Corporate Hippy

Last night I sent this email to the husband, my pal wingzz and my cousin jon:

Tomorrow – Thursday, April 19, 2007

Stony Creek Trailhead : 6:30

Here’s what’s gonna happen. I mean it. I’m going to lead, and we’re going to go really really really slow. We’re going to go slow because we’re not going to stop. I mean it. No smoke breaks, no pee breaks, no wuss breaks. We’re going to leave the parking lot and take the first left and climb the back way up to Mt. Sheldon. We’ll head in and do the roller coaster .. then the pines …

and then

we climb the snake, and ride the roller coaster one more time (this time because its so freakin fun)

I know … looks great in text, right? Well, this is what I’d really like to do .. and it’ll be tough to do on my own, so I’d love it if ya’ll would humor me and tag along

Who knows, we might just have fun too!

Unfortunately, Mike’s granddaughter was having her 2nd birthday tonight and we never heard from Jon. But, we pushed on, the two of us.

I had 4 goals: 1-climb the back of mt. sheldon and start right into the roller coaster without stopping at the top. 2-ride the roller coaster and go right from the prairie to the pines without stopping at the prairie. 3-finish the pines and take the 3 hill route to the snake without stopping after the pines 4-after climbing the snake start right into the roller coaster without stopping at the top

I’ve done some of these things before, but never all together. I always stop ALOT when riding Stony. I’ve also never ridden the roller coaster twice in one ride. Yeah .. I’m a slacker.

I reached 3 out of 4 of my goals tonight. I had to stop for a few minutes after the Pines because my back was aching aching aching. After that, I felt great! But then I started to almost get cramps in my calves. We’d talked about taking the bypass after the first section of the roller coaster the second time through because we were running short on daylight. I was starting to like the idea of taking the bypass when Nick realized we’d probably have enough daylight left to finish the coaster.

I didn’t want to. I was already in the bar drinking beer.

Turns out, the dude knows me better than I thought. He knew I was getting frustrated so he told me he’d ride ahead and let me do my own thang, take my time, take it easy. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I didn’t really feel like he was pushing me to ride faster, but I was feeling self conscious about how I was riding. Which really wasn’t a big deal until I’d convinced myself I was done

I needed the freedom to take bad lines and slow down unexpectedly. And that’s exactly what he gave me! And it worked I finished the roller coaster with a big ‘ol smile on my face.

The weather was amazing. I just got my new trails-edge jerseys and I got my first ever long sleeve jersey. I’ve decided that my favorite riding weather is when I can wear my knickers and long sleeve jersey. I love that thing.

We ended up at the Sherwood Brewing Company for dinner and beer. I like that place more every time I go there. Thanks Frank and Claudia!!!

So I’m all kindsa mellow … tonight was exactly what I needed to kick myself in the ass

life hippy

I love google. I use gmail, gtalk, maps, notebook, dashboard, and of course, calendar. I share my calendar with Nick and Jess. Nick created a Michigan Mountain Bike calendar. I’ve got a calendar for Jarek’s weekends. Its great!

Unless you want to get reminders from any calendar other than your “primary” calendar. Then, its not so good.

I wanted to create a new calendar called “reminders”. This is a calendar that’s not so much for appointments, but would be for things I want to be reminded of on a regular basis (ie – remind me to take a pill at lunchtime, or remind me to pick something up on my way home from work). I don’t want this crap in my regular calendar. I want to be able to hide my “reminders” calendar and keep it private (ie – unshared). But alas, I need to be able to actually GET reminders in order for this to work.

Not completely ideal, as its tied to Firefox in the form of an Add-on, but pretty damn close to ideal. For me, I want these reminders mostly while I’m at work. And, when I’m at work, I’m generally staring at a Firefox browser window 99.95% of my day. So, its really a good solution for me!

Just thought I’d pass it along. If you find yourself in a similar situation, give Google Calendar Notifier 2.5 a try!

geek hippy

I think its been about a year since my computer broke. The thing just up and died and it took my 2 hard drives with it. I started with a sloooooow hand-me-down machine with a 20g hard drive to tide me over. Eventually I turned the bastard off because it just wasn’t worth the time it took to do anything. Recently, I upgraded to a much faster hand-me-down, this one is lightening fast in comparison. But circumstances left me still with the 20g hard drive.

Translation: I haven’t sync’d my iPod to a computer in a year.

So today I took the plunge. We stopped by WalMart on the way to breakfast and I bought an 80g Seagate External USB hard drive. After breakfast, I downloaded and purchased CopyPod which promised to get my tunes off of my iPod and onto my PC – including my playlists and ratings (yes, I said purchased .. because, we’re talking about my entire music collection, my ratings, my playlists, my mother fucking data .. this is important shit).

The drive connected flawlessly. I hit the power button on that thing and my computer saw it instantly.

Score 1 for me!

I decided to move on to the iPod. Since I didn’t read the directions, I didn’t realize that I could copy my music directly to an iTunes library automajikly through the CopyPod software. Since I didn’t read the directions, I copied my music to a folder on my shiny new drive. After an hour or so of crunching, the copy was done. I opened up iTunes and browsed to my music on my shiny new drive and added those songs to my iTunes library. Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared – with no ratings .. no playlists .. no nothing. Shit.

Score 0 for me.

Ok .. so, I delete all of the music off of my shiny new drive. I open CopyPod back up and see that ‘copy to iTunes’ is an option. So I give it a shot. I spend another hour playing addicting flash games. When the copy process is complete, I clicked OK on the ‘complete’ dialog and mindlessly closed the program (I was a bit distracted as my volume suddenly became un-muted). So, I open iTunes again and browsed to my music on my shiny new drive again and added those songs to my iTunes library, again. Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared, again – with no ratings .. no playlists .. no nothing, again. Shit.

Score -1 for me.

I decided it was time to read the directions. Apparently, had I not closed the program after the ‘complete’ dialog box, I would have seen another dialog box that said it was about to automatically import my shit into iTunes. Heh. Who knew?

Take 3.
Delete the music off the shiny new drive. Copy the music to my iTunes library. LEAVE THE COMPUTER ALONE for about an hour. Click OK on the dialog box that says its completed the copy. LEAVE THE PROGRAM OPEN. Click OK on the dialog box that says its about to automatically import my shit into iTunes so keep your grubby hands off of it. LEAVE THE COMPUTER ALONE for an hour or two (went for Mexican food .. mmmm .mmmm). After dinner, I watched CopyPod finish its import into iTunes and waited for it to close iTunes and give me the ‘all clear’ dialog box.

I opened up iTunes and didn’t have to browse to my music on my shiny new drive and add those songs to my iTunes library. Because Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom – all of my songs appeared – in my library – with ratings .. with playlists .. with everything. Sweet!

Moral of the story: I could have spent my afternoon tweaking my iTunes library as I’ve been thinking about for a year now. Instead, I spent the day fighting against myself. Heh.

All’s well that ends well though … I’m pretty damn satisfied with the way it turned out in the end

geek hippy