Tim Danner

Yesterday I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. It was great fun and a worthy successor to Cryptonomicon, though I can’t, at this point, say whether it advanced my understanding of history or gummed it up with fiction. I feel like I should get a prize or something for getting through all 3,000 pages of it.

Because New Year’s Day fell on a Saturday this year, my employer elected to give us Presidents’ Day off rather than January 3^rd. I decided to spend the day on a solo bike ride. For Christmas I received a copy of Best Bike Rides in Texas, with a foreword by pre-Tour de France Lance Armstrong.

For today I chose #38, the Washington-on-the-Brazos Challenge, which is a 42-mile loop starting and ending in Chappell Hill (a tiny town on 290 between College Station and Brenham) and passing by Washington-on-the-Brazos state park. The book describes the terrain as “gently rolling hills.” I suppose that would be considered accurate, but as my cycling thus far has consisted entirely of ultra-flat coastal plains it was definitely a Challenge for me.

Today’s ride also impressed on me the benefits of riding in a group. When it got windy, I wanted nothing more than to be able to tap my hip, say “out,” and drop back behind a double paceline of fellow travelers/windbreaks.

I had hoped to get out from under the Houston gloom, but it didn’t work. The weather was just as overcast out there as it was here. You can’t escape February that easily.

Even so, the ride was much more pleasant than how I spend most of my Mondays.

Flashblock — Flash ads are even more annoying than animated GIFs, but there’s some nifty Flash stuff on the web as well. My old solution was to not install the Flash plugin in Firefox and just use IE whenever I encountered Flash content that I did want to load. With Flashblock, I can load individual Flash files with a single click.

Go Up — In IE, the Google toolbar has a handy “go up a level” button. This provides that function in Firefox.

Linky — When you want to open a large number of links in tabs, just select them, right click, and use the Linky submenu to do it all at once.

BugMeNot — Bypass “free registration required” sites like newspapers by right-clicking on the login box.

I used to use Tabbrowser Extensions, but there are hidden prefs in Firefox 1.0 that cover 95% of what I wanted, so I don’t bother with it any more.

The new Netflix Friends feature is nifty. Anyone who wants to see what I’ve been watching through that interface can email me or leave a comment for an invitation.

Friday night I went to hear Abi Tapia sing at a coffee house with a friend from work. A good time was had. Subsequently, Eric talked me and a few others into heading to his house to watch The Notebook. Since it was already 11, I figured that would cost me my Saturday bike ride, but why not? When the movie was over, around 2, I drove home and decided to set my alarm anyway.

In an uncharacteristic move, I actually got up at 6:30 when it went off. This week the group was riding the “Wee-Mart route,” a 60 mile circuit through League City, Dickenson, and Alvin to a little run down convenience store in central nowhere. On return (tired!) my trip meter read 61.82 miles, which is (only!) 99.5 km. Maybe next time.

Last October, the Rice Young Alumni newsletter announced an informational meeting for a Rice MS 150 team. It specifically declared that beginning riders were welcome. I hadn’t been on my old mountain bike for any distance since the end of biking HPER (a phys-ed class at Rice) several years ago, but that sounded like fun. So I went to the meeting, confirmed that beginners were in fact welcome, and decided to buy a road bike.

After a bit of shopping, I picked a 2005 Trek 1000, which is an entry-level 24-speed road bike with an aluminum frame and a carbon front fork.

One of Carrie’s classmates suggested hooking up with the Space City Cycling Club, an informal group which rides from the Bay Area Blvd. Bike Barn every Saturday and Sunday at 8 AM. They leave as one big mass, then break up into various speed (from as slow as 16 mph up to the hard core 24 mph guys) and distance (usually 40-60 miles) groups.

The downside of living near the middle of a sprawling city is that I have to drive half an hour to get somewhere with long, low traffic roads for a good ride. This means that I have to get up by 6:30 to eat something, load the bike on the car, and drive out there. I’d rather be sleeping then, but it’s probably good for me.

And it’s worth it–I’m having a good time and noticing improvements in my capabilities. According to my cyclocomputer, so far my longest distance is 50 miles and my fastest average speed over a full ride is 18.5 mph. I think that was a 40 mile ride. When nice weather–which I define as morning temperatures greater than 55°F and a sky more blue than gray–returns, I expect it will be even better.

In the end, the Rice team didn’t get enough takers to actually happen, so I need to find another team [note to self: do this soon]. In addition to the MS 150, I’m planning on doing the recently-announced Tour de Houston.

Rain falls on 610 Flooding the low places like Bad haiku on blogs

I seem to have lost interest in posting funny links, and I’m not sure why that is. It could be related to the intermittent screwups some people have noticed, where the site displays unstyled. When it’s in that state WordPress is also broken. I still don’t know what’s causing that. It just goes away on its own after a few hours. Could be an issue with the host.

Or maybe it just seems a bit pointless to post links to things that I essentially found on other sites that post links to things.

There’s still plenty of funny stuff on the web. Dave Barry’s blog includes so many links that I can’t even read them all. Boing Boing remains, as always, your best source for web strangeness and intellectual property moderation advocacy.

What I really ought to do (keyword: ought) is post more personal stuff, rather than just links. I should keep the “Recent Movies” sidebar up to date (or even say something about the stuff I watch–there’s a thought). There are photos I could post. I haven’t even mentioned here that I’ve started biking. And so on. For now, I’ll leave in place the scheduled job that copies any new links from del.icio.us to here.

In case you feel deprived by this, I’m posting the archive I kept from the old Python CGI funny link system I used before switching to a weblog format. There’s some good stuff in there, like Kikkoman and The Brunching Shuttlecock’s classic Either/Or. Link rot is pretty bad though.