I have not died. Rather, I am spending every free moment of my time recoding tumbledry to better serve everyone’s needs. What does recode mean?
Well.
Everything is brand new from top to bottom. New database, new front end (the part you see), spanking new page design, new back end (the part I see), every line of code revised or rewritten. I’ve gone through so many iterations of the design it makes my head spin, and have written about 3500 lines of code.
The new site will feature comments on any links, posts, and images added to the site. Images, you say? Why yes, there will be a daily image on tumbledry now. Every day, a new image, plain and simple. The site will also feature “tags.” That is, bits of text that identify information. The picture I took while at the theater to see “You, Me, And Everyone We Know” will be tagged with that movie’s name, as will my link to the review of it, and the post about my impression of it. So, information will be organized much better.
Comments are turned off because this is all running on the old database, and anything new that you say or I say needs to be moved over by hand to the new site. This is extra work I do not need.
Thank you for your loyal support and visits, and you will see the new version of tumbledry in two weeks at the most. I am looking forward to a long discussion about the redesign.
Keyboard with tiny screens for each key - The Optimus keyboard is an incredibly useful keyboard evolution - but 200-300 as the projected price? That better be lower. As a a commentor points out:
“Very nice and perhaps useful for some professions, but as a consumer I’d have to say they’re missing my budget for next year’s keyboard expenditures by an entire decimal place.”
Atari Video Music - This would be a perfect compliment to music at parties: “these AVM patterns were not a subtle blend of colors and shapes morphing together that you’d have playing in the background of your mellow 70’s cocktail party. Instead, the AVM produced an onslaught of spastic pulsing patterns that gyrated at an eye-numbing speed across the TV. The patterns are comparable to the seizure-inducing anime from the 90’s that sent a whole nation of Japanese kids into an upchucking frenzy.”
F-Train: On Insurance - If I could choose a way to write, this would be it. They say every great writer has a deep pain, an inner unrest; I don’t know if that is true of Paul Ford, but if inner pain is correlated to quality of writing, his must be very great.
Church and State in the US - The New York times supplies an impressivley even-handed description of the current church/state debate in the US. If you read an article about politics this month, read this one.
In a glorious attempt to destroy any remaining shred of privacy I may have on this online journal, it is time to trace my running route. First, I had to trace it myself, trying to figure out how far it was. So, I bought a replacement battery for my bike distance tracker attachement. Adding an extra ‘e’ to that word gives it more authority. Anyhow, I went to the specialty battery store, which, at a sterile 66 degrees, was completely devoid of people except myself and the sales clerk. He asked me what I needed and I handed him the button battery from my bike attachement. He glanced at it for about two seconds, and walked around the counter to a shelf directly behind me, plucking a small battery from the shelf. I began to question to legitimacy of this man’s job. A battery store would be the ultimate application of the ‘self-serve’ check-out ideal: walk up to a store front about the size of an ATM, hand the machine your battery (or type in the words on the front of it), and you are able to select from the available batteries. It grabs them from an automatic stockroom, you pay, and it hands you a battery. The man in the battery store probably would not like this idea.
Installation of the battery in the attachement went fine, and I traced out my distance, being sure to cut corners where I do when I run, and avoiding small children and cars along the way. You may think that last detail was superfluous, however I have been known to run into small children (both accompanied by their parents and alone), and quite nearly into cars at blind stop signs. The realization that running into something would ruin my distance tracking is probably the only thing that kept me from doing so. My route turned out to be exactly 3.1 miles. I do mean exactly. Just as I passed the end of my driveway, where I customarily end my run, the counter flipped over to 3.1 miles.
So, I set out to run this in 18 minutes. 13mph wind. 92 degrees out. What a dumb idea. I mean, 92 degrees? Mile one was good, downhill, made it in 6:05. Mile two: my body asked “why are you doing this to me?” Got one of those shivers up your back which signal the approaching visit of adrenaline or tunnel vision, the latter in this case. Pulled it together and came across the 2 mile mark at 12:30. Mile three: death. See, I forgot to factor in mile three’s half-mile ridiculous-hill-‘o’-pain-and-agony (the big straight horizontal line on the map). This made my final mile 8 minutes long. Finished at house at 20 minutes, 30 seconds, stumbled inside and hosed down with cold water.
As suspected, within ten minutes I found myself saying “gosh legs and heart that wasn’t so bad.” My legs, the punks that they are, replied “sit down … now.” My heart simply said “boom boom boom boom boom …” Stomach reported “possible nausea.”
UPDATE: I should have used a wonderful Google Maps API Hack called “Google Pedometer” to map my route. My latest route came in at 5 miles. This awesome tool saves the trouble of biking the routes, though I think I still will as biking is such a pleasure.
