Some After Work Fun

June 23, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I'm thinking I might ride to Manhattan Beach after work to catch up with Kathy and her sister, who are planning to go there to watch the Pistons/Spurs game. Bike Metro says it would be 37.58 miles. Sort of humorously the directions also take me directly by my apartment. That's going to be a cruel moment of decision -- "Ok, you've ridden 15 miles. You're tired. Your front door is right there. You could ride 23 more miles, or you could justgo inside and sit down." Of the 39 points in the directions, 28 are to get me home. The next 11 get me to the beach.

1062 feet of elevation loss over the length of the trip. That all comes before mile 26 or so, then it's mostly flat.

I'm sticking the Bike Metro map in the body so you can get a more visual feel for how this ride looks.

Update (10pm): I made it in about two and a half hours. My legs held up just fine, though I can definitely feel that they'll be a little sore in the morning, just in time to ride back to work. — Continue Reading...

Raw Numbers Mean Nothing

June 21, 2005 by Eric Richardson

This morning Sean linked to a a comparison Triston Louis did of how Google and Yahoo report links to blogs.

Tristan takes a look at the number of links Yahoo and Google and Technorati report as pointing to a site and uses that to infer how well each engine is doing in covering blogs.

I skimmed it this morning, and then just went back and had a nice back and forth with Sean about it. My contention: the comparison is worthless. — Continue Reading...

Ditty Bops and Bike Summer

June 17, 2005 by Eric Richardson

To clarify something up front: I'm not dead, just busy.

With that out of the way, here's something really cool... On June 30th the Ditty Bops have a show at Spaceland. But there's something special about this show. To quote their site:

Theme: Bikes. Please bring your bike and join us for a bike ride to our Spaceland Show. We will meet at at 9pm at The Bicycle Kitchen located at 706 Heliotrope @ Melrose (2 blks west of Vermont) in Los Angeles, 90029. We will depart from there at 9:30 pm sharp to ride to Spaceland for our show. This show is part of Bike Summer 2005. 50% of Ditty Bops proceeds will benefit The Bicycle Kitchen www.bicyclekitchen.com

That's awesome. I'm there.

Why Can't Open Office Delete a Hyperlink?

June 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

My girlfriend has been using Open Office for the past while, and every now and then these problems arise that really get me fed up with OO as a piece of usable software. For instance, the issue today is that she had copied and pasted a quote from the Internet into her paper, and OO had automatically made that text a link without giving her the choice. Since she didn't realize what was going on, that link style got carried through to the rest of the paper, and before she knew what was up she had a paper that was basically a big hyperlink.

Automatically making something a link is a UI decision that I absolutely hate, but whatever, that should be a silly little problem to fix, right?

No. It would seem to me that OO's word processor has no function to remove a hyperlink. I tried just deleting the URL (which it made me do on a per-paragraph basis, or it wouldn't apply), but no luck. Now the link just pointed to the document itself. I even downloaded the help package so I could look in the documentation, and while I see plenty of documentation for making a hyperlink, I can find none for deleting one.

I finally turned to AbiWord, which puts a "Delete Hyperlink" option into the context menu for the right mouse button (when appropriate). I think the paper is now ok, but my disgust for OO isn't.

Times covers Midnight Ridazz; Estimates 500 Participants

June 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

There's an article on the Midnight Ridazz in today's LA Times.

There were at least 500 of them, wearing angel wings, rubber tentacles, Girl Scout uniforms and other costumes. But in a city where freakish exhibitionism is as about as original as saying you're working on a screenplay, the more startling sight was seeing everyone pedaling a bicycle.

The cyclists commandeered three westbound lanes on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake late Friday night, forming a convoy a quarter-mile long.

The absurdity of the scene drew people out of bars, restaurants and even a hookah parlor. For a moment, it was as though the electricity had been shut off in Los Angeles and the streets had come alive with people wondering where the cars had gone.

I went on the ride Friday night, pedaling over to Echo Park to meet up with everyone. It was nuts. I'm definitely going back next month. The trip was a bit over ten miles each way, but it was a really relaxed ride, so it would have been easy for any level of cyclist to keep up. There was a photographer from the Times with us the whole way, but the pictures aren't online. I guess I'll be stopping to try and pick up a paper copy. Or maybe I'll get lucky and find one on the train again. Pictures posted to the Bike Summer site are here. I took a few, but haven't uploaded them to see how they turned out yet.