Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Maps

Published
by
admin
on February 1, 2008
in Tech
. 1 Comment

So I created a new page on the blog called Maps (see the tab above).  I thought it might be a good central repository for keeping my *.gpx files of the outdoor stuff I’m doing.  Right now I don’t have a whole lot up there, just a few bike rides, some snowboarding, and one run.  It will get more populated as I remember to take the GPS unit with me more often.  I’ll also eventually put up some of my other maps I’ve made, trying to document some of the trails, like the Private Reserve (PR) for example.

The little inline maps are created using a nice little plugin called XML-Google-Maps.  All you do is create a link to your *.gpx file and the plugin sees the link, takes the file and creates a Google Map out of it.  Then it also strips out the information to create an elevation chart below the map.  Pretty slick stuff.  It has a bunch of options that I haven’t really started messing around with yet.

Previously I’ve used GPS Visualizer to create maps from *.gpx files.  The site is an awesome resource for the mapping community or GPS users.  The ability to add overlays to maps is great.  It’s always nice to be able to see your tracks on Google Maps, but it’s even nicer to be able to see those tracks with a topographic or USGS overlay.  I’ll still use this site, as it’s so customizable and so much more full featured than the little plugin, but the plugin does the basics well enough.

Anyway, have fun.

Updates

Published
by
admin
on January 23, 2008
in Tech
. 0 Comments

Things may look a little different around here until I figure out what I want to do with the site. Felt it needed a new look and I wanted to update the WordPress code. I’m taking a stab at designing my own theme, but still getting used to working with *.css files and all these *.php files. I liked the white background for the text portion of the last theme, easier to read and all, but I’m still a charcoal kind of guy.

Couple of basic differences:

  • the comments link is now located at the top of the post (not sure I’m down with that, seems counter intuitive, but I’ll give it a shot.
  • there is more AJAX type of stuff - so things refresh live, rather than having to hit refresh, ie. when using the search function or when leaving a comment.

Hopefully it all comes together and I can figure it all out. Seems pretty easy once you figure out which files deal with which part of the puzzle. In fact, if you only read this site through your feed reader, you’ll probably never notice a difference…

New Web Host

Published
by
admin
on May 4, 2007
in Tech
. 0 Comments

So if you haven’t noticed yet, the site should look a little different. I just switched to a different web hosting company and well it was sort of last minute, so things are kind of in shambles. I’ve got a fresh install of the latest version of Wordpress and a brand spanking new database and I’ve just imported all the old posts. Things are going to look funny until I finish putting things back together, like images are gone, funky formatting of old posts imported into new version, etc. If you are trying to look at something on Fat Boy Deluxe and can’t seem to find it, let me know and I’ll make sure I expedite whatever is missing.

DT

Slow Start

Published
by
admin
on January 30, 2007
in Beer, Bikes, Dirt, Life, Road and Tech
. 2 Comments

Well it’s been a slow start to the new year on the blog. Some people blog religiously, several times a day, and well, I’m just not one of those people. There’s enough fluffy crap out there that you don’t need to read mine on top of it all…

The weather finally turned cold here. We still get the occasional 65 degree day, but for the most part we are sitting in the 20-30’s lately. We got our first snow a couple of weeks ago. There was about 1.5 inches of snow with 0.5 inches of ice on top. Virgin tracks were laid at Colt’s Neck with Gary, no pictures were taken…we had too much fun riding. The same weekend, our household survived the norovirus and put on a little wine tasting featuring VA wines.

I’ve been hitting the path again with Spearmint. We made a Wednesday night ride with Hatley out to the Brickskeller. There we listened to Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing in Portland, ME and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing in Sonoma, CA, talk about Belgian beers, professional brewing, and their travels together. We had the opportunity to taste 10 great Belgians, with a surprise tasting of J.W. Lees on cask at the end, not that anybody needed that by the end, ha. A good time was had by all. It really drove home how much I like the sour Brett character in Belgian beers. Let’s see…if I brew one now I could probably be drinking it by Fall.

I’m enjoying our new Subaru Outback that we bought just before the new year. It’s nice being able to put the whole bike right into the back without having to figure out how I’m going to fit it in. Need to get a hitch mount so I can have the bikes outside and have a little more room inside when traveling, but other than that the wagon is pretty much ready to go from stock. I always though I needed something a little bigger than the Passat, considering how much I do outside, but a big boxy SUV and it’s poor gas mileage and high price of ownership never sounded appealing. The wagon has all the room of an SUV, easily as much clearance as half of the SUVs out there, and still manages about 24-26 mpg - that’s what I’m actually getting, not what comes on the sticker… I’m probably getting about 40 miles or so less per tank than I did with the Passat, so I’m happy about that. Oh, and the dog freakin loves the thing. The wagon is also the first car my wife and I have had that came with leather and all the fancy pants climate control/heat seaters and whatnot…pretty cool. It performed flawlessly in the snow/ice, which is a lot more than I can say for half of the crackheads who were driving. Just a little tip…while your 18 ton 4 wheel drive behemoth will do just fine in the snow, it doesn’t matter how many wheel drive you have when you’re sliding down the ice. In other words, if you’re a crappy driver without 4 wheel drive, don’t think it’s going to make you any better…as evident by the 14 SUV pile ups off the Toll Road.

In the tech dept. we got some fun new stuff. Check out Portable Apps and grab the Firefox portable. They’ve tweaked Firefox to fit on a memory stick. I’m using it on a 128 MB stick and Firefox with all the extensions is only about 30 MB…java on the other hand was almost 60 MB and isn’t exactly portable. The nice thing about portable Firefox is that nothing gets written to the computer…at all. So no logs, cache, cookies, etc. When you pull the stick out of the computer, there’s pretty much zero trace. Not to mention it also makes keeping track of your newsreading super easy, since it can always be with you, no matter what computer you’re on.

Aight, back to paying the bills and dreaming of a brewery with singletrack out the back door…

DT

Updated Race Schedule

Published
by
admin
on April 7, 2006
in Bikes and Tech
. 1 Comment

So I took Gary’s suggestion and put together a little wiki action.  It’s not done yet as I’ve only had a chance to create the basic pages and have yet to decide how I want to actually add the race dates, but here it is: Race Wiki.  I moved the Excel spreadsheet to here.  If you like it, create an account and help me out.  If you hate it, well just go and download the excel spreadsheet.  Best of both worlds.

Oh yea, it rained today and I was thinking that meant no night rides tonight as the rain came down pretty hard.  But after some quick investigating, it looks like Colt’s Neck should be fine.  If you are thinking of riding, but are unsure whether the conditions are good,  check out this link: Weather Underground.  Remember, the general rule is to wait 24 hours for every inch of rain.

Also, not sure why, but the front page of the blog went to bold for some reason.  The last few posts are fine, but all the links in the sidebar and a few older posts still on this page are bolded up.  No clue.  Maybe they’ll eventually drop off the page and go back to normal, because it’s nothing inside the post and I haven’t changed anything within the CSS files.  Who knows?

DT

Templates

Published
by
admin
on January 23, 2006
in Tech
. 1 Comment

Now that I’m finally up and running on WordPress, I thought I’d tweak it a bit. I don’t currently have a good photo that would work up top, so I’m using the default photo that came with this theme. I’ve added plugins and changed the theme around to get some new features I wanted and to streamline the look. Not everything worked, but I think it’s a good start.

First thing I did was download a plugin that would allow visitors of the site to see what music I was currently enjoying, in real time. But the plugin is still early in development and I was unable to use it at work where I listen to most of my music. I think this had something to do with not being able to set a proxy in the plugin. It also would have been nice to have a little more control over the look and feel of the plugin output. So instead of using the real time plugin, I opted for a plugin where you can add your mood and music at the end of a post. Not nearly as fancy, but it’ll get the job done for now. Yea, that plugin kind of sucked, back to the drawing board…

Second, I downloaded the GeoPosition plugin. This allows you to georeference places and include a geo tag in your posts. This essentially puts an icon of your choice in your post and allows the user to go directly to a map of the place. I’m only using the GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth icons, because that’s pretty much what I use all the time.

The only other things I’d like to do is make some static pages to hang off the main page. Maybe a contact form, a links page, maybe a race schedule page. Things that don’t really need to clutter up the main page, but would be nice to have around. I’m still figuring out how to get around inside WordPress and exactly how I’d like it to seperate posts into specific categories. Probably continue to have this thing a little more underground than the previous blog, especially until it’s all setup and flowing like I want it.

If you found this site, well you done good, because I haven’t given the address to anyone yet, so you obviously have some good stat checking stuff. So here’s a song for you.

DT