In an effort to put in some km’s prior to next week’s Pacific Populaire, Agnes, Miranda and I went for a 61km ride yesterday. Traffic was light due to the long weekend and the weather was cool and overcast, making for a decent enough afternoon cycle.
I really enjoyed the route, cobbled together from the 50km & 100km Populaire routes currently listed on the BC Randonneurs’ website (I say “current” since they were different only a month ago when I last checked). So, in the interest of creating resources that other local cyclists can use, here’s a brief review of our route.
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My host moved this site to a new server the other day, so hopefully everything made it over in one piece. It was amusing to get e-mails about new comments being posted despite the fact that I couldn’t access the new server myself (DNS issue with my ISP). So if I haven’t responded to your e-mail or your comment has disappeared, please let me know.
PreFormatted 1.0 Released
The newest PreFormatted release is now online and includes some minor fixes. Specifically, a few filters had to be tweaked due to changes in the official Strayhorn release. I also added a fix for a common WordPress problem: wpautop() likes to place your <!--more--> and <!--nextpage--> tags into their own paragraph blocks. This produces invalid XHTML when your post gets split into multiple pages. PreFormatted will remove the offending tags when possible.
I have many features planned for the next release, including keeping a copy of posts in their original format. I’ve been using Markdown lately (on another project) so expect PreFormatted to play nicer with other formatting plugins — my strategy should allow it to detect which filters need to re-arranged automatically.
Jerome’s Keywords — Roadmap
Thanks again to everyone who has sent me feedback about this plugin. As mentioned in a previous comment thread, there is an alpha of version 1.5 that can be used to create a tag cosmos. I plan to release 1.5-final in the next few days, which will add a “top X” (insert your number here) keyword list and will fix the way category meta keywords are handled.
I suspect that the new features of 1.5 won’t scale very well for heavily used sites, so the next major release (2.0) will move to a different storage scheme. Don’t worry, the conversion will be painless and completelybehind the scenes. The plan also calls for an options page for easier customization.
Ludo announced the first beta for WPFF 1.0.0 a few weeks ago, and the second beta is now available. I finally found some free time to fix my test site and upgrade to the lastest & greatest.
The latest version is more polished since my last review and offers a few new features, including:
- Full search capabilities, complete with a custom template and a search term highlighter. Great job on this one, Ludo!
- Atom feeds and category-based feeds.
- Author pages.
- Basic comment formatting.
- Plus a bunch of small tweaks and bug fixes since the 0.99 betas.
I’ve just sent Ludo another small patch today that increases WPFF’s compatibility with WordPress. Hopefully the patch make it into the next beta, slated for release tomorrow. The changes are intended to allow you to use your existing .htaccess file generated by WordPress. I want to make sure that it’s easy to make the switch, so watch out for ports of popular WP plugins too.
I’ve spent the last few weeks importing my CD collection into iTunes. This is a big shift for me, and not just because of the size of my CD library (over 300 at last count). I’ve always insisted on the fidelity of CD audio versus MP3’s and resisted doing this for a long time. After all, why bother listening to an MP3 when you could just pop in the original CD?
But that’s the problem right there: as easy as it sounds, changing CD’s is a lot of effort (not to mention a big distraction) especially when trying to select out of such a large catalog. Since the switch, I now have a constant stream of music playing — my own personalized radio station — and I listen to a lot of stuff that just used to collect dust. I’ve kept the sampling rate fairly high but I still notice the difference on tracks with big dynamic ranges.
iTunes is a pretty slick piece of software. I like the smart playlists and the way “Party Shuffle” queues up tracks both before and after. Now I just have to rate the 2900 tracks imported so far to play favourite tracks more often and obscure stuff only every other month…
I’ve come a long way since last year, swimming-wise. It wasn’t too long ago that I counted every millisecond between breaths and dreaded the next 25m. Now I look forward to sessions in the pool and my biggest dilemma is whether to swim 400m or 500m sets!
The key indicator of my progress is the blissful experience of “time loss” (at least that’s what I call it). I’ve been there many times on a long bike ride, the kilometres slipping by as my mind drifts at a higher level of consciousness. It’s a peaceful experience where you can either have some really deep thoughts or just revel in the moment. When it’s over you have no clue whether five seconds or five hours have passed.
My only concern about “time loss” in the pool is that I lose track of how many laps I’ve done — very frustrating when doing a steady 500m set! Still, it’s fabulous to have become this relaxed in my most dreaded sport. When your fears of drowning have been replaced with fears that you’ll do an extra 100m, that’s not such a bad thing, is it?