Older blog entries for gleblanc (starting at number 26)

Biking

The first half of the bike ride in was tough. My legs complained the entire time. Once I got over onto this side of the river, and I'd gotten well warmed up, going was a lot easier. I managed to drink my "required" 2 cups of gatorade on the way to work yesterday morning, but almost none on the way home. I didn't drink much on the way in this morning either, but I managed to drink it down after I got in to work.
My mom and I went out to the Velodrome to watch the races tonight. There were some good races, and one of the guys I ride with at the Wednesday night classes was out there whooping ass. I'm getting familar with the names of the races, but I'm still pretty unclear on what names go with what events. There are a -lot- of different events out at the track. It was pretty fun watching the races, although it got a bit nippy, even though it was 80 degrees when we left to go out there. There's a pretty good breeze in the stands.
Oh, the bike ride home wasn't so rough... 14.7 miles an hour. Slower than I'd like, but I'll keep working on it. Maybe I need more hill climbing time. Actually, I'll bet most of the slowdown is because downtown was nearly impossible to navigate, because there's a parade tonight. The traffic was horrid, and nobody gave me any breaks.

Work Well, the manager/boss person leaves for vacation at 7am tomorrow, which will be both good and bad. Good because he -loves- to hear himself talk, and will make up BS about damn near anything he wants to (it's clearly BS to anybody with half a notion on the subject). Bad because now I have to do some of his job for a week. I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but the guy who used to do our tech support has moved to another department, so I have to do his job too. Hmm, I'm doing three jobs for a week. That sucks...

Looks like jfleck has been out playing in the yard again... Keep it up, gardens take time! We planted some blue-berries when we re-did the back yard last year, and they're looking really good this year. Maybe that was two years ago, I forget. We're going to get a crop this year, which should be really great in muffins and such. My dad loves to pick blueberries, so it will be really nice for him to be able to go someplace close and get them. I mostly like to eat them. :-)

Brits, and such

Hmm, I hope that's not a derogatory term, although it is a bit inacurate. I chat with <person>telsa a fair bit, when we meet up on IRC (gosh I wish I had a nice psgml like mode for this...), and she's been keeping really weird hours the past couple of days. Up at like 6am, and going to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning! Apparently she's "catching some kip" (did I get that right?) sometime in the afternoon. Still, weird hours.
The other "Brit" thing was pronunciation. One of the lists I'm on was chatting about "routers", as in the things that direct internet traffic, and got onto something, somehow, about how the "Aussies" and the "Brits" pronounce it. I've never heard the Austrialian pronounciation, but I'm certainly familiar with the Brittish one, as it sounds exactly like how we'd pronounce it in New England, especially an hour or two north of Boston.

Biking

I biked to work today. It was a great ride, I averaged 17.5 miles per hour. Amazingly fast. The ride home was 15.3, which is pretty good. My goal is to make every ride a better than 15 mile per hour average. If I can do that for a week or twos, it will be time for a new, faster, goal. Or maybe I should just tack and extra few miles onto the ride... I need to develop a decent training program (not software). A good set of workouts would be nice to have.
I've been noticing that I'm getting into much better shape now that I've been riding again. The first couple of trips to work were really rough, but now they're getting quite manageable. I can also see that my abs are getting a lot tighter than they were. My legs have some definition now, but nowhere near the bulk I had when I graduated High School. Hopefully that will be back before too long.
I don't mean that as vanity, although you could see it that way. I just hate being out of shape, but had trouble keeping myself there. I love biking, but I was really being a fair-weather biker for a bit. Now that I'm back, I'm thinking ahead, and trying to figure out good ways to get clean work-clothes to work, so that I can bike to work, rain or shine, and not have to lug a big bag on my back. My current thought is to rig a rack onto my bike. This is slightly complicated by the fact that I have a road-racing frame, and there aren't any mounting holes for the screws that would normally hold it up. I'll have to find a rig to mount it on the little triangular (should that have an ly?) shaped holes in the wheel drops. Oh yeah, one more way that I can tell I'm getting to be in better shape is that I can actually keep up for the first 2/3 of practice out on the track. I still get tired at the end, especially when they have me leading sprints, but it's a grand time, so who cares?!?
Wow, I just remembered something about the science stuff I was asking John (Fleck) earlier today! First, background... I make ice cream in the summer. Blackberry, strawberry, blueberry, mint, chocolate chip, whatever I can find that looks good. In order to do that, I have to make ice. Lots of it. At least 4 trays every day, often 6. Sometimes, when I take the ice out of the freezer, it will look like it's frozen in mid-splash. I'll get a picture to illustrate next time I remember. Anyway, I just checked the ice, and it freezes over the top first, and then on the sides and the bottom, trapping the liquid in the middle. As the liquid freezes, it expands. It's possible that at a certain point, this fractures the ice on top (since it can't go sideways or down). If the water was approaching the freezing point, as it escpaped the crack in the ice, it would be chilled even further, perhaps -actually- causing it to freeze mid splash. Any physics majors out there who can tell me why that doesn't work? I should ask muet...
One last question before I stop writing for the night... Anybody else know what kind of elevation gains they have on a typical ride? I've got about 350 feet down, followed by 100 feet up on the ride to work. All at just about sea level. On the way home, 100 down, followed by about 550 up, 250 down, and another 50 up. The ride home might even be hillier than that... (perhaps another trip down and up 50.

Wow, several people have already posted replies about the advogato thing... If I could hack, I'd do something with the thing that <person>dyork</posted>. Probably wget that, have a script search for the people who's diaries I read in that page, and generate a list of people who have updates. I could just remove all dupes, so that wouldn't be too hard. But how do I reset the list, after I've read a bunch? Hmm, maybe just delete the file it generates. Definately some possibilities there.

Anyway, as for life, eye contact is definately being avoided. Hehe, that must be a lot of work, since I walk through that office a dozen times a day.
And on the biking front, the track riding was -great- today, until that final race where my asthma kicked in... Bleah. I really need to get my own track bike...

Advogato

There are a huge number of diary entries posted here all the time. I like to read through them, and keep up on the diaries of the people that I know... But I haven't found any good way to do that yet.
I was trying to read all of the ones that were new since my last diary entry... but it seems that if I wait more than 24 hours or so, mine scrolls off the bottom of the list. :-( I could check it more often, but then how do I remember which ones I've read? Quite a sticky problem... Maybe I can get raph to keep a longer list of diary updates someplace...

biking

I biked in to work yesterday (Tuesday), in the cold and the rain. It wasn't such a bad bike ride, but the showers were closed when I got to work. Thank goodness I brough my own towels to wash up with. I didn't bike into today, since I'm going out to the track to ride. It's a nice looking day outside (it's knock on wood, not touch wood, silly), so hopefully practice will be on (you can't ride the track in the rain, it's unsafe). I did bring in a change of clothes, so that I don't have to lug them with me when I bike in tomorrow.
Speaking of unsafe, there are WAY too many people who are too stupid to own a bike around here. I'd say that 1 in every 4 bikers I see doesn't have a helmet on. That really irks me.
My other big rant is all of these idiots who can't be bothered to use directionals. I'll be zipping along down the road, minding my own business, in the bike lane, and some idiot will make a right-turn in front of me, and signal only after I almost slam into them at 25 miles and hour. EGADS people! Pay attention, I hate having to yell at you so that you know I'm there.

Pigeons

dyork has a note in his diary about poisoning pigeons in Canada. While that's not funny, it does remind me of a Tom Leher (I think it was Tom Leher, anyway) song called "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", which is hillariously funny. I'd put an MP3 up for you, but I'm pretty sure that's against the law. Nuts.

Relationships

Well, I'm still being ignored whenever she can get away with it, but we snuck up on each other coming around a corner, and she knew enough not to frown (at least not in front of her dad). Glad I've got people to chat with elsewhere, or I'd be really bored.

4PM now, must be time to think about going home (since I'm taking the bus, and I won't get home for an hour and a half).

Oh yeah... I'm not sure why one needs to read Alan's diary to make sense of Telsa's... They seem to stand on their own just fine to me.

Well, I disappear for the weekend, and I've got all kinds of stuff to read!

I was just noticing how silly this little entry form is... Raph said that it would accept closing tags as </>, but yet it ignores whitespace. If you wanted it to be convient, why not have carridge returns actually do something here? Sorry, just seems pretty stupid to me. <br>. Err, I mean

Thursday night I spent working on shortening a screw, so that I could get the cleat on the bottom of my bike shoe held on properly. The screw that it came with was only long enough to get 1 thread into the shoe, so it didn't hold well at all. I lost it on the ride to work one day. We went out to the hardware store at lunch, and found a non-stainless steel screw that was slightly longer, which was enough so that it went into the shoe a little bit more easily. That one came loose while I was at the track last wednesday. It held ok through practice, but came completely loose by the time I got home. I'd purchased a much longer stainless steel screw while at the store, and I went over to Rex's house, and ground it down to the right length, and put it into the shoe. I went out for a shortish bike ride on Sunday (half an hour or so), and things seemed plenty tight afterwards, so I'm hoping I've got it fixed this time. Didn't bike to work this morning, but I'll go our and do a longer ride after work tonight, even though it's plenty cold.

I guess I'll break now, so that I don't start ranting too much.

Hmm, looks like I made a couple of stupid typos. Just fixed a couple of them. It seems like it's been a really long time since I've had time to write anything here, but it's really only about a week. I think I've got lots of stuff to comment on. I try to keep up on other diaries which is where most of these comments come from.
I think I'll just forget about putting any order to this today, follow along... if you can!

jfleck, congrats on the personal record! Sometimes it's good to take a break. :) This guy knows about tomatoes too, although we don't grow yellow ones up here. John, you -have- to plant them in a new spot every year, and let something else grow where they are. Tomatoes are -very- nutrient hungry plants. I usually dig a hole about 16" across, and 8-10 inches deep, and the only things that go into it are a 1 gallon tomatoe plant, and black compost. I've yet to have a problem with tomatoe yields, unless you count having too many tomatoes as a problem. I've found that half-inch rebar is the only thing strong enough to hold up our 6' plus plants.
I'm really pleased to see somebody new working on gnome's bugzilla in a meaningful way. I cleaned up a -lot- of gnome-games stuff, and now people are actually using bugzilla to find bugs to fix in gnome-games. I'm hoping that gnome-utils will do the same thing, although perhaps a bit faster (it took months for people to realize that gnome-games was an almost sane component with regards to what bugs were left, and where they were).

I've been thinking that we need to start a "hackers bike club", or maybe a "docs guys bike club", since there are so many of us that bike. dcm, dyork, jfleck, and myself, at least. I'm not sure if the weather in Ontario is better, or worse, than it is here. It's been roasty-toasty here lately (80s and 90s, once up to about 110), but then it will swing back into the 60s and 70s. Dan gets to deal with 40s some mornings. Hard to say.
I've just about got my Dad's bike put together in working shape, so maybe he'll start riding it. I needed to have the front derailleur adjusted, the brakes tightened, the break levers moved to where he can reach them, and the handlebars re-wrapped. It still needs the rear derailleur adjusted a bit, but it works, as long as you don't downshift too hard (the chain slips into the spokes, not good). That's probably only another half-hour of work... yay!
I read something recently about Microsoft's new licensing, and it had me thinking, because they talked, in some way, about monopoly powers. There are quite a few monopolies out there, MS and Intel among them. These two companies were both in persuit of a monopoly for a while, and they both did just about anything they could in order to get there. When Intel achieved their monopoly, their CEO said "ok, were're the most powerfull semi-conductor in the world, we have to change our practices." However, when MS got there, they just kept on doing "business as usual", never changing their stance. In the USA, this is clearly in violation of the laws. Some people don't seem to realize that while almost anything is legal while you're in a competitive industry, all of that changes as soon as you own the industry.
Ugh, I'm too lazy to write anymore right now, more after I get home and get through these last 300 emails.

Computers

I got one of my SPARCstation 2s booting this evening. Unfortunately, I found out that my 2 1000MB disks were actually 2 100MB disks. Darn, that's small. How can I run any software in 200MB? Well, maybe those can be used to run my new DNS server or something. I've got a few 4GB disks around, but they seem to be rather failure-prone. I think I'll need to get some more disks for these machines.

Life

My parents are back in town, which is cool. Maybe they'll beat some sense into my little brother. Probably not. I had to run and get them from the airport about noon time today, and while I was gone, the university president sent out a mail telling everybody to go home. Of course, I arrived back at the office around 1:45.

It's really frustrating, now that I've finally got enough courage to even think about asking, that the campus is completely deserted. I don't know what to do about my last forray, perhaps just let it slide away. Even if I do, I need to make it clear that ignoring people is a lot less desireable than telling them no, dontcha think?

Computers

Woo! I've been working on updating plain-GNOME today, and making some decent progress. Now, if I could just get people to actually send release announcements of new versions, this would be much easier. I'll probably upload a new RH7.0 i386 set tonight, and possibly even i586 and i686, since all of the hard work is in getting the first set.

Biking

I did some riding out at the velodrome again yesterday. It's actually pretty embarrassing, since I'm horribly slow. I'm going to see about doing 60+ miles this weekend, just to give my legs a really hard workout. If anybody who reads this is a decent bike coach EMAIL ME! I need the help.

Life

Well, my fortune program has been returning completely boring stuff lately, so I haven't had anything to send. And considering the response that my last email got (absolutely none), perhaps that's just as well. Sometimes I wonder why I even try...

Computers

Hmm, I got absolutely nothing productive done on the computer today. Wonderful. I still need to spec out the laptops that we're getting for work, and it's horrible. I wish we had a network tech, but my idiot boss is dragging his feet on that. He has a good excuse, but for cryin out loud, there's way too much to do for waiting to be a good idea. At least now that he's a manager, he's out of the office a lot...

Biking

It was 105 degrees outside when I headed home today (that's about 40 celcius/centigrade), which is WAY too hot to be biking. It's down to just under 30 now, but I'm going to bed instead of for a bike ride.
Oh yeah, yesterday's ride home averaged 14.9 mph, which isn't too shabby, considering the hills. Maybe next week I'll be able to hit 15...

Hmm, I haven't updated this since Wednesday, huh? Well, that's quite a while...

Computers

I spent a lot of time playing around with rpmlint on the plain-GNOME packages... Rather tedious, but I think I'm getting some of the errors cleaned up. I also managed to build a gabber 0.8.3 rpm, which actually built when I gave that vmware machine 128MB of ram (it was going on 4 hours when I stopped it before, probably because the system only had 48MB of ram to work with).
I spent $Diety only knows how long trying to make Red Hat's DocBook XML packages work with libxslt. They don't, but I'm still fighting them. Using the DTD from the web actually seems to produce better results, although it takes a bit to download. Bleh.

Biking

Well, I didn't bike at all on Thursday, but Friday looked really nice when I got home that I headed out. I toured around for a couple of hours, then watched the races at the Velodrome. Pretty sweet... I manged 17 miles at better than 15 miles and hour, although not by much, and I had some breaks in the middle. Saturday I went out and rode just under 10 miles, again just beating out 15 mpg as an average. I took Sunday off, but rode in to work this morning, and averaged better than 16mph. Too bad that will look bad after the uphill ride home...

Life

Well, unfortunately, absolutely nothing to report (save suspicions) on this front. I sent off an email to Ashlin to see about doing dinner this week, but I don't know if it's even been read. I had to go over to the business office to see that AP checks printed properly, and she was sitting there filing. I'm sure she saw me, but she avoided eye contact. Is that a bad sign?