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Wednesday, January 31, 2001
I love these January thaw days, when the temperature gets into the 50's and the sun is shining. Took what was going to be a long bike ride. Got about 6 or 7 miles out an realized that I hadn't taken the groceries out of the car after returning from shopping, so I had to turn around and hope that I got home before the cottage cheese and milk went bad. Took a short, 2+ mile jog afterward to finish the workout. Not only is my eyesight getting worse, but it is so easy to put on weight this time of year. It's a constant battle to keep it off. (0) comments (0) comments Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Decided to take the day off and museum hop. Took the Metro in to DC to the National Gallery to see the Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries show that I liked very much. I loved the painting My Egypt by Charles Demuth. I'd never seen it before and thought his abstract treatment of a very realistic subject was excellent. I had read about Stieglitz, O'Keefe, Ansel Adams, and others when I read Edward Weston's diaries just after graduating from college. He had a big influence on me at that time, along with Gary Snyder and the Beats. (0) comments Sunday, January 28, 2001
It felt so good to finally cycle for more than just the few miles around town. Even though it was only a 20 mile ride, it was a sunny, clear, cool day and most of the ice and snow on the trails and roads has melted. Can't think of a better way to spend a winter afternoon. (0) comments Friday, January 26, 2001
Reading an interesting article in Wired Magazine about the inevitability of human cloning. It would be a strange thought to contemplate your living clone, especially from the perspective of a 10 year old clone realizing that the 60 year old fart is their older self. (0) comments
Updating this site is a pain, since whenever a change is made to the page as a whole, it must be re-posted, hence these latest, short blurbs. (0) comments (0) comments (0) comments
Changed the color scheme for the site. At least it's not immediately obvious that this is the basic Blogger template. It will do for now. Been reading the survivor stories from A List Apart. Interesting that so many people aren't really affected in a major way, and if they are, it seems to have turned out to be for the better. (0) comments
I'm beginning to wonder (doing a lot of wondering lately; must have too much time on my hands) about the benefits of public service. Attended a meeting last night to discuss putting in a new trail along a rural road. All I heard was how much the local residents didn't want the trail. And they will be the ones who, in years to come, will be wanting to walk to the local park and demanding a trail. (0) comments
Realized today that the archive function is not working properly. Wondering why I just don't do all of this manually... (0) comments Tuesday, January 23, 2001
I really do need to find the time to change this default blogger page, but it's either do that or ride the stationary bike for 30 min. and meditate... Took too long to write this short perl script to sort the project file created by 1stPage, the free html editor. It's a great program, but when one adds a project to the project file, it is appended to the end of the list and there's no way to sort the list (that I know of). # sortproj.pl # Written January 23, 2001 # Bruce Wright # Purpose: To sort the 1stPage project files by filename. # if ($ARGV[0] eq '' || $ARGV[1] eq '') { die "Usage: sortproj.pl infile outfile\n"; } $infile = $ARGV[0]; open (IN,$infile) || die "can't open $infile: $!"; # $! is error string var $outfile = $ARGV[1]; open (OUT,">$outfile") || die "can't open $outfile: $!"; # Skip first 3 lines and write to outfile. # for ($i=0;$i<3;$i++){ $null = print OUT $null; } $i=0; while ( chop $_; # # Be sure to use [] vs. {} # ($num[$i],$name[$i],$stat[$i],$loc[$i],$date[$i]) = split(/,/,$_); $counti{$i} = $i; $i++; } # # Sort the name field. # @sorted = sort @name; # # Name is sorted but the other fields aren't. Need to # figure out index for the other fields by comparing # the sorted name to the original name to retrieve it's index. # foreach $namesorted (@sorted) { $i = 0; foreach $index (@name) { if ($index eq $namesorted) { $indexnum = $i++; } else { $i++; } } print OUT $num[$indexnum],",",$name[$indexnum],",",$stat[$indexnum],",", $loc[$indexnum],",",$date[$indexnum],"\n"; } close(IN) || die "can't close $infile: $!"; close(OUT) || die "can't close $infile: $!"; (0) comments
Came across a good article on A List Apart about survival stories solicited from web designers. This generation of people from about 20-30 years old have an entirely new way of looking at the world of work. They're much more flexible, and mostly determined to do the kind of work they like and not what they must do to earn a living. The Post has an interesting article on the relationship of obesity to living in the suburbs where there are few sidewalks or places to which to walk. It's amazing to me how little people around my neighborhood walk. There are stores within about a quarter mile, but almost no one walks there. Later today I'm meeting with a group of residents who are fighting the installation of a trail by the department of transportation as part of a road "improvement" project. The engineers want to build the biggest, fastest road possible while the residents want a slow safe one. They also think that putting in a trail will destroy too many trees. While I agree to some extent, they are the same people who will probably complain later about the lack of trails in their area. (0) comments Friday, January 19, 2001
The poet Gregory Corso, one of the early Beat poets, died Wednesday according to this article in the New York Times (I think it requires a free registration with the Times). Here's an interesting article on Steve Jobs and the new Apple cube computer. I'm always kind of rooting for Apple although I haven't owned one since the early Mac Plus days. The Republicans have taken over DC the past couple of days, getting ready for the inauguration on Saturday, including big brother. It was good to sit and talk over dinner last night in Old Town, mostly avoiding politics. (0) comments Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Work is getting in the way of posting to this journal... Put in 4 hours today and didn't have time for much else. I seem to spend much of my time ranting and raving about pedestrian issues, calling construction crew chiefs to ask why a trail wasn't built, or writing to newspapers about dangerous streets. I guess I'm naive enough to think that I can make a difference. I've somehow retained the ability to be an optimist. The weather was great on Sunday so managed to get a long ride in on the Washington and Old Dominion railroad bike trail with K. (0) comments Saturday, January 13, 2001
Attended an excellent workshop on Walkable Communities given by Dan Burden, head of Walkable Communities. Unfortunately I had to drive, since the subway doesn't start running until after 8am and the workshop started at 8:30. Met the producer of the TV show Perils for Pedestrians and several other bike and pedestrian activists in the area. Yes, we are going to change the world, but it might take a while. (0) comments Friday, January 12, 2001
Blogger.com has bought a new server from the donations collected after it asked the community to help them out. Their recent publicity (as evidenced by my use of their service) was too much for them. It's blazingly fast compared to when I first used the service. Attended the first Colored Pencil class at the Art League last night. It's an hour drive of stop and go traffic to get there, but the instructors are some of the best around so it's usually worth the trip. It was kind of a drag having to hear another lecture on color theory and to draw yet another color wheel, but it was therapeutic once I got started. The rhythmic drawing action has a sort of hypnotic effect. One of the hot-blooded young guys couldn't take it and left after about an hour. Spent most of the morning going through the online Javascript exercises. I keep tellling myself that this new skill is going to be useful in the future, but it seems I've spent most of my life learning new skills to be used at a later date, and most of the time the need for those skills never arises. I guess it's good to keep this 51 year old brain active. AnaloxX is a site containing a collection of free software. One program facilitates the search for MP3 files on the web, another automatically closes those annoying popup windows that appear when entering some sites. (0) comments Tuesday, January 09, 2001
Found an interesting email on a system that I rarely check. A program that automatically checks web pages found a broken link on this site (Florida pictures) and reported it to me. Great idea; wonder when they will start charging for the service. (0) comments
Why hasn't anyone figured out a way to use a wireless portable computer with a barcode reader that you can use in a store. Swipe the product and electronically pay for it and be on your way. The next big thing in computers will be super small (9" X 4") (about 20cm X 20cm) with a high resolution screen that has a full keyboard, wireless internet access, language interpreters and compilers, full-featured editors and spreadsheet software and is ethernet capable. It will look a little like my Sharp TM-20. Laptops are too big and Palm computers are too small and don't have good portable keyboards nor full-featured productivity programs. It will happen in Japan first and find it's way here in the next year or so. (0) comments
Signed up for an online javascript course from MindLeaders. Since I have barely stareted to learn Avenue, and Perl, adding another language is probably a mistake. I think I enjoy the early learning process; facing the challenge of trying to learn a new subject. But then I rarely will learn something in depth. Guess that's why I'm a geographer, "jack of all trades, master of none". I'm still amazed at how easy it now is to find information. I knew the end of the above saying, "master of none" but couldn't remember the first part so I sent to the best search engine on the web, Google, typed in the phrase, and the first 3 hits contained the saying. (0) comments Monday, January 08, 2001
Saw "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" over the weekend. A great movie with incredible effects. It would be an ideal movie to have on DVD so that some of the fast action scenes could be slowed down. I want to see it again. It's good to see women kicking ass for a change. I need to buy some Fresh Fields (Whole Foods) stock, the healthy products grocery store chain. I spend too much money there not to own stock. Their prices are too high but the produce is top quality and I can find all the organic foods I need (or at least think I need). I never thought it would be possible to get so many organic goods back when I was in grad school when I wrote my Master research paper on organic farmers in Michigan, a very marginal niche at the time. Now that I'm writing here periodically, I find that I don't write as much in my paper journal. Still don't know if I'll keep this up, but it certainly is easy to do, especially now that Blogger.com has a new server, thanks to contributions from users. Found a good site on How to Write a Good Press Release, now that I'm doing the same for my part time job. I guess PR isn't so bad when it's done for a good cause. (0) comments Sunday, January 07, 2001
I was good tonight, I flossed, I used the proxabrush, I brushed, and don't forget the mouthwash. It takes half an hour just to clean my teeth. Reading Primary Colors by Anonymous Joe Klein and enjoying it more than expected. I thought I would just scan through it but got interested early and am still reading. Searched for a key to the characters, all of whom appear to be based on real people, and found what looked to be the idea site but it was a dead link. (0) comments Friday, January 05, 2001
I'm about ready to give up on Blogger. It's been incredibly slow lately; it would be much quicker just to edit these posts offline and ftp them to the server. However it does sound like their pleas for additional funds to purchase a new server are paying off, so perhaps there is hope. I'll keep posting with them for now. Received a Spam email today that when opened immediately linked to a web page. When I saw what was happening I immediately closed the browser. I NEVER click on links in Spam for fear of virus' and not wanting to be tracked through a cookie or other means. In this case there was no choice. Guess I'll have to figure out a way to delete spam without looking at it. Then just now I saw this reference to an article on web bugs that describes just what happened to me this morning. The web is so vulnerable to this sort of mischief. (0) comments Thursday, January 04, 2001
Spent most of the day beating my head against the wall trying to figure out what commands are available in Avenue, and where the stupid syntax errors are located. Finished part two of the application, with several to go. It has been difficult trying to convert from a sequential programming mindset to a more object oriented one, especially without formal instruction. Interesting arcticle titled The Misery of Web Applications, about how slow most of the web-based apps are, and how little tolerance we have for slow response. (0) comments
Working on a potential application for a client using ESRI's ArcView scripting language, Avenue, to manipulate map data tied to attribute information. Realize that I enjoy the process and success of writing software more than most other kinds of work, at least in the winter time. Don't know if the code will ever be used, but at least I'm learning a skill that might be useful in the future. (0) comments Tuesday, January 02, 2001
Needing to get outside, went for a long 5 or 6 mile hike. Fortunately, from my front door, there are many trails, most of which pass through heavily wooded areas. Walked a long stretch of the cross county trail and circled back on some other wooded trails. Scared up a few deer, a fox, a pileated woodpecker, a large raptor, and other assorted wildlife. Amidst all the recent development around here it's nice to know there are places like that left. Finished Night Train by Martin Amis and recommend it highly, an intelligent mystery told from the viewpoint of a middle-aged policewoman. (0) comments |