That’s what I’m wearing now.

The pink is the 14g taper, while the blue are 12g.

It took about 4 hours to get the taper–a polite word for a spear–fully into my bottom ear piercing, and while I didn’t cry, I certainly whimpered and winced at all the ensuing throbbing. I don’t understand how 0.337 mm difference can hurt so much.

Initially, it was no worse than the pain of my second piercings (which was rather painful, I admit), but on day two, I had a terrible headache (radiating from ear to jaw and beyond) and my headphones had to be worn in 15 minute intervals. I definitely rushed the taper insertion, though. When I move to 12g, I’ll take the whole day for it.

No related posts.

More, however, on the bike.

I got her (Rebecca, formerly [briefly and grumpily] Jezebel) all dusted off, oiled up, chain replaced, light batteries replaced, tires pumped, and ready to roll a couple of weeks ago. Deana and I went out for a nice little 5 mile ride around my area of town–on streets! Where cars are!

Bright orange helmet, a stop for a picnic with Greg (he drove), and no traffic incidents other than a stopped ambulance to avoid. A good ride.

She rode quite well, with the exception of me not being able to get her into the first gear on the front derailleur. There are hardly any hills around here that would justify me dropping down to that low a gear.

All was right until the final quarter-mile or so, when my back tire blew. I wobbled safely into the apartment complex, and then we walked the bike home.

I’m proud to say I didn’t hyperventilate even once.

Also, it’s not illegal in North Carolina to ride on the sidewalks. So hmph.

This past weekend, I took on the task of replacing the tube on the back tire. I got the wheel off, then the tire (that took a while, and involved one tire lever and a spoon handle). The new tube and old tire went on easy and inflated nicely, but getting the wheel back on proved problematic. I couldn’t get the alignment right–either one of the brake pads were stuck against the wheel, or the tire itself was rubbing on the frame, depending on how I seated it.

I finally got it into what I thought was a stable position, and called it a night. I checked over everything the next morning (and oiled the chain!), and went for a ride that afternoon.

And then… well.

After a long steep downhill, one of my back brake pads started holding to the side of my tire, making a whomp-whomp noise and slowing me down. So we stopped, and I broke out the tools and tried from my 5-years-ago memory and the shitty online manual on my phone to remember how to realign the brakes. No go, really, but I could at least get the brakes off the tire initially and get them to come back off the tire a bit when I released the brake lever.

Plus, we were only about 1.75 miles from home at worst. I will confess my hands were trembling quite badly as I worked. That certainly didn’t help me deal with the brake cable, and I both dropped it and got stabbed a couple of times.

We got another 0.25 miles down the road, and it was rubbing again, except this time my back brakes didn’t work at all due to the misalignment–one pad on the brake, the other too far off to the side to make contact with the tire.

We stopped in the parking lot of the best bakery in town, and I got to work again, ride essentially ruined. It was well into evening at this point, and if I couldn’t get going again within about 15 minutes, Greg was going to have to come get us. After some further shaky-handed repairs, I got the brakes to where I could slow down enough in the back to avoid catapulting head-first when using my front brakes.

Good enough. We rolled.

We got almost home–like 0.6 miles away–when I lost back brakes again and got a terrible drag on my back wheel. Done. Fuck this. Throw in the towel.

We started walking the bikes home when I realized that the drag was due to the true misalignment of the back wheel–it was touching the frame again, meaning the whole wheel had shifted during my ride. *shudder*

Then it started to rain.

Fer skerious.

So Rebecca’s in the shop now for both the front derailleur problem and the back… everything… problem. The bike doctor seemed to think a basic tune-up/alignment would be able to fix everything, but we’ll see when I get The Call tomorrow.

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1. A Shiny (Old) Bike!
2. New beers to try!
3. Three fun things on dance-day

When I graduated and moved to Charlotte, though, riding became purely for pleasure, and wasn’t particularly feasible for commuting. (I’ve pretty much always lived across town from my job and I sweat a lot when I exercise.) By the beginning of 2008, the bike was idle.

I carted it with me to the house, where it sat in the garage (excuse: the neighborhood was too hilly and roads too narrow!), and to my current apartment patio (excuse: it’s probably ruined now!)… until now.

Inspired by a potential biking partner (albeit one on a road bike), I’m cleaning up the bike. Tuesday night we wiped down the frame, gave the cables and tires a look-see, and degreased the chain.

Beautiful bike. I can’t believe I’d forgotten.

It looks like it’s actually in quite good shape, considering. The initial inspection suggests that all the brakes, shifters, and cables are fine. It was never left to sit out in the rain or anything, but it does have 4 years of dust on it. I’m using Deana’s knowledge and guides like “How to Clean and Lube Your Bike” to make progress.

Hopefully my collection of sources won’t resort in anything like my first Thanksgiving turkey.

Don’t ask. The color green was involved. And organs.

The air pump I own isn’t very good, so we couldn’t really assess whether the tires will hold air. I’ll try again with the pump, but if it won’t work, I’ll have to cart it down to the gas station and try to fill the tires with a higher pressure setup. I’ll be getting oil, lubricant, grease, a few tools, and a helmet this weekend. Hopefully I won’t need tires.

I never really did maintenance on the bike before (terrible, I know!), so I’m learning how it all goes. I assume the bike needs all the manual’s suggested maintenance for a year in order to get up and running now. If I only ride a couple hours each weekend after this, though, I hope my maintenance needs will be lighter than the manual suggests.

That said, I did do the initial assembly myself back in 2006, and am looking forward to diving into it again. I just have to keep away the other two geeks I’m often around, as they like to take tinkery tasks away from me.

While I’m very excited to see this beauty restored (if nothing else, I can give it a name!), I suspect I’ll feel rather different (more nervous) when I’m down in the parking lot faced with actually climbing on. If there’s one thing I learned back in 2005/2006, it’s that it’s not just like riding a bike.

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2. Going Natural
3. Tampa, day 1

I start on Monday!

There are a lot of things I’ll miss about working downtown: it’s a thriving area, full of people and energy. I also liked taking the bus, despite the occasional shenanigans. Needing a tank of gas once a month or so ain’t bad, either.

I’ll have about a 45-minute commute to Mid-Corp (busing would have been 1.5 hours, with two transfers). I don’t consider 45 minutes terrible, but then, I used to drive all the way down to Fort Mill (a full hour each way). I won’t be able to walk across the street to Amelie’s or to grab a slice of pizza or get Indian food, but my body will be more than okay with this. As will my budget, although I suspect the gas costs will more than counteract any food expenditures.

I’m very ready to move on to something new. My work here at Big Corp has been deconstruction, limited to front-end work aside from where I created opportunities for .NET/Python/anything-else-dear-god work by creating tools for myself. The IP agreement here is the most draconian I’ve heard of: it covers all concepts, designs, and work, on or off the clock, and on or off of company equipment.

I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t stand up in court, especially since I’m a contractor, but I’ve played it moderately safe by avoiding working on my retirement app idea, which would be directly of interest to them.

More than that, though… it’s hard to put into words that aren’t unprofessional, but this isn’t a healthy work environment for me. Physically, it’s cubes as far as the eye can see, institutionalized security, and no flair or flavor or color. People-wise, there’s an annoying division between contractors and permanent employees, I don’t have much in common with my coworkers (and I have no colleagues who are developers), and there’s a whole lot of negativity among the personnel here. It’s been a nearly daily struggle to avoid internalizing that negativity.

The last several months, I’ve been working from home a couple days a week, and that’s made many of these things easier to deal with.

But I’m also avoiding looking at the Mid-Corp position as a series of “doesn’t have x, y, and z” comparisons. I was put through a wonderful-but-tiring 2.5 hour interview–30 minutes with 5 different people–and the thing that impressed me most was the sheer enthusiasm of the team. Line of business, manager, both senior developers, all crunk about the work they’re doing. They’re experimenting with newer technologies, they’re agile (and somewhat Agile), and they have a work environment that encourages interpersonal connections.

I’ll be doing .NET development again (woohoo!), along with a healthy mix of more traditional front-end work.

I’ll be building something. I’ll be optimizing using all the tricks I’ve learned at Big Corp.

I’ll be interacting with line of business (real people!) to figure out feasibility and timelines.

I’ll be working with a sharp team who seem to love their work.

If the position is what I’ve signed on for, it’ll be so much more in line with my experience and interests.

Monday the 19th. So ready.

No related posts.

Anyway, last night I finally fulfilled my dream of seeing Cirque du Soleil; their Michael Jackson: The Immortal tour hit Charlotte this week.

That was a real circus. And one hell of a performance in general.

I have no pictures, because they disallowed photography of any sort, but I’m okay with that. (On a side note, does “Because of the pyrotechnics and strobe lights, we ask that there be no photography or recording of any kind” really translate to “We do our own PR and don’t want your crappy recordings on the internet”?)

They paid tribute to MJ’s life rather inclusively–the Jackson 5 (meh), his love of nature, his desire for world peace, his painful childhood and escapism, and hints of the scandals thru dramatized mentions of wanting privacy.

There were some absolutely amazing dancers on that stage. (There were also plenty of very good dancers.) I’m biased towards dancing that involves a lot of isolation movements (hip hop and belly dance; what do you expect?), so my favorite act was “Scream” by the “male rhythmic gymnasts”: orchestrated tumbling and flipping on an inflated cushion serving as a trampoline of sorts. I think I screamed when, in the opening, a guy that had been thrown in the air fell flat to the floor… and bounced.

A damn circus. So cool.

A close second was a very Cybermen-reminiscent (and shiver-inducing) “They Don’t Care About Us” dance routine. Dancers in robot/battle armor costumes, lots of heavy marching. Very powerful.

Greg‘s favorite act was “Smooth Criminal” which featured (if I’m not mixing up my acts) a great gangster-themed opening.

I’ve seen a couple of other circuses–a standard Ringling Bros circus and a UniverSoul circus–and Cirque du Soleil smacks the pants off of them. No sad-ass animals, just ridiculously skilled performers. I’ve wanted to see Cirque du Soleil since they started showing their performances on Bravo back in the late 1990′s, early 2000′s.

I was thrown into contemplation at the single-legged performer, particularly given my recent reading on an older circus/freak show fiasco concerning fictional conjoined twins and a case of “cripface.” (Awkwardness, all of that, but educational.) I felt that the way his solos were handled, such as the fact that he was pretty much only on stage for his solos, was questionable. Certainly nowhere near the same case as “Evelyn Evelyn”, but thought-provoking.

Greg (who hasn’t read the “Evelyn Evelyn” commentary, to my knowledge) was more of the opinion that he was filling the same role of a virtuoso as any of the other star performers, and was never portrayed in a “freak show” way (unlike the “monsterized” contortionist, interestingly). Aside from the Mime, though, there weren’t many solos like that. That said, he was definitely in the “absolutely amazing dancer” class, so Greg has a point.

I don’t know. I’m still considering. I don’t particularly need a declaration or “answer.”

A couple of cool meta-experiences: we got a free seat upgrade! After walking all over the place to get to our section (high [and cheap-ish] side seats, but not terrible), we were told that the entire section had been moved down and around to a more center placement. I’m pretty sure those seats were going for twice as much as I paid when I bought mine.

Holla atcha girl.

Second bit of fun: funnel cake. I haven’t had a funnel cake since visiting the local amusement park in high school, and Greg (poor, deprived child) had never had one had also been abstinent for over a decade. Mmm, powdered sugar, chocolate syrup, and fried dough. No redeeming nutritional value at all. I may go another decade before having another one, but last night’s was a wonderful experience. Very circusy, too.

Last night was a thoroughly amazing experience. I bounced in glee and anticipation at almost every musical/video cue of the show (there were only a few songs I didn’t know or didn’t care for). Since tickets were affordable (and strangely, only a couple bucks more expensive than when I wanted to go back in 2001), Cirque is definitely staying on the short list of must-see performances when they swing back through.

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2. New Witches Story: “Interception”

• EJ Flavors – Cupid’s Hunt 2012 – Lost And Found: The Lost – An excellent Valentine's Day mix by EJ Flavors. Yeah, I know it's barely even February anymore, but Angela Bofill's "I Try" puts chills up my spine whenever I hear it.
• Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End – NYTimes.com – I'm totally going to want to be an early adopter of these. If they seem promising, it'd be worth switching to contact lenses for.
• World population statistics – I always like these types of infographics. ^_^
• Slavery By Another Name – I heard this on my local NPR station the other night, and was glad to hear the injustices of the prison system be spoken for all to hear, but in a calm and reasonable voice.
• What’s Wrong with the IGF « The Rotting Cartridge – "Eight (8) judges were assigned to Kale In Dinoland. Of those judges, 1 didn’t install the game or respond to any of our invitations (which we had to send multiple times before judges joined). 3 judges didn’t play the game. Of the remaining 5 judges that played the game, 3 played it very close to the IGF deadline, which was December 5th. [...] Excluding the outlier, on average each judge – including the 3 that didn’t play it – played the game for almost 5 minutes’ time. [...] So we’re talking almost 4 minutes for each judge of actual game time."

And now for a vibeo:

A little dated at this point, but wonderfully funny. I like Jay Smooth on politics.

• Some Quick Thoughts on "Until Abortion Ends" – YouTube – More Jay Smooth: "But the underlying logic of this protest is baffling. They seem to be hoping that women who’ve decided to seek an abortion will visit this site and say 'wow, if you feel strongly enough about this that you’re making the irrevocable life-changing decision of giving up Dr. Pepper, maybe I should reconsider having a child that I can’t support!'"
• Thought: Double Fine’s Kickstarter Asks Big Questions | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – "The reality is, people like to pay for stuff – in fact, they’ll go out of their way to pay for stuff, pay more than asked, and even for products that don’t yet exist, just in good faith."
• What I learned from watching people watching Notch – O! Mr Speaker! – "No one was delving on the irony of spending an hour or so arguing about which language is better for games, without noticing that an actual game was unfolding before their eyes. If only games were flamewar powered!"
• Mitt Romney: Susan G. Komen Was Right to Cut Planned Parenthood – The Huffington Post – Oops. Even The Susan G. Komen folks backed off of that one, Romney.
• Robot blurs biological boundaries | Addison County Independent – The last section of the article (on emotions) is particularly interesting.

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I recently got a request for a way to help visualize the blanket that’s generated. It’s hard to work from a list of “r/h/p”-type entries. Not very user-friendly.

So I added in a color picker today, and the generator now shows the colors of the squares. As a warning, if you have a lot of very similar colors, the generated image may be difficult to work from. Then again, if your blanket’s in 15 shades of purple (yes, please!), you may not need this utility.

Now that the resulting blanket is far less printable (except to PDF), I think I may go ahead and add in a “permalink” functionality like what I use on the my World of Darkness ghost character sheet. It’ll allow folks to retrieve their blankets, but not require any personal information or account creation.

Techie Bits

My first color picker of choice (for simplicity of implementation) was jPicker. It’s got issues: it’s not very accessible, it’s not very pretty, and it’s not very fast. That’s been noted and fixes seem to be in progress. That said, the picker worked well in a scenario of multiple instances of the subform and updating a hidden form element, making for about a 5 minute implementation.

But dang, it’s big. I don’t really want all that stuff on there.

Enter Farbtastic (with its fantastic name), or, better yet, a github version. I had to put in the bit of work to get it to appear and disappear, as well as having it retain its values and such, but truly, this entire thing was a drop-in affair.

My life was made easier by the UI-agnostic setup on the backend. There are actually two “apps” there, in the Django sense: the granny_squares app that handles the form processing and blanket display, and the color_combinator that actually does the crunching to produce a blanket.

The color field doesn’t care if it’s a manually-entered word or a hex except for display, which is all within granny_squares. All the color_combinator needs is to know is whether two colors (or their individual fields) are equal; I just reassessed the __hash__ and __eq__ methods on the Color object to account for not having “initials” anymore.

Easy-peasy.

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1. Chewing on Granny Squares
2. Project Complete: Bir’day Blanket!
3. Crocheting and Knitting: Having the MIPS

Now, in my defense, I’m reading non-fiction, and that’s never been my strong suit, no matter how much the concept of the subject matter appeals.

But still.

I find myself feeling the flaws of books more acutely than I would in an online piece. For instance, Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence. Excellent concept for a book:

Amartya Sen proposes that the murderous violence that has riven our society is driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.

I’m halfway through the book, and while I still like the premise very much–and have had some shifts in my own tendencies to be reductionist in identity–the repetition within the book without significant meat added in each go-round is leaving me a little frustrated.

Republic, Lost is going better, but I still have some of the “Okay, you don’t have to hammer every point home; get there” issue. It’s truly a good, relevant read, though, even when I disagree with his points. Which, you know, happens when he puts pen to paper about teachers and why our education system is broken. He didn’t convince me that teacher tenure is the problem.

I’m rapidly developing a psychosis with regards to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fer skerious. First, I had a nice and free version of the unabridged edition on my phone via Kindle. Bad formatting, as these Gutenberg-esque books tend to, but readable. (The writing itself is another matter.)

I was chugging along, maybe a whole 4% into the book, when I realized that, hold on one damn minute, I’m only 4% into the first of six volumes. And I was swimming in a confusing array of Antonines, lifestyles of Roman soldiers, and cabbage caravan routes.

I knew there were six volumes going in, don’t get me wrong. But my phone’s Kindle screen trimmed the lengthy title to something like, “The History of the Decline…”, meaning I didn’t explicitly catch the “, Vol 1″ on the end. I guess I’d thought all six volumes were combined. Oops.

So I switched to the abridged version (because really, cabbage caravans), which I already owned in paperback form. But I let a couple of weeks go by before switching over, and now I have a strange sense of déja vu–should I be further along? Did I already read about that fellow’s adoption and how he leeched power from the Senate? I know I knew about him already from classes/other reading… Even flipping through both versions to match them up doesn’t help much; there’s so little text per page on the phone, versus the 6 pt font in the paper book, that its preferable to just reread.

Surely, there’s a better way for me to learn my Roman history without going to Gibbon for it. I can’t tell if the people who fawn over this book in their reviews are doing so just to seem smart, or if they actually like his prose.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess and Buddhism without Beliefs are treating me much better (especially when I find Alphabet, wherever it ended up…), but my foot-dragging on Identity, Republic, and (*twitch*) Decline makes me worry that I’m losing my ability to just be in the moment with a book, and will soon only find brief enjoyment from consuming RSS feeds with a frightening lack of recall for the details of posts by authors I so “lovingly” follow.

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3. Bujold’s Mirror Dance

The old site was brown and more brown, combined with a ginormous font file resulting in some terrible behavior.

I shall say no more. Those dark times are past.

I’ve been working on the redesign for a while, and I hate that it took so long, but I’m pretty happy with the results. Still kept the dark feel, but moved away from the monochrome look.

The new style is rather fresher and cleaner, and let me play around with the flexible box model and such things. Squee!

I also had some fun reading up on the OWASP documentation on web application security and leveraging jQuery Encoder on the Ghost sheet. The little app, even being mostly client-side, was still vulnerable, so I hopefully tightened things up there in a way that isn’t obnoxious. Encoding/decoding stuff should only be annoying for developers, not users.

Somewhere in the proceedings, though, I managed to break the admin console and have had to appeal to Stack Overflow for assistance. I’m going to be sad if I can’t figure out a solution to that, because Flatpages is handy for pages with dumb content, and I’d like to be able to update/fix some content on those. Manually updating the database is worse than hand-editing templates.

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Greg-the-cat was fascinated by the tinsel on the hat.

His parents flew in from Scottsdale, Arizona on Thursday, as his father’s birfday was Saturday. Party time! We ate ridiculous amounts of local food, enjoyed local truffles, and generally had a local-resident-as-tour-guide time, aside from the fact that outdoor activities were off-limits due to the cold. It was an emotionally complicated visit, but I’m glad for it. Greg and I both came away with a tangled mixture of mourning and resolve. Can resolve be tangled?

Anyway, Deana and I decided to keep his birfday on Monday simple, since it’d be in the evening after work. I threw together a little dinner of spaghetti squash and pan-fried chicken tossed with soft goat cheese and olive oil (as much as one can “toss” melting goat cheese). I served up a Spier chenin blanc with it, and I think everything turned out well.

Then we put Greg in gloves and a coat and hopped on the highway. He didn’t know where we were going, and all his guesses were for naught. We hit up Adventure Landing, which features both an arcade (!) and a putt-putt course (!). I wish I could have taken a picture as we pulled into the parking lot–he was thrilled.

Turns out that I’m less terrible at putt-putt than I thought; I usually managed one over par, with an occasional hole-in-one and a few 5+ shot dances around the hole. Deana and Greg, of course, managed at or one above par on pretty much every hole.

Damn putt-putters.

Arcading mostly consisted of shooter games. Not sure why shooters and driving games were most of what they had, but it was a blast. I coulda gone for a good game of Tekken 3, myself, though. Maybe no one’s making normal arcade games anymore.

We concluded the evening with a bit more Glee and a good night’s sleep. Not a bad start to Greg’s twenty-eighth year of life.

Related posts:

1. A Beautiful Birthday Weekend
2. Happy Bir’day to Me!
3. Assisting in Story Telling: Fun But Complicated