Turtle's around, and well; but she's very busy with her job search and the various related organisations that she's involved in. In fact, I'm only now finding time to compose this entry because she's got a "thing" going 'til late tonight. So I'm batching it.
My own status is SSDD. Alternately busy and frustrated at work (I lose 20 points off my IQ every time Gigglepuss opens her mouth). Busy spells with the pro bono web thingummy. Lawn mowing/trimming/fertilising/weeding.
I've also been getting out occasionally to test my ability to tolerate riding my road bike, in the wake of all the mechanical fiddling and physical therapy. There hasn't been as much improvement as I'd hoped and, as a result, I've finally admitted to myself that I'm just the sort of broken down old fart you typically see riding around on a recumbent bike.
Except... well, I'm a geek, and who better to be tooling around on a flying la-z-boy (as a friend calls his recumbent)? A chase [sic] lounge. A roll-away bed.
So I've begun shopping around, asking questions, getting an idea of which of the many mutant variaties would suit my goals the best. It's looking like this would fit the bill—fast, short wheelbase, up high, no tiny wheels—but it will be a couple weeks 'til I'll have time on the weekend to do some test rides.
Meanwhile...
I haven't forgotten that Anne infected me with The Indie Virus. Now, my wife could tell you that I'm not the most social of creatures and that I don't make friends easily. I don't have a long list of blogs that I read faithfully, but I see a couple that need to be and haven't been infected.First, there's Bret who needs The Indie Virus because he understands the Dilbert-esque world we both live in and addresses it with more restraint and humor than I could.
Then, there's Tink who needs The Indie Virus because, surprisingly, no one has infected her yet and because she's a student of human nature and more than a little twisted, to boot. Takes one to know one, and I count that as a positive.
Finally, but not leastly, Susie needs The Indie Virus because she's manic and doesn't have nearly enough to do with her time.
Now, what was I gonna say?
I know there was at least one entertaining thing I meant to blog about, this week, but I can't think of what it was. Guess I'll have to wait until that second No. 7-and-water has metabolised.Now playing: The Vines, Highly Evolved
8 comments:
Did you build that pro bono site? It looks good.
You're not going to like me after I tell you this but... I hit a guy on a bicycle with my car a long time ago (I was about 26 then). Luckily I was starting from a stopping position to pull onto a 4-lane highway from a gas station. He was going the wrong way (against traffic) and although I looked in the direction he came from, I didn't see him - I wasn't expecting traffic to be coming from the right and when I hit the gas to pull out he was right in front of me. It was horrible! I knocked him off his bike. Luckily he only hurt his ankle a little bit and was able to continue his ride to work - but I about had a nervous breakdown because I couldn't believe I actually hit a person. I will never forget it - I'm sure he won't either.
It took that accident and taking a motorcycle training class to cause me to become a more aware driver of a car. You guys are pretty brave.
Be careful Foo - too many ridiculous drivers at every turn.
Anne: I didn't do the original design and development on the Ride of Silence site. However, due to a combination of factors the guy who did was not keeping the site updated. This was causing some real problems for the Ride of Silence board, so they put out the word that they were looking for someone else to come in and help.
Turtle volunteered me.
It's been a good opportunity for me to learn some new things, but it was very stressful in the first six weeks or so. The original developer wouldn't give me access to the login information for the database that drives the locations page, so I had to spend a lot of time writing my own web-based scripts so that I could make the necessary updates to the database.
You can think of it as having to update a spreadsheet by entering commands from the DOS command prompt instead of having MS Excel to work with.
My contributions have been mostly behind the scenes, where I've been modifying some of the form-driven scripts to try and keep spammers and hackers from using them for evil. They had security holes you could drive a truck through. Now, not so much. I've also tried to mend some fences with people who were PO'ed because their requests for updates and to have loved ones' information added to the memorial page had gone ignored. There's no telling how much correspondence is sitting in the original webmaster's e-mail box, unacknowledged, or has been deleted, unopened.
As for your hitting the cyclist, that's not enough to make me dislike you. Sure, it sounds like you weren't paying as much attention as you could have been, but did you do it on purpose? Did you flee the scene? Did you learn something from the experience?
No. No. And yes.
I'll tell you something, though. It really grabs at my heart to receive the e-mails from people requesting that their friends' and love ones' names and pictures be added to the memorial page on the site. In their pictures, most of them are smiling and full of life. And now they're dead. Though they're not posted on the page, I read their stories in the e-mails I receive and, though all are tragic, some are heart-wrenching.
There's the 16-year-old high school student who was training for a ride to raise money for the Make A Wish Foundation. He was struck and killed by a truck pulling a stock car on a trailer. The driver admitted to speeding and that he'd been drinking earlier in the day. The driver pulled up inches from the boy, honking his horn, so it was likely a case of harrassment.
Then there's the man who wrote to have his wife of 47 years added to the page. His words were heavy with the frustration at the local DA's refusal to prosecute the driver who had run over his wife.
And on. The common trend is that, despite bicycles being considered by law to be vehicles, cyclists are generally viewed as being disposable. Got run over? Should've been on the sidewalk or on a trail somewhere.
Even when prosecuted, the driver of the vehicle is usually let off with a slap on the wrist, because juries of their peers think, "Well gee... it's the bike guy's fault for being on the road in the first place."
The moment you get on the bike, the value of your life drops to near nothing, they seem to be saying.
But cyclists are hardly free of blame. I can't tell you how many times I've seen cyclists roll stop signs, sneak through crosswalks, ride between lanes. If I were a motorist caught on a two-lane stretch of road behind a pack of 20 cyclists who won't ride single file (as they're supposed to on such a road), I'd be pissed off too. The arrogance of some cyclists is unbelievable. Both cyclists and motorists have to try harder to get along and be considerate of one another.
"Share The Road", in other words.
Oh my... look at the time. I could have made a whole post out of this.
I did take a look at that memorial page last night - it was painful. Thanks for sharing that information.
P.S. Don't you love it when the Bride volunteers her man for stuff. I'm guilty as well.
Glad to see you! Now, what the hell am I being infected with? This isn't like one of those military shots where they tell you it's for your own good but it's really some risky experiment that might make you grow hair in odd places is it? ;)
Tink: No, it's not one of those things where you get bombarded with radiation or infected with syphilis. I probably should have gone into more explanation about the experiment, but I figured I was the last to know. Rather than rehash what's already been hashed, I refer you to Hubbadoo, where Anne—the one who "infected" me—tells all.
Anne: In Turtle's defense, she didn't know how involved the project would be when she shoved me across the line in the sand. It was represented to her as being some pretty vanilla HTML updates that pretty much any idiot (thereby making me not-so-uniquely qualified) with a basic knowledge of HTML tags could do. Not rocket science, but the Ride of Silence folks are, by their own admission, non-technical.
The reality is that the site was designed to be driven by PHP scripting, which in itself eliminated your garden variety Frontpage Express hacker from the running; but then it turned out that all the good bits were generated from MySQL database queries. When I started, I had a working knowledge of PHP and only the most basic sense of how MySQL worked.
I know much more, now. That's a good thing, so for that I thank Turtle for giving me the shove. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have taken the time to learn some of this really useful (and not really as complicated as I'd thought) stuff, if I hadn't got thrown right into the deep water.
In my defense, I know Foo well enough to know he needed a gentle push to volunteer. It was an ideal opportunity to gain some hands-on experience which he desparately needs to transition to a new career, which he keeps telling me he wants. Samples = portfolio. In my long job search, I have learned much and am imparting to Foo (in abbreviated form) the gems. I'm cutting to the chase, so it doesn't take him as long as me to find the new career. This job search is taking me way too long, and I don't wish it on Foo, because he won't have the patience for it.
So...it's all good! :)
I like to volunteer The Hubbs because I'm proud of the fact that he is quite capable of doing anything - and doing is well. That's my man!
Thanks for the infection, and glad to hear that you've gotten into the mighty Beard. When you get a chance, check out their fifth album, whimsically entitled "V." (The working title, which would have been great, was "Jack Klugman." Think about it.) The two epics on that album are flat out amazing.
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