We ride. Again.

Donate Online!

Last May, I rode in my first ever Sam's Club MS 150 (Frisco/Ft. Worth). Along with the rest of my team, I rode a little over 150 miles over two days. Thanks in large part to the support of the blogging community, I was able to raise $500 for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Well, I'm back for more, and I hope to do even better this year.

On May 3-4, I'll be riding with The Wheeler Dealers, an MS 150 team founded in 2005 by my friend Bob. I'm pleased to be riding with them again this year, not just because they have so much fun and because a couple of my recumbent buddies have joined the team, but because I've seen firsthand the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis. You see, Bob's wife, Gerry, has secondary progressive MS and has been confined to a wheelchair for the past eleven years.

Turtle and I first met Bob and Gerry in 2002, and each year we've seen Gerry lose a little bit more of her mobility and strength to the effects of MS. She's a lively, outgoing woman who handles her disease with grace and courage, but it's tragic to see her increasingly become a prisoner of her own body.

Then there are our friends Barb and Joe, another couple who both suffer from MS. Joe was diagnosed first, and was already using a motorized wheelchair to get around, by the time we met him. Barb is able to walk using a cane, but has an entirely different set of symptoms than Joe's.

MS is a wasting disease that presents itself differently in each of those afflicted with it, and it takes away dignity and mobility. If I can do a little something to help by just riding my bike—because I can ride my bike—then I'm in.

But I need your help. If you feel, as I do, that finding a cure for MS is a worthy cause, I hope you'll help me to meet my fundraising goal by sponsoring me in this year's MS 150. It's easy to make your donation online, and it's tax deductible. It doesn't even have to be a lot of money. $10? $5? Every little bit helps. And if you know others who might be interested in helping out, please refer them to this posting or to my official MS 150 donation page.

Thanks, and God bless you.

No blog for the weary. Or wicked. Whatever.

Hi gang! Remember me? I'm the guy who used to post here with annoying regularity* in those halcyon days before my employer got bought out, I got assigned to a different development group, and I was issued a laptop computer as a perk** of my new position.

It's not that I don't think of you guys. I do. Weird and snark-worthy things are happening to me on a regular basis, but by the time I get to a computer out of sight of the surveillance cameras I'm either too tired to post or the memory cells that held the anecdote have been trod beneath the hobnailed boots of some XML transformation or the eleventy-seventh fruitless e-mail exchange between yours truly and a QA tester to whom I'm unable to convey even the simplest of technical concepts. It's not the first time I've wished I had taken Hindi in high school – or kept a better polish on my Spanish, at least.

Turtle and I are doing okay. She's still looking for a job and trying to keep me de-stressed. I'm trying to take advantage of the occasionally unseasonably warm day to sneak out for a training ride on my bike. The trips to the cardiologist were a bit discouraging, but he's not prepared to crack me open just yet. I'm to continue doing what I've been doing, though it has been suggested that I do what I've been doing at a somewhat reduced level of intensity. Riding for a couple hours at 90% of my maximum heart rate is not a great idea, apparently.

Things at work are pretty good, too. Sure, the hours are longer, the cubicles smaller and completely exposed, and the folks holding the purse strings are so tight that I have to make a show of sneezing all over my stuff to keep it from disappearing; but the work I'm doing now is interesting and even kind of fun. My new teammates are good guys and we have some laughs. One of the guys looks like Kevin James' XL (as opposed to XXXL) brother and has a phone with a Banana Phone ring tone. When he gets a call, we all jump up and dance around. Okay... I get up and dance around while the other guys look at me like I've forgotten my meds. Sometimes, I fire up the Banana Phone video*** through my laptop speakers and watch while Kevin James XL scrambles to figure out where he's left his phone. It's a hoot.

Last week, I had a weird dream that was going to share with you guys, but I didn't get to it in time. Now all I can remember about it was that someone I knew (I don't know who, only that I knew her) showed up at my work wearing a Hilary Clinton mask and wanting to discuss her “sweater puppies”. Probably just as well that it's slipped my mind. I've had about all I can stomach of The Hilmeister and all the rest of those gasbags vying for the office of Commander in Chief.



* But that's another topic entirely. Frankly, I'd rather discuss politics. Or have a root canal.
** Read, “Now that you can take your development environment with you, we'd like you to soldier on after you've completed your 9½-12 hours at the office. Yeaah... that'd be great.”
*** A retooled knock-off of the most excellent Badger Song.

Ghosts in Tri-X

Circa 1981. Shot with an Olympus OM-1N on Tri-X (and a tri-pod)

Just a little something to show that you can never stash some mementos of your past far enough to the back corner of the attic. This one – a self portrait for a basic photography and darkroom course I took in college – resurfaced today among some outdated atlases, a folio of Escher prints, and my deed to a one-foot square plot of land in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

No mullet, like the ones currently vying for validation over at Emma's place, but lordy lou did I ever need a haircut. And a competent dermatologist. And a fingernail clipper.

My instructor gave me a C+ on this project, noting on the back of the photo that I hadn't printed it dark enough (a shortcoming I've corrected in the version you see here).* The dramatically-lighted result of our assignment to photograph an egg fared much better and received an A-. It was voted Best of the Day by the other members of the class. Maybe it will pop up one of these days, as well.


* Speaking of corrections, check out the more dramatic post-processed version I did for The Dictionary of Image.

Contemplating contentment

I've never put much stock in a lot of the psychological manure thought up by the classical psychologists. Although Carl Jung always struck me as being less full of crap than many, the notion of synchronicity sure seems like a large wheelbarrow load of the stuff. And yet when, two days after posting my album cover made from a photo of a classic Rolls Royce, I was tailgated home by a late model Phantom, “synchronicity” was the first word that came to mind. I'll leave off repeating the next few; I hate being tailgated, and I like to try to keep this blog under the PG-14 wire.

Anyway, with that huge silver grille looming in my rear view, I pondered what sorts of wrong choices I might have made in my life that had led the guy in the Rolls to be driving what he was driving and me to be driving what I was driving. The thought occurred to me that if he didn't get off my bumper before the next time the driver in front of me randomly applied her brakes, I might find myself a bit nearer to being able to afford a Rolls – but I digress. I imagined I knew where he'd eventually turn (north into the neighborhoods of sprawling mansions and two-acre lots in Fairview) and wondered to myself what sort of work he must do (if any). Was he married with a family? Were they happy, or did they only put up with their workaholic husband/father because it was a lifestyle choice? Could he afford all of those fancy things, or was he in hock up to his eyeballs, developing an ulcer while chugging Dewar's and agonizing over how to stay afloat and keep the IRS at bay?

It was about that time that we came to an intersection where we parted ways – he turning north toward Beverly Hills Fairview and I heading south toward where my loving wife and kittens waited in our unpretentious, warm, dry home to welcome me after my day at the software mill. After I'd had a chance to relax in my humble but comfortable chair, we'd thank God for our many blessings and have a simple but satisfying dinner. We'd clear away the dishes, washing some by hand and tossing the rest in the fancy dish washing contraption, and then we'd settle in to watch a movie on our new flat-screen TV and enjoy the luxury of deep bass and crisp surround stereo from the new receiver and speakers I installed over the weekend.

And I'd realize that I didn't want the Rolls Royce (I love my Dorian); the house with ten bedrooms, five baths, two kitchens, and a media room with theater seating; the alcoholic trophy wife and avaricious snob-spawn; and certainly not the financial headaches. I realized, in that moment, that when I stopped long enough to realize it... I'm content with how green the grass is (or isn't, at this time of year) in my own yard.

Got it covered

While we're on the subject of album covers, check out the fun they're having over at Flickr: The LP portraits Pool.

Fantasy band meme

Via Gwynne via Eric via... aw hell, you get the idea. The idea behind this meme is to take three somewhat random bits of content and create from them a fictitious band, album, and album cover (or CD insert, if you must).

Here are the rules:

• Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
  The first article title on the page is the name of your band.


• Visit http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
  The last four words of the last quote on the page is the title of your album.


• Visit http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/The third picture on the page is your album cover.

Rolls Royce image © Mike Yamin. Used by permission.

Finally, here's Even If It's Wrong, the latest (and only) release by The Boshin War, which fictitiously debuted at #10.

The base image of the Rolls Royce is here. My random Wikipedia article was about The Boshin War. “Even if it's wrong” was my random quote fragment. Unfortunately, I didn't think to make note of the whole thing or who said it.

On the books for 2008

I know what some of you are thinking: “Foo never writes about riding anymore. So he had a crash and wrecked his shoulder. So what? It's cycling, not rowing.”

Well, to these naysayers I'd just like to retort, “Nyehhhh!”

Thanks to the prompting of Squirrel Bait (remember her from last year's MS 150), a sizeable contingent from last year's team and one new member hit the road at 1pm to log our first 20 miles of 2008.

For those of you who like your images a bit more amusing, try on this recent submission to the Dictionary of Image for size. It's been PhotoShopped a little, but the only deviations from reality were the addition of the definition text and a bit of texturing. This water tower for the town of Bourbon, Missouri, is the real deal.

Kind of adds a whole new meaning to the expression, “There must be somethin' in the water”, doesn't it?

Mein Großvater

My mother's father – or „mein Großvater“ – wasn't German, technically. He was born in 1902, on a farm in northeast Ohio, to first-generation Americans whose parents came to this country from the Alsace region of France. This was always a little confusing to me, when Grandpa used to tell us that his grandparents came from France but spoke German, not French. Once I got involved with my family's genealogy research, I learned that the Alsatians indeed spoke a dialect of German.*

At some point while Turtle's parents were visiting, the women were playing games and listening to Christmas CDs. “Silent Night” came on, and I was thinking of Grandpa and how we kids used to beg him to sing „Stille Nacht“ to us in his broken German.

The base image is a small photo Grandpa took of himself sometime in the 1970s at one of those automated photo booths you see at the mall. The pocket watch is one that he bought used around 1930 and passed down to me when I was in college (it still runs and keeps perfect time). The smaller blended image is Grandpa on his wedding day, in 1936.

* I admit to taking a certain amount of pleasure in telling people that even my French ancestors were German.

Christmas keepsake

On Christmas, while we were out in the garage opening our presents, my father-in-law walked over and handed me a small, heavy box secured with a rubber band. Inside, I found three well-used, brass-case pocket watches.

“I don't know anything about these,” he said. “Whether they're worth anything, I mean. I found them when I was going through some of the stuff we were redding up at Mom's house. They were Dad's, and you can see that one of them has his initials on it.”

And then he kind of shrugged. “Like I said, I don't know if they're worth anything.”

Well, they are – to me, at least. Maybe not in the monetary sense, but even if I weren't so fascinated with weathered old things with a sense of history about them, the real riches lay in the fact that my dad-in-law thinks enough of me to pass on these family treasures to me. Whether he sees them as such, or not, is entirely beside the point.

An added bonus is the design I found on the back of one of the cases, which depicts a bicycle racer. Based on the style of the clothes and the handlebars, I'd guess it was from the 1920s or so.

Christmas 2007: Still Breathing

This year, instead of packing up and taking to the road for the holidays, Turtle and I hosted her mom and dad, her sister, and her niece here in Texas. For the past week, I'd been dusting, vacuuming, cleaning, sneaking in a few last-minute shopping expeditions, and driving halfway to Oklahoma to find a wet (not “damp”) where I could buy fixin’s for adult liquid refreshments.

My father-in-law is insanely allergic to the cats. Even though we had the carpets cleaned and despite my having thoroughly dusted and vacuumed the house from top to bottom three times in two weeks prior to his arrival, he can only handle being in the house for about as long as it takes to use the bathroom. Longer than that, and his eyes swell up, his sinuses fill with mucus, and he sneezes violently and continuously. He and my mother-in-law booked a room at a nearby hotel, but he (and I) spent all the Christmas festivities out in the garage, where I'd set up lawn chairs, a folding table, and an electric oil radiator with a small fan blowing across it to provide some heat.

And we went “bumming”. I knew going in that Turtle's dad probably wouldn't be able to spend any time in the house, so I planned to take him with me to some electronics stores to shop for a new TV to replace the 26-inch Magnavox I've had since 1989. We were successful, and Turtle and I are now enjoying the bright picture, wide screen and (some) HD clarity of a 40" LCD Samsung set (LN-T4061F, for anyone who's interested in particulars). Now all I have to do is find a set of surround sound speakers we can afford.

Christmas day was a little unusual. While the women had themselves a noisy hen party inside, Dad and I hung out on the front porch. It was chilly and breezy but, as long as we occasionally moved our lawn chairs to stay in the sun, pleasant enough. A little before the crockpot turkey was ready, we set up a long table in the garage and dolled it up with a red table cloth. How many of you can say you had your Christmas feast in the garage?

This morning, it's a dreary, rainy day. My parents-in-law and my niece are driving home in the yuck. We drove my sister-in-law to the airport at 5:00 this morning, and by now she's touched down and fighting her way through throngs of fellow holiday travelers to recover her luggage. The house is quiet (the housekeeping staff are on strike for the day), and the cats have come out of hiding. The place feels a little lonely, but we have some fun memories.

Oh yeah: Merry Christmas!

IE8 on Acid(2)

In a move that almost certainly had nothing to do with Opera's lawsuit [cough], Microsoft has announced that an in-development version of Internet Explorer 8 has successfully rendered the Acid2 browser test.

Taking this announcement at face value (no pun intended), one might be tempted to think that Microsoft's browser development team has finally seen the error of its non-standard rendering ways. But... I've been verbally abusing Microsoft for a long time and can't just turn on a dime. I'm skeptical.

True, it seems that years of pressure and ill will over the debacle that was IE 6 have convinced Microsoft that it can't just run rough-shod over the W3C recommendations that standards based browsers follow. The IE 8 announcement makes some pleasing noises in this regard, but it seems to me that there's also quite a bit of tap dancing going on:

When we look at the long lists of standards (even from just one standards body, like the W3C), which standards are the most important for us to support? The web has many kinds of standards – true industry standards, like those from the W3C, de facto standards, unilateral standards, open standards, and more. Some standards like RSS or OpenSearch lack a formal standards body yet work pretty well today across multiple implementations. Many advances in web technologies, like the img tag, start out as unilateral extensions by a vendor. The X in AJAX, for example, has only started the formal standardization process relatively recently. As some comments have pointed out, CSS 2.1, one of the key standards that Acid2 exercises, is not “finalized” yet. Different individuals have different opinions about different standards. The important thing about the Acid2 test is that it reflects what one particular group of smart people “consider most important for the future of the web.”

Which, to me, reads a bit like – and I'm quoting my internal paraphrasing here – “We see Firefox's market share increasing and feel Safari and Opera nipping at our heels, and we admit that there's a demand for standards compliance. But we're Microsoft, dammit. We'll comply with the W3C standards where doing so is to our advantage and continue to push our own where it isn't.”

The future of web standards

Perhaps in response to Andy Clarke's recent call for the disbanding of the CSS working committee – in turn prompted by Opera's lawsuit against Microsoft – James over at The B-List has uncorked a truly perceptive analysis of The future of web standards.

Read it, if you're geek enough to care.

Settling in

I'm taking a break from putting together my task list of things that need to get done before my in-laws arrive for Christmas and thought I'd "send up a flare" to let everyone know I'm still around.

The move to the new office building is complete. At 6' x 6', my new cube – more of a stall since it has only two full walls – is less than half the size of the one I was in before, and this has underscored for me the lesson that no matter your situation, things can always get worse. And yet, aside from the cramped conditions, I feel like the work environment is going to be better. The aisles are wider, so despite having less desktop and storage space, the conditions aren't claustrophobic. Even better, the moaning, endlessly Eeyore-ish woman who kept me on the brink of homicide each day is on another floor. Even better, my new neighbors and team members are quiet and enjoyable to work with. It's also rather reassuring to have most of my former teammates officing in the same building again.

Things are finally starting to gel in terms of my new position, as well. I can finally start focusing on doing my job instead of trying to figure out what that job might be. I feel more like I'm starting to move forward instead of in circles.

Meanwhile, Turtle and I are beginning that frantic dash to complete all those Christmas tasks that we probably should have been working on two weeks ago. We've both been a little blue, lately, and the result was too much procrastination.

I've now been off my bike for 33 days. I've got to find time and motivation enough to ride another 25 miles if I want to reach 2000 miles for the year. Some of that motivation may come tomorrow, when Turtle and I attend a Christmas party being held by one of my MS 150 teammates. You can bet St. Bob will be there and trying to get everyone revved up to get out in the cold to start training for the 2008 ride!

I had another birthday and will save you the bother of asking the question with the simple response "pretty darned old". Turtle is always hard pressed to come up with gift ideas for me, and this year was no exception. However, she knows how much trouble I have with my back and remembered how she had to pry me out of the demo chair when I tried out one of those Shiatsu massage pads at the mall a couple years ago. She also knows that I'm kind of picky about this sort of thing, so on my birthday she took me out for lunch and then to the store to pick out just the model of massager that I wanted. The store was having some sort of sale, and Turtle had a coupon, so we ended up getting this delightful contraption for about 40% off its usual price.

This is going to be so awesome the next time my back is killing me as the result of yard work or honey-dos! I can now have a massage any time I want without Turtle having to aggravate her carpal tunnel giving me a massage.

Monday update

I'd apologize for the lack of original postings here, but I don't want to sound like a stuck record. I could post about my confusion and frustration over the way in which things are being managed (or more to the point, not being managed) since my company was purchased earlier this year – but I won't. I'm pretty sure the only people who aren't in exactly the same boat are those who work for themselves.

No bike riding for the past three weeks. Worse, I'm not feeling very motivated to do anything to change that. The good news is that, after my cardiologist appointment this past week, I'm cleared to ride. I just have to get out from under the laptop and do it.

Turtle and I did roll up our sleeves and put up our Christmas decorations, this past weekend. As a token of my affection, I stoically set about shuttling boxes out of the space above the garage, spent an hour or so debugging and untangling strands of lights, and then a couple more hours putting it all together. But as usual, I had to admit it looked nice, once it was all up and I was able to kick back with a beer, a couple Advil, and a Darvocet.

Also this past week, Turtle orchestrated the process of having most of our carpeting and all the tile floors cleaned. We're hoping that this will allow my father-in-law to spend at least a little time inside the house, when Turtle's family joins us for Christmas. Pop's deathly allergic to our furry dependents, so he and I spent a lot of time hanging out in the garage with a space heater, last time he and Mom came for a visit. It's not too bad, as garages go, but it would be nicer to be inside.

Then again, no one tries to talk us into playing board games when we're in the garage...

The Dictionary of Image

My first attempts at contributing to The Dictionary of Image (pool) on Flickr.

Roots

Roots
Originally uploaded by FooRider

Contentment

Movement

The inner workings of my great-grandfather's Seth Thomas black mantel clock. It was given to him and my grandmother on the occasion of their wedding and again, to Turtle and me, on the occasion of ours.

Worn

Cashew-nut

UFOs

That would be “unidentified fecal objects”, in this case. Don't laugh; this is serious business. Until my dad posted a link to the “Space Toilet” video on YouTube, I had never really given a lot of thought to the engineering implications of bodily functions in outer space. The video appears to be taken from a serious presentation by Col. Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency, but you'd think it was a stand-up comedy show. I guess that no matter how you slice it, poo is kinda funny.

While I'm at it, Turtle called this morning to tell me about a video of two cats having a conversation. After watching it on Yahoo!, I thought I might go looking for a copy on YouTube but was too lazy to actually do so. As luck would have it, the Space Toilet video has a link to the talking cats. Check it out; it's cute. For those of you who don't speak Cat, there's a dubbed version.

Flickr: Photos from Paul Grand

When it comes to art – what ever you reckon art to be – I'm one of those people who knows what he likes when he sees it. Sometimes, I even have a flash of inspiration for some imagery I'd like to create, but I don't have the PhotoShop skills to pull it off.

Paul Grand has the eye and the skills. Combining photography with typographical elements and a helping of age (or grunge), his is a style that really appeals to me. I don't know what a trained artist would call it, but I'll go with "mixed media" or maybe "scrapbook-ish".

Flickr: Photos from Paul Grand

One of these days, when I have a bunch of free time, I've got to enroll in a PhotoShop-oriented design class. Or buy some decent filters.

If you like Grand's work, there are quite a few talented, like-minded surrealists hanging out on Flickr's Man Ray group. Check it out!

Stop draggin' my heart around

Almost exactly a year ago, I was taking advantage of my use-'em-or-lose-'em vacation days to get some doctor appointments out of the way. My internist and his PA heard a heart murmer that they hadn't heard the previous year, which prompted an echocardiogram and two attempted appointments for cardio stress tests. The scheduling nurse couldn't pull her head out of her... Cosmopolitan long enough to get it right, and I ran out of vacation days. I figured I'd get it rescheduled after the first of the year, but then things got busy and I never bothered. If hitting 190 beats per minute on my weekend bike rides hadn't given me a massive coronary, how bad could it be?

I went for my annual physical today, and the murmer's still there. The doctor is perplexed, because the echocardiogram didn't show anything to suggest where the gooshing noise is coming from. And he wants to know where the gooshing noise is coming from.

So now, I get to add a cardiologist to my growing collection of specialists and hope that he'll find nothing worth cracking a sternum over. I prefer to keep my medical issues in the realm of abrasions, contusions, and dislocations. You know: stuff you get from bike crashes.

The up side is that my labs came back good, all my boy parts passed muster, my neck and back haven't flared up since earlier this summer, and I have a new pair of bifocals that I can actually see through without giving myself a headache. It's a pretty good place to be, heading into Thanksgiving week.

Artwork of note(s)

For those of us who just can't get enough of secret codes and fine art and music, there's a new twist on Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper".

Discovery News : Discovery Channel: "[R]ather than conspiracy theories, the new code points to a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice."

The first I'd heard of this theory was this morning, while I was watching ABC's Good Morning America. Although they did play a bit of the composition in the clip, they apparently felt that the reporter's running line of chatter was more important than the music, which was relegated to background noise. However, there's a video on their site that will allow you to hear a bit, if you're interested. I can't link directly to the clip, as it's obfuscated by JavaScript; however, you can find it by going here and looking for the Nov. 9 video in the search results.

Pala's theory is not without its detractors, of course.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web

Speaking of things that are handy as pockets on shirts, if you love fonts and have ever had the need desire to more fully understand the whys and wherefores of web typography, have I got a deal for you.

Check out The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web - a practical guide to web typography.

I'd tell you to tell 'em Foo sent you, but they'd probably be all like, "Foo who?" And then you'd probably be all embarrassed for me and like, "Tee hee." Unbecoming one of your obvious breeding and discernment, that's all I'm saying.