Salt Lake City lawyer commutes by unicycle

[john_childs]

I was lucky and managed to catch a local news recast of a SLC newscast about a lawyer in Salt Lake City who commutes to work by unicycle. They did a promo before a commercial break showing a guy unicycling and I immediately hightailed to the DVR to get it ready to record.

The guy's name is Richard Terry and he's already gotten a mention here before in this post by JJuggle: Six Questions For Richard Terry

A transcript of the TV newscast is here: KSL TV: Man Rides Unicycle to/from Work

Video is in my Monster gallery (scroll down to the bottom)
Video is in WM9 format and is 16 MB. My apologies for the WM9 format video but it was the only way I could make the video small enough to upload while still keeping the quality. Gilby's been messing with the gallery again and it's not letting me upload things bigger than about 16 MB. I made an MPEG-1 version but it's too big to upload. I'll upload it once Gilby finishes with the gallery update.

[unicus]

Originally posted by john_childs
I was lucky and managed to catch a local news recast of a SLC newscast about a lawyer in Salt Lake City who commutes to work by unicycle.

Nice little clip – I like the bit about the ticket for riding on the sidewalk

Video is in WM9 format and is 16 MB. My apologies for the WM9 format video but it was the only way I could make the video small enough to upload while still keeping the quality. Gilby's been messing with the gallery again and it's not letting me upload things bigger than about 16 MB.

I noticed the 16MB or so limits the other day too. As for WM9 it's the MPEG4 variant I dislike (something to do with propriety and M$) and now I mainly encode to an AVI MPEG4 profile that’s compatible with most standalone players so I can burn them to disc if I want.

[john_childs]

For archival purposes here's the text from KSL TV:

Man Rides Unicycle to/from Work
September 8th, 2005 @ 3:00pm

Sammy Linebaugh Reporting

Gas prices got you down? Sammy Linebaugh met a man whose childhood passion is saving him big time at the pump.

Richard Terry is a regular guy going to work, only his transportation isn't exactly typical.

Richard Terry: "In high school I rode to school, in college I road to school, so when I got a job and started working, that's the way I transported myself."

Up and down Avenues streets the Salt Lake lawyer commutes the mile plus to his office riding his unicycle. He's done it for 30 years. He's so good at it, he even held our camera to give us the view from where he sits.

Karen Terry, Richard's Wife: "Every single day, this is his car. That's how he gets to work. He rides in the wintertime even when it's icy, he rides that."

Richard: "Every so often you'll hit a sheet of black ice and you don't see it and you'll go shew, straight out and sometimes the briefcase will go, and you'll just kinda go flat out."

Karen: "One of the things we've had to do is find good umbrellas that won't invert in the wind."

Rain or shine he rides. It's a speedy eight minutes from door to door.

Unicycling, he says, is a lot trickier than you might think, so we gave it a shot.

Sammy: "Definitely harder than it looks."

Richard: "If you slalom ski or water ski, it's very similar. A lot of times I'll go up in the high Avenues and just come down, and it's just like skiing."

Sammy Linebaugh: "You ever gotten a speeding ticket?

Richard: "No, but I've had two policemen pull me over, riding on the sidewalk. And the one actually issued a ticket, but the prosecutor wouldn't prosecute, and I set it for trial and the prosecutor said, 'No, I'm not going there.'"

Meanwhile, Richard Terry keeps getting there his own way. The courthouses are within walking distance. Terry says, on the rare occasion when he needs to drive someplace, he takes the company car.

[MrBoogiejuice]

I'd love to see a British barrister in wig and gown, brief case in hand unicycling to court.

[john_childs]

I just put an MPEG-1 version of the video in my Monster gallery. Quality is not as good as the WMV version but I remembered to boost the audio level when encoding so the audio is better. There are some compression artifacts in the video that I don't like but it's about as good as I can do while keeping it under 16 MB.

The MPEG-1 version should be playable on computer systems that can't play Windows Media 9 video.