It’s been a cold spring here in south central. Kugel and I took a Saturday afternoon bike ride to Hans Herr House. Along the way we saw all sorts of cool spring things. Among which was this red-tail hawk that just killed a rabbit. I got about thirty yards from the hawk until he got nervous and abandoned his leftovers. Kugel just finished installing new brake levers on his bike and the shellac just dried on my MB-3 so we decided to take our bikes out for a photo shoot in the park. (more…)
Hi all, thought I’d customize the word press theme a little bit. Whipped out the Gimp and redid the photos on the top. On the left is my friend Louis’s bike. We took this picture last weekend on a relatively cold day in the park. I’ll put some more pics up from that day at a later date. Going right is a picture of some organic carrots taken at the Hollywood farmers’ market last summer. Alton Brown says that carrots used to be widely available in all colors but the Dutch bred them to be orange, and for whatever reason that’s all we eat now. Next right is a picture of me climbing a tree last spring. I managed to climb one hundred trees last year, a goal I recommend anyone trying. The last picture is one of the many waterfalls at Ricketts Glen State Park, a state treasure. Every Pennsylvanian should make a point of visiting some time.
The default Landzilla theme I use had the Links function broken with Wordpress 2.1.3. Of course a relatively proficient XHTML/CSS person could have fixed this in seconds. It took me two hours. Only one way to learn these things though. If I were a perfectionist I’d align it left, but eh.. I’ll wait until the next upgrade.
We’re redesigning our WAN at work and what a headache. Well you can’t mention WAN without having to deal with Cisco somehow. I’m just amazed at how they continue to dominate the switching/routing/security market even though their stuff is so ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming. Which got me thinking, what if Cisco made cars? Here’s an excerpt from an imaginary Cisco car lot. (more…)
Nike has ended their cross-marketing relationship with Trek and will probably phase out and discontinue their consumer cycling product line. Read this story to learn more about it. I file this one under “things I like and can’t get behind.” I’m sad because Nike cycling shoes were the only ones that ever fit me properly. I’ve had shoes from Sidi, Duegi, Specialized, Vittoria and none of them were as comfortable as the Nike’s I’ve had. That being said Nike also made the Air Span which was my all time favorite running shoe. This is the love/hate relationship I have with Nike. I really don’t like anything about the company except for their shoes, and I hate myself for it.
Now Nike is quitting the cycling business again. The first time was in the early 90’s when mountain biking was big. They sponsored John Tomac, a great guy and mtbiker, but when the mountain bike fad started to wane, Nike bailed. Later on, Nike gave Lance a ton of money and sold a lot of yellow crap. Now Nike is crying the blues because Lance is retired and sales have dropped. Here’s my question for the Nike execs: You had the biggest name in modern cycling wearing your products and you had a partnership with the largest bike manufacturer in North America, how on earth do you screw that up? If you can’t establish a brand under those conditions than you don’t deserve your Christmas bonuses. I think the truth is Nike doesn’t care about cycling or any sport for that matter. They only follow the money and pay lip service to the sport. They’re simply not committed. When Tiger Woods retires will they quit the golf biz? Probably. I’m no fan of Colnago bikes, but I bet Ernesto Colnago would rather be dead than quit making bikes. Most of the folks in the bike biz have some kind of passion for the sport. In the meanwhile I guess I’ll stock up on Nike cycling shoes for the next year, and if anyone has a pair of Air Spans in size 9, I’ll take them off your hands (not your feet).
Hi sandblade.net fans. I just upgraded from wordpress 1.5.2 to 2.1.3. Wow what a difference! Hats off to Matt and all the other WP developers. The upgrade process was smooth and painless. There was no need to use backups and it seems none of my content is missing. The look and feel of 2.1.3 has gone all web 2.0 with big blocks of nicely faded colors. So now working in wordpress feels like working in gmail. Other than that most of it is familiar.
Other features I like are the auto-saving drafts and integrated spell checker. The big reason I upgraded was to manage all the comment spam I was getting. It wasn’t so bad at first, maybe 30 a week. Now I get maybe 300 a day, and some of the spam is just unconscionably vulgar. Now I’m running the Akismet spam control plugin, and hopefully my days of reading hundreds of foul-mouthed spam are over. Well netizens let me know how the new sandblade.net is treating you.