Experiment 20090526, Part I: The Excuse
May3
First: I’m late. I know I’m late. I can’t do anything about being late.
My excuse: got home and had to immediately start helping my wife put up the new roof on the bunny pens. Yes, we have some bunnies. This project took us until around 10, which normally would be when I’m just starting to feel programmatically creative, however, I also logged 32 miles commuting to work on bicycle yesterday. So I was exhausted.
16 Miles on a bike: New Hartford to Farmington
May0
An approximation of my route.
I’ve been building up to this day for a few weeks. The road has been rocky, both literally and figuratively. Litterally because I’ve incorporated the Farmington River Trail into my journey, and there are stretches of gravel and a few little rocks here and there. Figuratively, because I’ve had 2 blow outs in that short amount of time.
But no more! Last week, I went to Torrington Cycle and fitness and got my bike upgraded to some hybrid tires that are more puncture resistant and new tubes, as well as a new set of brakes on the front (I had no front brakes this year or last). Man, these tires sure made a difference. It feels like I shifted into an easier gear all the time!
So today, for the first time ever, I started the biking portion of my trip in New Hartford, which comes out to a 5 mile drive, and a 16 mile bike trek. That’s 5 miles further than I’ve ever rode on my commute, as I used to debark from the commuter lot in Canton.
Alright, so goal met! New goal: commute completely on bike from Winsted to Farmington, a ~22 mile ride.
100 Days: 100 jQuery-based scripts
May1
This year, I’m participating in 100 Days, a little project started by Steve Ersinghaus and Carianne Mack (now Garside) which puts creativity to a test of time, stamina, and rhythm. The rule is, you have to do your thing every day for 100 Days. Also, the works should be interrelated somehow. Steve has all the players gathered in his netvibes aggregator, but here’s the rollcall:
- steve – short stories
- carianne – drawings
- jessica – pinhole photographs
- neha – poetry
- jim – scripts using jQuery
- maggie – food (wait, are we getting served this food daily? I hope so.)
So there you go. I’m hoping Steve will switch the netvibes aggregator to the “100 Days” tag feed only. Then again, it probably doesn’t matter because this is probably all I’ll use my blog for in the next 100 days anyway. [UPDATE: thanks Steve] Oh yeah – that reminds me – this all starts on May 22.
Absentee Voting using GoVoteAbsentee.org
Oct1
I just found a great service for voters: GoVoteAbsentee.org. Not only can they help you with absentee voting, you can subscribe to get e-mail notifications on national, state, and local elections so you don’t miss them. THis is HUGE for me.
biking to work
Jul8
I started biking [part-way] to work a few weeks ago and thought I’d mention it. I’m riding my old Fuji Sandblaster SX mountain bike that my mom bought me for Christmas 12 years ago or so. What a great bike! A little WD40 and oil and I was ready to ride (albeit still without a front brake, but I’ll get around to fixing it some day). Here is my route, which is apparently about 10.6 miles:
View Larger Map
I drive my bike to Canton from Winsted and park at the commuter lot there at the intersection of 44 and 179, then take 179 into Unionville and 177 to work. 177 is sketchy – alomst no shoulder in some places. I’m told there’s a bike trail that will get me pretty close to work that I’m planning on checking out one of these days.
My plan is to gradually shorten my drive and increase my ride. Maybe some day I’ll be able to ride the whole way. Right now it’s taking about 45 minutes to do the 10 miles. My entire commute is about 22 miles each way, so at my current skill level, it’s way too far to attempt. If I can get down to 30 minutes for the 10 miles, I’ll start increasing the biking part of my commute.
If you’re reading this post, I’ve ditched Lunarpages
Jul1
My web host of the past six years has finally gone super nova. Lunarpages used to be so great – friendly, helpful, understanding. What happened?
Every once in a while I’d log into CPanel to find new goodies, better deals, more features, more space, more transfer, etc. I got a free domain for life at one point, and I just thought, “Damn, think about all those suckas out there who aren’t hosting with Lunarpages.”
Then the toll-free tech. support number went to toll. “OK,” I thought, “big deal. I have a cell phone and I don’t pay long-distance.” Then the support line hours went from 24/7 to 9-5 M-F. OK, not cool, but whatever – nothing was broken so I didn’t really fret.
Then something broke. It was past their phone-in hours, so I used their support e-mail service. After going round and round, it turned out that they’d cut a feature under the auspices that the new CPanel itself didn’t support it. I found it hard to believe since CPanel lets you do thie thing I was trying to do – it just wasn’t taking effect.
Since that episode, little things have bean breaking from time to time. I have to really stay on top of things to make sure it’s all running tip-top. The tech. support isn’t bad, it’s just bad that I have to use it now quite often, and the responses are more likely to be canned or brush offs than helpful.
Finally, the last straw: they destroyed my DNS settings somehow. I’ve read other people’s posts about this, but I’d never experienced it myself. All of a sudden, like 6 domains I have are all pointing to lunarpages.com. Now it’s 12 hours later and still no response from tech. support.
Sorry, but that’s not acceptable.
So the new host is dreamhost.com. I like them so far. The sales dept. was very knowledgeable about their product, their wiki covers all migration and technical issues … they just seem very progressive overall. And, I got $24 off the yearly price of hosting because I went in from a link at wordpress.org’s list of recommended hosts.
I have a feeling that Lunarpages is going to need to move fast to avoid a landslide of users breaking away. Alliances change fast on the Internet …
Music
