[bike] Rockport, via the inland route

A huge mob of people -- ten in all! -- left from Davis Square on a sunny but not too toasty Memorial Day for the coast. We went up to Winchester, and from there up Washington Street into Woburn, then turned east and went to Salem; if you look at the canonical bike map this is actually pretty obvious, and much nicer than going through Malden and Lynn. We then went over not-the-default-bridge from Salem into Beverly, probably also a win, ate lunch, deposited people at the train station in Manchester, and went off to Rockport.

Useful bits of advice: if you try this, Beverly is pretty deserted around the train station, but a couple of blocks to the east on Cabot Street looked pretty settled. The southernmost chunk of 127 in Beverly is kind of unpaved at the moment, but we cleverly went around it. It looks like they're actually building 1A south of the Giant Bridge between Beverly and Salem along the commuter rail right-of-way, more reason to go around. Oh yeah, and bring weaponry in case your commuter rail car coming back is overrun with teenage girls screaming something in the vague rhythm of a Dave Matthews Band song; for yourself or them, either way you'll be glad.

Route map

Ask LiveJournal: SMC PCI 802.11g cards

It looks like newegg will sell me SMC SMCWPCI-G 802.11g desktop network cards for $24 plus $3.69 shipping if I get more than one. The int0rw3b doesn't seem to say a whole lot about them, beyond that they're built on an Atheros chipset and so madwifi works pretty straightforwardly. Class help just says "expensive name-brand stuff works better and SMC kicked my puppy once", which isn't that convincing to me. My gut reaction is that this is a good price for a product from a reputable manufacturer and vendor; should I not just go order four of these if I need them?