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I ordered from BicycleTrailers.com a Baby Jogger Tailwind trailer that I ended up returning. I ended up returning it mostly because it had no storage room at all. I’m toting my son in the trailer and he needs his lunch, sometimes a change of clothes, etc. And it’s nice to have that behind him where he can’t get at it. The trailer itself, while a bit on the heavy side, was extremely well built and had some very nice touches compared to our Burley LadyBug trailer. It seems likely that the Baby Jogger folks were aiming this at people who want to jog with young kids and that having no storage room was a feature, since the missing space gives a runner room for their legs to step forward. ...

I bought a Dell Dimension 9200 with a Quad Core processor. It hasn’t helped a lot but I’m reserving judgment on that until I get a second hard drive into the box. I’m suspecting that things are more I/O bound. Anyway, I didn’t want to pay what Dell wanted for a DVD R/W drive instead of a DVD drive so I got the box with just a DVD drive. I tried buying a DVD R/W drive at Target but the connections are wrong for my box. ...

I really liked this article from Bike Hugger called Why I ride fixed. It fits very well with why I ride a Redline 9-2-5. I’ve got fenders, which I need for the wet here in Portland. It’s got brakes, which I need to slow Ben and I down in the trailer. And to slow me down - my legs aren’t up to stopping the bike by themselves yet.

I read Sheldon Brown’s article on Breezer Town where he says The Breezer Uptown 8 is the best commuter bike available in the U.S. There’s a lot of things to like about the Uptown 8. I was able to test-drive one at Veloce Bicycles on Hawthorne. Pros Shimano 8-speed hub Hub-powered headlight and taillight - no batteries, hard to steal Full chainguard - reduces wear Cons No disc brakes - want to pull trailer down a steep hill in the rain Noise from rack and fenders 26" x 1.5" tires - seem slower than 700c tires The deal breaker for me was the disc brakes. How much of an issue this is really going to be, I don’t know yet. The downhill is at the start of my ride, so the bike will be relatively dry and any brakes might work well. On the other hand, the end is the top of a “T”. If I can’t stop and manage to avoid being hit by the SUVs and mini-vans taking kids to school, I’ll run right into a house. The twist shifter worked OK and would work well with gloves. I preferred the feel of Shimano’s RapidFire shifters but not sure that they’re as glove-friendly. I’ve also found the twist shifter seems to have more issues shifting smoothly than I would have thought. Some of this definitely may be due to my inexperience as a cyclist but I haven’t liked the sloppiness of my SRAM shifters (old Specialized Crossroads) or the Shimano 7 on an Electra Townie 7 I test-rode the Townie from the Bike Gallery on Sandy. ...

I’m trying to set up cron to run jobs for me. I have to go look up the weird syntax but OK. Found it. Everything looks fine but the jobs don’t work. Go on vacation. Come back and try again. Syntax is OK. Everything looks fine but the jobs don’t work. Dig, dig, dig. Find this Unix Crontab - setting up cron jobs using crontab You can execute crontab if your name appears in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow. If that file does not exist, you can use crontab if your name does not appear in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.deny. If only cron.deny exists and is empty, all users can use crontab. If neither file exists, only the root user can use crontab. ...

I thought this was a great explanation of why I’ve had trouble dealing with some excellent technical people. They had wonderful skills and cared about doing a good job but were very abrasive. Tact Filters has been around a long, long time but it’s as true today as it was 10 years ago, when it was written. Or 20 years ago, when I first started working with techies.

Haven’t implemented all of the things here but this looked promising on speeding up Ubuntu: Feisty Performance - “Fly Like A Butterfly

I was looking to do an unattended backup of some important files and found this very helpful: SSH your Debian servers without password

This seemed like a great article on how to develop modern-looking pages. I barely know some of the HTML tags but Web 2.0 how-to design style guide was clear with great screenshots.

Found this article on HowTo Mount NTFS Filesystem Partition Read Write Access very helpful as I continue to dig out from under the Feisty Fawn -> Gutsy Gibbon explosion … er, upgrade. The key thing here is the ability to mount the files so that they’re readable and writeable by an ordinary user. I am in the process of moving photos and music off my second NTFS-formatted drive. I may reformat it as ext3 or I may not but I want to know that I’ve got copies on my first NTFS-formatted drive (which is split with an ext3 partition) and my SimpleShare NFS NAS. ...