paul – Page 572 – a crank's progress

blackberry harvesting

went out this morning with 3 half-gallon berry buckets (half-gallon milk cartons with the tops cut off) and came back with 1 bucket and 2 children filled to the top.

I’m freezing a bunch of berries (like half of them) and will bake the rest in a peach or nectarine and blackberry crostada, a kind of open fruit tart/fruit pizza on a crisp pastry crust. Have I mentioned how I love summer fruit?

bike testing

LeMond Racing Cycles 2002: Bikes: Reynolds 853 Pro: Zürich

Zürich

Our best selling LeMond- and for good reason.

I rode one of these yesterday: Oh, my goodness. Just a joy to ride. I’m thinking of going back for another test ride, but do I want to torture myself? A mere nine hundred dollars stands between me and it: I could get something nice for the half that, I know, so it’s not that bad.

I also rode a Giant OCR 3 ( a mere $550), and didn’t like it as much.

the interview from Hell

A friend writes . . . . .

. . . . the [] interview was stupid. as far as answering their technical
questions, i did fine – they’re not doing anything tricky. and i had some
good talk with a few of the people i interviewed with, but i really don’t
like it when people expect me to answer questions from a stack of trivial
pursuit cards. or defend my personal choice of beer and linux
distribution.

And I thought those days were over . . . . .

gee, I wonder if she means NetInfo?

USENIX – LISA ’02 – TUTORIALS

Networking: How Apple broke a million things with one bad decision, and how to get them working again

if you never got to see the soundgarden, you may not for a while

Sadly, the publicly-funded art walk along the Lake Washington shoreline on the NOAA Sandpoint campus is closed to the public for security concerns: has been since Sept 11. I guess you could still hear the eerie aeolian sounds from outside the fence, but it wouldn’t be the same is sitting in the midst of it.

spiders and threads

Nicest of the Damned: Nice spider…

The question becomes, “should everyone on the web be sending out spiders?”

Or, another way to look at it: maybe a few people run spiders and the rest of us subscribe to them? It’s another aggregator, but based on content/context, rather than novelty. You get to unravel the web and weave your own.

I’m not opposed to spiders — they’re just fast automagic browsers — but I’d be concerned if there was a lot of repetitive crawling.

Another aspect of this would having it learn or suggest keywords based on a thesaurus or even note new words in proximity with your keywords: using the EvilBot, if bin Laden drops off the index of evil, perhaps he’s replaced by someone else and their name is suggested to you as a possible additional keyword.

zeitgeist-o-meter

the discussion of the EvilBot, repurposed as a tool to measure what’s on people minds, has gotten interesting.

I guess this is what I expected to find at BlogDex or some of the other aggregator/scraper sites.

Much as I’m leery of poll-driven news, this seems to be a different thing: collecting and sorting the thoughts of people who have already signed on as commentators is different from asking people at a bus stop. Not that it’s better, but your raw material comes from people who care enough to write about these topics.

I don’t want to deal with this

KING5.com | Top Stories

It happened in the Wedgewood neighborhood around 4 p.m. Thursday at the Temple Beth Am parking lot on the 8000 block of 28th Avenue. The girl was playing in the nearby ball field and paused on her bike on a parking lot strip.

I can see that parking lot from where I sit. And as it turns out, this is the second attempt in as many days by this creep. I’ll keep my eyes out tomorrow for the vehicle and individual. In my current frame of mind, it would be to his benefit for the police to find him before I do.

will comment for tips

I keep seeing search queries and browsing patterns that suggest people are coming here for answers: maybe all my answers are wrong, but I’ve not heard anything about that.

Anyway, I replaced the PayPal tip jar with an Amazon Honor System one: it was so garish, I moved it way down the page, possibly hampering its effectiveness, but it looks less crass.

My expectations are low (I try to take that approach to most things). Perhaps I’ll be surprised.

If someone were to learn anything useful here, some feedback, either verbal or financial would be welcome.

Author: paul