Being a beautiful day outside here in central Virginia, sunny, and flirting with 80° outside, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to take the bike out to the local park/conservation area and try to get a few hours of riding in. Really beautiful out there, if someone desolate – it’s warm, with a nice breeze coming in off the James River, though most of the trees haven’t started sprouting yet, and most of the green is still brown and flat, especially after all the heavy downpours over the last week or so.

It was a nice, peaceful couple of hours; saw lots of interesting animals, including three different types of geese, and with much of the underbrush gone, I was able to look at the park I’d logged so many miles in from a different perspective.

Unfortunately, about thirteen miles into my ride, I encountered this. Sticking out of my front tire:

That’s one big-ass thorn.

So, yeah, I walked the last two miles back to the car. Screw it, I’m still calling it fifteen miles logged. It’s not the first flat I’ve had, and won’t be the last, but I must tell you; riding the bike is a lot more fun than walking it.

EDIT: had to tweak the URL of the image; seems twitpic goes “POOF” after a certain time!

Trying something a little different this morning, instead of running a random ten off of the hard drive or mp3 player, I’m recording the first ten tunes that come out of my pandora radio quick mix station. It’s one of those things I’ve been playing with since I got the new phone, and so far, I kind of like it. If for nothing else, I amuse myself by guessing how long it’ll take for different “stations” based on disparate artists to converge on a third, seemingly unrelated one.

Anyway, tunes:

1. “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” – Ida Maria
2. “Harborcoat” – R.E.M.
3. “Nervous Night” – Hooters
4. “I Melt With You” – Modern English
5. “Bastards of Young” – The Replacements
6. “Runaway” – Bon Jovi
7. “Old Man” – The Wailin Jennys
8. “E.T.” – Katy Perry
9. “Alternative Girlfriend” – Barenaked Ladies
10. “Artificial Light” – Rainer Maria

Interestingly, the phone mix is better – this one (straight of the ‘net) was 60% songs from artists I have dedicated stations for. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which six.

For the last two weeks, the software project I work on has been in one of those hiatuses inspired by the need for the program managers to brief successively higher levels of authority about progress before being granted permission to move on to the next phase where we get to build things instead of talk them to death. As such, most of us peons have been “on the bench,” and have little direct responsibility for a short period, other than to show up every day and occasionally make reports of our accomplishments to our direct supervisors, who have little to nothing to do with the project, to justify our existence.

Most of us have been filling this time by catching up on our “continuous learning” requirements. This means clicking through a succession of online training modules of tremendously variable quality on everything from contract law to information security to workplace safety.

Earlier this week I spent two hours taking a mostly tedious module on stress management (I needed an elective for my next level of professional certification, and this one seemed the least painful one that fit the time window I had). Amongst all the other MBA-inspired platitudes, there were a few good pieces of advice, such as breaking down particularly intimidating tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks. It’s good advice, one of those lessons that I’ve almost, but not quite, internalized during the nearly thirty-seven years I’ve spent crawling across the surface of this sad little planet. I don’t always succeed in doing so, but it’s one of those little lessons I understand as valuable and aspire to apply to my life, and work to pass on to others.

Also, for a confluence of reasons, my idle processing cycles have been filling themselves with big, cosmological issues: the nature of the universe, humanity’s place in it, how we might make things better, etc. Not the worst thing I could be investing thoughts in, but much of the time, it’s a cloudy, confused, and sometimes depressing thought space.

Interestingly, in my regular morning spin through the internets, I saw this piece of wisdom in a comment from user “froborr” over at slacktivist’s new digs that ties these two recent obsessions together nicely, which I shall repeat here:

If every person saved 23 square centimeters every day, we could save the world in a year. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Sure, it’s abstract, pithy, and I can’t quite get the math to work out right, but I like the idea. As messy as the world is, philosophically, politically, environmentally, or whatever, if everyone does something small everyday to make their corner of the world a little better, eventually, we might get somewhere in making the whole place better for everyone.

So, I ask you all – have you saved your 3.5 in² today? And if not, why not?

Something I ran into this morning in purusal of the news: this story about how Magic Hat, the artisan brewer, just employed a new process that uses waste grain from the brewing process to produce natural gas to fuel the brewery’s wastewater treatment, saving the company a good deal of money and reducing it’s waste output.

It is truly a wonderful, especially considering the impending arrival of St. Patrick’s Day: Green Beer that doesn’t involve food coloring and mass market American swill pilsner.

In any case, slacktivist (new URL – update the bookmarks!), in response to this article, comments that he’s glad that he’s not a right-wing commentator or Fox News personality, as such a job would require him to be unhappy about a story this cool.

If your political ideology requires you to oppose making good beer more affordable, then it’s time to rethink your political ideology.

Indeed.

I had the privilege of hearing this fellow speak a couple of weeks back, and a lot of his way of looking at the world resonated and stuck with with me. It’s a beautifully spiritual way of looking faith, religion (and it’s various definitions), and the universe through a scientific lens; one to which I’m more than a little bit sympathetic.

Now, imagine my surprise and delight when I found out that a version of the piece that I heard the other week was available online, so I could point to it and with hearty “what he said!”

I do so now, linking to “Faith & Impermanence”, from the Rev. Paul Boothby.

If you have a spare twenty-five minutes or so, give it a listen, I suspect you won’t regret the experience,* whether you’re of a religious (however you define it) bent or not. It definitely falls under the heading of Stuff I Like A Lot, that occasional category I use around here for stuff I, well, like a lot.

Amen. Blessed Be. ‘Nuff Said.

____________________________

* -At the very least you’ll get a little chuckle out of the description of being the go-to Unitarian Universalist representative for the kids of Liberty Christian Academy when they get the assignment to seek out “exotic” religious traditions.

I’ve been seeing this all over the place the last couple of days, and to be honest, it’s one of the better simple analyses of the whole Wisconsin situation that I’ve seen.

Presented here for posterity:

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, ‘Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’

It’s sad and disheartening that a not-insignificant portion of people in this country have been convinced that cutting compensation to middle-class public servants like police officers and teachers by ten percent is an exercise in “sharing the sacrifice in these difficult economic times,” but raising taxes on income over and above the first quarter-million by half of that rate is class warfare and totally untenable.

Few realize that it’s ninety-eight percent of the country fighting over a fraction of the one cookie the other two percent deigns to toss our way. And, if teachers continue to get nickeled, dimed, and prevented from actually doing their jobs along the way for much longer, even fewer of the next generation are going to be equipped to come to that realization, let alone learn the skills to get to the point where they might one day be able to conceive of “cookies” in the plural.

But then, I’m pretty sure that’s the idea the people backing Governor Walker have in mind.

It’s been a little quiet around here lately, other than eighteen seconds of laser cat bowling and a couple of microposts. It’s not that I’ve died, though at times over the last week or so, it’s kind of felt like it. I figure the half a dozen of you who actually look here regularly and don’t just stumble upon this place via an obscure Doctor Who reference in a search engine might want to know where I’ve been.

Or Not. Oh well, I’m going to tell you (♫ he’s going to tell, he’s going to tell ♫) whether you care or not.

I’ve been doing mostly the same old thing, only I’ve been doing it through some variation of the flu. Blech. With the job change back in the fall, I managed to be at the wrong end of the state for every single opportunity to get the free flu shot at the office, and for the last week and a half, I’ve been paying the price.

What’s worse is that it’s been kind of a “walking” flu, so I’ve been feeling okay enough to justify going to work, but not doing much of anything else. I go to work, maybe watch a little TV, then I go to sleep. The last thing I’ve felt like doing is getting on the computer and shouting at the darkness via pixels on your screen.

Of course, it might be that I just haven’t had anything to say (other than “argh, I feel like crap” over and over), which happens sometimes, even without the flu.

Mostly, I just felt like I needed another fresh block of text up here. Enjoy. Lorem Ipsum.

Catherine said I should post this:

Randall has apparently hacked my brain:

Perhaps my information anxiety is not entirely unfounded.

Quoth on facebook (hock, ptooie!) a person I dated once upon a time many, many moons ago:

“Maybe If I was drunk I’d understand ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. The World'”

Which spurred the following thought in my head:

Well, that’s why things between us went the way they did…

A mystery I never thought much about, solved.