Older blog entries for gleblanc (starting at number 34)

Biking

I went over to the Velodrome on Wednesday, and it felt pretty good, although I was tired due to my forced week off. I do like biking out there, it's rather fun to race in circles, and deal with other people being on the track. I must build up my endurance though, as I'm getting tired at the end, and can't compete in the mock races. I got a new chain for my bike tonight, as well as some new gloves, and a new bottle of Tri-Flo. Great lube, that is. I'll replace the chain on Thursday, I suspect. Perhaps Friday, we'll see.

Computers

For the first time in ages, I managed to get my Evolution working to send mail at work. I'm really pleased, as reading things in Evo, then having to reply in Outlook was rather traumatic. As it turns out, it was a problem with my bonobo install, and nothing with gtkhtml. At least I have a new bonobo now... I'll try to get myself a new, working, nautilus tomorrow. I love GNOME.
We've been having some good conversations on the mailing lists about the direction that help is going for GNOME 2, although we need to be quick about this, since the API freeze is in just a couple of weeks. I hope others haven't waited as long as we have. BTW, don't let me comment on these things, I clearly have not a freaking clue about programming, and especially APIs. I thought I'd written a decent message, but it appears to have been crap. Ah, well, back to things I understand, I guess.
Work is getting down to actually hiring a person as the network technician. I want nothing to do with hiring people, nor even with evaluating their skills. I completely apathetic as to what happens there. This is a very bad thing. I should go mail out my resume soon.

running, sort of

I went to "participate" in the Ranier to Pacific relay this weekend. There are 11 runners on a team, and up until Friday, I thought I was one of the 11. As it turns out, I was a backup runner. Ah well, at least I got to hang out for the weekend, and go to the beach. Cool people, even if they were MD's. <grin /> I think I'll see about running in the relay for real next year. I'd love to do Hood to Coast again, but it's a bit different. H2C is about 1000 teams, and 2 days after registration opens, it's full. R2P is 100 teams, and I'm sure they could accomodate quite a few more. It's a bit ironic that r2p seems to end in a bigger town, which has more/better facilities for the end of a race than the h2c. Well, I'll write more about this one later, I think, but not just now.

Why is rudeness such an accepted value in US Teen culture? It really ticks me off. I'm going to have to return the favor one of these days... Break some noses or something. It's such a good thing I can't find out who people are on battle.net, or I'd probably drive over and beat the living daylights out of ThaHammerElf. If you see him, leave, he's a God Damned PK.

gman can't spell, but it's all good, because he's cool. 50km is a pretty decent bike ride, so good going Glynn. Get some higher SPF sunscreen... I'd go with 45 if you're applying it every hour. If it's really hot and you're sweating a lot, that can wash it off, so get the waterproof stuff too. <grin />

dyork enjoy Canada any where you like it! Enjoy SGML/XMLing. Are you biking again? What's the news?

jfleck is eating advocatos. The only good thing I have to say about them is that they help me remember how to spell advogato. :-) Not my fav food, but perhaps I've just not had them done well. I probably won't, until I get to going out a lot more, because my dad won't eat "Mexican food", which pretty much includes southwest stuff too. Oh well.

The style guide sounds awesome, I wish I had time to read it right away, but other things take priority. I'm not entirely sure why, but Advogato seems to be one of them.
DV is awesome. That's all there is to it. Apparently he's made some more speed improvements to libxslt. Processing time on DocBook: TDG has been cut -in half-. Truly amazing.

biking Tuesdays don't seem to be my day for biking. I don't think I mentioned this, but last week, a Volvo tried to cut me off at an intersection. I layed the bike down, and slid through the intersection, under the front of the volve. I lost one of the handlebar plugs, and got some pretty ugly road-rash on my hip, and a bruise.
Today, I had a hard ride to get to the track in time, and just barely made it. As we were coming into the straight-away near the end of the first lap, I crashed. I was fatigued from racing to get to the races in time, which didn't help any. I was drafting off of the two lead riders, and they hit the head-wind, slowing them down. I was still going along, and overlapped the tire of the guy in front of me by a couple of inches. I tried to slow down/get out of the way, but somehow wound up on the ground. I scraped up my knee, ankles, elbow, and chest. Not bad, but enough that they bled, and will look ugly. I also pulled some muscles in my shoulder, and that's gonna hurt tomorrow. The handlebar tape on my right handlebar is torn to shreads, so I'll need some new stuff. I also trashed my glove. They were really nice gloves... cloth backing, short fingers, good padding. The padding on the palm isn't really attached to the fingers anymore. So, a few repairs are in order, and probably a few days of rest off of the bike. I did bike home afterwards, nice and slow (well, I didn't work as hard as usual).
No more biking for me on Tuesday's for a while. I started a new paragraph here in order to write some more, but, uhm, I've forgotten what I wanted to write. Must be bedtime.

I finally sent off my resume to somebody today... I don't know if anything will come of it, but I'm going to start looking in earnest now, since I can't cope with where Concordia anymore. There are a whole variety of factors involved there, which I'll discuss after I'm no longer employed there.

dyork, I've hated all of the Montreal natives that I've met while there... They all know english just fine, but are too arrogant to speak it to you if you don't know French. Stick with Toronto, which is a really wonderful city...

biking
My goal when I started biking was to get up to better than 15 miles per hour for my rides, and I'm doing better than 16 on the ride home now. I'm really pleased about that. Goal setting is a really important part of any fitness binge. I think my new goal will be 100 miles a week. At almost 25 miles per round trip to work, that means biking 4 days a week, or at least putting in some serious miles for a couple of days. I think I'll need to increase that distance in just a few weeks, but we'll see how it goes.

emergent properties
Wow, jfleck posted a really cool example of emergent properties in his diary. Thanks! There's a lot that can be done with that one, I'll have to bring it up next time I'm sitting around BSing with friends.

rain
Heh, 0.06 inches, huh? We're supposed to get 0.5 inches between yesterday and today. Not neat storms, but we do get plenty of water. It's actually been raining since about 10 minutes into the Cat II race last night, not just drizzling. Pretty fascinating. Oregon is the land that intermittent, or "delay" if you prefer, wipers were made for. Low is too fast, and off is too slow.

Hmm, I guess I lied to DV this morning, I can read the French at the end of mathieu's diary, more or less (without the help of babelfish).

dyork mentioned something about an "American aversion to all things metric". I don't believe in such a thing. I'm an American, and I love metric. I can convert most things between metric and English Standard in my head in a trvial amount of time. Metric is incredibly nice computationally.
I'm amazed that people can get by using vi, or even vim, for SGML editing. I need to try out Dan's .vimrc, but I can't imagine it being able to keep up with an editor that actually reads, and presents options based upon reading, the DTD. I've gotten some people to write me some "macros" for things in emacs/psgml, like insert graphics, and other complex markup. I should write up a -really- good .emacs for use by the LDP, GNOME, and so on. Yeah, in my copious spare time. :-)

computer hardware
<rant> Dan York put something up a while ago about about somebody trying to put the e-smith server on a notebook (or laptop if you prefer). He said '...the system must be "PCI-based"...' and '...I haven't really seen any laptops that supported PCI cards!..." I'm looking at the website, and I see "PCI-based Pentium machine" as the hardware architecture. Regardless of which of those you choose, every x86 based laptop made today meets those requirements. They're all PCI based. The memory and the CPU exchange data through the "north bridge". The "south bridge" controls the expansion capablities, such as PCI, and ISA slots, and serial and parallel ports. Every chipset on the market now supports PCI. All of the notebooks that we've purchased within the past year no long have a PCI-ISA bridge, meaning that -all- of their peripherals communicate via the PCI bus. There's no reason that I can find that it shouldn't run just as well on a notebook as it does on a desktop system.</rant>
Sorry about that, I like to learn about computer hardware, and it irks me when I see things that are "just plain wrong".

Biking
I promised John that I'd write about my race last night here, so I guess I'd better hop to it. So, on Tuesday nights they have bike races out at PIR, Portland International Raceway. It seems that it's a 2 mile track, very flat, with curves that might be challenging at 150 miles an hour, but are pretty wimpy at 20. I'm not entirely sure how the entire race went, because I was working too hard to really think. We started off, and just glumped together for a while, then strung out into single file. Either the first or the second time we came through the finish line (did I mention that it was 5 lap race?), the guy behind me dove into a little sprint. Colin (a guy I know from the velo) and I took off in chase, and kept up with him. We got into a -fast- (for my tired legs, 25mph) pace line, which I was able to stick on for a lap. As we came onto the straight-away, after my pull, I didn't have the strength to keep up with them, so I let them go, and pushed on by myself. By the end of the race, I couldn't see either the two guys ahead of me, nor the guy behind me. It's pretty boring to just crank away for that long, but it's a really good workout. So, I got third, out of a field of 4, by a long margin both ways. Unfortunately, they didn't publish the results on the website, nor did times get posted on the emailed results. Drat.
Impressions? Well, the race was fun, because it was a race... and boring, because the track is really boring. Once I get faster, the other categories look a lot more fun (40+ people, rather than 4). But I race at just over 20 miles an hour, and they were all doing better than 25, which is just too fast for me to maintain. Those races will definately be a good workout for me. Six or seven miles from work to there, and then eight to twelve miles as a race, then another bunch (dozen?) miles home. And of course, Wednesday nights are out at the velodrome, when it's not raining. I do like bike racing and riding...

I've been off doing other things for a while, but decided I wanted to write something here tonight. Well, I wanted to last week, but things were too busy. Anyway, jfleck has been writing some neat stuff. I love storms, but there's no such thing in Oregon. I've heard thunder twice since I've been here. That's an average of once every 3.5 years.
I have no idea what he's talking about with "emergent properties". I read that a couple of times, and it still doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. I should look for more links on the topic, in all of my free time.

I saw a diary by hacker, and decided to read it, and as it turns out, he's writing docs for something that I've been dying to do for a really long time. Cross-compiling is such a bitch, but it's SOOOOO useful. Perhaps I'll try it out with Intel to SPARC compiling. Fun!

dyork was fighting XML/XSLT the other day, and came across a bug in libxml. Dan, upgrade to the CVS version, and things will be fixed. Heh, good deal, huh? I'll see if I can make a snapshot build for you. What Linux distrib are you using lately? I want to try this Real soon now, but I've got a few other higher priorities.
I didn't think CDATA marked sections worked properly in XML? Anybody know the details of what doesn't work properly here, and care to explain? Maybe I'll ask Liam tomorrow, if I remember.
I'm not surprised that Hotmail has moved to win2k, really. This is the first time that they've had an OS with even the potential to run that sort of a service. I don't think anybody other than MS would have made the move though, it's just too expensive to replace a working system that doesn't cost money, with a less efficient system for which one must purchase licenses.
Dan also wrote some stuff about the LPI, and about advogato's certification levels. Good stuff, but I've forgotten all of the comments that I wanted to make. I think I should take the plunge and get some Linux or Unix related certs. Now, to find some sample tests...

Biking
I think I may have a lead on a track bike, for a pretty reasonable price. The biggest problem with getting a rental bike is that I don't always get the same one, and some of them don't fit quite right. The seat is quick release, and I put my petals on it. However, sometimes the tilt on the bars is wrong, or they're a bit too high, or too low. I want my own bike so that I can get it adjusted and tuned properly for me.
I biked to work last Monday and Tuesday, which felt really good. Maybe I'll HTMLize my logs and put them online... Wednesday I went out to the track. I was a bit tired going into the workout, since my rides to work are really races against the clock. We did a much longer workout than I was used to, and I pushed myself pretty hard to keep up with the pace line. I was 5th from the last to drop out there. At the end of practice, we did some sprint races. That's three laps, the first must be at least a walking pace. The rest can be any speed, but usually the second is slow, and the final lap is VERY fast. I managed to finish 1 of these, but I was just barely coherent at the end. A couple of minutes later, they asked me to go again, but the coach didn't think that would be a good idea. I -wanted- to ride more, but wasn't physically capable of it. I biked home pretty slow. I couldn't ride to work on Thursday, I was just too tired. Friday I could have, but didn't, ride in to work. I'll take it a bit easier this week.
I just came up with this... But what I think I'll do is bike to work tomorrow (Monday), and get a lift home. Then get a ride in to work on Tuesday, and go out to the races a PIR, and maybe bike home from there (if it's not dark). Wednesday I'll get a ride, and go out to the track. The PIR races are on road bikes, which is good, because mine is well adjusted, and I can work the gears, almost. Gosh, I want indexed shifters.

Computers
I finished the exercizes for Chapter 4 in learning perl today. I keep writing things in Pascal, and wondering why they don't work. I'll get the syntax down quickly, as soon as it's not 6 months between hacking sessions. I need to get through chapter 8 ASAP. 8 is on functions, and I need to be able to use those to write the build script for GNOME 2.0. Bleah, not enough hours in the day. jrb keeps telling me to learn python, and I think I've got a good project for that ready, but I need to get job hunting too. So, Python is on the shelf for the time being. GPP stuff is going well, I need to draft a mail to see if there's space to put binaries on ftp.gnome.org and it's mirrors. I send Red Hat a set of updates for most of their GNOME packages today, hopefully dcm will see about getting those into production soon. I might even get to close a couple of GConf bugs that are in the Red Hat bugzilla, since I think they're my fault. ;-) Enough for now, I need sleep...

Stuffs

Wow, some dude was a total dick to fejj... The guy posted only one possible rational argument... Amazing
I don't really think fejj's first reply was that great, but it's easy to understand why he posted it. Oh, I see. They're all flames, but that's the way things go sometimes.
I REALLY like Evolution, although the snapshots that Ximian is making kind of suck ass. Speaking of which, I need to ask Robin if he's had time to hack on a simple build-script, so that I can feed tinderbox.

biking

Biked to work today, although I got a flat about nine miles into it. It was raining, so it was really hard to get the tire dry enough to get the patch to take at all. Of course, I didn't check well enough, and missed the piece of glass that was embeded into the tire. I got a new one tonight, but I grabbed the 650 tube instead of the 700. Rats. I'll go back, since I need to give them grief anyway. They need to replace the heel pad on one of my shoes, since it's already fallen off. I need to swap the tube for one the right size, and I need to get a real patch kit... the kind with glue, not just the pre-glued pads. The pre-glued ones are nice for weight, but they don't seem to work nearly as well as the ones with the rubber cement. I actually talked to the mechanic down at the bike shop (I've given up on Bike and Hike, since they don't keep the sales guys busy enough, and they tend to intercept you before you can talk to the mechanics). River City Bikes is where I'm headed lately, and this mechanic helped me find the good tires. This one looks pretty nice, and we'll see how it holds up. It had better be nice, for $50...

Work

Busy, drat. I wanted to be less tired when I got home today, so that I could do some job hunting. Alas, I barely had enough energy to sit in front of the TV.
10 Jun 2001 (updated 10 Jun 2001 at 21:03 UTC) »

[This entry has been edited for content, and to run in the time allotted]

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.

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