Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Goddamn You, Pointy-Headed Arithmetic!

Morning weigh-in: 172# 9.5% BF
 
By the way, the weekend:
 
Friday night was dinner with Anne in Bethlehem, after the usual towpath ride (just Kirk and myself this time). I suggested J.P. McGrady's as a nice change of pace, but when we got there it was jam-packed full of Lehigh students, standing room only, so we went back to Brew Works.
 
Saturday was busy, an ultra-mega-Selfish Day: yoga in the morning, drycleaning, banking, then over to Coffee Exchange to meet Anne before we hit the Garlic Fest. (Her home-brewing buddy Josh had a booth & was pushing garlic beer, but we were too chicken to try it.) Saw a few peeps while walking around, then we drove over to Weyerbacher and split a case of their special Harvest Ale, made (in very limited quantities) with fresh hops from Dan Weierbach's garden.
 
We then went up to Jacobsburg. That's where we met Lenny, and also Butch & Mindy: Butch was looking to sell Anne his old F600, and this was the test ride. Verdict: it's a go! We rode for about two hours, maybe 10 miles, ran into Joe G while riding but he was in high-speed mode...
 
Saturday Night: Lenny was down so I could show him Pearly Baker's so that's where we went next; after dinner he took off for home, while Anne & I grabbed dessert and coffee around the block, then returned for the Time Code show. Saw the crew (Bill & Danielle, Tara, Michele, etc) and the show was good but my day was long, and I went home early and slept the sleep of the dead.
 
On Sunday I took a trip out toward Scranton, carpooling with Eric and fellow biker Bernie, to the grand opening of a new trail system. This was a bigger deal than I realized; there were probably about 100 bikers there (including the Hubbard Bike Club crew, plus Rich B and Joe G), as well as a similar number of hikers, some police and Game Lands officials, and the local news crews. Plenty of speeches, snacks, ribbon cutting, and then finally we rode. Mucho recommendo, these were some killer trails and you could see they put a lot of thought and work into making them. We only rode 10 miles or so, but in our group there were several flats, one busted derailleur/hanger (Eric), and a broken frame -- I also got lost at one point. Tough trails!
 
More Fun with Pointers: I've been fooling with that program some more, and was still getting fairly random results out of the computer. Until last night, when... well, imagine you need to store data of a certain size, so you tell the computer to allocate some memory to store that data -- except you tell the computer, in a very subtle and hard-to-detect (for a neophyte) way, to allocate less memory than you need? Then when the time comes to store that data, and you go to put the tenth pound of shit in your five pound bag: the data pours out all over the place, corrupting other memory, results become unpredictable and then your program crashes... I found the problem and fixed it last night, now my test program runs flawlessly. I don't know if I'm a genius or a moron.
 
Last night was the gym (mini-workout) and laundry, plus dinner at Porters with Anne, the debate on TV and a couple of odd/interesting bar mates. Tonight is yoga, with symposium to follow.
 

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