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Sunday Jay, Paul, and I did the CRW Climb to the Clouds ride, which goes
up Mt. Wachusett and around the Wachusett Reservoir. I last did that
ride back in 2003 on my hybrid.
It was my third century of the year, and is part of the rhythm of my
prep for this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge. Two weeks ago I extended the
Quad Cycles no-drop ride to
Harvard into a century. This week (two weeks later)
I did CttC. And two weeks from now is the PMC.
You couldn’t have asked for better weather, and Jay and Paul are
virtually equally matched with me in terms of riding pace, which really
helped. We started an hour late and took a couple extended rest breaks,
so we were toward the end of the pack, but we were in no particular
hurry.
This year the ride wasn’t allowed within the
mountain’s park gate due to damage from last
winter’s ice storms, but the ride up Mile Hill Road is actually
more challenging than the last bit inside the park, so it was still a
major workout: much more difficult than the PMC’s route will
be.
Jay grew up in that area, but has always come up from the opposite
direction; doing the climb via the CttC route was something he dreamed
he might someday do when he was really in shape. I’m happy to say he
made it just fine, and it’s quite an accomplishment for anyone!
I will say that the ride had the same support failures that the
CRW has become known for. We went off-track for five miles or so thanks
to a missed turn, and we never found at least two of the water stops.
On the positive side, my bike held together, which I consider no small
miracle. I’ve had my bike in the shop for most of the past two weeks,
and the ridiculous misadventures I’ve had due to the bike shop’s
incompetence are fodder for another (lengthier) post. But she held
together (with superglue, zip-ties, and strapping tape—no
exaggeration) and did an admirable job getting me up and over what is
possibly the hilliest ride I’ve ever done.
Next up: more bike shop shenanigans, a leisurely ride with friends
around Cape Ann, and my final training rides before this year’s PMC!
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This weekend while I was at the farmer's market I discovered that my favorite local pickle people, Happy Girl Kitchen Co., offer workshops on pickling and preserving in Oakland. How cool is that? There's one on pickles, one on fermented goodies (sauerkraut and kimchi), and one all about preserving and doing tasty things with heirloom tomatoes. I want to go to all of them, of course, but that's not financially feasible, so I've decided to go to the tomato workshop since preserving tomatoes is what I have the least experience with. Plus you get to learn how to make their delicious salsa and tomato juice!
Is anyone else interested? I was thinking of signing up for the August 2nd workshop since I'm all excited and stuff and that's the soonest one that's still got space, but I could be persuaded to sign up for a later one if other folks want to go together on another date. Or if anyone decides to go to one of the others, maybe we could get together sometime afterward to share what we've learned.
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Originally published at Elliot's Blog. You can comment here or there. Had a lot of fun last night at the Raleigh Wars Assassin’s Ball. Posted photos from last night’s Assassin’s Ball.
Winning trophy
My prize for 3rd most kills
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Why?
Originally uploaded by lunchbreath.
This doesn't sound like anyone you know, does it? :) I actually stumbled across this a couple weeks ago, but was reminded of it just now because I'm buying yet another bag. As a companion to the new bag I acquired last week. Which is a larger version of a bag I already own. And yes, I need all of them! In my defense, I did sell a bunch of old messenger bags and backpacks I wasn't using, but that was mostly just to make room for the new bags. ( Bag Inventory )
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The idea has got some practical matters to sort out, but it's got a lot of potential: Bike Powered Buses.
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Just wanted to let everyone know, that a new version of MemcacheD has been released. We will be rolling this out to the memcache nodes during the week of July 20th to 24th. This should have very little impact on the stability of the website; however users may see a slight increase in load times as the cache is re-populated with entries.
The software has been tested and verified to be working just fine with the application; so we perceive this to be a very minimal risk in regards to updating, and the stability of the website.
Thanks...
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Thursday, July 23 I (aka, flushio=0) am playing as part of the 919noise showcase at Nighlight
It's been a while since I've played in public, so I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do yet. But I'll figure something out.
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My personal domain is hosted with google. I finally got tired of being a mail admin and fighting the hackers, spam, security patches, needy users (myself), etc... So I opted for google since it was free, I mostly use my domain for public email lists anyway, and they have some neat services I wanted like a calendar.
Now, while my email is hosted at google, I rarely use the web interface. I prefer to use clients such as Evolution, or the mail app on my iphone. Why Evolution? Well it has fairly decent imap support, integrated contacts and calendar, with ability to sync those with remote sites.
So, google calendar in Evolution. Easy right? Eh, sortof. Evolution as shipped in F11 has a half-baked Google backend for syncing calendar and contacts and stuff. Don't use it. Instead use the much more mature CalDav support to connect to your google calendar. This means you'll have to enter in some URLs manually, but oh well.
It's the manual URLs that are the fun part, particularly with hosted sites at google. Not much documentation exists for what the URL format should be. But I googled around a bit and figured it out. To enable your google calendar in Evolution:
1) Go to Calendars tab in the left pane.
2) Click File -> New -> Calendar
3) Change the type to CalDAV
4) Name it whatever you ant
5) Pick a color for the bike shed
6) Choose to copy contents offline if you want (I do)
7) Choose to make this your default calendar (I did)
8) Put in the url for your calendar. This is the fun part. For your hosted domain you should have one default calendar for your login. If you just want to use that calendar that's easy. The URL would be:
caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/email@address/events/ It seems the trailing slash is VERY important. Lost a bit of time to that one.
Be sure to use your entire email address, user@domain.foo. See below for using multiple calendars or a calendar other than your default one.
9) MAKE SURE "Use SSL" IS CHECKED
10) Put in your username. Again this is your full address.
11) pick a refresh rate and you're done.
You should get a login box once you've hit OK and this is the password for your user account.
Now, what about multiple calendars? You can have more than just one in google calendar, as well you can sync more than just one in Evolution. The settings are the same except for the URL and for that you actually have to log into google to find.
First log into your hosted site and click on Calendar. Then click on Settings in the upper right corner. Then click on Calendars within the settings box. Then click on the calendar you want to sync with. Near the bottom there is a section marked "Calendar Address" and it is here, in parentheses you'll find the Calender ID. It'll look like a bunch of soup, something like j2solutions.net_3p1f0ub33hzegvd9dx4qpcs64s@group.calendar.google.com. (I've changed my ID here to protect my innocence). It's best to just copy this string of text.
Now that you have the ID of the next calendar you want to sync, you can go through the same steps above for adding a calendar, only now the url would be: caldav://www.google.com/calendar/dav/calenderid/events/ . Replace calenderid with your calendar ID fetched from above. Be sure to pick a different color too!
Now you should be setup for handling multiple calenders in your hosted google site via Evolution. Have fun!
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I'm a calendar junky. If it's not on my calendar (and synced to my evolution and my iphone) I likely will forget about it. That's why it was important for me to figure out how to get my google calendar shared by both iPhone and Evolution so that I can make changes at any of those three points and have all there kept in sync easily. I'll detail that arrangement for anybody that would like it.
John Poelstra has done great work for getting a schedule in place for Fedora. Part of that work is producing .ical files for the various different task lists. See http://poelstra.fedorapeople.org/schedules/f-12/ for all that is available.
Given my capacity to forget dates, I wanted to import the .ical file for Release Engineering tasks into my google calendar. This turned out to be far harder than it needed to be, mostly because of how .ical is a fairly loose standard and no two producers/consumers shall agree. Every time I attempted to import or the .ical file I wound up with odd timezone issues and events spanning multiple days. Turns out that Zimbra reads X-MICROSOFT-CDO-ALLDAYEVENT:TRUE while google doesn't, so google was going by the timestamps on the events, offsetting the UTC for my Pacific timezone and generally making a mess of it.
Of course, I couldn't just find what Google wanted to see, searching for terms that involve google is not exactly easy. What I wound up doing was creating a test calendar in google, adding an event that was an all day event, exporting that as a .ical file and reading what it wrote. BINGO! Seems that in order to accomplish an all day event in google calendar parlance, you just have DTSTART and DTEND be just dates, without any time attached. Once I had that info, it was easy to sed the .ics file from John to strip the time parts out of the events (since all the events are listed as all day events) and then I had an .ics file that imported nicely into google. John says he'll look at doing the sed himself when creating the .ics files since he already has to post-process them out of TaskJuggler.
Lessons learned:
1) When testing importing events to your google calendar, do create a scratch calendar to test with. Deleting 40 some odd events by hand was not fun :/
2) When in doubt of an expected format, generate said format from the tool itself to get an idea of what it would like.
3) TaskJuggler can do neat things, but ZOMG does it have a learning curve. I wasted two hours or so trying to figure out how times and dates were set thinking that the .ics was getting generated incorrectly, and I still don't really know how it does things. I just backed away slowly and went on with "ok, just fix the .ics manually after the fact" route.
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How competive is CD 13 compared to other districts?
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Sunday my buddy Jay dragged a bunch of us out to the Old Rhinebeck
Aerodrome for their 50th anniversary airshow. They’ve got a collection
of a couple dozen antique flying machines, plus a few automobiles and
miscellanea from the early 20th century.
I’m not going to launch into a huge writeup; instead, I’ll just point
you at my Old Rhinebeck photo set, of which the following are just a
small subset.
The one thing I will mention is the 10-minute ride we took in a 1929
biplane, which was pretty superlative. I brought my GPS and recorded our
flight path, which you can see here (sadly sans altitude data). We went
10.5 miles, taking off and
landing around 60 mph at 345’ and maxing out at 82 mph and 1225’, which
would be 880’ above ground level.
On the descent, I was even able to fire off a quick status update to
Twitter and Facebook: aloft aboard an 80 year old biplane. HALP!
All in all, it was an excellent trip, providing a dash of adventure,
contact with friends, plenty of sunshine, and lots of awesome photo
opportunities.
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Over the years, I’ve been a gamer of various sorts. But my first love, before all this fancy computer stuff, was TSR’s Dungeon’s and Dragons. Not the Advanced stuff, but the original red-box-only-goes-to-level -3 Basic Set. And the Blue you-want-more-levels?-ok-here’s-levels-4-to-14 Expert Set.
And yes, I “graduated” to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (back in the day when Cthulhu was still in Deities & Demigods), and was so disgusted by 2nd Edition that I gave it up. Well, gave up D&D - I’ve since played and ran World of Darkness games, messed with GURPs, explored single player computer RPGS, been hooked on the crack that is MMORPGs, Final Fantasied it up, and so forth.
But the call is still there. Tabletop. Old-school, as it were. And 4th Edition D&D looks so…enticing. Shiny in all the right places and all the problems with 2nd edition are long gone and 3&3.5 got such good reviews….
And my kids are about the right age - well, R is, anyway. J may have a few more years to go.
So I’m going to pick up the core rules. And plan out an adventure. Maybe just a couple of one-shot single session deals to get a feel for it.
You know, ease back into it.
The only problem? Scheduling. I’ve got the kids every other week, and with school starting back up in a few weeks (already?!), I’m tethered to the house those nights. Leaving these questions :
Maybe one week at our place, one week at someone else’s?
Do I use an online tool like OpenRPG?
What night? I have to keep Wednesdays free, for sure. And sometimes Tuesdays. Sundays? Mondays?
I mean, how does one schedule these things anymore?
Originally published at sonney.com. You can comment here or there.
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Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On the way back in from the ride today in Lexington, I had a run-in with a car. It was the intersection of 4/225 and Mass Ave (right by Wilson Farms). The driver of a large pickup truck was pulling out to make a left turn and we were moving along Mass Ave. There were six of us, all in bright green and blue. He stopped and then started to pull out again and then stopped again. I wasn’t sure if he was going to keep going at that point or stop. Scott managed to get around the front, but I basically aimed for the softest landing I could.
That landing, as it turned out, was slowing a lot, hitting the front wheel against the front corner panel/bumper and then somehow bouncing back off the hood (I somewhat remember my hands pushing off the hood) and landing on my feet. Unfortunately, in the process, I managed to chip two of my front teeth.
911 was called and Lexington’s emergency services were very quick to arrive with a fire truck, a paramedic, an ambulance, and a police officer. After landing on my feet, I stayed on the ground for a minute or two to make sure all was okay and then moved to the curb. As the paramedics came over, I was pretty sure I was okay and eventually just did the “refused service” with the ambulance. They looked and didn’t see any protrusion or obvious things other than the chipped teeth.
The officer was very nice and took my information. Apparently he’s citing the driver. I have all of the driver’s information and plan to follow up with his insurance before long.
The bike was ridable for the 2 miles to the shop, but the frame is shot — there’s a huge bend in the top tube and in addition, the rear shifter is destroyed. Pictures in the future. As far as the truck — not sure if there was any damage; I kind of doubt it.
All in all, it could have been a lot worse. At this point, the worst pain is that my teeth are a bit sensitive and eating promises to be exciting as I can’t really use my front teeth. I’ve got a small scrape below my right knee and a little bit of soreness in my left knee and my right elbow, but I’ve already started the ibuprofin for those. And I’ve spoken with a dentist and he said it sounds like nothing that needs immediate attention, so I’m to call him first thing Monday morning.
The driver’s insurance should, especially given the citation, cover the dental work as well as the bike work and hopefully without a fight, but I’ve already put in the first contact to a local lawyer who specializes in bike accidents. Good guy and former president of MassBike and also previously helped Kate in an accident.
Witnesses included Scott, Jen, Barb, Brian and Suraffel.
And now, I’m starving, so I’m going to go find some food to cut up into tiny pieces and chew in the back of my mouth. I’m intending to go out tomorrow on the Merlin to unwind a bit and still am planning on doing Seacoast Safari next weekend. And I’m still looking for people to support me on that ride. Hopefully by then with intact teeth!
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So, Pandemonium Books & Games acquired Your Move Games in Davis Square this week. People have had a lot of questions, and so I am repeating here with answers. :)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Whaaaa?!?!?
A: Yeah, we're a little surprised too.
Q: When did this happen?
( Well, let me tell you... )
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More words! You know how to play the game.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) regyt associates me with squee, singing, leather, authority, & comfort.
Squee - I am often to be found in a state of squee. This is what comes of being pleased and delighted by so very many things in the world. Entries at the Urban Dictionary describe squee as the cry of the overexcited fangirl, and Wikipedia defines it as "a term to express cute overload." While some of my squee is indeed fangirl-related, and some of it is a reaction to things what are severely cute, that's not the full extent of it; it can be delighted excitement over just about anything. I decided last night that it's a portmanteau of "squeak" and "glee," but squee isn't always a noise. Squee is a state of being.
( Four more )
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On their free wireless, have a captive portal that connects you to the online catalog when you first open up the browser. No auth or other pain in the ass stuff, just make it so the first page you hit when you open a browser is the catalog.
BONUS POINTS: mobile device specific version for iphones.
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New revision of the card. No big differences except for the slide now includes useful info printed on it, and the instructions go onto the part of the card that doesn't get used.
Paper with a pattern on top, and white on the back seems to work best for engraving. This was cut on the Epilog laser cutter.
Lots of adjustments trying to get things to fold up nicely with the different papers.
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I blame Kay of The Dorsai Irregulars for this one, since she mixed it. OK, in all honesty, I’d also like to THANK her for it as well, since it’s not only delicious, it takes two of my favorite things and puts them together in one glass.
2.5 oz Gin (the good stuff, not the cheap stuff)
1 oz Absinthe
Shake lightly with ice, and pour into chilled martini glass. Requires no garnish.
By the way - any Con with the Dorsai as security staff will be one of the BEST cons you attend. At least that’s been my experience.
Originally published at sonney.com. You can comment here or there.
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My second Summer session class, Folktale in the Modern World, started today. There was an administrative snafu with my Summer schedule that ended up with me having to sign up for a class I didn't really want to take, then an enrollment snafu that actually allowed me to ditch my entire schedule, including the unwanted class, and register for the two most interesting classes that were still open: Sociology of Culture and this. And boy is it ever interesting! I've been pretty excited about it since I signed up for it, but I've been positively a-squee since I got the syllabus yesterday, and class today only added to my excitement. The topics we will cover over the next 6 weeks: - History of Marvels
- The Body Marvelous & the Body Monstrous
- Mutations & Transformations
- Fascinating Deviance: Cannibals & Serial Killers
- Pathologies of Place
- Pathologies of Race & Sex
- Monstrous Intersections, Bodily Penetrations, & Intrusions
The required texts (two of which I picked up at the comic shop): In addition to the core reading list above, we have a huge selection of recommended readings and viewings from which to choose for essays, including works by A.S. Byatt, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood; films like The Fly, Fight Club, Princess Mononoke, and Romero's Night of the Living Dead; and for the last week of class, "the alien abduction/impregnation film of your choice." This class is going to be awesome. My classmates are an interesting bunch. There are a few folks who seem as excited as I am about the material, and one very adorable shiny new transfer student who's looking to make friends, and (as always) some people I'm going to have to choose to be entertained rather than annoyed by if I'm going to survive the next 6 weeks. The instructor is kind of insane, but it's not yet clear whether it's the endearing sort of insane or the annoying sort of insane. I'm hoping it's the former, but even if it's the latter, I think I'll be able to deal.
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happy![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
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excited