A carnival of technology

I changed the comments system. It requires some styesheet changes, so you might have to do some kind of cache clearing before it works. The system I used before was NBCom, which has the advantage of being easy to get started and being linked from the Nanoblogger website. It has some pretty heinous shortcomings: it mangles the comments while removing HTML and often leaving an unrecognizable mess in its wake; the login system, simple though it may be, is too much of a hassle for anyone to use, and the code itself manage to make using PHP worse than it would normally be, eschewing the templating nature of the language—the only thing it does well—in favor of a series of writes to stdout, making it look kind of like a perl script. The last problem made it hard to edit, so I just made my own thing. I have a habit of abandoning projects half-finished, so moving things over to the front page now is both good and bad: it means that I can start using my work before I wrap things into a nice neat release for other people to use, but it also means that I may now never get around to making that release. Oh well.

I made the new comments page look like the rest of the site, but I also tried to keep the behavior similar to that of nbcom. I kept the spam-prevention image for one, since, though it is pretty easy to circumvent, it has done a good job of preventing spam, and the choices for the random word list are kind of funny. It looks like the author likes both Dune and Lord of the Rings, and I can respect that. I’ve gotten rid of the login system in favor of TypeKey since it’s easier to hand off account management to someone else. Anonymous posts are still allowed, but if you want to post with a name, use the typekey link. I allow HTML now, but the validator still have a couple of bugs. If you start out a post with an HTML tag, that whole thing better be HTML, because it’s not going to work otherwise. I do something with the linebreaks now, though, so feel free to hit Enter and expect something to come out on the other end.

I put together an XML schema to validate the posts to keep people from screwing everything up when they forget to close an <i> tag or something, and, even though I now think that XHTML is more of a mess than I did yesterday after spending most of today wading through a bunch of schema files, I think my way of doing things is more elegant and rad than the other people’s ways I could find, so maybe I should release that part before I lose interest.

So there you have it. A letter opener. Let me know if you have any trouble.

I tend to get two questions from people who know that I ride a bicycle a lot. First, how much weight have I lost, and second, what do I do when it rains. The first of those questions I find a bit unsettling, since it just reminds me that I’m kind of fat. I have been casually tracking my weight; I realize that I gained a lot after college when I could afford food again, but I don’t like to admit it. I’m down about fifteen or twenty pounds since I started biking most everywhere. I still eat just as crappily as before, so I figure that’s not too bad. As for what I do when it rains: I get wet.

The Southern winters I’ve grown up with are usually characterized by wide temperature shifts. As some would say, Georgia has two seasons: one that can melt a brass doorknob, and one that just makes it a little mushy, and this isn’t far from the truth. The trouble for me, the crazy guy riding around without a heated metal bubble, is that, though the afternoons in winter still tend to warm up enough to soften doorknobs, nights, and by corollary, mornings, get damned cold. I only have about 27L of space to work with on the bike, so I can’t well stuff a winter coat into my bags for the ride home after work. Also, on the couple of days I have found reason to wear my heavy coat, the difference in air resistance is very noticeable. It feels like I’m dragging a freaking parachute behind me. Usually I wear my tracksuit-looking blue jacket and just suffer through the little bit of extra cold. I’m not on my bicycle for more than half-an-hour or so at a time, so it’s not too bad. The blue jacket is basically a thin windbreaker, and it has a builtin stuff sack, so it’s really nice for biking. I warm up enough from huffing and puffing up hills that the cold isn’t a huge deal, but it’s still more of annoyance than the rain.

I ride in the rain. Some people have suggested that this is kind of a dumb idea, and they have their points. The first leg home from the office to the park-and-ride is especially dangerous since I have a bad habit of splitting lanes through the backed up traffic (but if I can’t do that on a bike, what’s the point?) while coasting downhill, and I did take a spill on Mansell that one time I locked my brakes, but as far as general wetness, it’s not so bad. I spent a lot of money and time installing fenders and getting waterproof clothing (neoprene socks and the aforementioned blue jacket), so as long as I remember that I have no braking power, I don’t think that accidents or pneumonia are big worries. My jeans do get wet, but I still find packing an extra pair a better solution to spending a big sack of money on rain pants suitable for biking. Other than the pants, the only parts of me that can still get wet are my face (I don’t think there’s a solution for this, so I’ll just have to live with the occasional wad of wet road gunk flying up at me), my shoes (expensive to fix and not a huge deal since the socks keep my feet from getting wet), and my hands.

One of the good habits I picked up after reading The Art of Urban Cycling (Robert Hurst, ISBN 0762727837) is that I always wear gloves. Besides protection from certain types of weather, they give me something to land on. Gel-filled gloves are pretty popular, but I try to avoid those, since I don’t find enough shocks on an everyday ride to justify something so pricily absorbent. I think that for the everyday rider gel gloves are just as ridiculous as those goofy lycra shorts. The idea of gloves in general, though, unlike the shorts, is not ridiculous, since road rash really sucks. The first pair I bought back in August was the REI-brand half-finger gloves. They’re pretty alright. I’ve noticed since then, though, that every time the weather changes enough to warrant another pair of gloves, the ones I want are on sale on a rack in front of all the bicycle components. The half-finger gloves became too cold after a little while, and suddenly, hey look! The full fingered version of the same thing is five bucks off! Those worked pretty well for a little while, but recently the wind and rain was enough to make my fingers numb by the time I made it to MARTA in the mornings, and wow! Something similar but wind and water resistant is on sale! What a coincidence! I wonder how long it’ll be until I need another pair. Hopefully by then I’ll have my dividend back from the other three pairs.