pretendamazing

My internet has been having problems for a couple of days at home, so I contacted TW help via twitter this morning. Unsurprisingly, they want to rule out the router.

I had hoped to connect my MacBook Pro to the modem and share the connection out to the other computers, but that doesn’t seem to work. All googling for stuff while working on my research now gets to be done on my phone.

My modem is in my office, which has poor lighting and window setup so I use it as a store room. Instead of cleaning it to use it for one day and be near the computer that’s connected to see if it loses access, I wrote a script that will alert me if something goes wrong.

The email didn’t get sent as soon as network returned because Mail had complained about not being able to access servers, but after I manually dismissed those it sent out. The actual script I have running will send an email as shown but also display a message box with the email’s contents (most importantly the time).

Today was Streets Alive here in Lincoln.

A few fairly major streets were partially or entirely blocked off from 11a-6p with the actual event running 12:30-5:00.

Sandy, Bob, and I all went and Karin and her husband showed (though sometime after we left the meeting point). We even saw Borky and T, though I don’t think they were participating.

There were all kinds of vendors and performers scattered along the route. Pepes was giving samples of cucumber lemonade, someone (I can’t remember who now) was doing smoothies from a pedal-powered blender (I’ve actually seen that somewhere else, some other event in town), Super Saver provided water, bananas, and granola bars.

One of the exhibits was some pottery place that does classes. They had some pre-made tiles that participants could design. Bob appeared to be too manly to participate and went for another loop, but Sandy and I stopped to make a couple of tiles.

I decided to use the design from our “I [bike] LNK” shirts. Conveniently, Sandy was wearing one of said shirts so I had reference material to work from. At one point, though, she did yell at me (“stop staring at my chest!”). Hehehe.

Travel there and back included, I did somewhere in the 18-20mi range or so and was beyond tired. Too much work and too little biking lately; my body wasn’t ready for that.

It was fun. I hope they decide to make it a yearly event. If so, they should do a better job of informing the public. We had quite a few cars driving parts of the route, going through a parking lot to get past the Street Closed signs, etc.

For the past couple of weeks, the cops in Lincoln have been warning and ticketing people who bike on the sidewalks downtown. While I’ll be the first to admit that I had ridden on the sidewalks there (though much slower and, hopefully, more observantly than most), it is illegal to do so. And as I’ve written before, not very safe.

I’m very much in favor of people not biking on the sidewalks. If we get more people biking in the streets, maybe the drivers will be more accustomed to us and not make it such a hostile environment for those of us who can’t maintain 40mph (in a 25, of course).

While I’m aware it’s hypocritical, what I’m not in favor of are the bike cops who repeatedly bike on the sidewalks, even with the ticketing, and don’t feel it applies to them.

A week or so ago, a friend saw a bike cop riding on the sidewalk near campus. When he told the cop that he wasn’t allowed to ride there, the cop replied saying he was “looking for someone.” Upon next sighting, he was in the street.

Know what’s better than stories of cops breaking the law? Pictures of it. Karin has started a new Tumblr called Biking in #LNK. While the blog will probably eventually feature other things, the first two posts are bike cops biking on sidewalks in areas downtown where biking on the sidewalk is illegal.

Thankfully, the delivery trucks have mostly stopped parking in the bike lane on 14th St. However, that lane is still in the middle of multiple lanes of traffic that send cars back and forth across the bike lane because of turn-only lanes. Everything from small cars to very large buses merge without looking for bikers.

If something could be done about the horrible drivers (AND the horrible cyclists — those red lights and stop signs apply to you, too; stop pretending they don’t), maybe more people would bike in the street and stop making the sidewalks so dangerous for pedestrians.

And with that, I’m off to campus. Which will include some biking downtown. In the street. Here’s hoping for decent car traffic!

For a few weeks (months?) now, my friend Sandy’s been talking about jumping out of a plane again. She’s got a better telephoto lens than I and wanted people to document the jump (as it would be her first static line jump), so I pushed back helping a friend move to go take pictures.

Flickr | Facebook (same pictures in each location)

Much more importantly than the images uploaded to those, I opened Photoshop (most of my photo editing is in Aperture).

I present the result of my Photoshop work: amanda_dance.gif and sandy_meets_corn.gif.

Just putting these somewhere where I can keep track of them.

• Nebraska Revised Statute 60-6,317. Bicycles on roadways and bicycle paths; general rules; regulation by local authority.
• Lincoln Municipal Code 10.48. Bicycles (PDF)

(via Brandon)

My current project at work involves interfacing with a Dell DX6000. While it has a REST API that you can work against, in an effort to have something fairly usable I would end up porting a large chunk of the existing API (whether directly or indirectly) to PHP if I were to write in that.

So, instead of reinventing the wheel, we decided to go with one of the languages they have an existing API for (C++, C#, Python, Java). C++ wouldn’t be a great choice (though could be amusing), and C# would require a Windows web server (unless Mono’s ASP.net stuff is decent yet?), so we’re left with Python and Java. The CDRH does some Python stuff with Django, but we don’t. We have one custom Java webapp (written long ago) and some third party Java stuff that we run. While I’m proficient in both Python and Java, with little-to-no experience doing web stuff in them, the fact that we already have a production Java environment running has us going that route.

For a couple of days last week and a few hours over the weekend, I’ve been writing blahg, a very minimal practice blog app in JSP. Having built in the basic functionality that I can refer to while writing my actual project as well as a general build script covering the things that I care about, I wanted to get one more thing figured out: integrating a CSS extension thing (LESS or SASS, for example) in such a way that the only instructions I need to provide for future developers on this project are how to configure pom.xml so that maven tomcat:redeploy works.

After a ton of searching, I ran across LESS for Java. There are two options for working with LESS in this library: 1) use the LessEngine class from within Java code to compile a String or a File with the LESS compiler, or 2) use LessServlet and map some/all CSS (and/or) JS files to run through it.

To simplify things, I chose route 2. The following shows the (relevant bits of) files to use LessServlet:

To the jerk who yelled SIDEWALK! as I was biking home today:

I’m so incredibly, terribly sorry that I slowed you down. Sure, I was turning off of 40^th onto Prescott and halfway around the corner when you yelled at me so I only slowed you down for maybe three seconds, but still, that’s three seconds you’ll never get back. Gone! You could have been able to sit at a red light further along your route for three whole seconds more had I not been such a stupidface. I apologize.

I could ride on the sidewalk in the future. However, let’s consider something first.

Let’s say I rode on the sidewalk. Do you have a son? A daughter? A niece or a nephew? Some other young child who’s important to you in some way and might be prone to playing out in the front yard of your home? What if I was biking on the sidewalk past your house one day, and they ran out in front of me? I was a little kid once; I often failed to look before running into the sidewalk in case someone was walking or biking on it.

Sure, I’m smart enough to slow down when I see that I’m approaching young kids, but maybe you have a tree or bush or something that hides them from my view. What then?

I’m an adult, huge in size relative to a little kid. On the street or on a trail, I go somewhere between 15 and 20 mph. Now, I’ve never done it or researched it, but I’m sure that little Timmy or Jane wouldn’t be feeling great if I ran into them at 20 mph (and subsequently landed atop them?).

I take precautions to avoid this and it has yet to happen, but it’s a very real possibility. In any situation, as careful as you are, the other person may not be. Little kids aren’t exactly widely considered to be cautious, especially when playing in front of their own home.

Yes, I slowed you down and made you lose a couple of seconds. But I ride in the street because it is, in most cases, the safest place—for all involved—for me to ride. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to continue holding a few drivers up a handful of seconds every now and then instead of risking seriously injuring or killing someone’s child.

Also, I’m curious: what should I do where it’s illegal to ride on the sidewalk? There are 7 areas in town apparently (I recall it being 4 when I read the actual law, but a tweet the other day said 7) where I legally cannot ride on the sidewalk. (Yes, I really have read the relevant sections of the Lincoln/Nebraska law relating to bicycles. Have you?) Most notably, downtown. There are plenty of lanes for you to safely go around me while I continue to bike much faster than I’d go if I were walking my bike on the sidewalk. Am I supposed to go much slower than I otherwise would just to save you a couple of seconds? I just want to make sure I know why I’m walking on the sidewalk where I’m legally allowed to ride in the street…

Update: Shortly after I posted this, a video made by a guy ticketed for not riding in the bike lanes in NYC started getting passed around by people I follow on twitter. Incredibly stupid and unsafe (c’mon, at least a helmet!), it’s hilarious and helps get the point across.

I decided long ago that I’ll die from one of two things:

1. Cutting myself
2. Biking

While it’s finally gotten a bit better, I have a history of cutting myself many of the times that I’m cutting fruit/veggies to eat. Keep me away from comically gigantic produce, as I’ll probably miss swinging the sword (the only cutting tool you’d use, of course) and chop myself in half.

The probably-more-likely theory is biking. And it’s been a while since I’ve complained about drivers, so I think I’ll do that now!

I’m getting a lot of neglected apartment cleaning done today, and I ended up needing to get some more Drano. So I biked to HyVee to get some.

On the last little stretch before getting to HyVee, I see this lady coming up from a side street. I’m already partially in the (quite large) intersection when she gets there…and decides she should go. With me already going. Downhill, so I have a decent pace going. Hello, slamming on brakes and veering toward the center of the street without regard to any cars that might be coming. Is it really that hard to check to see if someone’s coming? And if she did see me, would it kill her to lose 5 seconds to wait for me to go and pass me?

Of course, that was at the bottom of a hill, so after almost coming to a complete stop I had to go uphill against the wind. Grr.

Second is that fence running along there. Bikers can’t see cars, cars can’t see bikers. Since cars can’t see other cars, either, what happens almost every time that I bike along there (so I watch for it, but it’s still an annoyance) is that a car and I will get there at the same time. Given that they have a stop sign and I’m on a trail, I believe I have the right of way to cross. They don’t care. Again today, I come flying down because it’s at the bottom of a hill and I had the wind with me on the way back, and slam on the brakes to avoid going over some lady’s car.

In late December or early January, a little bit of chatter between Angela and I turned into a whole lot of #LNK people committing to running and doing the State Farm 5k.

None of us were runners. At least one ran years ago, but for many of us our experience was limited to the excruciating one mile run in elementary/etc school.

So we started. Most of us were doing Couch to 5k, a lot with this c25k iOS app. There were a few injuries and a lot of flu, but many of us got pretty far on the training. (The race was supposed to be W9D3, but the app didn’t advance me a couple of times so it ended up being W9D1. *shrug*)

Having done a 5k on Tuesday by myself (kind of; Angela was doing a “jalk” (jogging and walking, alternating as needed, at the same time but other than a couple minutes of warmup we only saw each other as we passed on my return trip) and getting an idea on what speed I can do^*, I didn’t care how I would place. Since we started this as a group thing with the idea of all doing the same 5k, I decided that I was going to run with at least one person the entire time.

Around 9:05 yesterday morning, we all piled into the starting line and awaited the start of the race. We quickly lost our big group and formed smaller ones based on speed, but (at least for a while in the beginning; that changed) nobody ran/walked alone. I stuck with Lisa the entire time, with us going at a pace we could both sustain for 3.1mi. We ran the entire time^** and finished in just under 38 minutes.

As we got close to the finish line, Chris‘ uncle Myron saw Lisa and I coming close and readied his camera and grabbed a few shots. We slowed down a bit to make sure he could get them before we passed, which made us miss the 50 minute mark—I didn’t realize until someone pointed it out later that that was the 10mi race’s time. After pictures were taken, we get back up to speed and then speed up a little.

With mere seconds until crossing the finish line, I considered asking Lisa if she wanted to race. Not knowing how much energy she had for a short burst and if she could beat me, I just kept my mouth shut and made sure to be a little bit ahead of her. I beat her by one second. WINNER!

Like biking, it seems as though a few of us really like it and are going to continue. Lisa and I are talking about doing another 5k over in Eagle, and at least three of us are going to do a 2mi fun run on Earth Day a few days later.

^* My back was killing me, so I was slower than I should have been I think. Having gone to the chiropractor since, I need to do another sometime soon. Average pace was 10’49″/mile.
^** She wanted to walk, but she didn’t want to slow me down so she kept running. Go Lisa!