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Actively Reading
Introducing Ethics | David Robinson, et al
Socrates Cafe : A Fresh Taste of Philosophy | Christopher Phillips
On-deck
Agile Software Development | Alistair Cockburn
The Hacker Ethic | Pekka Himanen, et al
Counter Hack | Ed Skoudis
Practical Unix and Internet Security | Spafford, Garfinkel
Read (since 9.16.99)
The Career Programmer | Christopher Duncan
A Beautiful Mind | Sylvia Nasar
Me Talk Pretty One Day | David Sedaris
Euclid's Window | Leonard Mlodinow
Ava's Man | Rick Bragg
Affluenza | John DeGraaf, et al
sed & awk | Dougherty, Robbins
The Unix-hater's Handbook | Simson Garfinkel, et al
XML/RPC | Simon St. Laurent, et al
Core J2EE Patterns | John Krupi, et al
eXtreme Programming Explored | Wake
Software Craftsmanship | McBreen
XML-RPC | St. Laurent, et al
Mastering Regular Expressions | Friedl
Programming Ruby | Thomas, Hunt
Slack | DeMarco
Advanced JavaServer Pages | David Geary
Effective Java | Jeremy Bloch
Learning the vi Editor | Lamb, Robbins
The Secret House | David Bodanis
Unix Tricks and Tips | Kirk Waingrow
Learning the Korn Shell | Bill Rosenblatt
Geeks | John Katz
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams
The Cathedral and the Bazaar | Eric S. Raymond
Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert Heinlein
Several Books on Solaris and Unix Admin
It's Not About the Bike | Lance Armstrong
The Humane Interface | Jef Raskin
The Pragmatic Programmer | Andrew Hunt
The Water-method Man | John Irving
The Nudist on the Late Shift | Po Bronson
Does the Center Hold?: An Introduction to Western Philosophy | Donald Palmer
Principles of Transaction Processing | Philip Bernstein
In the Beginning Was the Command Line | Neal Stephenson
The Tomb | HP Lovecraft
The Lurking Fear | HP Lovecraft
Secrets, Lies, and Democracy | Chomsky/Barsamian
Hannibal | Thomas Harris
eXtreme Programming eXplained | Kent Beck
Philosophy for Dummies | Tom Morris
Sophie's World | Jostein Gaarder
Clear Thinking | Hy Ruchlis
Chomsky for Beginners | David Cogswell
Philosophy, the Basics | Nigel Warburton
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! | Richard Feynman
The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien
Listening
Remain in Light | Talking Heads
Good Dog, Happy Man | Bill Frisell
Revival | Gillian Welch

 

 
Friday, November 30, 2001

So, I did ride in to work today. It was very cold, as evidenced by my ice-crystal-filled water bottle when I arrived at work. I, however, stayed pretty toasty. I wore my heaviest winter accessories (gloves, tights, booties), and was perfectly comfortable. I used my Cannondale cyclocross bike because it has knobby tires, and I thought I might run across a few sections of packed snow/ice. As it turns out, I only hit a couple of very small ice patches, which were no problem at all. The knobbies and heavier dress certainly knocked my speed down a lot - I had a 16.4mph average. It took about 23 minutes, compared to my usual 20 minutes flat.

muttered around 11:30 AM

Thursday, November 29, 2001

I've been horrible about updating lately, I know. It's all about security. What does that mean? Well, I host my site out of my house now. I do the news updates to my site via blogger.com. When I "publish" my news, Blogger sends the updates to the web site that's served out of my house. To do that, it uses FTP (file transfer protocol). FTP unfortunately doesn't encrypt security info like the login/password, so if someone happened to be "watching" (yes, it can be done), well, they could capture the login ID and password. Later, they could login to my machine and mess around with it to no end. They could even launch attacks against other computers from mine, once they've established a base there. Is this likely to happen? No, but it would really suck if it did. So, I keep my internal network "locked down" pretty tightly. When I want to publish to my site from Blogger, I have to "unlock" the FTP port for just long enough to let Blogger send my updates, then lock it back up again. This is a pain, so I tend not to do it very often. I do have a way to work around this, but I haven't gotten around to doing it just yet. There you have it.

Riding
I've managed to ride very close to 200 miles so far in this month! I'm at 188 at this moment. That's much better than last year's November number of 107 miles. As a matter of fact, if I ride to work tomorrow, which I intend to do, I'll just barely surpass 200 miles. On the days that I can't ride, I do a spinning workout.

I've been pretty good about commuting to my new job a couple of times a week so far this late fall. The weather has been very, very good to me until just recently. My morning ride in to work is very dark, and sometimes, very cold (the coldest has been just under 30 degrees). Tomorrow will be the real test, with the temps dipping down into the lower 20s. I have all the right clothing, though, so I should do fine. I just ordered a fancy cold-weather jacket and gloves by Castelli. Haven't received the goods yet -- can't wait to see if it was worth the bucks.

Work
My BEA gig is going pretty well so far, although so far I have just been writing JUnit tests for existing code. Once this mini-assignment is done, I should be getting a meatier assignment.

muttered around 9:08 PM

Thursday, November 08, 2001

This morning's commute to work was my first "true" winter ride of the year. When I got up, it had snowed overnight, and there was about 2" of snow on all the grass and trees. The streets were wet, but not frozen. It was around 32 degrees. I decided that this was the first true test of my resolve to ride through the winter, so I suited up and took off.

I wore:

  • Shorts with legwarmers
  • Wicking long-sleeved undershirt
  • Heavy long-sleeved jersey
  • Very light and thin windbreaker
  • Toe covers over shoes, over sandiwch bags, over wool socks
  • An earband under my helmet
  • Neoprene gloves
The ride was great. I was just a tad overdressed. Probably would have been just fine without the undershirt, or with a lighter jersey. I averaged 17.4, which is quite a bit slower than usual, but i was a little more conservative on the turns and didn't go quite as fast down the hills, since I was a little afraid of hitting black ice in a couple of spots.
muttered around 2:45 PM

Sunday, November 04, 2001

I haven't updated in quite a while for a reason -- my new DSL connection has been down a lot, and I'm now hosting out of the house. If my DSL connection is down, I can't publish. Why post if you can't publish? Well, actually, it would have made sense to continue posting, even though I couldn't publish for a while. Whatever.

Job Progress
I finally got a job. I started as a contractor for BEA Systems (makers of WebLogic Server, etc.). It's a great gig - I'll be helping to build BEA's own portal, using their own products.

Cycling Progress
I didn't get 400 miles in this October :-(. "Only" 360, which is a lot compared to last year. I intend to bike commute to BEA at least a couple of times a week this winter. It's only 6+ miles each way. I can do it by bike almost as fast as by car, and it's less stressful and better for me.

muttered around 2:02 PM

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