Where on earth are Foo and Turtle?

Despite the post title, my grand plan was less to make a real contest of it than to provide a place to drop some vacation photos. Unfortunately, after the first couple, the weather turned and there haven't been many photo ops.

It's been raining here, and when it's not raining it's so humid that when we went out for a while yesterday, all the store windows were steamed up. Last night (10/22), the waves were quite large - by my landlubber standards, at least - and all the "local" TV stations were issuing tornado watches. On the up side, the locals have really been needing the rain that we (apparently) brought with us from Texas.

Here's a quick shot out the door from this morning. I'm hoping I'll get to take some more interesting pictures before we leave this weekend.

Don't start with me

Over the years, I've installed a lot of Windows applications on my computers, and I find it irritating when a new addition has the arrogance to set itself up to start every time I boot up my computer. Often, the solution is as simple as setting a configuration option, but sometimes the application doesn't provide the option to turn off auto loading.

This morning, when I installed an application that allows me to synchronize my Palm handheld with my Yahoo! calendar, I quickly discovered that it was one of the rude variety that insists on starting up, whether I need it or not. That's when I paid a visit to Annoyances.org, a handy site where you can find lots of tips about how to deal with all sorts of obscure little Windows... well, annoyances.

In this case, I learned that the solution to my auto-run problem went like this:

1. Open Start -> Run and type in "msconfig". Press enter.
2. When msconfig starts, select the "Startup" tab and find the offending program in the list.
3. Uncheck the box next to the program you want to stop auto-loading.
4. Click "Apply" and then "OK".
5. When you reboot, you'll receive a message telling you that you've changed your configuration and do you want to run msconfig and see this message every time you reboot? Check the box that says not to show the message again, and... voila!

Link

Missing

I strolled in to my cube this morning with plans to dive back into Beginning XML 1^st ed., which I'd been studying when I left. Weighing in at over five pounds (by my estimation), about 2½" thick, and with a cover printed in the WROX standard red and gold, it's hard to miss. Yet missing it was. In that spot next to the pile of ASP.NET and C# books, there was no nerdily-grinning photo of the book's author—only bare desktop.

I promptly fired off an e-mail carpet bomb, requesting that whichever of my developer colleagues had "borrowed" the book in my absence should please promptly return it (or state their ransom demands). They promptly fired back notes disavowing any knowledge of my book.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions: either one of the cleaning staff has higher aspirations than emptying my waste can, or He is trying to tell me that my seven-year-old 1st edition isn't going to cut it, and I should order Beginning XML, 4^th ed. (and expense it).

Update: The XML book never did turn up. I need it to prepare for my new job responsibilities, so I went ahead and ordered a new, 4^th edition copy of the same title from Amazon, yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from the receptionist informing me that I had received a package that was too big for my mail slot. I thought, No frickin' way. But sure enough, it was the book I'd ordered earlier in the day. Now, I did spring for 2-day shipping, and the book did ship from just the other side of the Metromess, but... holy cow, that's fast. It usually takes at least a day just to process an order.

Weekend update

This past week, my employer sent me, along with two of my colleagues, to a five-day ASP.NET training course. Two days of C# with one instructor followed by three more days of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET GUI training. The C# side didn't really cover much that I hadn't already picked up from books and web tutorials, and the instructor had a tendency to wander into personal anecdotes unrelated to the material. But the ASP.NET section was awesome. The instructor was very knowledgeable in the material, but perhaps more important, she did and excellent job of keeping us engaged and focused. There were cow jokes involved.

I find training classes like this exhausting but worthwhile. Sitting in class, trying to cram everything into my brain is tough enough, but the training facility was clear on the opposite side of the metroplex, and the classes ran 9am-5pm. In other words, I had three hours of rush hour beep-and-creep driving--for the first couple days, at least. After that, I decided I'd rather get up and do my morning drive at my usual time, in lighter traffic. In my mind, it's much better to spend 40 minutes driving and kill the slack 2+ hours 'til class time reading a Dan Brown book than to spend 1½ hours clawing my way through traffic and arriving in a Really Bad Mood. The return trips still stank, but I did manage to find a route that cut the drive time down to about an hour.

But I digress. It was a good class, and I learned a lot of good stuff--not the least of which, that I need to learn to "let it go" and accept the fact that using Visual Studio to create ASP.NET 2.0 web applications means that I don't have to code everything myself, from the ground up. Weird... but cool.

There's a dark side to increased productivity, as illustrated by this morning's Dilbert, which Turtle just brought to my attention.

Next...

Back to work, tomorrow. I haven't heard anything from my new supervisor, this past week, so I'm assuming that I'm not to report to the new office yet. I'll be back at the old place, where I'm scheduled to sit in on a "webinar" and learn how substantial the benefits plan cuts will be.

I'm trying to impress Turtle with my efforts to embrace change, but I'm feeling a bit like a cork being tossed around in the ocean.

Veteran Removes Illegal Mexican Flag

In Reno, Nevada, a local Veteran may be brought up on charges after cutting down a Mexican flag being flown illegally above the U.S. flag. A local television station had received numerous complaints from residents and went to investigate. When their reporter arrived, the Veteran took the opportunity to make a public statement. He quickly lowered the flags and used his army-issue knife to cut them down, taking possession of the U.S. flag and leaving the Mexican flag where it fell.

The man commented "I'm Jim Brossert and I took this flag down in honor of my country with a knife from the United States army. I'm a veteran, I am not going to see this done to my country. if they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us, but I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back."

Link (Infowars.net)

According to the Infowars article, similar events have been reported in Maywood, CA., Tucson, Arizona, and Jupiter, Florida.

Earlier this year, there was a flap when it was discovered that someone had climbed the broadcast tower of a local conservative talk radio station and planted a Mexican flag there. It took a couple days to get someone to climb up and take it down, during which time the radio station faced fines for the infraction.

Call me reactionary, but I can't help feeling a bit like we're under siege and just too polite to do much about it. Except for Jim Brossert, I mean.

A tip of the hat to Cowtown Patty.

Boo Boo Kitty

Fuzzy Dependant #1 has lately decided that ear scratches and drive-by belly rubs aren't enough. He's discovered Daddy's Lap and is not shy about demanding his rightful place there, sometimes at the expense of whatever I happen to be typing on my laptop keyboard at the time.

Turtle recently captured this moment of pure bliss.

Incognito

I think we've established by now that my inner child is far too suppressed for me to get too excited about Hallowe'en any more, but some of these costumes are just hilarious. My favorites are the Parade Rock 'n' Roller and the Man-eating Shark.

If you buy one of these, I want to see pictures.

Oopsie.

So... I'm sitting here in my cube, with my XML/XSLT/XPath book in front of me, and I just finished rendering one of the exercises. What used to be a fairly innocuous bit of XML has transformed into a giant robot that's now duck walking between the rows of cubicles, trying not to step on the hotline people.

Could I have mis-coded something in my style sheet?

Paradigm shift

Ever since the company I work for was purchased earlier this year, the word has been that development on the project I've worked on for the past 10 years would be ending and that our team would be redistributed among several other groups. During my tenure, my primary responsibility had been to find ways to make the application run on the mainframe—a role that had long kept me on the periphery of things and under the radar of the people who hand out cool new things to work on.

Ironically, the fact that I wasn't well versed in some of the more esoteric inner workings of the code worked in my favor when we received our new assignments.

Because much of what I did wasn't very interesting and involved lots of time waiting for programs to compile and link, I entertained myself by learning what I could about HTML, CSS, and various other web technologies that I could get my hands on without having to request software licenses from MIS. All those years I'd spent tinkering, I thought I'd never have any professional use for the things I was learning, but it turns out that my side efforts positioned me well to be assigned to a team that's doing ASP.NET and C# development. And, because I wasn't one of the experts for the old project's core architecture, I was easily released from maintenance responsibilities.

That all sounded very promising, but I've been hearing for years how I was going on to bigger and better things. Nothing had ever changed, so I had my doubts that it would be any different this time—until this past Friday, at least. That's when it all came together. Decisions were made. Schedules were set and briefings held. Training classes were scheduled.

All the tinkering and reading I've done over the years, on my own time, is going to come into play now. My new responsibilities will involve large, steaming helpings of XML, XSLT, XPath, DOM, JavaScript, CSS, etc. and my familiarity with those technologies will make it a whole lot easier to get my head around the new stuff and more quickly make a contribution. I get to work with technology that's not 30 years old, and I'm kind of stoked about it!

CSS: IE7 float / italic / background positioning bug

I recently stumbled on a peculiar (but not unexpected) Internet Explorer 7 bug that has caused me hours of head scratching. To the best of my knowledge and Googling, this specific behavior hasn't been documented on any of the usual guru sites, such as Position Is Everything, so I'll attempt to document it here.

Overview

For purposes of this discussion, I've pared my page structure down to the most basic structure required to produced the undesirable behavior. Here you see a body element, which contains a centered div with the id content.

<body>
<div id="wrap">
 <div id="content">
   <div id="timestamp">Updated 09.25.2007!</div>
   <div id="copyright">Copyright © 2007</div>
 </div>
</div>
</body>

My CSS code sets a static width of 500px for this block, gives it a white background, and centers it horizontally in body. The body has a 1008px x 3px background image that repeats on the y-axis and is centered horizontally. The content div's left and right edges align with the left and right edges of the background's gold "box".

Within the content block, I define two more divs: timestamp and copyright. I want timestamp to appear in italics and line up to the right, so I apply font-style:italic and float:right to it. The complete CSS looks like this:

body {
 background: #000 url("bg-test.gif") repeat-y center top;
 font:normal normal x-small "Trebuchet MS",Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
 margin:0; padding:0;
 /* IE hacks follow */
 text-align:center;
 font-size/* */:/**/small;
 font-size/**/:small;
}
#wrap {
 width:500px;
 margin:1em auto;
 background-color:#fff;
 text-align:left;
}
#content {
 margin:0;
}
#copyright {
 background-color:skyblue;
}
#timestamp {
 background-color:pink;
 font-style:italic;
 float:right;
}

In most browsers (yes, even IE 6), this renders like the following screenshot:


In IE 7, the content div remains centered, but body's background image position has shifted toward the right.

The Cause

So what's happening here? After a bit of tinkering, I discovered that the layout broke only so long as I floated the timestamp div. Unfortunately, none of the usual tricks for correcting IE's float bugs had any effect.

Eventually, I removed the italic style from the timestamp text, in an attempt to reduce the code to the bare minimum required to reproduce the problem. Which went away. I put italics back, and it returned. This reminded me of an article I'd seen on PIE, which described a bug in the way that IE handles widths for italicized text. It didn't seem to directly address the background image problem, but it led me to experiment with setting an explicit width for the floated timestamp div.

The Fix

I set width:10em, which is large enough to accomodate the timestamp text and, because it's in em-units, will expand if the viewer increases the browser's default text size. Then, to make the date text align as far to the right as possible, I set text-align:right.

Bingo. Problem solved circumvented.

Update: I submitted this write-up to “Big John” of PIE fame only to discover after several rounds of head scratching e-mails that this bug doesn't seem to occur in all IE 7 installations (including Big John's). I get it on my personal laptop and my desktop box at work, but my work laptop and some co-workers' workstations don't exhibit the behavior. All IE 7 version numbers tested are the same, so it may be related to something in the maintenance levels of Windows XP itself or in the metrics of the fonts installed on a given computer. Very weird.

To see if your IE 7 installation exhibits the bug, try the demo here. For the record, the IE 7 Windows factory at browsershots.org exhibits the centering bug.

How did I get here?

This month's search terms:

• sparks are going to fly cause i'm turned on again (see "friction burns")
• "dilated eyes" eye drops Which reminds me that I still haven't made my opthalmologist appointment.
• jessica alba shoulder ride Blasted thought police...
• buy.pickle.juice Not. While. I. Can. Get. It. For. Free.
• i'm singing a song rolling along "Locomotive Breath", occasionally.
• "rear steering bike" I've read the discussions, but I still think this sounds like a Bad Idea.
• zoom foo Yes, but probably not for another week or two.
• a word for people addicted to riding mountain bikes "Mosquito bait". No, wait. That's two words.
• badonkadonk site:blogspot.com Sounds intriguing.
• ladiesladies "flush them" Dial back the mysogyny, dude. You just need to find the right one. And you might try bathing.
• nabumetone dogs I think I get it: an anti-inflammatory punk rock band. Revolutionary (or not).
  

Now playing: OK Go, Oh No

How the Web works

I was Googling to find a web page cross reference of CSS color codes to named colors, which I found at the Color Schemer blog. I stayed around to browse the blog postings and found this posting with a photo of a Mazda 3 hatchback with a clever license plate (Dorian's would probably be "A0A0A0", for those geeks playing along at home).

I followed the photo link to Flickr, where I learned from visitors' comments that the car lives (or works) right next door to my old office, in Dallas. Considering that most Mazda 3 hatches seem to be gray, silver, blue, or white, I figured there was a pretty decent chance that this was the same red Mazda I've seen a couple times over the past few months. One of the commenters seemed to be the car's owner, T. Scott Stromberg, and curiosity compelled me to follow his posted link to his web site.

I don't have the sort of eye for art that some of you have, and Stromberg's style doesn't really speak to me; but the guy definitely has talent. I could easily see his art hanging in some jazz joint or Mexican restaurant. And, if I were working on a festive web design, I might well be inspired to borrow from his palette of colors.

Which would lead me back here, which, if memory serves, is how the world wide web worked before we had all these cool search engines to take us right to where we need to go.

Hand me my pith helmet, Livingston...

...I'm on Safari.

Ever since I became interested in developing standards-compliant web content, using semantic mark-up and CSS, I've tried to keep a representative sampling of browsers and different versions of those browsers on the various computers to which I have access. All well and good, as long as we're only talking about Windows boxes; but what about the bunch of you Apple devotees?

When Emma first posted about browsershots.org, I rejoiced. Finally, I'd be able to see my pages as they rendered on Safari and other non-Windows browsers. The catch is that lots of web developers (and wanna-bes) rejoiced, as well, the result being that there's usually a long queue of other sites waiting for their screenshots.

This morning, I learned that Apple has made available a public beta of its Safari 3 browser for Windows XP and Vista and, although I wouldn't quite say I rejoiced, I did promptly download and install the thing to add to my collection.  It probably does not render XHTML/CSS in precisely the same way as earlier Mac-only versions do, and so doesn't replace browsershots.org in utility, but how can I pass up another weapon in my standards compliance arsenal? 

No accounting for taste

In previous postings, I've mentioned that I've become the caretaker of various family treasures, sometimes under mild protest. At an early age, I had it drilled into me that "It's impolite to beg" and, as a result, I've always been reticent about accepting my aging relatives' possessions. At least, that's part of it. Another reason is that I feel that I'm somehow hastening their departure from this world by allowing them to give away their stuff. I know: illogical.

None of which explains the wotsit at right.

During the same visit when my granduncle Carl sent home another of his clocks, we were hanging out in the cellar. It was all pretty much as I remembered it from my childhood. Same slightly musty smell. Same cinderblock walls. Maybe a little smaller than I remembered.

"I've got to start getting rid of some of this old junk," he said. "I'm not going to be around much longer."

At nearly 90 years old, he might have had a point, but I don't even like to think about his passing. In some ways, I'm closer to Carl and my aunt Mary than I was to my grandparents, the last of whom passed in 2000. Still, I know that with no children of their own, they've been sticking name tags on their various treasures for years, so that they could ensure that they found their way to the people they felt would appreciate them most.

"It's just a bunch of junk," Carl repeated. "But if there's any of this you want, I wish you'd take it."

Okay. There was one thing. For as long as I could remember, there had always been this weird cast iron bottle opener mounted on the wall. Kind of a scary thing, to a small kid, with its four wild eyes and bucked teeth, but it had made an impression. I'd always associate the memory of it with that basement, and I told Carl as much. He didn't know what I meant, at first. It had been there since sometime before I was born, and it had long since faded into invisibility for him.

When I pointed it out, he promptly grabbed a screwdriver from the battered toolbox he'd used when he worked as a machinist. Still shaking his head in amazement that I'd pick 'that old thing' as a memento, he placed it in my hand and laughed.

"You'll have to mount that on the wall in your kitchen and think of your old uncle whenever you open a beer," he said. Which is entirely the point.

Except I'm pretty sure I'd never get away with putting it in our kitchen.

But wait. There's more!

I can't remember what I was looking for, but I found a web site the other day that sells reproductions of Carl's bottle opener. And then, because my interest gets piqued by the strangest things, I continued looking. I found an auction site that had a mint condition specimen with its original box. And then, a woman's description of the same bottle opener, which she'd found in the remains of a fire. She's apparently interested in odd things, as well, because she actually took the time to research it.

Attention, entities of the earth

My fledgling attempts to learn HTML and create a web site came 'way back in 1995. My goal was to create a web presence for my family's genealogy research. Since much of that research is riddled with German, I frequently found myself in need of umlauts but never often enough to justify the mental real estate to memorize the HTML entities for the decorated characters.

Enter Leftlogic's HTML Entity Character Lookup tool. Now, instead of Googling all over the web for a long list of HTML entities that may or may not give me what I'm looking for, I can now enter a character that kind of looks like the one I want, and the tool shows me a list of candidates. For you fans of the forbidden fruit, there's even a dashboard widget you can download.

Sweet.

Shadow World

Turtle e-mailed me a movie file this morning, and I enjoyed it so much that I just had to run right out and find it on YouTube so that I could share it with you. The movie was a Raymond Crowe performance of "What A Wonderful World", acted out with shadow puppets.

I encourage you to watch this and be entertained.

Now playing: Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Corelli: 12 Concerti Grossi, Op.6

They came from the oil fields

That's right. This weekend, Turtle and I had the pleasure of meeting and having dinner with Janie and her husband while they were in The Metromess for other events.

I'm always just a little apprehensive when setting up a meeting with someone I know from online but have never met before, in the physical realm. That may sound like a strange admission, coming from a man who first met his wife in an IRC chat channel and regularly attended computer BBS gatherings during the early '90s; but a first real-life meeting with an online acquaintance is like a blind date. Or a box of chocolates. Oh, you can get a certain sense of people from how they write and what they write about, but there's always the chance to find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, with Too Much Information or too little to talk about.

Like that time in 1992 when I drove an hour or so to a BBS potluck. I'd had some good results making new friends when I attended a similar gathering from one of the other BBS systems in the area, and I was feeling adventurous. I arrived to find an unusual mix of nerdy, rough, and just plain unusual characters, but the people seemed nice enough. The conversation over dinner was typical computer nerd stuff, but afterwards, when everyone adjourned to the living room for a marijuana-fueled Traci Lords film festival...

Well, let's just say my capacity for new experience had been exceeded. Call me a coward—or a prude, if you must—but I faked the onset of a migraine and fled.

I'm pleased to say that our dinner with Janie and her husband was nothing like that. The four of us fell easily into a wandering, seamless, laughter-filled conversation that was cut short only when Turtle and I had to leave for an appointment before church. No weirdness, and the only hint of marijuana was the fern-like print of my shirt. It was big fun, and I'm glad we had the chance to meet!

So now I've met Bill and Janie, which makes me 2 for 2 in the Blogger Blind Date "success" column.

Nerds and the fashion void

In case anyone is keeping track, it stopped raining a month or so ago. The wet weather and cooler than normal temperatures have given way to the customary hot, dry weather that we north Texans are used to. When I rolled into the driveway after my evening commute, Dorian's in-dash thermometer read 105 °F.

I've been working some long hours lately. That has put the brakes on my after-work bike riding and makes it tough to find time for routine chores like mowing the lawn. Turtle, being in attuned to such things, was waiting for me when I walked in the house.

"You're not planning to mow the lawn, are you?" she asked. When I didn't immediately respond with the 'no' she was looking for, she continued. "I was talking to Mom, and she says you should take it easy, have a nice cold beer or two, and not die."

"Mmm," I said, noncommittally. I knew that the only beer on the premises was in the garage, where it was about 120°.

But what's that got to do with nerd chic? you're probably wondering.

For as long as I can remember, one of the defining characteristics of nerds has been their complete lack of fashion sense.* Thick glasses, held together with safety pins and Scotch brand tape. Highwater trousers. Sweater vests. Not last year's fashions, nor even those from the year before—five years, ten years ago.

I've always felt it was unfair to assume that nerds can't dress themselves presentably. It's just lower on their list of priorities than hacking the Linux kernel or re-watching the entire Firefly series from start to finish (including Serenity) in one sitting. Why blow perfectly good money on a new pair of eyeglasses when it could be spent on a Visual Studio 2005 upgrade?

It's with that kind of mentality that, the minute Turtle's car was out of sight and on the way to her meeting, I went to my closet and grabbed my old red, sleeveless cycling jersey (the one whose elastic waistband was shot). I dug out an old pair of navy gym shorts (the ones whose drawstring had broken) and my old Halo sweatband, dressed, and headed out to mow the lawn.

Sure, the combination of tight cycling jersey and shorts that displayed just how weird a cyclist's tan lines really are would have elicited hoots and jeers from the guys down at the local day labor office. But from a practical standpoint, the wicking fabric of the jersey got me the most cooling benefit from what little breeze there was to be had. The sweatband kept the perspiration (okay... rivers of sweat) from burning my eyes. The shorts... well, let's just say I don't have the flabbiest man legs and bum on the cul de sac.

I was just finishing up when one of those Lexus [snicker] trucks pulled up in front of the next door neighbors' house, and a woman in a tailored white linen suit climbed out. As she made her way up the sidewalk, I saw her eyeing me and imagined that she was horrified by my attire.

Yep, I thought, cracking a grin. Still got it.

That, or she was mesmerized by my tan lines.

* I say "their", but I don't think that's fooling anyone. We're talking about me.

Exxxcellent...

Through The Simpsons' eighteen-year history, we've seen lots of guest celebrities reduced to two dimensions. I've always wondered how I'd look with yellow skin and googly eyes... and now I know.

As part of the non-stop hype for the recently-released Simpsons movie, Burger King has put together a web site where you can upload a picture of yourself, answer a few non-personal questions, and see what the analyzer thinks you'd look like as a cartoon character from the Simpsons. I was frankly surprised by how well this worked.

You can try too. www.simpsonizeme.com

Ride report: Tour de Paris (Paris, TX)

The 90-mile drive to Paris in the pre-dawn hour was a little spooky because of heavy fog along the way, but the day dawned sunny and clear. I rolled into the Paris High School parking lot at a little after 7am, started unloading my gear, and immediately started streaming sweat. As I was preparing to leave the house, I couldn't decide between a short-sleeved jersey and a sleeveless one. I was glad I'd brought both and chose the sleeveless.

At a little after 7:30, I'd finished with my preparations—sunblock, HRM, bike assembled—and gave The Stradas a call. They were still about 15 minutes from the high school and unlikely to be ready to go by start time, so I went ahead and began making my way toward the starting line.

A few minutes before 8:00, the organizers made a few remarks and then handed the microphone over to a gentleman introduced as Lance Armstrong's dad. He went on for a couple minutes about how the Tour de France didn't hold quite the same interest for him as it had in years past. The riders laughed, but I was distracted. I seemed to recall that Lance didn't have any kind of relationship with his father and referred to him as "the DNA donor." It seemed rather... uninformed for the Tour de Paris organizers to have this guy as a special guest when Lance Armstrong didn't even acknowledge him. Turns out I was the uninformed one, though. When I got home, I looked it up and discovered Terry Armstrong is Lance's step-father—and one who's obviously quite proud of his adopted son, at that.

Aaanyway... we got off promptly at 8:00 and, because I'd managed to find a spot toward the front of the group, I had very little of the claustrophobia I experienced last year, at the start. Last year, I was toward the back with all the wobblies; this year, I was up with the hammerheads. We took off, and most of the folks around me coalesced into several pace lines. Those who didn't rode in a predictably, orderly fashion, and in no time at all I was in clear air. At least, I was in clear air until I caught up with one of the pace lines, which was writhing back and forth across the entire width of the lane. So I passed them. And then I passed another. I finished the first 10 miles with an average speed of 21 mph.

Between miles 10 and 20, the pace lines reeled me in again. As they passed, one of the guys smirked and said, "Guess you're not as as fast as you thought, huh?" I told him that I reckoned I could keep up the pace just fine, if I'd been sitting on and sucking wheel all day, instead of going it alone. He just grunted and sucked on past.

When I made my first stop at mile 30, I had an average of 20.4 mph, but it was starting to heat up. The roads were rougher than I'd remembered them from last year, and I'd come to the realization that I might have mismanaged my resources on the first half. I hung around at the stop for longer than I normally would have done, hoping to hook up with the bunch of RBENT folks I thought were supposed to be in attendance. Corsa Ken arrived after a bit, but no sign of The Stradas or anyone else, so I took off before my legs got any stiffer.

I could tell I was fading. Though there were no serious climbs on the route (and no rollers of consequence until we hit Rt. 19), my legs felt rubbery on every incline. I went into conservation mode, spinning more and tucking everything in on the slight downhills to get aero and conserve energy. Still, I must have been doing better than some people. Somewhere around mile 35, I picked up a tail and towed a very fit-looking young fellow on a cyclocross bike for about 5 miles before he peeled off at a rest stop. He expressed his appreciation but never offered to take a pull. The moral? Don't let any DF rider tell you that he can't get a draft off a recumbent.

At mile 50, I "had" to stop again. I needed pickle juice and a few minutes off the bike in front of the gasoline-powered cooling fan that was set up there. Corsa Ken showed up a few minutes later, and Steve Strada shortly after that.

Steve was looking strong and only stopped because we yelled at him. So strong, in fact, that when we headed out again, I could tell that I was holding him back. Once we got into the final stretch and the rollers, I admitted to him that I was cooked and that he shouldn't let me hold him back. He didn't. Meanwhile, I continued on in energy conservation mode, feeling every one of the days during June when I should have been riding and getting stronger... but hadn't.

And yet, as I was grinding my teeth and spinning my way up one climb, I passed a DF rider in a Rolling Stones jersey.

"Hey," he said. "I'll toss you a rope and you can pull me, okay?"

"Good luck with that," I told him, but I was thinking, Up yours. This Little Engine That Could is through towing roadies for the day. He passed me, but I caught him (and passed him) once we made the turn on to the smooth straight stretch leading to the high school. "No fair!" he called out, laughing. "You're coasting!"

I dug in and cranked it up to 23 mph, trying to bring my average up a tick from 18.9 to 19, but I never quite made it. That said, "nearly 19" is a new record for me at any distance, so I mark it as a good day. My heart rate monitor showed that I'd averaged 165 bpm (86% of my maximum) for the duration of the ride.

Special congratulations go out to dallasbikr, who finished 100K on a fixie with an 18+ average. Dude, you're sick!

It's okay, Mom

A time for Heroes

...and Chuck.

I've been seeing the amusing and slightly mysterious teases on NBC for the last week or so. Tonight I finally took the bait and wandered over to the www.chuckssecret.com web site to see what the deal is.

The fact that I'm now eagerly awaiting the Fall premier of this show probably reveals more about me than I'd like, but I can't wait. Based on the preview, Chuck looks like Get Smart meets Gotcha meets Clerks, with maybe a bit of The Office (if The Office took place in Best Buy and if it was funny).

Lost in translation

I'm often impressed with Google's language translation service. Sometimes, I'm amazed—but not by the accuracy of the results.

I've mentioned in passing that some of the work I'm doing involves Unicode support. Since I don't speak or write Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or any of the other language that requires characters outside the ISO-8859-1 code page character set, I've been tapping Google for some test data.

Sometimes the results are rather interesting, as in the case of this Arabic translation of a well-known children's rhyme:

ماري كان قليلا الحمل. عن ابتزاز الابيض الذي كان الثلج. في كل مكان ذهبت ماري، انالحملكان متأكداان نسلكه.

...which Google translates back to English as...

Mary had a little pregnancy.
The blackmail was Snow White.
Everywhere I went Mary, that the pregnancy was sure to go.

I know we're seen as infidels and all, but that spin seems just a bit cynical, even to me.

More disturbing, perhaps, is the fact that the phrase "I like monkeys because they taste like chicken" makes the round trip from English to Arabic and back with no problem.


Now playing: Spock's Beard, Snow

Ride report: RBENT club ride (Celina, TX)

On the RBENT forum, one of the members commented on his disappointment with the Mesquite Rodeo Ride, noting that one of his usual routes had better roads with less traffic, and he didn't have to pay to ride on them. One thing led to another, and before he knew it he had gotten roped into organizing a Saturday club ride showcasing 50+ miles of his favorite route.

It's been tricky finding time to ride during the past couple months, what with all the rain we've been having. As the date for the ride approached, we all watched the weather reports very carefully and hoped that we'd catch a break in the weather, and we did—sort of. There was no significant chance of rain in the forecast, and by 8am when we headed out from the quaint little town square at Celina, it was sunny with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. It was humid and was going to get hot, but I was slathered in sun block and carried nearly two liters of water, as well as a bottle of Accelerade. No problem.

We got our legs warmed up and before long were cranking along the wide shoulder of FM-289 at around 20 mph.

Mechanicals 1-3

About ten miles up the road, at Gunter, there was a problem. One of the DF (a.k.a., "normal bike") riders who had joined us had a flat. A couple people stayed back to help while the rest of us went on to wait at a convenience store a short distance up the road. And wait. And wait. (We later found out that he changed the first flat but didn't get the tube seated correctly and immediately flatted again.) While we were waiting, one of the guys noticed that his rear tire had a bulge. After some discussion, he decided it would be best to turn back.

Finally, we were back on the road, heading west along FM-121 toward Lake Ray Roberts. Traffic was a non issue, for once, as our route had been chosen expressly for its scenery and wide shoulders or low traffic.

Mechanical 4

We were enjoying the sun and the scenery when someone called out "FLAT!" We pulled off, and the victim set about replacing his punctured tube. Mrs. Strada and I stood baking in the sun while discussing the luck deficit that was developing, and the cruel twists of fate intertwined with a career as a professional bowler.

Finally, we... well, you get the idea. We turned south on FM-377 toward Pilot Point. More nice scenery and great company. As we entered Ray Roberts State Park and passed over a thin finger of the lake, we were all amazed at how high the water was. Last year's many exposed tree stumps were hidden, and the water level was into the canopies of trees that normally stand on the bank, well up from the usual water line. We wondered what we'd see when we crossed the dam, further on in our ride.

Mechanicals 5 and 6

About a mile from FM-455, where we'd turn and head west over the dam, I heard the dreaded "FSSSsssSSSsssSSSsss!" that signaled yet another puncture. This time, it was me. I called out "Mechanical!" and rolled into the parking lot next to a strip mall while there was still a little air in the tire. I think I pulled off the fastest tube change of the day, but maybe it only seemed that way because I was busy. Still, it was long enough for our bad luck to find another one of the DF riders, who broke his chain. I'm not sure how he managed to repair it, but he'd already headed back home by the time I finished changing my flat. Or maybe someone came and picked him up. I didn't find out about the problem until we were all back on the road.

We headed west on FM-455 toward the dam. By this time, we had spent so much time stopped by the side of the road that the heat had caught up with us. In the heat of summer, a successful ride is as much about staying on the move and completing the ride before it gets hot as it is about going the distance. The combination of heat, distance, and having to warm up our muscles after every repair stop was starting to wear on everyone, and our pace had slowed by a few miles per hour. Chip seal that hadn't seemed so bad in the early stages of the route was now drawing complaints from a couple of the riders who had lost their happy thoughts.

And then the remaining DF rider (see mechanicals 1 and 2) flatted.

Mechanicals 7 and 8

The poor guy. Mr. Strada stayed back with him while the rest of us rolled slowly on, in search of some shade. There was none.

A cell phone rang. It was Mr. Strada. "Um... we need a 700c tube. Does anyone have one?"

Most DF road bikes use 700cm rims, and so there's usually an abundance of spare tubes of the correct size. Unfortunately, on this day, the two other DF riders had had to turn back, and most of the remaining bikes were Bacchettas with dual 650cm wheels. Fortunately, one of the recumbents was of the big rear/little front wheel variety, and its rider pedaled back to donate his spare 700cm tube. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, but on a ride like the one we were having, the generosity of such a gesture was huge and was not lost on me.

Meanwhile, we waited, baking in the sun. We re-applied sun block. We finally decided that the best way to keep cool would be to keep moving, so we headed out at a leisurely pace across the dam. Halfway across, the cell phone rang. The flat was fixed and we were ready to move on. We returned to where the mechanics were waiting and were just about to roll out when...

"Damn," the DF rider said. "I just flatted again."

He hadn't even gotten back on the bike. Out of options, he found himself some shade to sit in and called the DF riders who'd turned back earlier to come and pick him up.

Denouement

We made it through the return trip without any further mechanical mishaps, but by this time everyone was dragging and feeling the effects of the heat. I continued to drink from my water bladder, but my breakfast was long gone and the snacks and energy gel hadn't done much to perk me up. Our pleasant ride was rapidly turning into an epic.

At Aubrey, we turned east on FM-428 for the home stretch back to Celina and a series of rolling and not-so-rolling hills. One of the guys, who normally rides a fast, sexy lowracer was having a tough time. "Anything less than a 20 mph average just isn't worth bringing the racer," he'd said earlier in the day. It was a decision he had come to regret, I suspect.

I was feeling a bit beaten down too, but I concentrated on pedaling in circles and remembering to drink often, all the while watching my average speed fall. When we rolled into the town square, my computer showed 60.17 miles. All it would take is a few leisurely laps up and down the lightly-traveled streets to complete two more miles and a full metric century—but I was done. I had developed a thousand-yard stare, and my legs felt rubbery. I needed air conditioning and food.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been a really fun ride (instead of a pleasant epic). The company was great, and it was fun riding with a bunch of fast recumbents, but the heat, the bad luck, and the fact that I really haven't been on the bike for a month made for a long day. I'll be ready to try it again when the rain stops and I've had a chance to get acclimated to the heat.

I'll bring more than my usual two spare tubes, however.

Long may she wave

• 3 half-inch screws - 30¢
  
• 3 lead screw anchors - 15¢
  
• 4 hours hammer drill rental from Home Depot - $41.75
  
• 5 minutes of my time (not counting the 45 minutes I spent trying to drill the first ¼" of the first hole in the brick and the 1½ hours spent running to and from Home Depot for drill rental) - FREE
• Seeing Old Glory flapping in front of the new house - Priceless

Happy Independence Day!

Teatro de los artes marcial

Wanna see something really funny? Catch some cheesy old Hong Kong chop-socky flick on Telemundo, dubbed in Spanish. Say, Invicible Armor, the synopsis of which reads, "Falsamente acusado de asesinato por un corrupto oficial, un hombre usa las artes marciales para limpiar su honor."

The truly disconcerting part is that I actually got the gist of it.

iMania

It was only as I was finding my way back here to begin this post that the irony of the previous post's title hit me. After two solid weeks of rain and one of the wettest springs in the state's history, Texas is anything but dry. Waterlogged, maybe.

I think we can safely declare that the past couple years' drought is safely over.

Anyway, with more storms in the forecast and after... um... sleeping a bit too late to get myself around in time to go riding with any of the local clubs, I'm planted in front of the TV, catching up with what's going on in the world.

The iPhone

I want to preface my remarks by noting that Apple's new superphone does look cool. I know that Bill has been salivating over this thing for months, and I expect Eric has been eyeing his new toy budget, as well.

BUT... I guess I'm not the gadget geek I used to be. I just don't get what's so special about a phone that plays music and has fancy scrolling graphics that people would feel compelled to camp out in long lines, in the rain, for a chance to buy one. Maybe I'm just cheap, because when I see all these ads touting phones that allow you to browse the web or watch TV shows from the comfort of your phone, all I can think is, "Wow. The air time for that must cost a bundle." So cheap that Turtle and I don't even spring for the extra $15/month that would allow us to make use of our camera phones.

Which leads me toward another rant about how devious it is to make camera or music phones cheap, but design them so that the only way of getting content on or off of them is to upload/download them using costly air time. But I'll resist the urge and move on.

In the news

Just when I had begun to think that Americans were starting to wise up, it looks like some of us have rediscovered the joys of frivolous litigation. When I heard about the recent $54 million (note: not $54M) lawsuit brought by a D.C. judge against a dry cleaner who misplaced a pair of his pants, I took it in stride. I view our nation's capital in much the same way as I do Hollywood, each being in its own way a sort of common sense black hole from which only ridiculousness can escape. [link]

The next story was about a woman who is suing Mars, the makers of Starburst fruit chews, claiming that, "about 3 chews and it literally locked my jaw… and it just literally pulled my jaw out of joint." [link]

Lady, you've been around long enough and have eaten enough candy to have experienced Sugar-Daddy, Tootsie Roll, and Laffy Taffy (i.e. "old-timer candy"). If you can't figure out that something like Starburst could be hazardous to your crowns, you probably should be required to wear a helmet when walking.

Literally.

Dry Spell Outlasts Dry Humor. Film at 11:00

I know, it's unconscionable to go as long as I have without posting, but while my current work situation doesn't provide much in the way of entertaining anecdotes, I'm pleased to report that I seem to have appeared on my boss's boss's radar. Is it presumptuous of me to dream that I might someday battle my way out of the cubicle and into an office again?

Maybe not, but I'm far too occupied with exceeding expectations (and getting noticed for it) to concern myself with that, just now.

Meanwhile...

I rediscovered some bicycling poetry I wrote a couple years ago. Since I can't seem to keep track of this stuff, I'm archiving it here.

There once was a C++ coder
Who was known for his powerful odor.
He said, "I commute
And it's hot out, to boot;
But my bike, she's content 'cause I rode 'er."

I'm a big fan of Harry Graham, so...

Willie up the hillside spun,
The price his burning hamstrings paid.
When halfway up he said, "I'm done."
Poor William didn't make the grade.

Willie on a bike of red
Bonked because he had no Gu.
He wore no helmet on his head,
And now he's dead: he bonked it too.

And a wee limerick...

There once was a man from Nantucket
Whose bike was so tough he could huck* it.
He rode off the edge
Of a very high ledge—
They retrieved his remains with a bucket.

* A mountain biking term meaning to... well, throw oneself off a cliff without a second thought, basically.

Ride report: Collin Classic (McKinney, TX)

The 16th Collin Classic was a very different ride from the 14th Collin Classic I first took part in, back in 2005. That one was beastly hot, the 50-something mile route was crazy with large-aggregate chip seal, and I was still suffering on a DF bike. After what seemed at the time like an ungodly amount of climbing, we had to battle up one of the vicious hills on the frontage road running south along US-75—only to arrive at McKinney High School to find that the Chipotle eats we'd been promised had been replaced with jelly sandwiches or rubbery hot dogs. Some people were irate because the t-shirts had run out, and they'd been given headsweats instead.

The Classic took a lot of knocks that year, and the ride director has since worked very hard to address the criticisms. In 2006, there was a lot less chip seal, the giant hill at the end had been deleted from the route, and there was pizza and fajita tacos for afters.

This year, the improvements to the 55-mile route (in fact, 53.72 miles) continued. There were still plenty of hills to climb, but I can't remember a ride route that had such a generous portion of smooth, well-maintained pavement. There was a small amount of chip seal, but it didn't feel particularly rough to me. Either it had been broken in, or running my tires a couple PSI softer this year helped. There was no wind to fight, and the heat wasn't too bad.

I had another very good day.

Mr. Strada, Corsa Ken, Mrs. Strada, and a boy named Foo.
(Photo courtesy of www.bicycle-stuff.com.)

I started off with The Stradas and Corsa Ken, but that didn't last more than 100 yards. Thanks to the crush of riders and a mechanical glitch involving Mrs. Strada's computer sensor, I quickly became separated from The Stradas. Not long after, I lost Ken as well. Without any social governor to keep my hammerhead wanna-be tendencies in check, I set about the business of passing... well, anyone between me and a vacant stretch of road. I hadn't started out feeling particularly spry, but my legs warmed up and the HRM showed an average around 160 bpm (not unreasonable, for me). By mile 30, the crowd had thinned slightly, and I pulled in to the rest stop to wait for the Stradas so we could regroup. When they arrived, we compared computer readings and found we'd been averaging 18.5 mph to that point.

A bit further down the road, Mrs. Strada took a spill at a railroad crossing and got banged up a bit. She's a trooper, though, and after taking a few minutes to clean her injuries, we were all back on the road. We all made it across the finish line at around 3 hours and 15 minutes, in plenty of time to chow down on questionable-looking (but muy delicioso) soft tacos filled with a mixture of eggs, potatoes, and some sort of meat-like substance that may or may not have been chicken.

It was in the cafeteria that I finally caught up with LanceNotStrong, Allez, and Allez's husband. I'd run into rcarlino before the ride, and he said Lance was looking for me, but I never was able to spot their group during the ride. I took the opportunity to interrupt their conversation for a few minutes before leaving them to analyze the contents of their tacos.

Notwithstanding my glowing review of the Wild Ride, the 16th Collin Classic might have replaced it as my best for-pay ride experience of this season, if the route had been about 10 miles longer and if I'd spent less time separated from my riding buddies. As it is, I'm pretty pleased at having finished a ride of that length, with hills, with an 18.1 mph rolling average.

On the juice

Lest any of you be tempted to suspect that I'm kidding about the pickle juice that's become increasingly popular with cyclists over the last year or so, I present Exhibit A.

Or maybe Exhibit P. Or D. Just... look at the picture.

I know what you're thinking, because I thought the same thing: "Eww. Nasty." And yes, all else being equal, you won't catch me lounging in front of the TV, sipping this stuff after a hard day at work. That's what a nice, cold dunkelweisen is for.

On the other hand, when I'm 40 miles into a hilly bike ride and sweating like a pig, this stuff is a real picker-upper. Still doesn't taste great... but better.

Meanwhile...

I found this on my camera while retrieving the picture of the pickle juice. Turtle's out of town for the weekend and may enjoy this shot of her baby girl.

Ride report: Mesquite Rodeo Ride (Mesquite, TX)

I've been back on the bike and participating in charity rallies since 2004, but I had never tried the Mesquite Rodeo Bike Ride before. At the urging of the Stradas and a couple of DF buddies from the Plano club, I signed myself up for the 56-mile course. Turtle signed up for the 20.

It takes the two of us a bit longer than most to get our collective show on the road and to get unloaded and set up, so we arrived at the Resistol arena (or Mesquite Convention Center... whatever) at around 7am. As a result, we got a prime handicap parking spot next to the hotel and set about setting up her handcycle and my bike. And then we waited, watching for the RBENT bunch we were supposed to meet. And waited. By a few minutes before 8:00, Turtle had returned from her pre-ride pit stop, and we still hadn't seen a single familiar face on a recumbent. I later learned that this was because everyone else had parked on the complete opposite side of the convention center.

But no matter. With a few minutes to spare, we made our way to the starting pack where we got Turtle introduced to a couple RBENT folks doing the short route, and I hooked up with my bunch. The start was... awkward. Fred Flintstoning it up a grade to start on a wet street with a bunch of high-strung DF riders is not the ideal way to begin a ride, but we managed and set about picking our way through the pack toward clear air. The Stradas and I quickly got separated from the rest of our group.

Early on, I was impressed with the traffic control, not only for the motorists but also in the way that we cyclists were funneled to where we needed to be by means of liberal application of road cones. Sure, it made things a little dodgy having to at the same time avoid cones knocked over by inattentive riders and greasy-looking puddles on the streets—but there were half a dozen intersections and lane transitions that would have been much less safe without them. Route layout and intersection were, with few exceptions, better than for the Wild Ride, and that's saying something. I thought the route was a nice mix of urban and country riding, and while I could have done without some of the teeth-rattling, multiply-patched sections of pavement, sometimes that's just the price you pay for beautiful scenery and the not-entirely-unpleasant tang of cow poo in your nostrils.

Photos Copyright © 2007 by flyinglazboy

The route was, at once, less hilly than I'd heard in the past and more hilly than more recent reports had led me to believe. Maybe it was just that I was having an off day (or feeling the effects of not having ridden in nearly two weeks), but it seemed like we did an awful lot of climbing for the less than 1500 feet of elevation gain the ride is supposed to have. But it was all good, and the best part is that instead of getting smacked by the thunderstorms that were predicted, we got a nice, sunny day.

And Blue Bell ice cream for afters.

I kind of wish that there had been a chance to log my sixth metric century (100 km = about 62.5 miles) of the year, but given that I thought I might have to downshift to one of the shorter routes because of the weather, 56 miles and change is just fine. Motorists were sharing the road nicely (except the woman who nearly dislocated her shoulder rolling down her window to spit and scream obscenities at us), we didn't have any unpleasant encounters with racer boys, and the company couldn't have been better. Unless...

Nah. Scratch that. I don't know if Jessica Alba even knows how to ride a bike.

Wherefore art thou, muse?

I remember now: I have this blog thingy where I used to post my internal dialogue for the... well, entertainment might be too charitable a word. Amusement, perhaps.

Around 3:30 this morning, I finally gave in to concerns about lawn care that had been milling around in my head and keeping me awake. I crept out of bed and went to my office to look up some information about thatch control and core aeration, but I ended up playing around on Flickr. It's fortunate that web sites don't literally collect dust, but I could tell that it had been a while since I'd been on that site. As if it weren't bad enough that I haven't really uploaded much of anything since Turtle's and my Caribbean cruise last year, I also had a couple buddy requests (or something like that) in my in box.

I didn't even know I had an in box on Flickr.

Anyway, I discovered a new "blog this" feature that allows you to, with the click of a button, add many of the photos on Flickr as a blog posting. Even more exciting, this actually does work with the new and super handy (here's a tissue, in case any of that sarcasm dripped on your shoes) Blogger Beta. I promptly blogged a couple photos I found particularly interesting so that you could enjoy them too.

That lasted about as long as it took for me to get to work, have a cup of coffee, and pause to wonder about the copyright implications of my actions. Sure enough, "The Jimmer's" photos were marked "All rights reserved", so despite the fact that he (or she) hadn't disabled my ability to use the "blog this" button, I felt my only correct options were to either take down the images from my blog, or go through the whole process of contacting the photographer to ask his permission to display his (or her) work.

Frankly, that's just too much effort to go through just for an image of a dilapidated shack with a TV with the screen shot out in the front yard. Even if my alternate title was going to be "The Presley Homestead".

Meanwhile

I've been trying to take Tink's recent challenge to heart and return to noticing all the strange little things going on in the world around me.

• The beefy, early-middle-aged guy in the booth across from us at Chili's. The tribal armband tattoo was kind of cool. The spider web encircling the point of his elbow wasn't something I would have chosen—but then, part of the reason I don't have one is that I could never think of a design that represented something integral enough to Who I Am that I'd want to wear it for the rest of my life.
  
  Which brings me to the four-inch high "KISS" plastered across his bicep. Now, I can almost understand someone getting a tattoo of the Grateful Dead's iconic skull. For their fans, it's not just a band; it's a way of life. But KISS? Sure, I have a couple of their earlier albums (one within arm's reach), from before they got old and fat and couldn't carry off the whole rock-gods-in-makeup thing any more. But come on. Bands come and go.
  
  I bet the poor guy sees that tattoo in the mirror and wonders what he was thinking. Or worse, maybe he doesn't.
  
  
• Speaking of rocking out, I actually got on my desktop computer at home the other day and rediscovered the pile of MP3s I have on it. It occurred to me that it might be nice to put together some driving music to listen to during my commutes, now that I have a CD player in the car. The result? Commuter Sampler - Vol. 1.
  
  You'd think that I'd use lots of soothing ambient music and drowsy Rachmaninov... stuff. Nope. It's all high octane stuff. Counterintuitively, it helps my mood during my commutes, perhaps because I'm so busy howling along with Queens of the Stone Age's "No One Knows" or Dwight Yoakum's "Fast As You" that I can't be bothered to get pissed off when the dozenth butthead cuts me off without signaling. Or maybe there just aren't that many people willing to cut off the insane guy while he's yelling at his windshield.
  

Cut off

If it weren't for the fact that Blogger is a free service, I'd start to suspect that I'd forgotten to pay my blog bill. Sometime during the past few weeks, I've stopped receiving notifications about comments left by anyone who's logged in to Google. That means I get notices when rcarlino leaves a comment—anonymous, technically, since he's not logged in, but not really, since he leaves his handle—but never know when anyone else does.

Right about the time Emma Sometimes pointed out that one of my posts had got the comment link turned off, I noticed that other posts had received comments I didn't know were there. And here I thought I was just boring you all.

Are the rest of you having this problem, or am I getting the VIP treatment?

Meanwhile...

I wish I had more entertaining things to tell you about, but there's not much going on but work.

I'm overdue for a trip to Costco, so maybe something weird and blogworthy will come of that.

This morning, I saw three ducks foraging in the ground cover landscaping outside the big city building where I work. They were the tame white ones, and I have no idea where they might have come from.

Yep. I'm coming up dry, so in parting just let me share this thought with you: Я имеют жить форель в моем нижнего белья.

Ride report: Richardson Wild Ride (Richardson, TX)

For most of the early part of this year, I was focused on training and raising money for my MS 150 ride, but today Turtle and I took part in our first charity ride of the year.


The Richardson Wild Ride benefits the Richardson Regional Cancer Center and is held in conjunction with the Wildflower Arts and Music Festival each May. I rode in the rally two years ago, before I made the switch from my Trek 1500 road bike to the recumbent. That year, the weather was sunny and surprised a lot of us with a high temperature in the upper 90s. I went out fast with the long riders, bonked hard before the second rest stop, and barely managed to limp back to the finish for 40 miles. Still, what I'd seen of the event impressed me, and I was eager to see how things looked from the seat of my recumbent this year.

When we rolled out of bed at 5:20 this morning, I heard rain pounding on the roof. I groaned inwardly, because Turtle has a history of having to skip rides because of bad weather, and she was really looking forward to this one. But a quick check of the weather radar revealed that the rain was much lighter elsewhere and would likely pass through before the start of the ride. We continued our preparations, and by 6:30 the rain had stopped. At 8:00, when the ride started, the streets were still damp and puddly in spots, but we weren't getting rained on. And it was cool. Oh bliss!

Squirrel Bait—or as she has officially requested to be addressed, "Squirrelly Girl"—was there too, and we planned to start at the rear of the pack with Turtle so that we could ride out with her. Turtle was headed out to do the 16-mile route on her handcycle; SG and I would ride together as far as the second rest stop, which was the turnaround for the 40-mile route. I'd decide at that point whether to return with her or continue on the 64-mile route.

Starting at the back, we knew that we'd have to fight our way up through the slower riders, but by 15 miles the pack had thinned out a bit. When we go to rest stop 2, SG stuck to her plan and continued on the 40-mile route. I was feeling strong and headed into the hills to the east of Lake Lavon to bag my 5th metric century for the year.

At rest stop 3, I pulled in for a snack and a potty break, and I was pleased to see Mr. & Mrs P, a couple friends I'd met on a previous ride were standing next to their brand new, fire engine red Bacchetta Stradas. We rode on together, forming our own little pace line and having a ball.

See, one of the things about recumbents is that our ride rhythm is a bit different than wedgies. We tend to descend faster, while the wedgies are riding their brakes. Since we have to work harder on climbs, we prefer to fly down hills and use the momentum to reduce the amount of work we have to put into a following climb. So I often find myself penned in behind a glob of wedgies, losing all my momentum and then having to work my tail off on the following climb because the wedgies don't even start climbing until they absolutely have to.

It was quite relaxing to ride with a couple people whose rhythms and ability level were similar, so no one had to wait up for anyone else. And we got some strange looks from our fellow riders along the way, including a priceless moment during a climb when we passed a line of wedgies. On the way down the hill following the climb, MrsP rolled up next to me.

"Did you hear that?" she asked. I hadn't, so she explained. "I didn't get all of it, but one of the women in that group we just passed said something about us passing them, and one of the guys told her, 'Don't worry. They won't be able to keep it up for long.'"

They were right, of course. Once we got out of the rolling hills, we did ease the pace to 17 mph or so, but we never did see that group again. I guess they couldn't keep up our pace for long either.

When we arrived at the finish, we thought it would be neat to line up across the road, side by side, so the event photographer would get a shot of the three of us together. At least, until we discovered that there was no even photographer at the finish line this year. Ah well. We just consoled ourselves by sitting under a tree with Turtle, Sarah, and CliffyB while noshing on cold cheese pizza.

And the sun came out. It was a very good day and among the most fun of the rallies I've ridden during the past few years.

In terms of the ride organization itself, it's the about the best I've ever seen, from registration and packet pick up, to parking direction, to staging at the start. The rest stops are not as extravagant as some, but when you get to the finish, it's pizza and beverages galore. Traffic control on this ride is outstanding from beginning to end, with peace officers controlling most intersections and volunteer flagmen on some of the busier streets to make sure riders make needed lane changes in time. The only possible down side is that riders can become complacent and ride right through un-controlled intersections, assuming that they have right-of-way—but that's absolutely not the fault of the organizers. Another knock peculiar to Turtle's situation is that they hadn't provided a single handicap-accessible porta-john. She was pretty hot about that, but the ride director made it right, comping Turtle's ride fees for both this year and next year's ride, as well as giving his heartfelt promise that the oversight would not be repeated next year.

Thus making the Richardson Wild Ride one of the premier rallies in North Texas.

Just... a little while... longer

Just another couple days and I should get part of my life back. Brain cells and fingers left idle in the wake of my indentured web servitude... [sob] ...well, the mind bloggles at the possibilities.

In the meantime, check out this funky (in the words of the photographer) shot of the bunch of us waiting to roll out on the first day of the MS 150. I think it's rad.



...and one of my favorite shots from the whole weekend: Turtle congratulating me after I came across the finish line.

Copyright © 2007 Cessna395

Now playing: Drivin' and Cryin', Fly Me Courageous

The long and winding road

We've all heard the expression "as the crow flies", right? Well, it has nothing whatsoever to do with this past weekend's MS 150. If one were to pop up a map on Google or MapQuest or Yahoo!, he (or she) might be inclined to observe that there's no way the distance between Frisco and Ft. Worth adds up to 150 miles. I'm here to tell you that there most certainly is—if you take the scenic route.

Such a scenic route would include little-known dots on the map, such as Rhome and Dido. It would pass through the sleepy environs of Prosper and Ponder and Krum (but not quite Krugerville). It would cross Lake Ray Roberts and Eagle Mountain Lake. There would be an abundance of wildflowers and longhorn cattle and people waving from lawn chairs in their front yards.

There would be wind and rain on the first day, and long steep hills (and more wind) on the second. And at the end, there would be friends and family, some jumping up and down, some waving from their wheelchairs—but all cheering their faces off. There would be a jumpin' band playing, and tents with Cajun food and liquid carbohydrate replenishment.

And sore muscles. And a sort of vague sense of joy, not so much because the headwinds and hills were over, but because of a sense of having accomplished something for a worthy cause, in the names of others who could not do so for themselves.

We had a freakin' blast, wind and rain be damned.

Postus Scriptum

It has been brought to my attention that there was no comment link at the end of this posting, and sure enough when I looked I found that comments and backlinks were disabled. I didn't do it intentionally, so maybe Blogger burped. Or they've helpfully changed my defaults.

Foo needs...

No one actually tagged me, but Gwynne posted this meme, and I thought it would be fun. Go to Google and type in your name, followed by the word "needs."

• Foo needs a Bar to do some or all of it's work. You'll get no argument from me. However, I do object to your misuse of punctuation, as well as being reduced to an 'it'.
• Foo needs to actually perform, say in certain cases First only, in others Second only, in others yet, First then Second (if Foo never needs to call Second before, and First after, on its argument, then its unit-tests will not exercise that path). Your lips move, but I can't hear what you say.
• Foo$ needs. You've got that a little backwards. It's "Foo needs $."
• Foo needs to be abstract. Now you're just stating the obvious.
• External callers will have no idea that Foo needs swapped arguments. Maybe, but I find that having any kind of conversation with a telemarketer is rather like talking to a brick wall.
• Foo needs lots of extra page reads. Because it feels good to be needed.
• Foo needs to know how to provide a Bar. Look... if you let me know you're coming, I'll have some Shiner Bock on ice. If you want something with fruit or an umbrella, consult a professional.
• Foo needs to be shared between multiple components. Forget it. I'm, like, totally monogamous.
• Foo needs a stronger incentive. I said FORGET. IT.
• Foo needs to be foo. What else can I be but who I am?
• silly-foo-needs-meme.html — mumble mumble I resemble that remark.

I could go on, but I have things to do. Love ya... buh-bye.

T-minus three days...

Well, more or less. I could probably geek out and embed a sly little niblet of JavaScript into this post to accurately count down the hours until the Dallas/Foat Wuth MS 150's Saturday morning launch time. I could... if I weren't so dadburned busy.

Tightened deadlines and paring of the development staff at work means I hit the ground running every day and don't slow down until I've put in my 9½ hours. I'm not looking for sympathy. Save that for the folks who got the pink slips. All I'm saying is that some very prime blogging time is being utilized more productively than in the past.

When I'm not at work, I'm doing homeowner stuff and handling the conscripted webmaster duties for all the Ride of Silence organizers who have waited until the last couple weeks to submit their event information. That won't let up until after May 16.

But I'm still here, and I haven't closed up shop. I've actually had a few things I felt were interesting enough to post about, but I got to work, got busy, and by the time I was in a position to post again, I... uh... what was I saying?

My neck's back to what passes for normal in my (wait for it) neck of the woods. The legs are strong and ready to roll. I still need to give my bike and gear a final going-over, but it's supposed to rain for the next couple days, so I have time.

As long as the weather behaves itself, it's going to be a great weekend. The troops—Turtle and assorted other family and well-wishers—all have their marching orders and will be busy getting us riders where we need to go before heading out to the lunch stop to help make sammiches. To top it all off, we received our cool team jerseys from a generous benefactor. Sweet, no?

Besides looking cool, there's a bit of symbolism in the design. Red, if not the MS Society's official color, sure does show up on a lot of little rubber bracelets and on the Champions of MS bandannas. I'm told by people who actually have luck to test that black chips are $100, and green chips are $25. So the chips on the front of the jersey total $150. I hope I don't have to explain why that's a significant number.

On the back, four playing cards bear the faces of the five friends and loved ones for whom we're riding. I think that's the coolest part of the design, and it's kind of a shame that it won't be visible while I'm riding because I'm basically lying on my back.

Finally, I want to thank those of you who have sponsored me in this endeavor. My blogger friends have made up the bulk of my contributors, and I find that pretty darned amazing.