Oh to ride a bicycle more...

December 05, 2007 by Eric Richardson

IAAL-MAF Eric Richardson

In light of the LA Times article about Midnight Ridazz and its mention of the IAAL-MAF (under sporadic rides at the bottom), it would perhaps be an appropriate time to discuss the fact that I suck at reliably getting on a bicycle these days. I rode tonight up to Atwater Village and back, and the hill on Glendale blvd reminded me just how little time I've been putting in the pedals lately.

Given tonight's ride, two trips to USC and a sidetrip to the Wilshire Library Branch, I've ridden about 30 miles in the last three days. Sadly, I don't know that I could tell you the last time I had done that.

But enough complaining... The simple solution: Go ride a bicycle.

I can start by heading over to the shop to get some new bar wrap to replace the padding on the left side of my bars. It ripped and I've been riding without for a couple weeks.

Bicycle Transportation

November 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Bike Bike Racks at Caltrans Eric Richardson

I took this photo for a blogdowntown post today, and I really love how it came out.

Shot with the kit Sony 18-70 3.5-5.6 at 50mm f/5.6, 1/125sec exposure. Taken crouched in the curbside lane during a break in traffic.

Two Random Rails Notes

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I spent a chunk of the evening getting up to speed on how you're actually supposed to deploy Rails applications, figuring that my method of manually starting a server on some arbitrary point and pointing Apache at it probably wasn't recommended.

For both this site and blogdowntown I've set up mongrel clusters behind a pound balancer, roughly following instructions here and here. I don't currently have the mongrel clusters running out of init, but I think that should be the last step to getting things happy.

I'm been messing around with ambition, a plugin for writing database queries via Ruby. It's not that I think SQL is anything hard, it's just that there's a certain appeal in a query like:

live = Post::STATUS_LIVE
@aposts = Post.select { |p|
    p.status == live && p.users.id == @author.id
}.sort_by { |p| -p.timestamp }.first(3)

So far I'm just using it in a few places on the periphery of the blogdowntown code, but I'm intrigued.

Testing the New Interface

November 27, 2007 by Eric Richardson

After letting this blog sit abandoned for months I've finally gotten around to giving it a bit of love. I've pulled over the code from blogdowntown and basically just stolen most of the design and style. The eventual goal is to merge whatever bits are going to remain from ericrichardson.com into this site and push everything back together. For now I'll try to start with just making a blog post every now and again.

I can't say that in the design process I was really working with the irony of using a No Stopping sign on a blog that hasn't had a post in months, but I'll go ahead and take credit for it anyway.

Filling Out the Apartment

July 07, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Kathy and I spent two and a half hours at IKEA this afternoon, which is about two hours longer than I ever like spending in the store. To me the IKEA experience just seems overwhelming. There's too much stuff, and putting together rooms inevitably leads to having to make too many choices.

But we had needs, and IKEA had furniture.

The table I assembled in November was the last real purchase Kathy and I had made, and we had some serious gaps in what we had vs what we needed.

So now arriving tomorrow we have 550 pounds of furniture (according to the IKEA home delivery guy). We have company arriving Wednesday, so between now and then we get to 1) clear out where it'll all go, 2) assemble everything, 3) put things away, and 4) get rid of trash and junk.

Update (Monday morning): I spent seven hours yesterday on assembly and got about 70% of the way through. We got four pieces, and I assembled two and a half (though most of the complicated stuff). Pictures will come tomorrow after things are finished up.