Thanks to the blood sucking NTTA, I finally have a bridge I can use to get to work by bicycle. Once I figured out a way to navigate the 7.5 mile (12km) trip with the least contact with traffic, I started bicycling to work as frequently as I've been able to will myself.
The first few days were hard on my body, very tired when I got to the office and subsequently depressed in the afternoon on the prospect of having to face about 40 minutes of effort to get home.
Two weeks later, I no longer even care about the effort - it's actually easy. And, now it's closer to 30 minutes because I'm hauling ass as best I can.
My goal is to use my bicycle to eliminate at least two commutes by car per week. Coupled with working 4x10 instead of 5x8 hours at the office, that's a 60% reduction in my gasoline consumption via commute. Screw you Exxon.
I'm logging my miles per day, and I think 50 miles (80km) per week - overall not just on commuting - is a great goal for me. Also, I've added my logging to my FriendFeed, to beat down all the idiots who think I'm interesting that follow me that way.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Michael Michael Bicycle
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Giving Disqus a Try (redux)
Giving Disqus a try (too). I think the only reason I've avoided a deluge of comment spam or stalkers is because my blog is utterly irrelevant and uninteresting. At least that's what my AdSense account tells me...
Friday, May 16, 2008
Random Album Review: Recovering the Satellites
I'm fairly certain Counting Crows is the best band that's arrived on the scene in my adult life. As I listened to this album, fresh with my reviewer-ears, I realized that I'd no idea all these songs were from the same album. iPods tend to de-educate album detail as it goes about rendering songs as singularities to sort and configure at will. I'm not sure that is A Good Thing. This fact is yet another sound reason for the Random Album Review.
I had one concert experience with Counting Crows at the Texas Motor Speedway in 1997. Their performance was extraordinary and had the effect of locking me in for life. As usual, I've laid out the tracks best to worst with the first half dozen or so very difficult to decide between.
5-stars
Goodnight Elisabeth (4:33) - Romantic and sappy and all that.
Another Horsedreamer's Blues (5:20) - I remember this song as particularly soothing to my daughter as baby. To this day, she's still not allowed to sing along to the "Stupid Mothers" line, but allowed to shout the "Drunken Fathers" line with impunity. Go figure.
Catapult (3:35) - Pulsing and pushing, great on the headphones on the big hills.
A Long December (4:58) - As great as this is, there's a couple live versions in my collection that are even better. Counting Crows is one of those great bands that encourages trafficking of their live bootlegs.
Miller's Angels (6:34) - Hey Romeo indeed.
Children in Bloom (5:24) - Someone finally takes of the handcuffs of the lead guitar.
4-stars
Monkey (3:02) - If Horsedreamer is my daughter's domain, this belongs to my son. All monkey everywhere on that boy.
Angels of the Silences (3:39) - Angels picks up the pace, an excellent respite among all the brooding ballads.
Mercury (2:48) - Harmonica?
3-stars
Daylight Fading (3:50) - OK, I guess.
I'm Not Sleeping (4:58) - Good but radio overplay diminished this one for me.
Recovering the Satellites (5:25) - Why do title tracks let down so often?
2-stars
Have You Seen Me Lately? (4:11) - Yawn.
Walkaways (1:12) - I'm not sure why this ditty was ever included.
If you're interested in a listen,
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Getting Right
When I'm disorganized, lost, grumpy, surly and incomplete there always comes a moment when I can see the corner to turn to get me out of the mess. To a place a point over there, where I can shake loose and get right. The place the point is a redundant destination. The path to it well trodden, but I don't think I've ever looked down and examined where how it twists and turns.
I want to get right, now. Where is the place the point?
I know I have to get right with my lover, neglecting my favorite only piece of ass is too often an oversight.
I know I have to get right with my kids, not let this summer pass by as three more months knocked out on the way to them moving out.
I know I have to get right with my health, ending this farce where I'm fat and slow when I should be so fucking hot and and fast.
I know I have to get right with my code, writing shit that makes sense to other people, including myself 30 days later.
So I'm going to get right.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
String in a Haystack
This is for the data reverse-engineers out there. What do you do if you have a distinctive string value making an appearance in a form or report that's in a big application package, and you have no idea what table or column that value might be calling home? Here's some fancy dancy Oracle SQL to do the trick. I would double-check with your DBA before running against production systems. Your mileage may vary.
declare
cur sys_refcursor;
val varchar2(4000);
begin
for i in (select 'select "' || atc.column_name || '"' ||
' from "' || atc.owner ||
'"."' || atc.table_name || '"' ||
' where "' || atc.column_name ||
'" like ''%' || :searchstring ||
'%''' as cmd
,atc.owner
,atc.table_name
,atc.column_name
from all_tab_columns atc
join all_objects ao on (atc.owner =
ao.owner and
atc.table_name =
ao.object_name)
where ao.object_type = 'TABLE'
and atc.data_type = 'VARCHAR2'
and ao.owner = :schema
order by 2
,3
,4)
loop
open cur for i.cmd;
loop
fetch cur
into val;
exit when cur%notfound;
dbms_output.put_line(val || ' <= ' ||
i.owner || '.' ||
i.table_name || '.' ||
i.column_name);
end loop;
end loop;
end;
There are two variables, the :searchString and the :schema. Bind/substitue with your query tool of choice.
WTF UPS?
I recently purchased a new monitor, having it shipped to me via UPS. I don't do a lot of UPS business, on either end of the equation, so perhaps I'm a bit behind the curve on this issue. To keep tabs on the deliver, I investigated using my tracking number and RSS with NewsGator.
Guess what? UPS, king of the cutting edge doesn't do RSS. My only choices are continually visiting an updated web page or e-mail. E-mail?
Jason Young (ytechie.com) has a SimpleTracking web service that has great RSS feed wrappers for many major US delivery services, UPS noticeably excluded. UPS is cockblocking him all the way on exposing this data for any service to build great things.
Jason has a petition on this issue for UPS to consider. I encourage my massive single-digit readership to affix their name to the petition; takes 10 seconds.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
So Long DOT.TUNES
I fired up DOT.TUNES Version 4 this morning to share some music with my daughter. I've written previously on the pros and cons of this software. It works well enough so I use it. Then today, I get this bullshit:
Which makes no sense to me because at no point during the original install was there any mention of "expiration". Since I'm firmly entrenched in the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" camp I'm irritated by this mystery arbitrary expiration. Regardless, I go to the indicated URL, because maybe there's some heartbreaking security problem and upgrading is something essential. Maybe I go there because I'm a sheep.
The page primarily references downloading an ostensibly new product called Hook Up, a Mac OSX product which is useless to me. Below the fold there's a banner for the DOT.TUNES v4 product that interests me. The odd lack of prominence for v4 doesn't give me hope they plan on continuing their free license for v4 over the long haul. They might as well have their hyperlink in the closet, buried under cleaning products, an old broom and a mop that's seen better days. I follow the link.
Right off, I'm irritated as all get out. The DOT.TUNES v4 page has music automatically playing like a shitty MySpace wasteland. Not even good music; I thought a rat was chewing on my woofer cables at first. So be it, I find the pause icon and end that nonsense.
The first thing I notice, and maybe most people don't notice these things, is that there's not a stitch of information about DOT.TUNES v4 being new in any sort of way. No new anything. I click on their blog to see what announcements might be relevant to why perfectly good software has suddenly threw up on its own shoes. The light bulb goes on.
Because it's free (as in beer), there's always been a hidden expiration as a marketing tool to force you back to the mother ship if you want to use the software. Very uncool. I could see doing this, but making it up front when you install it (so you can make an informed decision). I could see a expiration that forces an announcement to freebie users. I could see a nag screen that can only be removed by returning to their new product screen and subsequently upgrading.
But, I can't see using a hidden expiration to disable perfectly good software for marketing purposes. That's flat out sheisty. So, goodbye DOT.TUNES. I will not be upgrading. I will not be using or recommending your firm's software to anyone, ever. I know that I wasn't part of your revenue stream, nor was I going to be anytime soon - so you might say good riddance to me. But maybe if enough bloggers (who also aren't in your revenue stream) expose how devious your firm operates, your bottom line will be diminished.
Despite my already enduring love of open source software, it still takes an occasional kick in the groin to remember why.
What is the Random Album Review?
Before I post my next review, I want to chat a bit about what the Random Album Review series means to me. I love my iPod. Over the years, combining my sizable digitized CD collection and downloads left me with about 10,000 songs. It was great that I was enjoying all my music in single compact magic box, but it was maddening how much crap was in there too.
So, I sat down and listened to it all. In a grand act of self-expression and personal liberty, I deleted all the crap. That left me with about 4000 songs, still quite a bevy of tunage. But that wasn't all. I found that I generally collected music via compilation releases which left me with an empty feeling in a weird way. Compilation albums are kind of seedy and coolness killers. They are an absolute expression of being a late adopter.
I went through my entire collection again. This time I endeavored to document in iTunes: the source album, original year of release and album art. My wife calls this couple of months the dreaded "headphone era". Demonstrating ADD superpowers, I think I even cleaned up iTunes at the dinner table, during dinner with my family. That effort was completed a couple of weeks ago.
So what's left after reaching the summit? Well for one thing I noticed that the quality of some of my favorite songs isn't quite as good as I'd like. When I first bought an iPod and ripped music (circa 2004), I was too ignorant about quality and obsessed with storage. Also, I think the algorithms that iTunes uses to rip music have improved. Several iPods later, storage isn't an issue with 60GB to work with and a more selective collection. Rather than implement an ADD approach, I'm re-ripping my music one album at a time and blogging about it, doing this at whatever pace happens no longer how long it takes.
One word about the "random" nature. It is only as random as iTunes is capable, which is quite suspect but good enough for this purpose. I have a smart playlist that looks for songs that 1) aren't singles, 2) have a five-star rating, 3) haven't been reviewed previously - and then limit that list to one song. That's how I determine which album is next. When I run out of albums that have at least one five-star song, I'll knock it down to four-stars - but that will be a while.
I'm also, trying out new social means to share my collection with family, friends and stalkers. I haven't found any yet that work just the way I want. I'll keep trying out a variety of them and linking or embedding them in Random Album Review posts. Don't expect any consistency on this aspect of the reviews, as I'll be all over the map as it pleases me.
