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Oh, man does this take me back! I spent hour after hour playing the original handheld LED football game - working on my offensive fake-out and hammering the arrow keys into dust.

Now, I can play the game on my iPod Touch. Sure hope I don’t put my finger through the touch screen…

The Boy™ and I went to the Kickoff ‘08 game, and had a total blast. Lots of fun, and the Dinos won (but we missed the action of the fourth quarter - had to leave a little early with a worn out 5 year old )

(slideshow not visible in RSS feed readers)

I’ve been meaning to write a mini review of my 2008 Kona Dew FS, and figured after riding it for a year I’d have some thoughts on how the bike works as a daily commuter. I picked the bike up exactly 1 year ago today, and have ridden it to and from work in pretty much all kinds of weather (+30˚C heat waves, monsoon thunder/hailstorms, blizzards, and -30˚C cold snaps). In that year, I’ve put 4,800km on the bike.

Here’s the bike on the day after I bought it:

One thing I learned is that the bike shop makes a HUGE difference. I went into Bow Cycle thinking I wanted a particular bike - I’d done some research on teh intarwebs and all - and wound up talking to a tech/sales guy there. Doug asked me what I wanted to do with the bike, what my ride was like, etc… and wound up showing me a bike that was several hundred dollars cheaper than what I came in looking for. He walked me over to the 2008 Kona Dew FS, which had apparently just come in, and we checked it out together. I took it for a quick spin, and bought it right there. I had the shop put on a rack so I could use my paniers, and fenders so I could ride in wet weather. I also had them switch out the seat for the one on my old bike - it’s a cheap seat, but I’ve gotten used to it. All in, I think the whole thing cost me $850 - and they gave me almost $50 for my crappy old bike as a trade-in.

What impressed me in the shop was the big-ass 700c tires. My previous bike (a 1994? Scott Head) was heavy, creaky, and the wheels were set up for mountain biking - big knobby tires on normal-sized wheels. The Kona has the giant 700c wheels, and comes with tires more suited to commuting (some grip, but much closer to street slicks than knobby mountain shredders). What does that mean for a commuter? Much less roll resistance. You can pedal, and the giant wheels will coast. And coast. And coast. Whereas the knobby mountain bike tires would bump-bump-bump and stop.

The tires are also rather thin - meaning there isn’t as much contacting the road surface, so there’s less friction to slow you down on an even surface. This turns out to be exactly what you want on a commuter bike for most of the year, but can be a pain when riding on snow and ice because you don’t have as much traction as you’d have with the fat knobby tires.

Another thing that impressed me right away was the range of gears. 3 gears in front, and 9 in back. For my ride, that’s exactly what I needed. I have to climb (and descend) a whole bunch of hills, so being able to drop down to a very low gear meant I was able to do the ride. And also being able to shift into a very high gear meant the downhill stretches were more fun

And the index shifters are great, and make it easy to pop up or down a gear very quickly and efficiently. The only trouble I had with the shifters was a result of needing to tweak the adjustment - when I first got the bike, they were fine, but slowly I needed to really jam the left shifter to upshift. I wound up damaging my left thumb from pushing it too hard, too often. Stupid me, though, because it took a tech maybe a few seconds to adjust the shifter in the shop, and that problem went away. Lesson learned: regular maintenance is a good idea. Once adjusted, though, they’re rock solid. I can now shift and know the bike will respond. This makes crossing busy roads a bit less stressful, and also makes the long climb up the long hill on the way home just that much easier.

The other thing that attracted me to the bike at first was the disk brakes. Again, my previous experience was with a crappy Sport Check Special bike, and its brakes weren’t very good. When wet, I’d blast through intersections because they didn’t have any stopping power. Not with the Kona. The disk brakes are fracking awesome. They can stop me when riding about 40km/h, in maybe 20 feet. I could probably stop faster if I tried. And they work great when wet. I don’t have to worry about losing stopping power. My bike will stop, assuming it’s got traction. One thing I found is that the disk brakes become slightly less effective in very cold temperatures. They still work - and much better than my previous pinch-brakes - but less effectively than when warm.

The “FS” in the bike’s model name stands for “Full Suspension” - it’s got a suspension front fork, and a suspension seat post. I love the front fork, because it’s also lockable. If you want a soft ride, or are going through some rough terrain (like construction zones, dirt paths, etc…) you open the fork so you have suspension on the front of the bike. But when you are on flat ground, and really want to give’r, you can lock it so it doesn’t suck energy out of you by bouncing up and down as you pedal. It really does make a huge difference, so when I’m riding up a hill I just reach down and flip the switch to Lock. Before I get to the construction zone near my house, I just flip it to Open, and I get all of the suspension goodness. Best of both worlds (except the weight of the suspension fork doesn’t go away when it’s in Lock…)

The suspension seat post is a love/hate thing with me. I do like that it softens the ride. But, I’m really not a fan of the wobble it adds to the seat - it actually causes the seat to rotate slightly around the vertical axis as you move. It’s not the end of the world, but it can get annoying.

What else… Oh! The bike comes with toe baskets on the pedals, so your feet are nice and stable while pedaling. I used these for the first few months, and was getting used to them. Starting and stopping at traffic lights was a bit interesting, as you have to slide your foot into the basket to get it into place, and you can’t always do that easily. When riding on slippery surfaces, I’d leave my feet out of the baskets, so the pedals were “upside down” when riding. That way, if I lost traction and started to go down, I could put my foot down more quickly, or swing it out for balance. That saved me from wiping out many times. But one afternoon, while riding through some deep snow, one of the baskets was ripped right off the pedal. I decided to remove the other one rather than replacing the broken basket, and found I liked riding the bike much better without the baskets at all. The pedals can be a little slippery, but the grips on my shoes (and in winter, boots) grips them well enough to keep my foot in place.

The only real “upgrade” I’ve done to the bike was to replace the rear tire. It wore out after about 2000km (because the rear of the bike carries most of the weight) and I replaced it with an Armadillo. Much better traction, and the tire seems to be relatively impervious to punctures - I’ve only had one flat with it since replacing the tire, and that was a torn valve stem not a puncture.

What I do know is that after 1 year, 4800km, 1 “dooring”, several wipe-outs, a few flats, a couple of blizzards, and daily rides of 14km each way, I still love the bike. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good commuter bike. It’s not an offroad bike. But it’s one hell of a great commuter bike.

Here’s the bike after a year of wear and tear (and it needs some love - I’ll give it a good scrub this weekend. promise!)

I’d LOVE to have written a post on how awesome Spore is, what a great game/simulation it is, and how I’ve been playing it nonstop since it was released.

But I can’t.

I prepurchased Spore for Mac on September 5 - 2 days before the release - and have yet to receive a download link for Spore for Mac from EA. They sent me links to the PC AutoDownloader, and PC installer. But no Mac version. So far, I’ve been ripped off by EA.

To date, all I’ve received for my money is this:

As it is, I have a hard time recommending Spore to anyone, because it means dealing with EA. And all they’ve done is rip me off and not answer my repeated pleas to give me the product I paid for.

I mentioned this morning on Twitter that it took me maybe 30 seconds to upgrade my blog to the latest WordPress release. I thought it might be handy to show how I do it. I’m not sure if this follows best practices, and it might be a good idea to back stuff up before upgrading, but this process has served me well for the last several versions, and it’s just so quick and painless that upgrading is trivial.

It appears as though 3 of the 4 major national political parties have balked at the suggestion that Elizabeth May represent the Green Party at the televised leader’s debates.

The Green Party is a valid national party, now with a seat in Parliament (although the member was previously an Independent who switched to Green, not an elected Green MP).

According to The Canadian Press,

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday that letting May into the debate would be in essence allowing a second Liberal candidate to participate.

He said it would be fundamentally unfair to have two candidates who are essentially running on the same platform in the debate.

Really?

Harper gets to decide on who gets to participate in the debate based on his assessment of the uniqueness of their platform? That’s not how democracy works. The leader does not get to decide which voices get to be heard, or which issues will be discussed.

All this exercise tells me is that the televised leader’s debates are nothing more than sanitized synchronous press releases. If it was a valid and honest debate, the Green party would be represented (as well as, perhaps, a few other parties).

And Harper wasn’t the only leader to threaten to boycott the debates if the Greens were allowed to participate. The only leader that welcomed May was Stephane Dion. Which means that Layton and Duceppe are right up there with Harper in avoiding a real, meaningful, democratic debate.

Threatening to boycott a debate if another valid candidate is invited to participate? Childish and undemocratic.

Update: And for the Canadian media outlets that decided to not invite May to the debate so as not to upset the other candidates - you just lost any shred of objectivity. You are no longer a separate, objective, impartial media. You are nothing more than media outlets. You are not journalists, you are not unbiased. You are a press-release distribution network. The right thing to do would have been to respond to the 3 candidates that they are welcome to participate in the debate, and would be missed by the voting public if they choose not to show up.

Update 2: w00t! score one for democracy in Canada! The Green Party will be at the debates!

I’m working with a faculty member who is using a WordPress with his students this semester as a place for them to publish and reflect as a group. To make things easier for everyone involved, it’s a good idea to batch create user accounts for the students so they don’t have to go through that process (it’s easy, but every step avoided means people are more comfortable and less aggravated with a service).

Do support that batch creation of users, I installed the “Import Users Plugin” which, surprisingly, provides a way to import users into a site. All you need to provide is a username and email address for each student and it will create the account, generate a password, assign the specified user Role, and send an email to the student so they can login. It doesn’t create blogs for each student, but for our current use-case, it’s ideal - adding users to a single blog in a WordPress Multiuser service.

If you need to batch create a bunch of users, first enable the “Dagon Design Import Users” plugin on your blog, then follow these instructions:

The list of users could be pulled from Blackboard or Peoplesoft, but needs to be reformatted into

username|email address

structure so the plugin can make use of it.

I just ran John McCain’s speech from the final day of the RNC 2008 convention through Wordle to generate a word cloud to see major themes.

I’ve been slowly tinkering on the Learning Communities concept, playing with the idea and starting small by facilitating a “blogging and student publishing” group. Today, I opened it up pretty wide, sending an email to over 2200 faculty members to invite them to identify topics that would interest them for potential learning community gatherings.

I expected to have to explain what I was intending, to describe what I mean by “learning community” and to reinforce that the groups are completely about faculty (and grad student, and staff) contributions, rather than The Official Presentation From the TLC. This is a faculty thing, inquiry in action. I’m just there to facilitate and provide caffeine and carbs (and whiteboard and any other support is needed to keep the discussions moving).

I’ve had phone calls in response, every one of which along the lines of “that’s great! you’re really asking US what’s important! and have I got some ideas!” - there’s been enthusiasm, eagerness, and excitement.

I posted a poll to help gather priorities about the various topics I brainstormed (as well as encouraging people to suggest other topics by posting comments, or to indicate that the whole thing is just silly). And pretty quickly the votes started rolling in.

I was a bit sneaky in how I managed the invitation for participation - I used it to quietly announce UCalgaryBlogs.ca since the poll was hosted on a blog there. Already, a prof has set up a blog to use with her class, and others are telling me they’ll be checking the service out. Very cool stuff.

This has been one of the better days. Do the right thing, don’t ask permission, and run with it.

Donncha pushed the WPMU 2.6.1 update live today, and it’s a required upgrade for security reasons. I just wanted to post that I’ve upgraded ucalgaryblogs.ca to WPMU 2.6.1 and everything appears fine. It took all of 2 minutes to do, too.

Here’s my process:

1. back stuff up.
2. login to the server via ssh
3. download WPMU 2.6.1 into ~/temp, and unzip it.

   cd ~/temp
   wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.zip
   unzip latest.zip

4. delete the wp-content directory in the freshly downloaded copy of WPMU 2.6.1 - I do this so I don’t accidentally overwrite any customized themes, or nuke anything in mu-plugins or plugins…

   rm -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/wp-content

5. copy the fresh copy of WPMU over top of the existing one in the web directory

   cp -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/* ~/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/

6. run the WPMU upgrade site script to run any necessary updates (I don’t think there were any database updates, but it’s probably a good idea to run it anyway). This will automatically run the script on each blog installed on that copy of WPMU.
7. done. test some blogs to make sure stuff is working fine.

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