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My new year’s resolution this year is to ride my bike to work at least 50 times. The first thing that I have learned from this is that I a master of excuse making. Between morning meetings, my employer’s occasional “dress like a banker” days, family scheduling, angst about being drenched with sweat at work and the good old fashioned lazy, I managed to go more than one third of the year without making any progress towards this goal. As of this week, however, I’m on my way.

The ride could not have been more pleasant. It was cool in the morning and not hot in the afternoon. Morning traffic was great. One driver waited at a four way stop and waived me through such that I wouldn’t have to come to a complete halt, which was totally cool of him. None of the cars got all up ons when I took the lane, which I did at every intersection. Exactly one car got within three feet of me. SGV drivers: thanks!

It took me about twice as long to ride — almost exactly an hour each way — as it does to drive on a bad day. (Although not an atypically bad day. Few of my drives in count as “good.”) That said, I got two hours more exercise than I would usually get, so I consider it a big time-saving win.

The home route through Arcadia’s peacock country may or may not be the best way to do things. I’m looking to avoid traveling on Rosemead or Colorado West of Baldwin, and this seemed an easy enough cut through, however I took a couple of wrong turns and ran in to some dead ends. Huntington in the morning was 100% reasonable; I’ll probably give it a go on the way home next time.

I’m planning to ride again next Thursday, and hopefully twice the week after that if all continues to go well.

Stephanie got me a subscription to Sirius for Christmas, and we were listening to its jazz channel this evening while doing the NYE thing. The first song I heard after midnight was Giant Steps. This bodes well.

Happy 2008, everybody.

The first project I ever worked on was in the news recently. The Synthetic Aperture RADAR run by the European Space Agency is being used to detect massive rogue waves. I worked on the Information Management System/Data Analysis and Distribution System (IMS/DADS) for the ESA satellite and a similar one run by UA Fairbanks, writing testing code for a huge Motif application used by scientists to get particular images for their research. The software that I worked on is likely long since decommissioned — does anybody use huge, Solaris-only Motif applications any more? Really? — but it’s fun to see what the project’s data is being used for.

Whenever I use the web or write email, my working environment displays in black on white and I’m just fine with that. When I edit text, black on white just seems wrong and I always switch things around to be white on black. This never struck me as odd until today. Does anybody else think it’s odd that one color scheme would make perfect sense in one context but come off as very wrong in another rather similar context? Or is it just me?

My son is doing a project for class this week that involves survey data and presenting it in graph form.  (Yeah, stats!)  Can you take a second to answer the $64,000 question below by 6 p.m. PT tomorrow (Wednesday).  Thanks!

From  The Kid:

What are your three favorite ice cream flavors? 1. 2. 3. Thank you for taking time to fill out my survey! Sincerely, The Kid

If you’ve already responded via email: Thank You!  Your answer is already recorded.

This morning, Stephanie, The Kid and I decided to go on a hike. We had already blocked out a chunk of the afternoon for sitting in front of the TV watching the Kentucky Derby and (for two of us, at least) having some mint juleps, so an afternoon out in the mountains seemed like a good counterbalance.

We drove up to Big Santa Anica Canyon and decided on the trail up to Hogee’s camp. The way up was fine. The weather was perfect. The trail was in good condition. Good times. We made it maybe two thirds of the way up before we had to start heading back in order to make it home before post time.

About a mile from the trail head The Kid stepped right over a rattlesnake. Literally. The snake must have been crossing the trail just as we were coming down, because another couple coming up had passed that point not two minutes before we got there. I seriously doubt that the snake was, you know, hanging out on the moderately busy trail sunning itself.

As it turns out, even people who have never heard a rattlesnake before know exactly what one sounds like. The Kid heard the hiss and the rattle and took the hell off down the trail. I’ve never seen him — or anybody, for that matter — move so fast. This was a good thing, because it got him out of the way of the snake, which was absolutely the appropriate thing to do. However, it did put me and Stephanie in an awkward position, as The Kid was down the trail and around the bend, we didn’t know if the snake actually bit him, and chasing after him was made difficult on account of the pissed off rattlesnake sitting in front of us on the trial.

Being a lifelong suburbanite, I’m not nearly as up on my animal kingdom language as I should be. There was a troop of boy scouts maybe a quarter mile up the trail from us, and I’m sure they could have accurately intrepreted what the snake was trying to tell us. Left to our own devices, all Stephanie and I could come up with was “stay back there or I’ll bite you.” I think we were probably right, or close enough at any rate.

Wanting very much to find out if The Kid was ok — we could hear him yelling at us from around the bend, which was promising — I did my best to communicate to the snake that it should get off the trail. There was a good sized stick by the side of the trail, so I grabbed it, broke a little chunck off and threw it at the snake. The message I wanted to send was “my species got to where it is in large part because of its ability to use improvised tools. So piss off before I get that big rock over there and crush your skull.” I don’t know if this was a good idea at all or even necessary — the snake probably would have taken off on its own had we left it alone, just like the other couple rattle snakes I’ve run in to have done — but I was in a hurry, and it worked, so oh well.

We trotted down the trail a bit and found The Kid just around the corner. He was a little shaken and all the way adrenaline-tastic, but the snake didn’t get him and he didn’t go tumbling down the side of the hill, so we were happy.

What did strike me as silly is that while we had water and first aid kits and whistles (well, most of us. While Stephanie and The Kid were well prepared for the hike and had whistles on them, I choose to not bother with probably the most important piece of gear you can have out in the woods. Smart.) and what have you, I don’t think we had anything for snake bites. And honestly, aside from “keep the bitten bits lower than the heart, stay calm, etc etc.,” I don’t at all remember what to do with snake bites. Had he been bitten, our only real save would have been the boy scout troop with all their gear up the trail from us (It looked like they were doing a shakedown hike for a trip this summer), as most of the looked to be the right age for having somewhat recently earned their first aid merit badge. I think that covers snake bites. Either way, I feel silly for not having a better idea of what to do in that situation.

It wasn’t too far from there to the trail head. I picked the winner for the race and probably won’t hike in shorts next time.

Yesterday was one of those days when both crappy and really, really good things happen. It’s a bummer that the bad goes down, but at least the good is there to balance things out.

So, the bad. I’m out of disk space on my laptop. Very, very out of disk space, to the point where I can’t do many things that I need to do. I got an external hard drive, and that sort of helped, but it was really too inconvenient for regular use. So, rocket scientist that I am, I replaced the hard drive with a much larger one and accidentally pulled the keyboard ribbon off the motherboard in the process. Oops. I now own a very expensive Apple-branded brick. (Although it’s an Apple-branded brick with a bitchin’ hard drive.) We’ll see if Di-No can fix it.

However, this was more than balanced out by the fact that Stephanie spent all day working yesterday to get the hot tub up and running. It is now fully operational. Which is rather more than braggable. Before bed last night, we poured a couple of cool beverages, turned the jets on, jumped in and watched the first half of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House on her (still functional) laptop. It was quite great.

This was the friendly greeting I received after taking the holidays off of work. I’m not one of the “I get 1,000 emails per hour” people, so this is more than a little terrifying. I wonder how troublesome the good old “select all, delete” would be ;)

There’s relatively little traffic between Monrovia and Pasadena at 5:30 in the A of M. Just thought I’d share.

For those of you playing along at home, my extra checks were in the box labeled “Office Double Misc.” I distinctly remember putting them in the “Al Qaeda” box, but I guess not.

Oh well.