Statrix Redux

I just received an email from United Airlines reminding me that I’ll flying off to SFO in the near future. It’s not like I’ve forgotten, but it did tickle me into giving my trip some renewed thought.
It seems I’ll be on the BART a bit, first from SFO to Oakland, and later off to Walnut Creek. In fact, now that I think about it, what’s to keep me from doing that on my first day? Hmm…
Luckily all my destinations are easily accessible from the BART and I might even have some fun going there.
Aloha!

A tale of steel and mud!

Aside from my hideous emotional scars, inflicted, as it turns out, by ME. I've got a nice 8" scar on the back of my left leg.

I received it as a child in Sabah (North Borneo). It was the rainy season and it seems I was playing under the house, which like all good houses was raised up on posts to avoid the mud and muck of said rain. Well I slipped in the mud and tore open my leg on a stray strand of barbed wire lurking in the ooze.

Since there was no medical help available, my dad used butterfly bandaging to put it all back together and I was left with a scar that was huge on a five year old. At fifty-one it's still pretty big.

Cool, eh?

Last night I was invited to a great concert at Leeward Community College. Angélique Kidjo was there with her band and boy is she good.

Originally from Benin, she’s played with just about everyone in modern music. It’s pretty clear why.

She’s quite a “warm” performer and her concert was more like a party that she was hosting than a concert. Indeed she brought much of the audience up on stage with her at one point and had everyone dancing.

I had a great time and encourage everyone to check her out!

Aloha!

A couple of things have happened today, Postie has been upgraded to version 1.1.3 and I’m checking to see if it actually works as advertised. In the last upgrade, to 1.1.2, a couple of things went wrong. First and foremost was that the Cronless Postie plugin did not see a version number change, so it kept begging to be upgraded, even though there was no change. A little editing did just fine. The other problem was that the readme.txt file contained a bit of php that kept it from being displayed correctly when accessed through the plugin management’s Quick Readme link. This required a bit of editing to source file to make sure the php snippet was broken. I suspect this actually happens because I’m using a php plugin. The upgrade to 1.1.3 still has the bit of php to deal with, but the versioning has been fixed.
But what about this Rohloff business. To where are we going to Rohloff? It’s a geared hub for bicycles don’t you know.

I would like one for my next bike. The problem is that that hub costs about $1300. That’s a pretty penny, especially when you consider that derailleurs, even good ones, are basically dirt cheap in comparison.
But we’ll see. I haven’t got the money for a new bike, much less a hub, at this point, so it’s more or less a moot point.
Now for my comments about the Postie upgrade. It worked, but it still does line breaking really badly, at least when sent an HTML message. I’ve got to try it next with plain text (my choice anyway, but I thought I’d give HTML a go first).
Aloha!

One of my favorite bike websites is that of Rivendell Bicycles Works. Even if you aren’t in the market for a new bike there’s plenty to recommend the site. It’s chock full of great articles and has a point of view that extends somewhat beyond simply selling bikes. They do that I’m sure, but they do so much more. In that way they are a bit like a like another favorite of mine…Green Gear, Inc and their Bike Fridays.
The madness though, that’s the topic. Here’s the scoop…
I noticed while browsing on the site that they were in California; specifically Walnut Creek. That meant nothing to me, but I got thinking it might be somewhere near Oakland. As it turns out, it is. In fact it’s about 20 minutes away on the BART. Even better both BART stops are short walks away for me. Too cool.
I’m going to go check out a Rivendell Bicycle!
I can’t afford one at the moment, that’s for sure. But I do have a bonus coming in and…well…I’m sure you can imagine the rest. It’s a bad idea all the way around, hence my suspicion that the madness had returned. 🙂
I mean seriously, is this sweet or what?

I suspect it’ll be a while before I can actually purchase one built out as I’d like, but I can dream and…I can get myself fit for it. After all, as much as I like my current around town ride, this is a beauty.
And if it’s touring I can always trick it out like this…

Aloha!

I’ll be headed off to Oakland for a few days next month so the time has come to figure out what the heck I should be doing there besides taking the BART to San Francisco. Most of my time will be spent at a conference and I’m certainly looking forward to that, but there will be a bit of time on either end and I’d like to fill it with more than watching TV in my hotel room (that actually almost never happens..really!).
Here’s the skyline from Wikipedia:


I’ve discovered that The Clorox Company is headquartered in Oakland..in this building in fact:

It’s a Miracle in a Bottle indeed!
Angel Island is an idea as the ferry goes there. In fact it’s possible that I may be able to bike on the island if I get there, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.
Speaking of a ferry, even if I don’t get to the island I think I would love to take a ride around the bay and most likely will do so. I’ve got to explore the options, but right now the Blue & Gold Fleet is looking good.
Well as you can see there’s plenty to do – Clorox, the Bay, Angel Island. There must be more and I’m off to find it!
Aloha!

I’ve got to tell you, it’s been quite a day here. I’ve been testing
out the various blog by email features of WP and the Postie plugin. It’s not that it wasn’t working, just that I
wanted to find the best format to use for my email -plain text, HTML,
etc. Generally I think plain text works the best, but on the other
site I manage the folks I work with are probably going to use HTML
mail, just because that’s what they normally use and remembering to
use text isn’t going to work well.
The problem wasn’t Postie today, it was cron. For some reason I couldn’t get the job to ‘take.’ That is,
my host wasn’t allowing me to set the job. I finally gave up for a
couple of hours and now it works. Or rather, I can set a cron job. I
don’t know if it works, that’s what this post is for.
Aloha!

I was down at Ala Wai harbor and came across the junk crossing the Pacific Ocean. Cool!
Sent from my iPhone

This was certainly not original to the person who passed it on to me but…

If I Had My Way by Jan Tik (Jan Tik)

Set aside a bit of time one day a week, Saturday for instance, for all the worrying that you would otherwise do each day.

"But by Saturday I won't remember what I was worried about!" 🙂

Aloha!

I’ve been using Plinky on and off recently. It’s a fun way to create a bit of content and sometimes I am really glad I used it. For those of you who may not know, Plinky is a fairly recent social media site that puts out a new question each day. Your response is posted on Plinky itself, and can be exported to your blog, or Facebook, or…you get the idea. 🙂

In any case, because of the recent trouble I had on this blog, I decided to revalidate my front page. As it turned out I had a recent Plinky post and it…gasp…didn’t validate.
It turns out the cute little badge they insert with the code below does not have an alt attribute. Shame. 🙂
img src=”http://www.plinky.com/proxy/badge?id=2201″ style=”border: 0; padding-right: 4px; vertical-align: middle;” /
Anyway, I fired off a note to their tech support on Get Satisfaction and received a nice note back in something like 10 minutes. The problem isn’t fixed, but it’s nice to be counted.
Thanks Corinna
Aloha!