12 Hours In A City project

My good friend Clark has been getting a lot of press recently about his new project 12 Hours In A City and I’m pleased to announce I’ll be helping him out.

These guys are using JetBlue’s All You Can Jet Pass to get a taste of America and get the experience of a lifetime. They’ll be visiting about 27 cities in 30 days, relying heavily on contacts made through social media sites for tips on interesting things to do in each city, rides around town, and places to crash for the night.

So far they’re off to a good start, they made it on the homepage of CNN’s Travel section the day they left and got invited to a see a Red Sox game from the Dunkin Donuts box at Fenway Park in Boston (their first stop)!

With their rigorous travel schedule and the fact that they’ll be spending most of their downtime in the air, I’ll be administering the site, making updates here and there, and implementing some additional social networking functionality.

Good luck and safe travels!

The “New”

Well, here is the new “design”. I opted to go the theme route because I find I get bored with a design by the time I’ve got it all fleshed out for Word Press. Besides, like I said, I’ve been pretty busy with paying work lately.

Over the last few weeks I’ve upgraded Word Press to implement some security updates as well as take advantage of some widgets and plug-ins available for more recent versions. The Recent Reading and My Flickr sections of the footer are new to the site.

I’ve also updated the directory structure and moved some things around a little. It’s been tested locally but please let me know (in the comments here) if you click on something that doesn’t work as expected.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Coming…soon(?), this website also has a new home with Bluehost. They came highly recommended and they offer RoR hosting so hopefully you’ find some posts about Ruby here in the near future.

Coming…soon (?)

Unfortunately this site has been largely neglected (in favor of paying work). But hopefully soon all that will change…

I’m trying out a new host and this will be the first domain to switch over. When it does, it will have a new (sorely needed) look. The new host supports RoR so I hope to play around with (and write about that) here.

OMG…the music!

I have an ipod and an FM transmitter for the car. If you don’t know, it plugs into my ipod and sends the music to an empty FM station so I can listen through the car stereo. It’s very cool because I’m done with CDs and all my music is stored on the computer and ipod (for portability).

The transmitter needs to be tuned into a pretty empty station in order to work and be heard clearly (without static). Unfortunately there were hours and hours of driving time through the Midwest and above that for whatever reason, I couldn’t find a station empty enough to make it worth tuning into. Instead I spent hours hitting scan and bouncing between country and religious stations.

S– and I were headed out to run a quick errand today and she wanted to listen to a CD. I popped open the changer and what did I find…?

Six great CDs ranging from Tom Petty and System of a Down to Wyclef. They were there the whole time! Oh well.

Hood River, Oregon

I made it into Hood River, Oregon about 1:30 PST today.

The alarm on a car outside my hotel room window last night went off about every 20 minutes it seemed. Finally about 4 I decided it was’t going to stop so I might as well hit the road.

Idaho was beautiful and the mid-June snowstorm I encountered in Lookout Pass between Montana and Idaho was certainly unexpected.

The tip of Northern Idaho went fast but Washington was painful. Most of what I drove through was desert-like and knowing I was so close…but still hours away made it all the more painful.

I finally crossed over into Oregon about noon with a few more hours left to go. Battling the winds shooting down the Columbia River Gorge with four bikes on the car (acting as a big sail) seemed to make me go backwards.

Ah…finally sweet relief and a place to crash…Hood River.

Check out the Flickr pictures from the trip.

Missoula, Montana

I spent most of the morning in the Badlands and Black Hills Forest taking pictures. With lots of time to make up, I drove about 15 hours today for a total of almost 950 miles. Ouch!

I’m spending the night in Missoula and shooting for finishing the trip through Idaho, Washington and Oregon tomorrow. The legwork and extended time in the car today should leave me with an “easy” 7 to 8 hour day tomorrow.

Murdo, SD

Tonight I’m in Murdo, South Dakota, a few hours East of Montana/Wyoming borders. In almost 800 miles of driving today, I crossed all of Iowa and most of South Dakota. I’m beat and headed to bed even though it’s only 8:30p here.

Tomorrow’s agenda is a quick stop at Mount Rushmore for pictures, Custer National Forrest to see some bison, and hopefully make it as far as Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

I’d like an easy day of driving Sunday to finish up this trip. We’ll see what happens.

I’m Not Dead…Yet.

I think that line is from Monty Python…technically I think it’s, “He’s not dead yet”. At any rate, I’m not dead. I’m just in Illinois.

Some of you know and some of you do not. I’m currently driving cross country to Portland, Oregon. I’m relocating.

That’s part of the reason I haven’t written here since I don’t even know when. Too busy with house and packing and moving preparations.

I hoped to post pictures here of my travels. I’m taking them. Unfortunately it seems I’ve packed the USB cable for my camera who knows where. So pictures will have to wait until I unpack. Stay tuned…

Fully Subverted

Since implementing Subversion at work,I’ve been anxious to get some of my own files here at home under source control.

I’m now pleased to announce that it’s complete and went rather painlessly. I installed Subversion this weekend using one of the graphical installer packages. After I got that up and running,I chose Tortoise SVN as the client,mostly because we use it at work but it also integrates nicely with Windows. Tortoise gives you a contextual menu right in Windows explorer that allows you to manage all your version controlled files (or add files to source control) by simply right-clicking.

If you’re new to setting up source control and repositories (like I am),it doesn’t get any easier than these two applications. Now I just need to setup up my repository so I can connect to it from my laptop.

Hulkamania!

After sleeping for maybe an hour in 10 to 15 minute intervals on the red-eye from the West Coast,I was in no mood to get my picture taken when my parents met me at the airport this morning.

Until I saw this guy: