Archive: August 17, 2011

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Rocky the Squirrel, on Facebook

Wednesday,  08/17/11  12:31 PM

Hey y'all ... a couple months ago I reported Rocky the Squirrel (aka me) was again riding in the Furnace Creek 508 (aka "the toughest 48 hours in sport").

In case you're interested, I just created a Facebook Page for the  Rocky the Squirrel team.  Please Like this page to show your support and to get updates on my training program, my crew, and our progress!  And if you'd like, please Follow us on Twitter as Squirrel508.

I hope to give ongoing reports during the race itself (October 9-12), I understand there's a lot more cell coverage along the route now than there was in 2009.

That's me at right, riding the 508 in 2009, about 100 miles in when I was still smiling.

In terms of preparation, I'm pretty far ahead of where I was in 2009; I have 2/3 of my crew set (fellow endurance riders Mitch Albo and Gene Smith), and I'm riding every day, including incorporating some long rides like the Cool Breeze 200K this weekend, and the Son of Death Ride a week later.  Now I just have to get my mental state where it needs to be (!); that was my downfall last time.  Onward!

 

Wednesday,  08/17/11  10:07 PM

Wine Not, continued... so I was telling a friend that I've gotten serious about training for the 508, and told her I've given up drinking wine (!), am just trying to take care of myself, eating, sleeping, riding, working out...  and she said "wait a minute, sleeping?" and I just had to laugh.  Yeah, I'm actually sleeping [more]...

One of Google's better logos, celebrating Pierre Fermat's birthday; showing a rendition of Fermat's Last Theorem.  You know the story; he noted it in a book, writing "I have found a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this margin is too small to contain".  Of course his proof was never found, and despite huge efforts on the part of many mathematicians a proof was only found recently, in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.  While accepted, Wiles' proof is quite complicated and requires over 100 pages, which may explain why Fermat couldn't fit it into a margin :) 

Powerline's People's Choice award goes too ... Doorbell.  Pretty powerful, we are definitely mortgaging the future. 

I enjoyed this quite a lot: It's the Economy, Dummkopf!  A nice treatise on European economies and Germany in particular, from the always-enjoyable Michael Lewis.  You can see that the situation in Greece and the impending situation in Spain are going to cause big time friction in the Euro world.  It's like Germany has to cosign for Greece. 

Meanwhile: downgrade for US, but not for France.  "S&P was saying that the United States is a bigger credit risk than France."  Well that's Change all right :( 

Wow, the Disney World Tiki Room is back!  Who knew? 

Can I just say, that Twitter's recent change to convert all URLs to use their t.co shorteners is bogus?  I can?  Whew.  Of course they want to capture the clickstreams but it's an icky change.  Twitter is going to fail, mark my words. 

This feels like another kind of thing I find bogus, when a service deliberately cripples themselves to nudge users into premium upgrades.  An example is HotFile, which introduces delays and slows download traffic if you use the site without upgrading.  I get that they have a right to make money - so does Twitter - but it just feels ... icky.  Better to find a true premium feature for which you can charge than to artificially degrade service. 

Firefox 6 has arrived, and I am using it.  I must say, no apparent change over Firefox 5.  (Here's Mozilla's list of the changes.)  I get that they're trying to show momentum, but this was not a major upgrade, more like a 5.1.  Blech. 

This could be big: Skype launches WiFi finder for IOS.  Sure wish I could have used this while in Europe, maybe I wouldn't have needed anything but my [Verizon] iPhone.  There's WiFi everywhere, but figuring out how to connect is nontrivial.  The situation cries out for a "roaming" solution. 

ZooBorn of the day: a Potoroo joey.  What ... you never heard of a Potoroo before?  Well that's why you read my blog :) 

You might be a geek if you like this: a side-by-side comparison of PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby.  I like this.

 

 
 

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