Good exercise

Mark is in town visiting after spending this last year at CMU. While here, he graciously organized a hiking trip to Sequoia National Park. We did around 20 miles over two days, 12 of which with full packs, and over 4000ft of climbing with full packs. The consequence of this work was that my old trusty camping backpack finally broke. The duct tape came loose, my sweat helped, and the left shoulder strap broke. This pack has lasted around 15 years, so it has done its job. Now is probably time for a new one.

My other bit of exercise was riding home from the tenderloin without a seat on my bike. Someone managed to get the seat, and post, off of my bike while it was locked up . Normally riding without a seat should be challenging, but not too bad. Unfortunatly, my bike is a fixie and I had clipless pedals and shoes with me today. I learned after the first block that I shouldn't clip in since it is very hard to clip out while pedalling and standing up. I also had a down hill section that was very scary. It turns out if you have your butt too far back on the bike that it becomes wobbly.

Overpopulated

I've always thought Canada was overpopulated. I finally have evidence to support that. Canada has a higher population density than Iceland (and Australia)!

Watching TV in a browser

So TV has finally come to the browser. The current incarnation that I'm playing with is Hulu. Hulu has two seasons of babylon 5, so that's what I have been watching. The annoying part of Hulu is that even after it has buffered the video, it will still pause during play back if a network connection is lost. My guess is that they have a set of pings they send back to ensure you are still watching. If a ping has not been acked in so long, then a synchronous ping will be send which blocks playback until the video can continue.

Stalking has gotten so much easier

So there are three things people should know about stalking on the internet.
1) Every Canadian is on facebook.
2) Every Brazilian is on Orkut (pronouced or-ku-chi)
3) Whoever is left is probably found through a quick google search. Youtube content does help with this.

Pet Peeves of the web

Two things have been bothering me for a while:
1) Titles that are links. For example my stupid canvassers post has the title linking to the same page. This is especially annoying on link filled news pages since the title should be the only thing to click on to get focus into the browser windows.
2) Pages that refresh themselves. This annoys me because it forces me to stop reading an article as I am trying to read it. It is also annoying since any embedded youtube videos stop downloading, stop playing, and lose my place in the video.

Stupid Canvassers

So some canvassers came by my apartment building. They tried ringing a bunch of door bells and someone eventually let them in. They went door to door and tried to knocked on every door.

I leave my apartment door open when I am home, so if anyone wants to visit they know they are welcome. This seemed to confuse the canvassers as they couldn't find apartment 6, which is across from apartment 5, below apartment 8 and above apartment 4. They even joked that the building may not have an apartment 6.

Random thought

So qwerty was designed to avoid having two keys beside each other typed in a row. This was to avoid jamming keyboards. Dvorak decided this wasn't a useful design goal, so made his own keyboard. Anyway, this criteria to avoid jamming also makes qwerty better for small keyboards, since the jamming is now done between my fingers instead of the keys on a typewriter.