful Basque region of France, might I suggest Hotel Juantorena? Also, spreading this info to motorcyclists far & wide would be much appreciated.

(I will try to scan in their pamphlet, but in the mean time, here’s their contact info:) t

Hotel Restaurant Juantorena

64430, Baigorry

Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Aquitaine, France

Lat/Long: 43.17405, -1.34875

Phone: 05 59 37 40 78

Email: hotel.juantorena@orange.fr

Their pamphlet shows that they have a website (http://www.hotelrestaurantjuantorena.fr) but it doesn’t seem to be working?