The Plentiful Vintage

So I've been working on the big database coding project in earnest, which has resulted in a certain amount of, um, organization to my dreams. Object oriented dreams, sheesh! But that's not the main reason I'm here.

Not long before waking this morning, I dreamt that I happened to glance at a piece of code that went something like this:

If varPerson = "Vampire" Then GasolineDiscount = 50% *

When I woke, I couldn't help but think that that's would be one heck of an incentive to wander around a Sunnydale cemetary after midnight.

* Thinking back, it was more of a lookup table than straight code, but you get the gist of it...

World Crossing is apparently closing its doors, or rather having its doors closed on it. Another piece of my past vanishing. Not that I'm particularly upset about it. I pretty much stopped hanging out over there at all once b.org finally found a stable hosting solution. But it is sad. The folks still over there are scurrying around looking for alternative hosts and ways of saving their forums*.

* I took a look to see if my Caretan icon was still in place on the last forum posts before the move, but I must have replaced it with my usual Opus icon during one of the brief returns during a b.org outage. OTOH, Lorne's head is still falling off up at the top of the page. I hope someone saved that somewhere.

It was never the best system, and since it was essentially a test bed for the platform, service was occasionally spotty. But it had the virtue of being free, and it served as a lifeboat for a number of communities after Salon pulled the rug out. And for awhile the Buffista Contingency Plan was the most active forum over there, at least until the Rules Girls showed up. Good times.

At least there is some warning for those still there. Peoples Forum, which ran on the same platform and served as another b.org safe house, just vanished without a trace one day, an example of what happens when one entrusts a community's existence to a single hobbyist. Table Talk continues to hang on, but it seems a ghost of what it was before it went pay. There is still a Buffy thread, #9, although it was frozen three years ago. When we left it was on thread #8. And Mary Beth is still there, so that's something.

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For the past few months an old post of mine here on LJ has been attracting the occasional spam comment. I screen anonymous comments, so LJ notifies me every time one shows up, and I delete them as spam as soon as I see 'em. It's always the same post. The odd thing is that the post is from June 2009, and is just me quoting another blog comment that I thought was hilarious. (Still do.) Clearly this must be a spambot algorithm gone wrong, because why spam a two year-old post? Nobody except me has likely looked at it in ages (if ever). I suspect a couple of words from the quote are the red flag for the bot. I suppose I could put up a test post using them as a honeypot to see if my suspicions are correct.

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Spring seems to be slowly making its way to Rhody. The weather has been a little warmer, and the snow cover has mostly gone away. The exceptions are shady areas and the huge plow piles that are holding tightly to their existence.

I hauled out the bike yesterday for the first time since December, and took a ride on the bike path. It was good to be on the bike, less good to have to deal with all the puddles on the path. At some point it was plowed, and being in the woods, the plow pile is still there leaking all over the path. Plus, they only made one pass, so only about 2/3 of the path is exposed along most of its length, making for some narrow squeezes twixt strollers and bikes. Also, I started breaking in a new saddle (more on this later), and my butt got really sore. If it gets a little warmer, I may have another go today, this time with the old saddle.

Well, today it was wicked hot for April, reaching the mid-eighties. Very summery, with little shade from the trees yet to mitigate all that hot sun.

I drove up to the Blackstone Valley path for the first time this season. I did this with a bit of trepidation. Last time I rode Blackstone, a young man became trapped in one of the tunnels under Pratt Dam, and drowned while rescue workers tried in vain to free him. I was worried about my reaction to the place where it happened, but it turns out I had little reaction at all. It was a quiet, sunny day, with no one around the spot, and no outward evidence that anything bad had ever happened. I sent a silent thought in the young man's direction and kept on going.

The path runs from Central Falls all the way up to Woonsocket now. I always start near the mid-point of the path, and head south first. The southern half is older, bumpier (tree roots have buckled the pavement upwards in spots), and more heavily trafficked. I felt really strong despite the heat, and made pretty good speed in some pretty high gears for me. Then I turned around to head north, and finally noticed the stiff breeze that had apparently been pushing me along so well. It was pretty much in my face all the way up to Woonsocket, and made for slow going.

Then, just a little south of the Woonsocket treatment plant, I saw a vehicle on the path ahead of me surrounded by a group of men. At first I thought they might be some clueless anglers (trout season just opened here) with an ATV, but as I got closer, I realized that they were rescue personnel, and that they were loading a stretcher onto the back of what turned out to be the groundskeeper's cart from the athletic field complex a little further on. Now I got weirded out. I was able to ride past as they were seeing to whomever it was, but I didn't rubberneck. The actual rescue vehicles were waiting at the treatment plant, and I saw one of the firemen propping up a bicycle. Now I'm wondering if its owner was the person on the stretcher.

By the time I got turned around at the north end and headed back (the new section that was under construction in the fall is now fully open), the rescue trucks had left. With the wind at my back again, the rest of the ride was easy.

When I got home, I looked to see if there was anything in the news about the incident,but there was nothing. I'm hoping no news is good news this time out.

As I was getting ready for my ride this evening, a couple of small kids on bikes (with grandma walking behind them) passed by, and the boy looked at me and said, "Cool!" When I asked what was so cool, he said it was my gloves. I mentioned that the palms were padded, which helps protect your hands in an accident. He agreed that this was a good feature, then showed me the scab on his knee that was the result of his most recent bicycle mishap. Then he noticed the toe clips on the pedals of my bike. That got another "Cool!" Meanwhile grandma and little sis were waiting quietly while he geeked out. A seven year-old thinks I have cool stuff, so I've got that going for me...

It was nice to get out after a couple of days of heavy rain. The weather has been wreaking havok on my attempts to get into a decent riding routine. I thought I'd finally settled in towards the middle of July. I even managed to get in a good ride between afternoon and evening sessions at ReaderCon. (My hotel was only a mile from the Bedford end of the Minuteman bike path.) Then monsoon season started. Ride two days, Watch it rain for three, mow the lawn, get a ride in, watch more rain fall, lather, rinse, repeat. Still, I am closing in on a thousand miles for the year (959 so far), and the odometer on my not quite 15 month-old Fuji rolled past two grand tonight.

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( My legs hate me, apparently... )

Headline noted by Marty over at DT:

Royals To Get A Taste Of Angels' Colon

( The rest of the story... )

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Still cool out, but I managed to get out for a ride tonight. It was chilly and the battery on my bike computer died, but I persevered.

Posted by Jon B. over at b.org:

Celine does AC/DC...

The air guitar makes it perfect.

Still better than the State of the Union speech.

...while following the A's-Twins game on GameDay. Barry Zito's GameDay photo scarily resembles young Steve Gutenberg.

I had a deeply weird dream last night. I was in a clinic of some sort. I didn't start out there, but things are a little fuzzy before then. I was there to get medication of some kind, and they gave me three different drugs in serum vials. I went off to try to find a private room to take them, but there were two problems. First it dawned on me that I would need a syringe to administer the drugs, and a) I didn't have one, and b) I had no idea how to give myself an injection anyway. Second, there was someone else in the room. He talked to me for a moment (I don't remember what he said), then left through a hole in the wall, and it occurred to me that he was probably living inside the walls like Lazlo in Real Genius. He even looked like Lazlo, now that I think of it.

Anyway, I was trying to decide whether to find someone to give me the injections, or follow the guy into the wall when a woman came through the door, and she asked me if I would teach a groups of kids in the next room the sugars song, just like I did the last time I was there. (Huh?) So I followed her into a what turned out to be a class room, with a mixed group of adults and kids, and tried to remember the sugars song. Except there was no song. It's the mnemonic for remembering the names of the eight aldohexoses. So I started writing it out on a white board, except I couldn't remember it because I kept thinking it's a song, and I couldn't get the song right because I was earwormed by Tom Lehrer's Elements song. I tried singing that with another guy in the class, but we completely frelled it up. ("There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hafnium and gubnium, and bremium, and reenium, and...") I went back to the white board, and as I was writing, I did remember the last part of the mnemonic, "in gallon tanks," so I wrote that, and started writing "galactose" under "gallon." Except I kept getting confused by the earworm, and kept making mistakes, which I tried to erase, but the teacher had given me the wrong kind of pen for the white board, so it won't erase, and I still couldn't remember the first part because of the earworm, and I started to get embarrassed that I couldn't remember.

Then I wake up. It's morning, so I get up. And I remember, "All altruists gladly make gum in gallon tanks." Allose, altrose, glucose, mannose, gulose, idose, galactose, and talose. Go figure.

Jon at DT posted a neat recap of a great Dodger-Braves game played twenty-two years ago today. DLowe pitched another excellent game yesterday, beating the Padres, 3-1. His games scores since he made the adjustment to his motion are 63, 90, 74, and 63. The five immediately preceding the adjustment were 35, 54, 41, 53, and 23. The adjustment? He nows starts his motion with his foot on the first-base side of the rubber, instead of the third-base side.