Nick reintroduced me to netvibes the other day and I’m testing a module for my portal. If all goes as planned, I’ll have an open blog-field on my dashboard/portal for me to enter a quick blog post without all of the WP Dashboard rigeramoroll ..
Its pretty simplistic .. not sure if its looking for HTML commands or what … I’ll have to see how I like it ..
Last night I sent this email to the husband, my pal wingzz and my cousin jon:
Tomorrow – Thursday, April 19, 2007
Stony Creek Trailhead : 6:30
Here’s what’s gonna happen. I mean it. I’m going to lead, and we’re going to go really really really slow. We’re going to go slow because we’re not going to stop. I mean it. No smoke breaks, no pee breaks, no wuss breaks. We’re going to leave the parking lot and take the first left and climb the back way up to Mt. Sheldon. We’ll head in and do the roller coaster .. then the pines …
and then
we climb the snake, and ride the roller coaster one more time (this time because its so freakin fun) 😀
I know … looks great in text, right? Well, this is what I’d really like to do .. and it’ll be tough to do on my own, so I’d love it if ya’ll would humor me and tag along 😉
Who knows, we might just have fun too!
😉
Unfortunately, Mike’s granddaughter was having her 2nd birthday tonight and we never heard from Jon. But, we pushed on, the two of us.
I had 4 goals: 1-climb the back of mt. sheldon and start right into the roller coaster without stopping at the top. 2-ride the roller coaster and go right from the prairie to the pines without stopping at the prairie. 3-finish the pines and take the 3 hill route to the snake without stopping after the pines 4-after climbing the snake start right into the roller coaster without stopping at the top
I’ve done some of these things before, but never all together. I always stop ALOT when riding Stony. I’ve also never ridden the roller coaster twice in one ride. Yeah .. I’m a slacker.
I reached 3 out of 4 of my goals tonight. I had to stop for a few minutes after the Pines because my back was aching aching aching. After that, I felt great! But then I started to almost get cramps in my calves. We’d talked about taking the bypass after the first section of the roller coaster the second time through because we were running short on daylight. I was starting to like the idea of taking the bypass when Nick realized we’d probably have enough daylight left to finish the coaster.
I didn’t want to. I was already in the bar drinking beer.
Turns out, the dude knows me better than I thought. He knew I was getting frustrated so he told me he’d ride ahead and let me do my own thang, take my time, take it easy. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I didn’t really feel like he was pushing me to ride faster, but I was feeling self conscious about how I was riding. Which really wasn’t a big deal until I’d convinced myself I was done 😉
I needed the freedom to take bad lines and slow down unexpectedly. And that’s exactly what he gave me! And it worked 😀 I finished the roller coaster with a big ‘ol smile on my face.
The weather was amazing. I just got my new trails-edge jerseys and I got my first ever long sleeve jersey. I’ve decided that my favorite riding weather is when I can wear my knickers and long sleeve jersey. I love that thing.
We ended up at the Sherwood Brewing Company for dinner and beer. I like that place more every time I go there. Thanks Frank and Claudia!!!
So I’m all kindsa mellow … tonight was exactly what I needed to kick myself in the ass 😉
I love google. I use gmail, gtalk, maps, notebook, dashboard, and of course, calendar. I share my calendar with Nick and Jess. Nick created a Michigan Mountain Bike calendar. I’ve got a calendar for Jarek’s weekends. Its great!
Unless you want to get reminders from any calendar other than your “primary” calendar. Then, its not so good.
I wanted to create a new calendar called “reminders”. This is a calendar that’s not so much for appointments, but would be for things I want to be reminded of on a regular basis (ie – remind me to take a pill at lunchtime, or remind me to pick something up on my way home from work). I don’t want this crap in my regular calendar. I want to be able to hide my “reminders” calendar and keep it private (ie – unshared). But alas, I need to be able to actually GET reminders in order for this to work.
Not completely ideal, as its tied to Firefox in the form of an Add-on, but pretty damn close to ideal. For me, I want these reminders mostly while I’m at work. And, when I’m at work, I’m generally staring at a Firefox browser window 99.95% of my day. So, its really a good solution for me!
Just thought I’d pass it along. If you find yourself in a similar situation, give Google Calendar Notifier 2.5 a try!
I think its been about a year since my computer broke. The thing just up and died and it took my 2 hard drives with it. I started with a sloooooow hand-me-down machine with a 20g hard drive to tide me over. Eventually I turned the bastard off because it just wasn’t worth the time it took to do anything. Recently, I upgraded to a much faster hand-me-down, this one is lightening fast in comparison. But circumstances left me still with the 20g hard drive.
Translation: I haven’t sync’d my iPod to a computer in a year.
So today I took the plunge. We stopped by WalMart on the way to breakfast and I bought an 80g Seagate External USB hard drive. After breakfast, I downloaded and purchased CopyPod which promised to get my tunes off of my iPod and onto my PC – including my playlists and ratings (yes, I said purchased .. because, we’re talking about my entire music collection, my ratings, my playlists, my mother fucking data .. this is important shit).
The drive connected flawlessly. I hit the power button on that thing and my computer saw it instantly.
Score 1 for me!
I decided to move on to the iPod. Since I didn’t read the directions, I didn’t realize that I could copy my music directly to an iTunes library automajikly through the CopyPod software. Since I didn’t read the directions, I copied my music to a folder on my shiny new drive. After an hour or so of crunching, the copy was done. I opened up iTunes and browsed to my music on my shiny new drive and added those songs to my iTunes library. Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared – with no ratings .. no playlists .. no nothing. Shit.
Score 0 for me.
Ok .. so, I delete all of the music off of my shiny new drive. I open CopyPod back up and see that ‘copy to iTunes’ is an option. So I give it a shot. I spend another hour playing addicting flash games. When the copy process is complete, I clicked OK on the ‘complete’ dialog and mindlessly closed the program (I was a bit distracted as my volume suddenly became un-muted). So, I open iTunes again and browsed to my music on my shiny new drive again and added those songs to my iTunes library, again. Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared, again – with no ratings .. no playlists .. no nothing, again. Shit.
Score -1 for me.
I decided it was time to read the directions. Apparently, had I not closed the program after the ‘complete’ dialog box, I would have seen another dialog box that said it was about to automatically import my shit into iTunes. Heh. Who knew?
Take 3.
Delete the music off the shiny new drive. Copy the music to my iTunes library. LEAVE THE COMPUTER ALONE for about an hour. Click OK on the dialog box that says its completed the copy. LEAVE THE PROGRAM OPEN. Click OK on the dialog box that says its about to automatically import my shit into iTunes so keep your grubby hands off of it. LEAVE THE COMPUTER ALONE for an hour or two (went for Mexican food .. mmmm .mmmm). After dinner, I watched CopyPod finish its import into iTunes and waited for it to close iTunes and give me the ‘all clear’ dialog box.
I opened up iTunes and didn’t have to browse to my music on my shiny new drive and add those songs to my iTunes library. Because Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared – in my library – with ratings .. with playlists .. with everything. Sweet!
Moral of the story: I could have spent my afternoon tweaking my iTunes library as I’ve been thinking about for a year now. Instead, I spent the day fighting against myself. Heh.
All’s well that ends well though … I’m pretty damn satisfied with the way it turned out in the end 😀
it would seem as though this weekend was wasted.
Ok. I’ll admit, there was no riding. Very little exercise at all, in fact. I take complete responsibility for this. Its been a rough few weeks – mostly at work, but busy outside of work as well. I’d had about all of life that I could take by the time my day ended on Friday. I was tired, and, were it not for the assortment of prescription drugs I take, I would have been seriously cranky. So, I wanted a no-fuss weekend.
On Saturday, Nick reloaded his home desktop computer – much needed activity. He also got his passport documents all finished so he can take them to the passport office this week! I was able to upgrade my home desktop with some finagling and also reloaded windows. In between all of this, we took the dogs for a short walk in the woods yesterday and Nick submitted our taxes!
I shouldn’t be so excited about submitting tax forms that also require a large payment from us, but actually, I’m VERY excited about this. Both last year, and again this year, we had to borrow money from my 401k to pay some bills. We’ve been actively working on our debt situation for nearly 3 years now, and paying this tax bill marks the end of our hard work. Paying this tax bill leaves us only in debt with our mortgage and one car payment (and that will be paid off by fall). Tomorrow, when the government takes a few grand out of my bank account, I’ll breath a giant sigh of relief. Tomorrow, when the government takes that money, we will be as close to financial freedom as I need to be right now. Tomorrow marks the day when we stop kicking ourselves for mistakes we made in our first 7 years together and start looking forward to not ever making those mistakes again. Those dollars that the government wants from me is like a giant weight that I’ve been carrying on my shoulders for a long, long time. Tomorrow, that weight will be lifted from my shoulders. So yeah. Its a good thing 🙂
And today? Today was the icing on the cake!
I got a chance to finish my latest bike project. My new (to me) Bianchi PUSS is now complete and ready to roll!
I can’t wait to ride it on the trail. Unfortunately, this is Michigan. And we’re seeing signs of spring. I may have to wait. *sigh* Isn’t she purty tho?? (don’t worry, kev – the check’s in the mail! 😀 )
Also today, Nick and I gave ASTARO another shot. We tried, and failed, to load the free firewall/gateway a few months ago. After fighting for weeks, we gave up and tried IPCOP, which worked great, but was lacking in the GUI arena. Well, Astaro released an updated code, allowing home users to use their corporate code for free – up to 10 users. We decided to give it a shot. I think, start to internet browsing, we might have spent 20 minutes. Damn cool system, awesome GUI, easy to use, works like a champ. I’m in geek heaven 😀
This is all for now. I might come back and add/edit later .. who knows .. for now, I need to go to walmart and buy some dog food and toilet paper to round out my weekend 🙂
It was a rough one out there today. Lots of crunchy snow and slick iced-over xc ski tracks. Slow going and completely anaerobic.
But, damn it was fun 😀
The cameraphone doesn’t do the day justice. It was gorgeous outside today. But, riding at Stony was somewhat surreal what with the helicopters flying overhead and the police driving around in search of a missing person.
Its been a rough week. I’m tired and mentally fried. So, maybe I’m a little punchy, but here are a few things that I got a kick out of on my way to work this morning:
ahh… Friday .. I love it 😀
I drove to South Bend, IN on Monday for work. I was there with my co-worker through the day on Thursday. It was a rough week. I ate badly. I brought my bike and trainer but only actually rode for 45 min on Monday.  After that, it was just a decoration to administer guilt. Work went relatively, but was still frustrating and very tiring. The weather was ridiculously cold, and on Tuesday morning, I lost the last fan setting in my Jeep, so I only had heat if I was going 40+ mph. I left on Thursday almost in a state of depression, despite the daily dose of crazy pills I take.
My boss let us stay home on Friday in thanks for our hard work and volunteering to go in the first place. I spent the day just trying to chill and recoup from the crazy week I’d had. I was tense and tired and it was nice to sit still. We talked about spinning, but never made it off the couch. Jarek came over and we watched 3 episodes of Alias and 2 episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It was awesome 😀
But, by Saturday, I needed to do something. Jarek was off to a birthday party so we had the day free. Nick was “mr. idea” this weekend and took me to the Tree Farm for a Single Speed ride in the snow. Our ride time was ~1hr 40min with an average speed of 5.9 mph .. S L O W .. My front brake on my SS had lost its usefullness and so I had very little control over my bike. Also, the snow was a little wet so it kept icing up my cleats, so I had a terrible time clipping in. I couldn’t wear my tinted glasses because I wasn’t going fast enough to keep them from fogging up. But, let me just say this:
The ride .. was fucking .. Awesome… I had a blast. I had so many endorphins running though me when we were done that I just needed BEER. So, Nick too me to Dragonmead in Warren and I had an English Brown Ale and an English Amber Ale. Yummmmmy.
Saturday was a great day 😀
Now, today was way colder than yesterday. Like almost 10 degrees colder. When we got to Stony Creek High School at noon to meet Mike, Nick and I both realized that we needed to switch from our normal fleece-lined tights to our heavy-duty AmFib tights. Once we finally got rolling, we warmed up pretty damned quick. I rode my K2 Flyin Monkey for the first time since I bought the lighter wheelset. That bike is ridiculously fun to ride. Oh My Gawd .. I had SO much fun today. Since the weather was colder, the snow was much firmer and easier to ride. My cleats didn’t freeze up once, and both of my brakes worked flawlessly 😉
Then, we got a call from our foreign exchange student (the jessica girl who just moved to germany) and we chatted with her for ~45 minutes. She’d gotten the care package we sent and wanted to say thanks!
I’ve been in a rut lately. We’ve been in a rut lately. But, it seems we’re working our way out of it. I feel oddly refreshed after this weekend. I’m most thankful to my great dude, Nick because he was my tour guide this weekend. He made the plans and I just went with it. Good stuff. Thanks baby 😉
Nothing burns my biscuits quite like appliances that call themselves simple and prove themselves to be anything but …
Ok .. in the GRAND scheme of things, this thing is a pretty sweet piece of technology and, if you get past all of the ‘gotchas’ , it is pretty simple.
But, to lable something ‘simple’ and ship it with a default configuration that will not work in a standard windows xp workgroup and have NO documentation as to why …. well, that’s just plain rude.
So, here’s my deali-o. We got a smokin deal on this 250 Gig File/Print appliance called SimpleShare. We waited patiently for this thing to come. Finally, it arrives! And there is much rejoicing! Until we find ourselves hours later, about to put our fists through monitors because we cannot browse our own windows workgroup, muchless see our shiney new driveshares.
The husband first followed the setup wizard and quickstart guide and immediately got a strange error when trying to map a drive to his local machine. He thought we probably had generic windows xp sharing issues that seem to bite us in the ass constantly, so we spent a few hours fiddling with settings only to wind up with the same strange error. Now, we can browse via HTTP to the Admin GUI and we can ping the device by name and by IP, but when we try to browse for it, windows gives an “Network Path Not found” error. This makes no sense to me.
If I can ping you, and I can reach you via http, then your network path is found.
Today, I finally had some time to sit down and play with this thing again. I found the 100+ page help file to be utterly useless for any kind of troubleshooting. The help file assumes ‘best case scenario’ and nothing more. I also looked through the FAQs on the company’s support page and found some information regarding error codes for problems mapping drives, but nothing about network path not found. I needed to consult the Internet.
Google handed me a forum thread where someone was having the same problem as me. Several people responded with answers regarding those same error codes that I read about on the FAQs, but none of them helped the original poster, nor did it help me. Finally, someone responded with what seemed to be a very obscure answer, but I figure it was worth a try.
He suggested I look under Printers –>Printer Pool Name and change it to No Printer Pool . So I went to my web gui, and clicked on the ‘Printers’ icon, and sure enough, there was a printer pool name assigned. The printer pool name was SimplePool … This is significant because the File Share pool name was also set to SimplePool and was causing conflict. I changed the setting to No Printer Pool and suddenly everything worked.
This little configuration glitch caused me not to be able to browse my own windows workgroup, and would not let me map drives to my simpleshare server. As soon as I made the change, I had access to my windows workgroup and my simpleshare also showed as a member of that workgoup.
Its always those little things that bite ya in the ass …. I hate that shit 😉
We’d probably known each other for about a year when we started flirting. I think it was July – Lallapalooza 1993. He was there with a casual girlfriend and I was enjoying the freedom of knowing that I’d be fleeing town in a few weeks, leaving for a college education. It was a hot, hot day and the drinking water had somehow become contaminated. He was old enough to buy beer, and ironically, beer was the same price as the bottled water they were trying to sell. So, we drank beer to quench our thirst.
I remember sitting in the shady woods, drinking beers and batting my eyelashes. Somehow, we talked each other into festival ear piercing in an ez-up tent. I made him hold my hand while I was getting punctured with a blunt object through my flesh. Not that I really thought it would hurt that badly (I’d had this done a few times already), but it was a good excuse for physical contact (I’m only 18 remember).
I never saw him that night after I’d worked my way through the mosh pit during the headline concert (Primus – w00t) and landed a spot on the barrier gate at the foot of the stage. Apparently, the girlfriend had managed an injury, and consequently, he spent most of the Primus concert in first aid with a bitter and pissed off girlfriend.
A few weeks after the concert, the girlfriend was an ex and we were hanging out. In early August, we went to see The Mighty Mighty Boss Tones at Harpo’s – a small shady bar in a shady part of town. We had sex in the bed of his pickup truck after the concert. After that, it was 3 steamy weeks of fun before I left for college.
He came to see me off, in the early morning, the day I left. He said he wanted to marry me someday. I told him I was flattered, but that he shouldn’t wait for me. I wasn’t planning on coming back.
Even though we were going to try and give the ‘long distance relationship’ thing a bit of a go, my heart just wasn’t in it from the start. As soon as I got to my dorm and started meeting new people, I knew I wanted to separate myself from the past I’d made downstate. I’d promised him that I wouldn’t end our relationship until we could see each other in person. I wouldn’t do it over the phone or in a letter, I’d give him that much. Well, within 3 weeks of starting my new life, I was drafting a “dear soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend” letter. I’d found someone else and was moving on.
We talked briefly when I came home for Thanksgiving. We saw each other again that following summer – my first summer home from college. I was still dating the distraction that caused me to break things off. This new boy, he and I had a good thing. But, the old boy and I were going to be friends. Since we were still friends, I figured there was no harm in asking him to buy me some beer to take back to school with me. Heh. What a dork I was 🙂
The night he bought me a case of MGD was the last time I talked to him until after I graduated and moved back home.
That new boy? He and I lasted 3 years. I held on tight to him until I realized one day that I really just couldn’t stand him. I couldn’t stand him or his family and I needed to be done. A year or so later, my friendship with the Italian Stallion became much more. We dated during my last semester in college and when I graduated that December, we kept it going when I moved back downstate to find a job. He decided he was done with me when I took my first full-time professional job in Lansing. He figured I’d never move back up to the UP and he knew he sure wouldn’t move downstate – not even for me.
So, since I was lonely and starting to get depressed, I decided to get in touch with an old friend. This old friend put me in touch with some other old friends. This old friend also introduced me to ICQ and sent me some contacts. Sure enough, that boy that I’d left standing in my street 5 years earlier was one of those contacts.
Being completely unfamiliar with Instant Messaging, and only mildly familiar with email (this was only 1998), I sent (in hindsight) a very strange IM to that old boyfriend of mine. He hadn’t heard from me in almost 4 years, and one day he gets an IM that said nothing more than “Hey Loser … ”
We’ve been married for almost 7 years now. Funny how these things work out, isn’t it?
