jststeve - Steven Hawkins

I have wordpress installed now and will be making a migration over shortly...look for a new look and more frequent updating !

So McGuire asked me to:

Pick up your nearest book and go to page 123. Find the fifth sentence, and post on your blog the next three sentences. Acknowledge who tagged you, and then tag five more people.

I'm at work and I have a bookcase with various tech and security books but I also have some more interesting material. I thought I would be a Canadian twist on it and grab "Coke Machine Glow" by Gordon Downie. Lead singer for the Tragically Hip. The first challenge is that the poetry book only has 94 pages...what to do? 123 Mod 94 = 29

So on Page 29, Sentences 6,7,8...hmmm darn poetry

Here is the whole page:

New Orleans

In 20-watt New Orleans
envelopes lick themselves.

Alternatively the back cover has (Sentence 6 and 7):

Here we are in bed.
Here we are
beside each other
after everthing
we've said.

We will see if any of these people bite:

Rob
Marianne
Tim
Kris
Jim

From Positivity Blog

1. What are you really thinking about today?
“As you think, so shall you become.”

2. Simplify.
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

3. Learn about yourself in interactions.

“To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”

4. Do not divide.

“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”

5. Avoid a dependency on validation from others.

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”

6. Be proactive.

“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”

7. Be you.

“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

This arrived in my inbox this morning when I got to work

Your children and I are requesting that from this point forward you do not leave your bike clothes anywhere upstairs but instead leave them in the laundry room. We have gone upstairs twice since you left this morning and after thoroughly scouting upstairs to find the offensive odor source it was determined to be your very very rank bike clothes. I had to go back upstairs again and was assaulted by the pungent stink of those clothes. Since we haven't even reached the warm weather and your clothes are silently killing each and every one of us you are requested to never leave them upstairs again. The laundry room will never be pleasant smelling again either but that is my only thought for now other than the garage! Thanks for your cooperation. Our noses and stomachs (the stench is making us all nauseas) will thank you!

Lots of love, your family

Started the bike riding season off on Sunday. Great ride put on by County Cycles in Roseville. Here is to a fat burning season!



Update: Kevin at Hiawatha as a post up including the brutal climbing we did.

I had a sad task this morning. I took Liefde for her last visit to the vet.

Marianne has written a beautiful reflection on what a great part of our life that Liefde has been apart of. She will be missed.

Liefde was always a bundle of excitement. Always seemed to be smiling at you encouraging you to go for a walk or play. She was one of the things that united Marianne and I when we first met. We would take Liefde and George on long walks and talk and discuss our place in the world. They accompanied us on our first big adventure to Moab mountain biking. I remember Liefde running in the parking lot chasing our friend Chris on his bike and afterwards we had to bandage up her feet because they got cut up. Still she was all bubbly and happy and ready to run more.

Her personality reminds me so much of my wife and I will cherish that each time I see that.

You were a great friend Liefde and will be missed.

A picture of Tim getting ready to leave work one day this fall and rain has started. Tim go buy a real rain jacket

For image manipulation I like to use the GIMP

It is an opensource tool that can work with layered images like those from Photoshop. I am no pro so the light bit of work I need to do this tool is great.

Ok...so admit it. How many times have you clicked through the I'm still evaluating Winzip dialog?

Well there are other options out there. I evaluated Winrar by suggestion of a coworker. It is quite nice and their product seems reasonably priced. It has lots of nice features including the ability to create a self extracting file and place a password on the file. The compression of rar files is supposedly superior to zip files but I can't really say.

Another coworker suggested 7zip. It is a open source compression/decompression utility. I have downloaded it and I'm giving it a try. Free is good. Perhaps a small donation to further development.

News story that contains a simple test.

I'm a right brained thinker. What are you?

Apparently this made the rounds a while back but I'm just catching up.

Long over due post.

I have been riding to work 3-4 times each week. It has done the mind and body good! I had been riding a bit but when the bridge collapsed it greatly altered my commute time and it was making my cranky. Now I'm feeling more fit and it is a chance to plan my day and process it on the way home.

I have noticed several different bike lane markers but the one below cracks me up. It is a one of a kind on the Stone Arch bridge.


And now a close up of the abstract riders head....

We use SVN for projects at work and other OSS software I use often stores their code in SVN.

I like to use Tortoise SVN since it integrates nicely with the desktop explorer interface.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Turns out to get full functionality on 64 bit Vista I needed to install both the 32bit and 64bit versions so that it would hook into all applications. Working great!