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We got our “numbers” today and several of my colleagues received promotions. A co-worker told that a former boss of his used to remark that, “Any day the firm hands you a check on a discretionary basis is a good one.”

He’s right, it is a good day.

The forecast predicted 60°F weather so I took a day off from work to ride. I slept late only to be called from work at 9am and spend a couple of hours logged in from home. It made for a late start.

A few weeks ago I installed a bracket, a RAM mount sourced from Cycoactive, to hold the Garmin Streetpilot III my father-in-law gave me when he bought a new model. Last Sunday I had sorted out the mounting and GPS configuration on a short ride. I still need to adjust the mount location so that it doesn’t interfere with folding back my bar map case when I fuel but

GPS on a bike generally works. The best feature is that it lists the approaching intersection while displaying the map. Backed with the confidence of the map, I took roads I might never have tried; many of which proved to be very good. I also liked being able to verify the reading of my speedometer, 3-5 mph optimistic below 60 mph, and odometer, which was correct.

Some features don’t work. The marking of locations is awkward and it takes four button presses to take a mark and the return to the map. The short battery life is very short and it burned through six fresh AAA’s in less than five hours. There is nothing I can do about the first but the second I can solve by running power off the bike.

I still need to figure out how to export the marks and route on Linux or Mac OSX. Garmin’s USB card interface is not recognized by either and Garmin’s software only runs on Windows.

The outbound leg of the ride was great. I logged a fairly leisurely 240 mile round-trip, crossing back and forth through the backroads of the New York/Connecticut border. I need to incorporate Routes 37 and 39 into another ride. I stopped once for food in Kent and at Amenia Union cut back into New York State toward Millerton before heading home.

The leg back was awful. The wind had picked up and I fought shifting 35 mph gusts at speed all down the Taconic and Sawmill Parkways. I was blasted back and forth across my lane, frequently pushed off my line in turns and a few made me wonder if I hadn’t stalled the engine with the way they slowed the bike. Reaching the West Side Highway at rush hour was, if you can believe it, a relief.

I felt that my lack of experience with Lisp and Scheme was worth remedying so I picked up cheaply a used copy of Simply Scheme by Brian Harvey & Matthew Wright. It’s a bit elementary but it is intended for liberal arts majors and those who find they need a bridge to SCIP.

An annoying quirk of the book is the authors’ decision to use a nonstandard library of their own creation to hide the “complexity” of Scheme. I picked up copies of simply.scm and functions.scm from ftp://anarres.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/scheme/.

Unfortunately, I’m temporarily stalled. I intended to work with SCSH, the scheme shell as a shell in Emacs, and I may, but have to work out the library dependencies and possibly language features. PLT’s DrScheme might work but also has problems with the original library. This version of the library at UChicago is supposedly adapted for DrScheme but it looks like I need to remove the redefinitions of some built-in functions.

A fellow motorcyclist passed this link puncturing the cruiser crowd on a email list today: Black Echo’s American Angst.

Go ahead and laugh. They can’t hear you over their loud pipes and tinnitis.

The instructions for installing James Seng’s CAPTCHA module for MovableType 3.x were incomplete. You need to also edit the /lib/MT/App/Comments.pm module to perform the security check itself. This is the same trivial code insert as in pre-3.x releases: sub post { … require MT::Blog; my $blog = MT::Blog->load($entry->blog_id);

    if (!$q->param('text')) { 
       return $app->handle_error($app->translate("Comment text is required.")); 
    } 

    # 
    # Security Code hack 
    # 
    require MT::SCode; 
    my $code = $q->param('code'); 
    my $scode = $q->param('scode'); 
    my $sscode = MT::SCode::scode_get($code); 
    if ($scode ne $sscode) { 
        return $app->handle_error($app->translate( 
           "Wrong or missing Security Code.")); 
    } 
    MT::SCode::scode_delete($code); 
    MT::SCode::scode_create($code); 
    # 
    # End Security Code hack 
    # 

    my ($comment, $commenter) = _make_comment($app, $entry); 
    if (!$blog->allow_unreg_comments) { 
...

Save it and that’s all there is to it.