Cycling

While I've been in California this summer, I've been pretty car-less and with gas prices the way that they are, I'm not complaining. Instead of a car, I have a new bike, a Trek 2.3. I have wanted a road bike for a long time, and this summer turned out to be a opportune time to get one.

Of course, I decided to go ahead and register for the Marin Century, even though I hadn't done any regular riding for the last two years. My daily commute is around 7 miles, round trip, which gives me a chance to do push myself, but I really enjoy the longer rides as well. This morning, I decided to go for a 65-mile jaunt around the South Bay: over Dumbarton Bridge, out through Newark and Milpitas, down around San Jose and back through Cupertino and Los Altos. There weren't any major climbs, but it turned out to be quite the ride, and has given me some confidence for riding a century only 5 weeks hence.

On an unfortunate note, I did forget the sunscreen today, so I'm sporting some rather odd tan burn lines.

Tomatoes and Drunk Drivers

The CDC has reported that since April, 552 persons infected with Salmonella Saintpaul. As a nation, our reaction has been almost heroic. We've pulled tomatoes from store shelves and fast food restaurants, banished them from sandwiches and let tons of stock spoil. In spite of its long-known and far-reaching health benefits, the tomato has overnight become the worst villain in the culinary industry. (Fortunately for our family, home grown tomatoes are still considered safe—for now.)

In 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, an estimated 17,602 people died in alcohol-related traffic accidents. In 2001, more than half a million people were injured in crashes where police reported that alcohol was present (source). That's one injury every minute of every hour of every day for the entire year. For those keeping score at home, that's one Salmonella case for every 208 alcohol-related injuries, just since April.

Although no known deaths have occurred due to the Salmonella Saintpaul outbreak, we've bent over backwards to "fix" that problem, but whatever efforts we make to curb drunk driving seem to have little effect. Putting my personal religious disdain of alcohol aside, it would just seem sensible to put the same vigor into the problem of drunk driving as we do to contaminated tomatoes. We seem to accept drunk driving and the consequent deaths as an unfortunate part of life, whereas we have a right to eat tomatoes risk-free. Maybe it's just me, but this seems a bit backward. I guess it just shows that the rational man is still an elusive creature.

As Joseph Stalin once remarked, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic". And that smells of rotten tomatoes.

Family Campout

We've tried camping with Hannah a couple times before, but they were both trying experiences. We'd like to think that we learn from our mistakes, so we planned another family campout for this spring. Due to a number of postponements, we were finally able to go camping this past Monday.

We went to Pedernales Falls State Park, and I think Hannah enjoyed herself. The campground was relatively empty, and the weather, despite threatening rain, was only overcast and not even too windy. We had a good meal Monday evening, and managed to get Hannah tired enough to go to bed easily. Tuesday morning, we stopped by the falls, and then went downriver to the swimming hole and waded around for a bit.

With me leaving for the summer and #2 coming in September, it might be a while before we go camping as a family again.

The good ol' days

"...when men were men and wrote their own device drivers."* I've never gotten around to writing any serious device drivers, but a recent article by Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror reminded me of my first programming language: QBasic. I first started writing Basic programs in the early 90's while in the eighth grade using Microsoft's provided environment. (We created faux-"DOS Box" programs for Windows 3.1 which induced significant head scratching among the computer illiterate at my middle school.) What more could one want than an interpreter with as-you-type syntax checker and nary a native compiler to be found?

Well, at least it's good to know that some things never change.

* With apologies to Linus Torvalds, of course.

I'm a Switcher

For several months, I've been wanting an Apple MacBook Pro. I've kept putting it off, first waiting on the release of Leopard, and then for the latest hardware revision. A couple of weeks ago, the Mac Book Pros were upgraded to use more recent Intel processors, as well as have bigger hard drives, and I soon found myself with a compelling need to have a laptop. So, on March 7, 2008 at approximately 8:37pm Central Standard Time, I became a Switcher.

So far, the experience has been mainly positive. Like others, I appreciate Apple's attention to detail, both in hardware and software. It's also been nice to have a handy Unix development environment for hacking code. I've already played around a bit with Photo Booth, and I'm looking forward to editing home video. It may take a while to get used to different key bindings for common commands, and other differences between OS X and Ubuntu, but I don't think the transition will be too painful.

Lest this be seen as simply another fanboy post, I still find plenty of things different and unexpected (where is universal 3rd button copy-and-paste?!?), but overall the experience has been a good one thus far.