Friday Already

Morning weigh-in: 175.5#, 13.5% BF
 
Hmmmm... looks like Blogger has been improved yet again... fonts, photos, a few more html tags as buttons, and a raw HTML editor. Verrrry interesting!!
 
Rode last night, did a loop out near my "benchmark ride," but a little bit hillier. At the end of the ride I saw co-worker Scott on his bike at the corner of 13th & Northampton. He'd done the Genesis "Ice Cream Ride" and was waiting for another rider to come up in his car, follow him home and pick up a spare pump bracket. I went with them, hung out for a bit. It was a kind of nice way to end the ride.
 
Brain rot: didn't play with the computer last night. Forgot to pay my phone bill & they turned off the line. Oh well, something to do at lunchtime. (In my defense, they now send three separate bills instead of one, I'm so confused...) Last thing I did Wednesday though, was to download the latest kernel, maybe I'll build it this weekend, get my video card back up & running. 


 

back from an involuntary hiatus

Morning weigh-in (Wednesday): 174.5# BF forgotten
Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 177.5#, 13.5% BF

Got knocked out by a 24-hour bug, starting around midnight Tuesday. Here's the news otherwise:

Pump it up: I went out for a towpath ride Tuesday night, but before I left I checked the tire pressure -- it was like in the mid-20 psi range! I sort of noticed they seemed mushy on the turns on Saturday, I also noticed I felt slower and more sluggish than usual but didn't bother to make the connection or remedy the problem. Anyway, I pumped them up pretty high for me lately, about 40 psi, and felt like superman on the path. I felt so good that I decided to really push it, and ended up with a 1:24 burn time (approx 16.5 mph avg for 23 miles). Nowhere near my old records (1:28 for 25.4 miles, or 17.32 mph avg), but not bad! This won't do me any good at the Wilderness 101 I'm sure, but it's still a confidence boost even if I torched my lungs a bit. I can't believe I used to ride 55 psi on 1.95" tires...

After that I hit the showers, then met Theresa at Which Brew. Typical night there, very cool especially since the Mug Club Night (already postponed from last week because of the July 4th holiday) was cancelled because Kelly Jo was sick. That night of course, I got sick too, and found that T also took Wednesday off because she got hit by something. Coincidence? Probably not, but the bug didn't get caught Tues nite, more likely it happened much earlier & was caught by all of us from some other source.

Yesterday I stayed home, played some more with sed and found I could get some rudimentary template control, but it's pretty unwieldy; I also think I have a handle on my slow internet download problem, if not the solution then at least an understanding of the problem. I also got a haircut, and dropped my bike off for repairs at Bike King. It was Heath's birthday last night and he called, so I dropped by WB one more time for a quick hello.

ONe more thing: I got an email from "PayPal," looks like someone was on a phishing expedition. More on this in a day or two maybe.

Linux Voyager: sed and awk and bash, oh my!

Morning weigh-in: 176#, 13.5% BF

OK, so I haven't played with awk yet, but I'm starting to look at sed, and I'm getting a little deeper into scripting with bash. The context, of course, is still that script to take a bunch of JPEG files and generate a photo gallery for them.

Right now the script creates a directory called "html" in the working directory, and one called "photos" (with a "thumbs" subdirectory) there as well, then for each jpg/JPG file in the working directory it makes a smaller, thumbnail version of the file in "photos/thumbs", moves the file itself to "photos", and generates an HTML file in "html" to display the original file. It also makes an HTML file in the working directory to serve as an index, which displays the thumbs as links to the display files. The display files have links to each other -- "next" and "previous" display files, as defined by their order in the index -- as well as a link back to the index.

I used this to make my "Photos of Mike" Gallery, which shows how the resulting pages work together. (The explanatory text on the display pages was put in with an ordinary HTML editor; this text, and the linking structure on the display pages, are why I used HTML instead of just displaying the photos. If you look at the navigation links on the bash vs the awk pages you'll see why I thought my link structure was a good idea.)

My problems with the script as it stands are mostly related to its lack of flexibility. I'd like to have more control over the photo file selection, and maybe have the index and page display files be written from templates; I may also make a lot more of the "hardwired" stuff be variables, with default variables that can be superseded by a configuration file. These can all be command line arguments, options etc, and the configuration file could be just another shell script, but the templates may be tricky... hence, sed and awk.

In the long run, it may be easier to just port this to perl, but in the even longer run, an entirely new web page structure, based on CGI or CSS, may be the smarter move. (I spent some time experimenting with forms last night.)

Half-past Summer

Morning weigh-in: 175#, 10.5% BF

So the Fourth has come and gone, and now Heritage Day has passed...

Friday: nothing much happened. I worked late, went to Which Brew and then crashed early.

Saturday: I felt tired but went to the gym anyway, then when Dawn didn't show (& I remembered we'd cancelled) I just blew it off. Some housework, then I did a slow, medium-long ride on the Lehigh towpath: brought the camera, took pictures of Bethlehem Steel, the new trails behind St Luke's Hospital, and the trainyard west of Sand Island.

Sunday was pretty interesting. I went with Theresa and "Murph" (aka Mike Murphy -- I've known him for years & just found out his real first name) to a brunch at Margarita's house -- where Jay DeJesus showed up on his road bike, then to Mary Merritt's annual party to watch the fireworks. It was pretty cool, saw Violetta (who will be leaving for Alaska soon), and also John & Sue Zorn with their daughter Kayla, who is probably about 2, maybe a little older. And of course, the fireworks were awesome.