Well, a week and a half later, without hassle, I had a nice new replacement pair of FiveFingers KSOs! I’m so happy to be wearing them again. They really feel better than normal shoes to me. So much so, I was thinking of buying another pair even if they didn’t warranty-replace them. (Possibly the
FiveFingers Classic which seem like they have inherently less stress at the point my first pair began to fail.)

In a few months (once I lose some excess weight and am less focused on cycling due to rainy winter weather) I’m looking forward to trying some light trail running in these.

I’ve also resumed the knitting project I started nearly two years ago. It’s a Doctor Who scarf. Knitting it is a fairly mindless activity, but quite relaxing as well. Here’s an old photo of it:

And, I’m reminded that I and Tien first met exactly 2.5 years ago (ignoring leap years.) I’ve been quite happy sharing my life with her.

Sunday I thought we were going to ride about 40 miles. Well Tien was remembering the distance based on a different starting point, and as a result, we rode 52.5 miles, from Menlo Park to Los Gatos and back. I actually enjoyed this. It was a nice long ride with a couple good climbs in it (the short and very steep one on Pierce Road got my heart rate to 178 at the top.), but mostly fairly relaxing. There were only two real downsides to it: the last 10 miles I was feeling a little weak and less mentally sharp, even trying to keep food and electrolytes in me, and I also got some sunburn, because I forgot to put sunscreen on the entirety of my arms. (I had the good sense to put it on my upper arms.)

Riding with Tien has been fun, even though I tend to have a bigger appetite for levels of intensity that make you feel like you can’t take any more (see the 178 above.)

Since the ride on August 2 is full, my revised schedule of organized rides is going to be:

• August 10 - Tour de Max - the 40 mile, the 70 mile would be too much climbing for me right now, and probably a bit much mileage.
• October 18 - Davis Bike Club - Foxy’s Fall Century - I’m certain now that I will be ready for 100 miles then.

I haven’t scheduled anything else yet — nothing else seems to be nearby and the distance I want to do at that point on the calendar. At this rate, I think I’ll be set to get back to trail running in the winter when the weather gets rainy enough that I won’t want to bike as much.

While it seemed cool when I first heard of it, I only recently had something which made it useful to me. I upgraded the Squeezecenter software for my Squeezebox (wireless ethernet music player), and it broke my favorite third-party module, SuperDateTime. I use SuperDateTime to replace the builtin clock functionality with one which shows the weather.

While I could just fix SuperDateTime (or wait for the maintainer to fix it), I noticed that the Squeezebox has a very simple RSS reader. This led me to googing for RSS feeds of weather and configuring it to display one. I happened to opt for Yahoo’s, because it’s well documented. But, this kind of sucked — The verbose form of the weather report and forecast was so much text that you could stare at the the squeezebox for half a minute while it scrolled all the text by.

Here’s where the Pipes comes in. I decided, why not minimize the feed to only the essential information. Basically, a simple task is required:

• Fetch the weather RSS for the appropriate location.
• Extract the current temperature and condition (Sunny, Cloudy, etc.)
• Extract the temperature and condition from the nearest (in time) forecast.
• Build a string out of this, one line of text.
• Spit out a feed where there is one item, where the title is the location and the description is this string.

But, while Pipes makes some things so easy (parsing XML, for example), it makes other things relatively hard or clumsy, at least to someone who is familiar with (text) programming languages. It was not without a learning curve.

Here is the result of my efforts. (Click view source if you want to follow along.)

What it does, in Pipes modules is:

• Get a zipcode and units (F or C) from the user who is instantiating it. (Might as well make it generic.)
• Convert the units to lowercase if they are not already (for the RSS feed syntax.)
• Convert the units to uppercase for display
• Fetch the corresponding weather feed.
• Loop over the items in the input, and for each, use the String Builder module (a lot more clumsy than a simple s(n)printf or string concatenation operator) to build up the output string, assigning this string to the description field of the item.
• Yet another loop to build a feed of new items, assigning the zipcode to the title of the item and the description to the description, eliminating the irrelevant data in the source feed.

Now, I suppose that wasn’t so bad. I know that my second use of Yahoo! Pipes will be much less troublesome than the first time I used it, but the lack of easy to use sprintf-like constructs and the need to use this explicit “loop over this feed and apply this module to every item in it” seemed a bit tiresome.

It does however provide a bit of inspiration for how one could create an easy to use (for the experienced python programmer) set of classes in python for doing this sort of processing of RSS feeds while abstracting away the low-level details. Also, I’m pleased to see an attempt at a visual programming language — something I think we see so little of, not for reasons involving the limitations of computers, but because of the power of plain text.

I’m trying to determine where the sidebar widget configuration is stored (in the DB, presumably) — the configuration UI is failing to set it sanely for me.

Update: Okay, I see. Sandbox wants to display certain default sidebar items if nothing is defined for a given sidebar. I’ve worked around this by putting stuff in both sidebars (which are actually just stacked one above the other.

Last weekend I rode 34 miles in about 2:33. Three or four times a week, I bike to work, which is 10 miles in each direction. I’ve gotten that down to as low as 49 minutes (including stops) when I timed myself on Monday. That means I’m actually averaging as fast as my car commute. (Car commute is only 7 miles, but hilly/more dangerous, and takes me 30-35 minutes. That’s 12-14 MPH. That bike commute is 12.24 MPH. Both including stops.) I don’t expect I’ll get much faster — significant improvement beyond 45 minutes would probably require unsafe maneuvers — the safe improvements possible are better acceleration and better top speed — not many hills in this route. I am having a fun time speeding past tourists going up the hill at Fort Mason.

Weight is down about 1 pound in the past 3 weeks, bodyfat is down about .6% in that time period. I’ve been doing some weightlifting, but not the 4-5 times a week I was doing before I got serious about the bike again.

As far as organized cycling events, I think I’m going to do a 50k on August 2. I’m planning to do a century (100 miles) on October 18. I may schedule a 40 mile ride and a metric century (100km) somewhere in between. Though, the latter is way out in the middle of nowhere and would require staying in a hotel the night before.

I don’t think I have any interest at riding longer than 100 miles and will probably focus at getting faster at shorter stuff (both hilly and flat) after that point. That’s something about the challenge of climbing a hill that’s hard to resist.

• Arial: The Scourge of Arial
• Times New Roman: Are You a Times New Roman or a Tahoma
• Trajan: Trajan is the Movie Font (video).
• And the number one hated font of all time, Comic Sans: ban comic sans
• From the NY Times: Arial, Mon Amour, and Other Font Passions

To varying degrees, I agree with many of these. I’ve developed some opinions on fonts, both as a result of casual use, and most recently, trying to spend more time thinking about design. I’ve been redesigning my Wordpress theme (actually just writing a stylesheet for use with Sandbox.) Some of my personal feelings about fonts (which I’m not going to explain in detail at the moment): Some fonts are bad merely because they’ve been overused. Monospace fonts suck for everything but writing code. “Old-style” serif fonts, especially Palatino, look more interesting than Times New Roman. Serif fonts are less readable than sans-serif fonts at small sizes on low-resolution displays.

Nose is a nice alternative to simply using the included unittest framework. Do see the PyCon slides.

In preparation for a project where I’d like to deliver compressed wikipedia article text to a flash lite 3 application, I’m writing a tool to import the “pages-articles.xml” dumps into a database. I’m playing with a couple different approaches to this. One is to actually store gzipped article text in BLOBs in a database table. However, if there’s any doubt about the ability of the database to handle that, an approach that I know will work is storing offsets into a file which is a concatenation of individual gzipped articles. Thus, you can quickly seek to any record in the file. (This technique has been used where I work for years for storing the output of web crawlers without creating millions of small files in a filesystem — see the ISO draft WARC file format, Annex A.)

The more I use sqlite3, the more I like it. It seems to be capable of handling a 2-3G database okay, though I’d really like to benchmark both of the above approaches.

Also, I’ve slowly been reading through Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a very satisfying book, and I’ll have to write more about it when I’m done reading it. It puts form to a lot of less connected ideas which I’ve been exposed to in the past.

I may have to get out my old GPS and take a drive in Tien’s Prius some Saturday in the near future. Notably, over half of the time, here, it’s going to be in the water, which I think is impractical for most people.

I bought a pair of the FiveFingers KSO in black, because they’re the most subdued and look like shoes from a distance, while still being well-ventilated. I was sure to carefully follow the sizing info on their web site.

They arrived on Wednesday, and they seemed to fit fine. I had a couple little concerns at first, but after wearing them all day Thursday and Friday (admittedly for my rather sedentary job), I had only two remaining concerns. The first was, these are great, but how long before I wreck the soles? Compared to a normal shoe, the sole has to endure a lot of flex, including around the toes and ball of the foot. The other concern is that the big toes aren’t quite as large as my toes. While my toes feel comfortable, I’m concerned that the sole underneath not being as wide is going to gradually lead to the fabric on the side of the big toe coming in contact with the ground and wearing through.

I wore them again today. I went to the beach and walked a couple of miles. I got them wet. One thing I learned, which does not surprise me, is that these are not sand-proof. If that was a concern, I’d consider the FiveFingers Flow, which has neoprene sides and top, instead of mesh. The KSOs dry fast though. Aside from the sand trapped inside feeling a bit abrasive, they were quite comfortable.

These things feel great even when you’re walking over sharp gravel. And, it’s nice to have that uneven feeling of the ground you’re walking on to be carried through to your feet. I find myself even walking on different surfaces than I normally would, merely to find out how it will feel in these shoes.

When I got home today, after shaking out the loose sand, I decided to put these in the washing machine, since there was some bits of fine sand that just weren’t going to shake out. The instructions are warm wash, air dry. It’s great. This is a pair of shoes you can machine wash on occasion — especially good when you’re not wearing them with socks.

So, the real test is going to be whether these last a reasonably long time before wearing out, but aside from that, I’m very happy with them.