bikefixed exposes, or outs [or whatevers] himself.

After having been on FB with my real name for lots and lots of years, I've been wondering why I'm going on with a pseudonym here. Plus, bikefixed was an awkward name. It referred to the kind of bike I liked the best, a fixed-gear bike, and was like a statement urging people to bike 'fixed'. You know, instead of using all them fancy gears and stuff.

So, it's pointless to keep using it. I know I have been rather sharp, rude and insulting at many moments, a habit borne of using an MOL name. If I'm going to act like that I should be able to face up to a person instead of hiding behind it.

Many of you know my real name so I'm going to see if that name is available on MOL and switch to it.


You have a great job educating us all on the covid thread.  Thanks, and please keep posting.


bikefixed said:

Plus, bikefixed was an awkward name. It referred to the kind of bike I liked the best, a fixed-gear bike,

 Ha!  That's exactly what my bicycle is!  I've had it for many years.  (Gulp!  I just did the arithmetic - 55 years, at least!)


marksierra said:

 Ha!  That's exactly what my bicycle is!  I've had it for many years.  (Gulp!  I just did the arithmetic - 55 years, at least!)

 I loved the smooth pedaling stroke it helped develop in my legs. I even loved a 42x16 in these fuvking insane hills around here.

I always had at least a back brake installed though. Never tried to learn to track stand either. Folks who can do that seem to superpowers. ;-)


I only ever had a back brake - as in a 'stand on the pedals and try to pedal backwards to engage the drum brake' - on mine.


bikefixed said:

Many of you know my real name so I'm going to see if that name is available on MOL and switch to it.

We met IRL some 10 years ago when you collected wooden work tables from our house. We were uprooting ourselves after 37 years. 

 


Welcome to the real names posters club should you chose to go that route.  


I've been The Soulful Mr T for so long I've forgotten my real name. 


ok, I think Peter needs to update the thread title to - Bikefixed exposes himself!  grin


jamie said:

ok, I think Peter needs to update the thread title to - Bikefixed exposes himself! 
grin

 I think Bikefixed outs himself would be more suitable.


The current title, 

bikefixed exposes, or outs [or whatevers] himself.

works fine.


The COVID discussions have really been wearing on my mind. That's why I've been writing those long, convoluted posts every now and then. And that is a big reason why I decided to ask for a change in my MOL name to just be my real name.

So, a bit more about me. My first education was in medicine that took me from pharmacy school to graduate work in the basic science of pharmacology. After my doctorate, I went back to Boston as a postdoc at my alma mater, Northeastern University. I even got to teach some lectures in courses I'd taken some 10 years earlier.

It was there while I was researching developmental events leading to the onset of schizophrenia that I had a revelation. When I got my Ph.D., it was perhaps one of the most humbling moments of my life. I was now out from under the protective guidance of a professor as my thesis advisor and it was time to show I could actually do the work of a scientist in a more independent setting. My revelation was the bitter realization that while I was smart and knew a lot about pharmacological medicine, I needed to be better at the research necessary to come up with new and proven knowledge. After 2 years I decided that I should stop wasting my boss' time and let him hire a better scientist. I could teach but the tenure track was just not in my future since I wasn't as good a researcher as you need to be. Whatever grant money I might get would be better given to better talent. The same would apply to work in the pharma industry and I was already disenchanted with that whole mess and the dominance of monetary gain rather than helping humanity as the motivation for producing medicine.

One thing I was really good at was collecting data and doing the stats and coming up with ways of presenting and displaying it. I taught undergrad and grad students how to do that stuff and that was the late 90s, just when computing power was maturing. Windows 3.1, those were the days. Remember CricketGraph on a Mac? Anyway, I decided to go into medical software. I taught myself basic C++ and took some client/server & database programming and got some good jobs as a QA analyst in medical software. Hey, it was the 90s and the joke was that all you needed to do was make mist on a mirror during your job interview and you'd get hired in the burgeoning tech/internet industry.

In those 10 years between '95 and '05, I was unfathomably lucky to see that Ms. bikefixed had become a valued HR worker at the Saks 5th Avenue in Boston. They promoted her to a regional position and that moved us out to Chicago for just under 2 years. in 2007, they decided to make her the person heading up the HR for all the Saks Off 5th stores and moved her here to work in their Manhattan offices. I was the person who did the "fixing up" stuff around the house to sell it and then find the new one and handle the moving while she was already in the new locale in temporary housing. With all those short-term jobs on my resume with noticeable gaps between jobs, it was pretty clear I was best suited to accepting life as her cabana boy. Sweet.

When she decided to take the promotion, we talked about all the different areas where people who worked in the city actually lived. There was Long Island, Connecticut, non-NYC New York, New Jersey. Lots of places to check out. Ms bikefixed said, "We can live pretty much anywhere you want, as long as it's Maplewood or Millburn." Heh heh. She'd grown up here and graduated from Millburn HS in '84. She rode the veritable pipeline out to Ann Arbor and we met at the University of Michigan in 1987. She sang in the church choir. I thought she was really pretty and had an even prettier voice. Still is and still does, actually. When she was working at the Campus Inn on State Street, she always got a kick out of talking to the New Jersey parents shepherding their fledglings off to college. 

I myself had grown up in the metro-Syracuse area, where it was practically in the public school curriculum starting in kindergarten that Jersey was just about the worst possible place in the whole country. Ms. bikefixed had done away with any Jersey accent she may have had so how was I to know what truly lurked behind those luminous emerald eyes? I had no idea what awaited me here.


What a great story.    I really like your input and graphs on covid and they help us better understand this pandemic.   Please keep posting.  



RobertRoe said:

What a great story.    I really like your input and graphs on covid and they help us better understand this pandemic.   Please keep posting.  

Thanks. But I have to say that I'm not always right. I have lots more to write. I used to write on a thread called Fixins but I suppose that has been long tossed away in the bitbucket.


PeterWick said:

Thanks. But I have to say that I'm not always right. I have lots more to write. I used to write on a thread called Fixins but I suppose that has been long tossed away in the bitbucket.

 I'll take someone who tries and admits they sometimes gets it wrong over someone who starts from an unshakeable conclusion and loudly argues that any contradictory evidence is the result of bias or conspiracy.


The_Soulful_Mr_T said:

I've been The Soulful Mr T for so long I've forgotten my real name. 

 It’s Bourne. Jason Bourne. 



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