Cottleston Pie

After five years, the outer covering on my Corolla steering wheel began to flake off. The surface underneath wasn't as comfortable to grip and the edge of the flaking was rough, almost sharp feeling.

So I bought a leather steering wheel cover from Wheelskins and sewed it on myself. The color did not match what I saw on my monitor—the real item was lighter in color—but the color worked well, maybe even better than what I was expecting. (Wheelskins will send free color swatches so you can get a better idea what the real color will be.)

Here's a photo of the cover on my steering wheel:

It's really fun to drive now, almost like having a brand new car.

I'm quite happy with DreamHost hosting, where I receive excellent value for my dollar and relatively huge amounts of drive space and bandwidth, which they keep increasing even for us existing customers.

But if I had a critical service where reliability was more important or I was developing complex web applications, I'd definitely take a look at TextDrive who have very thorough list of supported features, including several that are unusual and particular favorites of mine such as Subversion and PostgreSQL.

They are also generously hosting hosting the new WordPress plugins site.

I'm not a customer, because I don't really have the time to use the great facilities that I would pay for at TextDrive. But I'm glad to see them out there.

I've been faced more than once with wanting to package up a collection of files, organized in folders, to share with my parents, who also run MacOS X. It might also come up in the future with a few friends who are considering Macs and not all of them are Unix-savvy. Most recently my dad and I needed to swap photo collections from Christmas.

With my Unix background, I naturally think we could all just tar and gzip collections. This has several shortcomings. One complete showstopper is that it requires using the command line to create an archive (decompresion is as easy as double-clicking). Another shortcoming is that resource fork information is lost (this will change when the next version of MacOS X Tiger is released: cp, tar, rsync will be HFS+ resource-fork aware). The lost fork is okay (and sometimes desired) for some filetypes such as JPG photos, but not for iView MediaPro photo catalogs and various other files which become useless if the fork is not preserved.

There might be free applications which allow manipulation of tared and/or gzipped files, but a quick search did not reveal anything that I wanted to ask my parents to download to help them create an archive.

For the photo swapping, I discovered that WebDAV was the way to go. WebDAV allows mounting of web server disk space as a drive in Mac’s Finder (same as .Mac’s iDisk) or Window’s Network Places/Internet Folders. I setup a WebDAV shared folder on my Dreamhost hosted website, where it is a feature, and then a short time later, my dad and I could both easily mount it and share files and folders of files via drag-and-drop. No archive file creation necessary. No FTP use necessary. Clearly an excellent solution.

However, I'm still keeping my eye out for alternatives. One I just learned about today: there is an application call BOMArchiveHelper in /System/Library/CoreServices/. If you drop a folder or file on that, the whole thing, including resource forks, are archived into a .cpgz file, a gzip compressed cpio file. If you double-click the file on another MacOS X system, the file or folder is restored. Unix users can also expand such a file by using gzip and cpio directly.

Another alternative, which amazingly didn't occur to me earlier, would be that it is easy to create a disk image from a folder of content. That would preserve resource forks, but would still involve using FTP or some other program to actually transport the file.

All in all, WebDAV was definitely the way to go, but it's good to keep in mind all the alternatives.

Sadly, GeoURL has been "down for renovations" and unavailable a long time.

Today I found a similar site that also does geographical proximity searches and uses the GeoURL-compliant ICBM META tags to recognize web site location: A2B. They are actively adding features. I found notice about some recent additions on the forum. Using A2B, I was able to re-add a "[What's] Nearby" link to this blog, just as I used to have one using GeoURL.

In a recent post by a friend, he remarks about a reaction he got from a checkout clerk.

I've always found that getting a reaction from a checkout clerk is pretty unusual. A few years back, I loaded up on all kinds of different things at the grocery store one day, all just for just me.

"Do you always buy things in pairs?" she asked.

I looked and much to my own amazement, I had some even number of everything. I've always since suspected that I've some sort of lurking Noah gene.

Today I learned to snowboard up at Sugarloaf (where they call it "learning to ride").

And here's my good friend from my high school years who also happens to be a snowboard instructor. She taught me as part of a regular lesson in the morning and she didn't have to teach any more classes that day, so we spent the afternoon sliding down the mountain on snowboards.

We snapped one photo each of each other (the photos above) on the trail Boardwalk before the sub-20°F temperature and gusty winds quickly convinced my camera to plead "no battery left" even though it was fully charged.

Monday morning, I received email from a friend inviting me to come along for the Jingle Bell Ride that same evening, sponsored by our local Bicycle Sport Shop. The ride started through Austin's Trail of Lights, wound up through town to the elaborate light displays on 37th Street where there were snacks and hot cider, and then wound back, including a circle around the capital and down Congress under some more excellent lights.

It was popular. I haven't been able to find anyone reporting an official number, but a local bike shop owner who was counting told us he was at 730 when we passed. And we were definitely not near the end of the pack. That's a hard number to believe but we've no reason assume a mistake. The rider were of many ages, some very young participants too young to reach pedals were pulled behind their parents in little screened-in trailers. There were a good number of tandem bikes.

It was fun to ride with a large group at night with headlights and blinking tail lights everywhere. Many people were wearing Christmas clothing. One guy in our group had red antlers. His wife had big, bright, striped socks like you'd expect to see in Dr. Suess. I wore green with a red scarf, which was an excellent choice as the night was cool, probably in the 40s (which is more significant when biking than when walking).

After going not even a third of the official course, we stopped at a red traffic light. One of the ride's escort police officers announced that because the huge popularity of the ride had overwhelmed the police support, the ride had officially been cancelled and that, assuming we obeyed all traffic laws, we could continue under our own auspices as bikes are always allowed to do. Was he serious or joking? We couldn't tell at that moment. It soon became clear that we'd lost the police presence and he had indeed been serious. We became an unintentional Critical Mass ride.

Everyone continued and there were still refreshments at 37th Street. Near the end of the ride, one of us got a flat on Congress, so we fixed that under the Christmas lights.

This was the first large, organized bike ride in which I've participated. I've been told it only gets less crowded.

The NYTimes recently published an article that one of my favorite topics: what makes people happy? Certainly not always what people might think would make them happy or what they think should make them happy.

Today's article in question is: What Makes People Happy? TV, Study Says . The headline result is unsurprising to me. Call a friend during his or her favorite TV show just to chat... But don't call me during mine. ;-) Everyday life on sitcoms can be very smart and funny business when everybody talks like some alumnus of the Harvard Lampoon has carefully crafted the lines. That probably because some alumnus did.

The more surprising result is that raising children is more fun than housework, but not much. I've never done such raising myself, but have heard it many times proclaimed as the joy of many a parent's existence. The paradox just highlights that the method of measuring happiness that was the topic of the article is just one particular metric. It measures what makes people enjoy the moment.

However, most of us look back with great satisfaction at swaths of time and what was accomplished even though some, much, or even most of the time, the journey was less than fun. Sometimes the harder the trials, the sweeter the memory of overcoming them. I know that a lot of schoolwork can fall into that category, especially when the hard work leads to success. I would guess that a lot about childrearing does too.

This being such an interesting topic to me, it's now a proud category on this blog.

I recently learned that the NOAA is experimentally offering access to its forecast database via an XML Internet interface.

That's all well and good. But a few days ago, what I was really thinking I might find interesting would be some historical barometric pressure readings so I might try and get a feel for how the pressure changes and what it means. Everybody daydreams about stuff like this, right?

A little poking on the NOAA site revealed a 24 hour summary of conditions, including pressure: Camp Mabry, Austin, TX (KATT). It is part of an experimental offering of XML feeds of current weather conditions.

Tonight I saw a commercial for Katz's Deli and Bar, the relatively famous Austin establishment. At the end, owner Marc Katz didn't say his big line, "I can't help it; I've gotta tell you, Katz's Never Kloses!" Instead, he just said, "Katz's, 6th and Rio Grande."

Curious, I wondered if perhaps it had at some point closed(!), so I went looking for the Katz website and learned some things.

It's been 25 years and Katz's has still never Klosed.

Less than a month ago, Katz's Deli and Bar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring according to an article in the Austin Business Journal. The business itself is reported to be operating as normal during the restructuring.

I can find no restaurant website. It appears that Katz's may have had a website at katznevercloses.com (Citysearch had a link to it), but that site is now blank with no mention of the restaurant