jststeve - Steven Hawkins

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!

Occasion I want to create a PDF from a document or spreadsheet. In comes PrimoPDF . It installs as a printer and from any application that you can print from you can generate a pdf.

http://www.primopdf.com/primopdf_free_idx.aspx

Of note:

it is still free.
There is a separate link for a 64bit installer which I needed

336 WATTS Body Battery Calculator - Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing - Dating

JustSayHi - A Free Dating Website

Another great year of sailing at the Apostle Islands. I have been going each year since 2003. I snap a few pictures each year and post them on our picture site. Here is the link to the slide show.

Thanks to all the hard work of the skippers and the church staff in putting this weekend together.

I like WinSCP for doing SFTP and SCP file copying. I have tried out the native FTP that is imbedded in explorer and that seems to work as well. The two panel dispaly in WinSCP is what I like. Choose the directory on one computer and then choose it on the next and drag and drop what I want to move.

There may be something better but this works well and I'm not inclined to hunt another one down.

I like Picasa.

We have been using Picasa to view and organize our photo collection for a couple of years now and its great. The features and speed keep improving. I like the ability to tag all of our photos and the fact that it does not directly make changes to the original photos but rather creates a delta of the editing changes.

I would like to try the linux version at some point and look at migrating our home machines to linux! In my spare time of course

The windows Vista picture manager looks to have adapted many of the functions that I like, will need to investigate but likely will not look to migrate from Picasa.