Friday, January 13, 2006

Jane Says "I'm Going Away To Spain"

Morning weigh-in: 180.5#, 10% BF

Two (small) dinners last night, no suppression effect even though I did a killer workout at the gym. Oh well. Tonight should be a towpath ride, maybe on the singlespeed.

Listening: Jane's Addiction, Nothing's Shocking. Been hearing things I didn't catch back when I first got & listened to it, especially "Jane Says." Some of the things that "Jane says" used to make me think "oh that's such a sad epiphany," but now it might just be a song about post-breakup self-pity. Still a sad and pretty song though, and it still reminds me of the girl who once dated Joe Schwenk's friend, manicurist, bartender, last I heard (20 years ago) trying to get her life together...

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Making the Connection

Morning weigh-in: 180#, 13% BF

So last night I was supposed to go to the gym, but blew it off when I realized I'd already eaten too much time, would get there too late to get in a good workout, so instead I played more with the computer(s) & read a little more from that book of medieval history. Dinner was the tuna & wilted greens over pasta.

What I was doing was, I'd noticed that a few of my photos in some of my original (ie non-flickr) galleries wouldn't display and wanted to fix them, but I couldn't remember which ones they were -- and I didn't want to search through all my photos one at a time, looking for the bad ones especially over a dialup line. So...

At first I thought maybe the JPG file didn't get copied properly when I first put it on my website (thus it would be empty), so I ssh'ed into the Super Dimension Fortress, ran something like this:

[me@sdf galleries]$ ls -l */photos/*.jpg | awk '$5==0 {print $9}'

This would have listed all my regular (ie non-thumbnail) photos, and displayed any that had zero length, but nothing showed up. OK, the files are probably not empty but corrupt, so I ran something like:

[me@sdf galleries]$ file */photos/*.jpg | awk '$2~/data/ {print $1}'

This goes through all my JPEG's, looks inside them to determine their data type, and display the ones that are just plain "data" rather than "JPEG." Bingo! I found four or five files that were corrupt, so for each of them I ran something like this on my home machine:

[me@local photos]$ djpeg foo.jpg | pnmscale 0.5 | cjpeg | ssh me@sdf 'cat - >foo.jpg'

This "decompresses" the JPEG file foo.jpg, runs it through a scaling program, "compresses" the output back to JPEG and sends that to ssh, which is set to write its input to foo.jpg on the other machine. Badda-bing, badda-bang, twenty minutes of thinking saved me hours of drudgery.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Nika! Nika!

Morning weigh-in: 180#, 11.5% BF

Today marks the anniversary of the Nika Riots in Constantinople in 532, brutally suppressed by Belisarius. Every time I hear "Nika! Nika!" I think of Pauly Shore's "Lisa, Lisa."

Anyhoo, dinner last night was tempeh & veggies stir-fry. A red bell pepper, a cubano pepper, a poblano pepper, an onion, some ginger, some broccoli & a small butternut squash -- surprised it all fit in the frying pan, let alone my stomach... Was going to ride last night, but delayed until 9:45 (stupid internet, stupid big dinner, stupid medieval history book), decided to run instead. Tonight will probably be tuna & wilted greens over linguini, followed by a trip to the gym.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Soylent Green

Morning weigh-in: 181#, 11% BF

Lunch yesterday was grilled chicken w/ pepper jack cheese on a roll, dinner was a lentil & spinach "burrito" with a salad, later dinner was a bowl of cereal -- didn't want to go food shopping hungry, you know. (Um, yeah.) Breakfast: cereal. Late breakfast: yogurt & an apple; there was also a mid-afternoon snack break yesterday, gotta watch myself, maybe schedule in some acceptable between-meal snacks. Anyhoo, been eating a lot of soy (tofu, tempeh) and lentils lately, same stuff that all the different soylents were supposed to be made of in "Soylent Green."

Speak of the devil: I was cleaning out my mailbox at home the other day, found an email from Yoann, the one he sent everyone just before relocating back to France. Had a dream about him the other night after that, and yesterday I got forwarded a message from him -- he's in love, popped the question on Christmas and is now officially engaged. Good for him! Weird synchronicity though.

Ported some shell scripts from the home computer to my SDF account last night, but it looks like the Super Dimension Fortress is crashing pretty hard right now, can't play with them today.

UPDATE: SDF is back up, my homepage is back, the camper is happy again.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Isn't That Pretty?


Isn't That Pretty?
Originally uploaded by donXfive.
I just posted a few pictures from the ride yesterday. Didn't take too many photos but I did manage to get a few good ones. Case in point: We used this trail that goes along Monocacy Creek to get from Doug's neighborhood to downtown Bethlehem, and this is one of the things we saw. Apparently, the gravel (or whatever) plant still had their automatic sprinklers on, and it produced this ice sculpture. When we came back later it had collapsed into the creek.

Monday, Monday

Morning weigh-in: 181#, 9% BF

Saturday night was Which Brew -- sans live music, therefore w/ good conversation. Talked to Heath & Hans for quite a while. Dinner was a cheeseburger, washed down with two Brooklyn Smoked Porters. Ahhhh...

Sunday was a ride at Sals. Me, Doug and John C started from Doug's house, then met Rich, also Eric the VMB member (who rode from his house in Whitehall). We got in a really good ride, 18 miles altogether. Trails were in excellent condition, dry or frozen in most places, with the tiniest dusting of snow on the leaf cover in some places. Kind of struck me at one point, how really pretty it is in the woods, weird juxtaposition to our kamikaze shenanigans. After the ride we (me, Doug & Lori, and Rich) went to JP McGrady's for lunch. "Badass Cheesesteak" and a couple of Rogue Chocolate Stouts, mmmmm...

Back to reality today, planning to keep a clean nose diet-wise, cooking at home for the rest of the week. Tonight is a rest day; I'll do laundry and hit the supermarket.