This afternoon, I was introduced to an amazing Google tool that I wish I had found a year ago. It’s called SketchUp — a 3D technical drawing program available for free download from Google. Or if you want to upgrade to pro, you can buy it for $500. It’s extremely simple to use, though it follows a pedantic logic, but at least it’s very fun and has instructional pop-ups for each instrument in the program. In about forty five minutes this afternoon, I threw together this beauty, a set design for BU Stage Troupe’s summer theater show. 
True, the dimensions are off (I believe it’s about thirty-five feet high) and a few angles are skewed, but it looks great and you can rotate the image around to see every intricate detail of the set. Definitely worth it for college theater geeks, or if you’re bored and want to procrastinate by reorganizing your entire dorm room.
In other news, I got into another bike accident yesterday. I say another because last year in May I got hit by a truck door and sent to the hospital. On Monday afternoon, I was riding through the stationary post-Red-Sox traffic in Kenmore Square, zigzagging between cars, when the chain popped off my bike and I wiped out in the middle of the street. Luckily it wasn’t a bad fall and I got off relatively OK (see figure 2). 
It’s not that I want to brag about war wounds, but literally a minute before I collapsed in the street, a car nearly pushed me into the lane of parked cars on the side of the road. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the phone, or speaking to your spouse (*cough cough*), any kind of distraction on the road subtracts from total awareness. I’m stealing the video below from the blog of Rachel Popkin, one of the ROFLCon team. It’s an excellent YouTube commercial from the UK about awareness of cyclers on the road.
If you’re driving, please be safe and be aware.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4&hl=en]
伏見いなり、京都
