November 2007 Archives
DART rail has a lot of construction going on downtown lately, getting ready for the Green Line expansion as well as making the trip through downtown quicker and easier. They have been taking advantage of holiday weekends to shutdown the trains and get construction done more efficiently. For the Thanksgiving holiday, they are shutting down starting on Wednesday when many people, including myself, still have to go to work. They do provide a shuttle bus but that can be a hassle, particularly if many people are trying to use it.
Since my office would be closing early, I decided this would be a good chance for me to try doing a longer commute on the bike. I took the train to Mockingbird Station and then rode over to the Katy trail at Mccommas and McKinney. The trail goes all the way to the American Airlines center, which is about a mile from the Infomart. Excepting the weather, the trip went exceedingly well. The Katy trail is very nice, double wide concrete plus a soft surface jogging trail for most of its length. There are only two road crossing so it was pretty fun, just zipping along. From Mockingbird to the Infomart is about 5.5 miles and the total trip didn’t take much longer than my regular commute would have. In retrospect though, I think I probably had a partial tail-wind and slight down slope in the morning because it was not nearly so nice in the afternoon.
I look forward to taking advantage of this route in the future, when the weather is a little better.
This was next to the bench at the bus stop today: diet Coke, condoms, and Vienna sausages. Somebody had an interesting little party!
We have been watching the new Battlestar Galactica series lately. In the season 2 finale, the Chief, as Union President, gives this workers unite-type speech about throwing yourself on gears and such. I thought, that sounds awfully familiar. Turns out it was paraphrased from a famous speech by Mario Savio, a ’60s political activist. I’m most familar with it though from the Utah Phillips/Ani DiFranco versions.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part—you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it and the people who own it that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.
One of the most underused HTML elements is the optgroup. When you have a select with many options, you can separate them into groups, indented with labels. Like this:
One of my least favorite web idioms is the paired multi-select where you have two select boxes and buttons to move items between them. For work, I needed to add optgroups to an existing paired-select. Unfortunately, simply adding the optgroups revealed limitations in the Javascript that moves the items left and right. I looked around on the web and couldn’t find any examples that implemented this with optgroups in mind. Most of the implementations I’ve seen re-sort and completely recreate both lists on each move. It seemed like trying to add optgroups into this method would be problematic so I decided to try and come up with something from scratch…
I was listening to PRI’s Fair Game (think Public Radio + The Daily Show) last week and they were talking about Mitt Romney being a Mormon and how that affects his presidential campaign. The commentator mentioned how Romney comes from a long line of Mormons and has ancestors who were significant in the early history of the Church.
I thought, wouldn’t that be interesting if I were related to Mitt Romney! I did a little searching and although I couldn’t find any direct family connections, I did find an interesting historical connection.
Romney’s great-great grandfather was a Mormon apostle in Arkansas. His murder, by a non-Morman, led, in part, to the Mountain Meadows Massacre for which my great-great grandfather (see photo) was held responsible and executed. Crazy. [source]
Not quite as weird though, as Cheney and Obama being related.
For example, one of the first things I noticed on the bike is this odd little piece of rubber stuck to the frame.
That is the kind of quality I didn't expect from a $350 bike. It has a nicer over-all feel than the Trek comfort bike we bought a few years ago and was similarly priced if not more expensive.
One disappointment is the way it holds together when folded. Dahon uses a magnetic mechanism which is better than some folders which have nothing to hold them together. However, the magnets are not strong enough to always hold and sometimes it opens up when I am getting on and off the train. If you made the magnets any stronger, though, it would be too hard to unfold when you are ready. I think that some kind of locking latch in the frame hinge would be better.
I’ve been trying to get into this blog thing for a little while. One of my excuses for not writing more was frustrations with the blog site I had chosen, Vox.com. So, I’m giving it another go with MT4 which gives me more control over the small details I tend to obsess over. So far, I’m liking it ok and I’ve got several posts waiting in my head. We’ll see what excuse I come up with next.
I’ve copied over some of my previous posts below. You can also use my primary, more permanent URL which tries to combine all my “stuff” from around the web and will stay updated even if I move my blog again.
