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I Biked to Work (Last Week!)

I mentioned Bike to Work Week last week, because that is when I Biked to Work.

Even though my youngest child did not support me (“What if you don’t make it?” she said) I did it. According to the GPS it was a 7.6 mile ride, and took about 43 minutes. My average speed was around 10 MPH. Going uphill it was around 6 and going downhill it was more like 20. In fact, 24.9 was the fastest I could go.

Trek 7200

It was fun, but not something I could do every day, or even once a week. There are so many days when I just need a car. Obviously I can’t bike to work on the days I need to pick up the kids, or have to meet someone in Brookfield or Milwaukee, or whatever. And since I sometimes work long days, I wouldn’t look forward to riding home in the dark after working 12+ hours. Of course, I’m just an excuse-maker.

But it got me thinking… What if I got a scooter? I mean, sure I wouldn’t exactly be getting the exercise, but think of the money I’d save in gas and wear and tear on the old CR-V! This line of thinking lasted about a day, and included looking for used scooters on Craig’s List, and chatting with a friend who knows more than I do. I even tried to do some rough math and figured if I got a used scooter cheap it would pay for itself in car/gas savings after 3 years of riding it to work. I’m insane like that.

I’d like to try biking to work again this year, and the crazy scooter idea is on the back-burner for now, unless you know someone who wants to trade one for some freelance web development and hosting.

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Suggestive Search

Yesterday Dana was using my iBook and needed to search for something, so she started typing in Firefox’s quick search bar. Then she says to me “So, been looking for college girls, eh?” (She asked it jokingly. I think.) Which surprised me a bit, mainly because I hadn’t been searching for college girls, but also because I almost never use the quick search bar. I’ve been using Mozilla’s keyword feature for so long, I’m wired into just hitting command-L, and then ‘gg’ followed by the term I am searching for. (Notice the small grey text ‘Suggestions’ below.)

Search Suggestions

So just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I checked it on another install of Firefox, and the same thing happened. You can also see this in action if you go to Google Suggest and type in ‘co’. At least it worked for me just now. Oh, Google does have this to say:

Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.

Novel or intriguing indeed. Anyway, it’s a good idea to know about this suggestive search feature the next time someone thinks your search history includes something you were not searching for. Not that there’s anything wrong with searching for whatever you’re searching for…

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Bike to Work Week 2007

It’s almost time for Bike to Work Week 2007…

Bike to Work Week 2007

Now, for some reason I thought it was this week, so I’m planning to ride to work tomorrow. It’s about 8 miles, which means I should be able to do it under an hour at a comfortable pace. If for some reason something goes wrong (flat tire, get hit by a car, fall in a lake) I’ll be calling one of my co-workers who drove to come pick me up.

I’m all in favor of riding to work (Ernesto the Biker does it!) but it’s just not always practical. I mean, I left work at 2:30 AM the other night, so riding home would not have been too pleasant.

Anyway, if there is a chance you can ride to work next week, do it. You probably need the exercise.

If you’re in Wisconsin, check out the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, and if you’re in Milwaukee, check out Bike Milwaukee.com

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Ted Leo and The Pharmacists

We saw Ted Leo and the Pharmacists last weekend at the Metro in Chicago, and it was awesome. Awesome times ten. (Here’s a terrible shot from my phone. Flickr has some way better photos from others.)

Ted Leo & The Pharmacists

If you’ve seen my last.fm profile you should know Ted Leo is at the top of my list. I like Ted Leo for a number of reasons, musically, politically, and personally. We’re about the same age, and got started in the same music scene at about the same time. Of course nowadays I just type commands in the terminal, and Ted rocks out like nobody’s business. I’m glad I made it to this show, as I meant to see him in 2005 but missed it due to unreliable transportation issues.

I sort of consider Ted Leo the modern-day Joe Strummer. He even played “Johnny Appleseed” in the middle of the show, while the drummer was busy moving stuff around. Of course, The Clash is also in my top 5 bands of all time list, so this was equally awesome. Seriously, I think he should just be called Ted “Awesome” Leo. (Am I gushing? I really don’t do that too often.)

For a taste of Ted Leo live, check the Internet Archive, or NPR for a show from 2007.

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Finding modified files

I needed to find all files on a Linux box that had been modified in the last 24 hours. Years ago I used to have a custom Perl script for such things, which I would use for various software development projects, but I found this awesome command: 

find / -type f -mtime -1 -exec ls -al {} \;

You can change the ‘/’ if you want to look somewhere specifically, like your home directory, or /etc. Of course you can pipe it to grep for just grabbing certain matches. The -1 specifies 1 day. I always love finding simple commands that are so powerful.

Oh, I found that bit at DZone Snippets, it’s titled Search for files modified the last … days.