Apologies, my mistake. Also, when talking about Gandi's pricing I was speaking generally, i.e. they are more expensive than average domain registrars. I've, however, bought domains from them myself and their support and admin are great, so I would totally recommend them.
American Fiber is a corperate venture and doing work in the large cities can be expensive (especially New York) so maybe that has something to do with it.
That actually seems like a reasonable difference considering that outside of cities biking is only a hobby (and sometimes quite a dangerous one depending on infrastructure). And in America many commuters drive for over 20 minutes.
I know what you're saying, so I'm sorry for being a little pedantic, but I just have to jump in and point out that there are MANY bike commuters in suburban and rural areas. I lived in Bloomington, Indiana for two years and biked 3 miles into town every day. It was incredible for my health and the countryside is just gorgeous. In many ways it was vastly preferable to my various urban commutes since then.
You're right that the infrastructure is often lacking, but you learn the tricks you need to get your errands done, and there are many of us out there every day building the critical mass to change that.
This seems to be the usual retort anytime someone dares and propose a change in the insanity that is car driving in America. It is as if god personally swept down, laid out cities and then continued to crush their public transport systems.
In reality of course, these commute times are all of your own making. Just because politics in the 20th century designed cities a particular way doesn't mean it is now forever set in stone in the 21th.
These commute times are not your own making they are based on your salary, your priorities in housing (neighborhood, safety, price), and your work location.
There are plenty of times when it is too expensive to live near work.
There are plenty of times when housing near work is low income or unsafe.
To be fair though, there's nothing particularly difficult or slow about a ~20km commute with a good public-transport infrastructure.
Until recently I lived about 20km away from my work, and my commute took about 25-30min: 10min walking and 15min on the train. I found this a very nice and relaxing commute; being on public-transport means you can read / browse the web / zone out, and indeed it's a valuable unwind time for me (the walking time is also hugely beneficial in this respect). [The same trip by car takes about 30min with no traffic, or an indeterminate amount of time in typical rush-hour traffic...]
Calgary is just silly large and special. My commute to the university is 30 minutes in good traffic by car. Mass transit implies about one and a quarter hours on the ctrain and twenty minutes on a bus. Plus waiting time.
Keep in mind Tokyo is only the center of that metro area. Tokyo itself is 13M people. The full metro area is 35M! Meanwhile calgary is a mere 1M!
Calgary is just not scaling. If we tried to fit 35M people in Calgary the city limits would start hitting the Rockies! Just as CPUs are hitting limits on the speed of light Calgary is hitting limits on safe highway speeds. Mass transit could be improved but it cannot shrink the city.
I used to cycle 15 miles or so each way to work a few years ago. That place did have a fitness center w/ showers on campus, so it worked out ok (except having to get up an extra couple hours early). My current job just moved into a new building with a small fitness room and showers, so I may try it again next summer (about the same distance).
The best part was actually looking forward to my commute -- even though I only cycled about once or twice a week. Now I'm so far out of shape, it will take a few months of working out in the gym to get back to what I was doing (and hopefully my knees won't go out again).
The thing with Bloomington is that it's very bike friendly compared to most cities of similar size and there is a substantial cyclist population considering half of the town consists of students that have nowhere to park their cars.
Your average noncollege town isn't like Bloomington.
Right, even the European average of 188km isn't very much, half a kilometer per day annually). Between commuting and running errands, I am riding about 500km per month (Portland, OR).
I would think that since you are living in the country if you take a night course (or something equivalent) you could probably learn a lot quicker than someone living outside the country.
Immersion helps, but it's pretty easy not to become immersed in Scandinavia, because everyone both speaks good English, and switches to it quite quickly when they realize you're a foreigner. It's possible to ask them to please speak Danish/Swedish/Norwegian because you're learning, and many people will then switch back, but the immediate switch to English is basically default (especially in Denmark).
I've lived in Denmark for 2 1/2 years and probably have had less real need to speak Danish here than in the 3 weeks I spent in Spain! More Spaniards are either unable or unwilling to speak English, so that trip was much more immersive language-wise, in that I actually had to interact in Spanish.
Don't be to hard on the Spanish. I lived there for some time and can attest to that most Spaniards really would like to improve their English but find it incredibly difficult to do so. This is especially true for the spoken language.
My personal theory is that Spanish Spanish (i.e., from Spain) has a range of spoken sounds that is to a large part complimentary to that of English, thus making the transition between these two languages particularly difficult. (Note that there is significantly less of a difference between the sounds of American Spanish and English).
I use my University library similarly, I only wish the public libraries were so accommodating, here you have to reserve meeting rooms and those are only available to you twice a month (for like 2 hour periods).
Thankfully the University offers Alumni access to libraries, internet, and computer facilities.
I switched from electric to safety razor and found it easy to use, you can use gel or cream that you already use or try to go fancy with the brushes and poraso in a bowl.
The main thing is that you don't apply pressure you just let the razors weight and sharpness of the blade do the work. Only nicks I have ever gotten is when I messed up my hand placement due to lack of attention when flipping the razor and the corner of the blade got me.
I don't know how long the multiple blade razors take but if I have a weeks growth of hair it takes me 3 times going over to have a smooth shave (once with the grain, once across the grain, and once against the grain) though I usually forgo the against the grain and the shave is pretty good.
Overall time it takes is 10-15 minutes including filling the sink with warm-hot water, lather, shaving, and cleanup.
Usually smoke detectors are a 1 in each room (and 1 in the main hallway) thing nowadays.
And as for the hunt for the low battery it is a problem (though usually only one week a year if you install the same smoke detector in all rooms at the same time. And it is hard to find because it emits a high chirp every 30-60 seconds but that chirp echoes throughout the house and is hard to pinpoint (especially if you do have 1 in each room).
But I agree loud and sensitive better than the alternative and you can avoid accidental set offs by not having one located near the kitchen stove, though most of the time bad smoke detector locations are in apartments where you wouldn't have a choice to move them anyway.
Really curious not trying to be snarky, I have some projects I'd like to put on that domain for fun but $40 or more dollars isn't worth it.