Blessed Are The Lazy

Well that was a lot easier than I would have thought -- I used gengetopt to do all the real work, and now I have options added to the MTO program. I should have realized, programmers pretty much hate tedious grunt work (like, say, MTO's), so whenever there's a tedious programming task, you can be sure there's some tool to automate or simplify it...

 

That was early in the evening, and also later in the evening; in between was dinner with Anne's friend Mike and his new GF. We were going to eat at Mama Nina's on Main Street, but it was so crowded we decided to go around the block to the Apollo instead -- a very wise decision. Dinner was awesome (me: sashimi appetizer, brisket sandwich, and a martini), and Mike's friend was really nice. She had a lot in common with Anne, and even knew some of her old friends.

 

Home by 10:00 or so, a little more computer fiddling, and an early bedtime. Tonight is the gym, to be followed by an evening at Porter's. It's been a while.

 

Whatever Happened To The Armored Changeling?

Morning weigh-in: 178#, 13% BF

 

Où sont les enfants de fée blindés d'antan? No ride last night. I was going to meet a friend before the VMB meeting and get in a quick Sals ride, but he couldn't make it and I just blew it off. Once upon a time I would have gone riding and blown off the meeting, or maybe rode to the meeting (I walked), and I would have rode Monday night and not been tired, and not cared about rain or cold...

 

Oh well, good meeting, over at Cutters, the new bike shop in south Bethlehem. Lotsa good stuff starting to happen, in terms of trails and access, lots of events -- rides, parties, trailwork days -- coming up too. I picked up Anne's new brakes from Bob afterward, then met Anne and the Naughty Knitting team for tacos at Brew Works. Tonight we're going out to dinner -- I'm not sure where, but I can guess -- with Mike and his new GF.

 

Linux Voyager, A C Change: I decided to straighten up and fly right, at least with respect to that MTO program I wrote... My program as written is basically a filter, gobbling up the standard keyboard input (which had better be in the correct format, since there's absolutely no error checking), doing its thing, and then spitting out the results (in their own, different, arcane format) onto the standard output. No options, no error checking, something meant to be used by me and no one else. I took care of a lot of that stuff with shell wrappers, plus redirection, xclip and spreadsheets for my I/O.

 

What I think I'll do is rewrite the input to at least be able to handle bad data more gracefully (and also accept input files on the command line), then add command-line options to make some of the (currently) more hard-wired parameters more flexible, and finally figure out what the useful output should look like. With any luck, by the time I get around to finishing this I'll think of some more stuff to add, and I'll never finish...

 

Three Days

Morning weigh-in: 178#, 12.5% BF

 

One of the nicest weekends (not counting those vacations) in quite a while:

 

On Friday we did some reorganizing and consolidated bookcases -- a big deal in a bookish house like ours -- then we went out for a ride at Jordan: Anne and me, with Donna (first time on real trails), and Greg & his daughter Julie.

 

Anne and I went out for dinner later, and met up with Donna and Greg again, as well as E-Rock's roving birthday party (Doug & Lori, Eric, and Mike & Pam) -- which was good, because before that it was just the two of us, alone at a giant table in a very busy restaurant. Debby and Joe came in a little later from some concert, and had to sit at a nearby "overflow table;" we moved over there when the birthday party absconded to the Steelgaarden, but that's about the time I ran out of steam and we called it a night.

 

Saturday I woke up on time to do the things I wanted (basically, early morning yoga followed by a visit to the gym), but I felt so worn out that when I found I'd washed all my gym shorts at the same time, and they were all still wet, I heaved a sigh of relief and went back to bed... It was a fairly nice day, but after breakfast I spent most of it parked in front of the computer, doing pretty much nothing unless you count Facebook and coffee. (Anne spent the afternoon making hot sauce from her bumper crop of habaneros.) We went for a really nice walk along the canal later in the afternoon. the colors were just starting to change down there, and the afternoon light was beautiful. Dinner was at home: ribeye steaks, spelt with caramelized onions, and carrots cooked with honey and ginger.

 

We decided to break from our usual Saturday night routine, so we walked down to the Old Brewery Tavern (where, strangely enough, we both got proofed) to check out the scene there: cigarette smoke, and lots of TVs playing college football  -- I can't even be in a room with a TV or I'll end up staring at it -- but the music was nice and they had a few decent beers. We hung out for a while then went to the Starfish (packed), and met up with Doug & Lori and a whole bunch of other VMB members. No smoke, even better beers and (live) music, and only one TV (showing Goldmember) that I eventually just faced away from. An awesome night and another late one, but I felt a lot better than the evening before. (On the way home some angry-looking woman passed us walking the opposite direction, then later seemed to be following us. We were able to laugh about it in the morning, but at the time it was kind of creepy: we took evasive action once we noticed, and took a less direct route home.)

 

Sunday was beautiful, so after another awesome breakfast we did a road ride north of town. Two of them: Anne had volunteered to lead a road ride later in the day, as part of the CAT Open House, and so we did that too, and were joined by a bunch of other people, including Donna and Debby. Both rides were about 25 miles long; the group ride was at a mellower pace and took longer, but our total "outdoor time" was about five hours. After that we met Debby and Donna for dinner at Brew Works.

 

Tonight and tomorrow are MTB nights: towpath tonight, Sals tomorrow before the VMB meeting.