Geek on Two Wheels

My lack of updates? Non-sense!

Here is one now: http://www.scaryideas.com/project.html

SFU Outdoor Resource Club Photo Gallery — check out the mountain biking albums.

Things learned tonight:

• Not checking batteries before going on a long night-ride is a bad idea
• Dollar-store batteries: you get what you paid for, or less
• My $70 headlamp is not broken
• Avid BB7′s are really, really, really good brakes

Due to the relatively good weather, I decided to play hookey from work and go riding today instead. (As it turns out, there wasn’t too much work to be done today either).

To make a long story short, it was awesome. I overcame my commonsense and learned to huck from something higher than 3 feet, and it was nice to have the trails all to myself.

Oh, the squirrel thing? On my run down Upper Mel’s (trails that lead from across the Maggie Bentson Centre field to University Drive) I encountered a grey squirrel. As I came around a corner, the startled little rodent jumped down from a sapling, and dashed across the trail, two feet infront of my front tire.

Luckily for both of us, having noticed a large moving thing in the bushes, I had already slowed down, avoiding an fatal accident.

On a related note, the forcast looks great for the next week. Going dirtjumping on Saturday will be awesome.

This getting dark early thing is really throwing me off.

Now that I’m once again physically active, I can’t stand not being able to go out and ride in the late afternoons. Sleep, work, school, then, BAM! Night time. Not enough daylight to ride. I could buy myself a set of high-intensity biking lights, of course, but any decent ones, even in the low end, will cost more than $200.

I might need to start cutting back on partying and gaming for some early-morning rides…

To summarize, it was a great day of riding, and I replied to about 200 pieces of email today. Why, you ask? Read on…

Lets start from the beginning.

I first noticed something was amiss when I noticed that a co-worker of mine — who receives emails sent to our webmaster@ address — forwarded me about 8 pieces of tech support email in the morning. As atrocious as the integration of our various systems are, I average roughly a email per month that has to be forwarded to me from webmaster@ — something was terribly wrong.

As a matter of routine, I check my helpdesk email account, and Lo! 60+ pieces of new email since Friday. Something is definitely wrong.

Now, since I could not actually scroll through my email, due to the horrible web interface to Lotus which I have no choice but to use, I was not able to fully comprehend the gravity of the situation until much later. However, a quick scan revealed an email which points out that the database server for the PASBC has gone belly-up, bringing down the entire system with it. Fantastic. I will have to deal with all these emails after I get back from the chiropractor.

When I returned to my post, after an unsuccessful attempt to use Internet Explore (apparently, Lotus Notes works even worse in IE, as in, I can’t get a list of emails), and using some clever window-manipulation (I’d never thought that xfce’s Alt+drag for moving windows will come in handy) I discovered, to my horror, that the new email count was over 220.

Fuck.

This, afterall, being my job, I had no choice but to push ahead. Quickly composing two canned-responses, I began the flurry of click and pasting that would occupy a good portion of my day.

Well, after completing my application for funding for CUTC, anyway.

Now, at this point, I thought that it couldn’t possibly get worse. Well, we all know how that usually works out…

The Lotus Mail web interface is such a mess of javascript and pop-up windows such that after prolonged use, it would actually bug-out Firefox’s pop-up blocker, causing no new tabs to be created, even with the website whitelisted, making reading the nebulous amount of email, much less replying to them, impossible. Even worse, the javascript heavy site actually brought Firefox down to its knees several times, even causing my poor browser to raise warning messages asking if I was absolutely sure that I would let such destructive and snail-paced scripts to run.

Only a few minutes into my daunting task, I am quickly tempted away from the task at hand by the promise of good bike riding. As fortune would have it, today is the first day in quite a long time when it has not rained the night before, and the day-star was actually showing it’s blinding but glorious face.

This oppertunity was not to be wasted, massive inbox or not.

Long story short, the riding was awesome. Slightly muddy and wet, but awesome.

After getting back to campus late for my evening class, I proceeded to spend the next hour struggling with wireless in a futile attempt to get back to answering all of my emails. One misconfigured accesspoint and much profanity later, I was once again greeted by auth1, which, miraculously, was eager to grant me access to the IntarWeb.

Much pasting, web-browser restarting, half-assed attempts at paying attention to the lecture, a break to ride home in the darkness (which, again, was awesome), eat dinner, and even more profanity later, it was done: my inbox once again in a glorious state of no-new-emails.

Even accounting for duplicate emails from the more impatient clients, at least 200 pieces of email was replied to today, of which most are from unique users. I hope never, ever, to do this again, EVER.

Now that I have completed this relatively brief but much needed rest from electronic mail, I’m afraid I must once again open my digital notepad for yet more email writing, as there are announcements that need to be made, and events hyped about.

Lets hope that only a very, very small portion of those 200 users decide to ask me more questions tomorrow…

Ever notice how the SFU Authentication logo looks like flames?

I bet it represents what the servers are doing right now.

It is now past noon on a weekday, and I, again, find myself still in my bed room, curtains drawn, only wearing a pajama bottom, wasting time on my laptop sitting in my armchair.

I despise the days of — not definite but most-likely — of working eight-to-five.

Alright… Time to go take a shower and forage for some food.

It is no secret that I enjoy cars of the small and back-hatch equipped variety. In fact, I have often said that if I were to ever buy a car, the Toyota Matrix or Echo Hatchback would be my first choices.

It is no surprise, then, that I love the new 2006 Echo Hatchback — or, should I say, Yaris Hatchback.

Mmm… 3-door RS edition…