I love numbers, charts, stats, and such. I also love bicycling. When those two loves collide, you end up with a mega-spreadsheet of bicycle stats, going back for 25 years. So here are a few totals...

In 2008 I rode 2,769 miles.  952 of these miles, or 34% were ridden inside on bicycle rollers. This was the first year in my life that I have ridden at least 100 miles every month. Grand total for the last 25 years? 36,191 miles.

Over the last nine months we converted our spare bedroom into a den for me (Tim). I was reaping the benefits of that today, as I worked at home due to snowy weather. A beautiful snowy scene forms a picturesque backdrop to my home working environment.

A snow storm a few days ago brought ice, snow, and then more ice. The top covering of ice was thick enough to walk on without breaking through to the snow beneath. Clearing the driveway became a mining project (one which I decided to forgo), and temperatures were frigid enough that ice melt was a joke.

As a result, I was not surprised when Colleen told me that one of our cars was stuck in the driveway. However, when I went out to examine the ensnared vehicle, I discovered nothing but a couple of very small depressions in the ice where the tires were. However, no amount of rocking the car from drive to reverse or my feeble pushing on the hood moved the car. I even put crampons on to gain better traction on our slippery driveway as I pushed.

Perplexed, I enlisted the help of a nearby friend on the next day. A few minutes before he arrived, I noticed that one of the tires was flat. Doh. Changing the tire fixed the problem. Resistance from the flat tire + icy driveway = stuck vehicle.

Unfortunately, the tire will have to be replaced, as it had a nice-sized chunk of metal in it (see photo).

I am a Mac guy; that is no secret. But my hatred for Windows, or more specifically Compaq (bought out by HP) is growing by leaps and bounds.

Let me back up. A client brought me a desktop machine a couple of weeks ago with a dead hard drive. I ran a hard drive recovery tool, Spinrite, on it and was able to create the most agonizing grinding sounds I have ever heard a hard drive make. The drive was toast. No freezing this one. No problem. I replaced the hard drive. After ordering restore CD's (the original was scratched) and loading the 12 of them (Compaq evidentally never heard of a DVD), the fun began. I got a System configuration error, stating that I should call “Customer Care” with “Error Code Purple.” 

Code Purple is the sign of a booby trap placed in HP and Compaq computers that will prevent it from booting if you reinstall the system after replacing any piece of hardware (in my case, a hard drive).  I instant messaged HP support. They told me to bring it in to a service center. I thought I was supposed to be the service center! (Transcript included in the extended story).

I found the fix at http://www.billoblog.com.  The short of it - if you have Win XP, empty the contents of  C:\hp\bin\ConfigCheck\cfgchk.bat and just leave an empty file with that name. I used a Ubuntu Live CD to do so, but could have just as easily transferred the drive to another working Windows (oxymoron) machine, and edited the file there.

The moral of the story: don't buy a Compaq or HP machine unless you like booby traps!

Alright, I admit it. I have been sucked into Facebook. I have known about it for years (or at least 4 - it was started in 2004). However, ironically, it was my wife that pulled me into it. She started using it about 2 months ago. That and seeing that Twitter didn't seem to be going anywhere, I decided to create an account on Facebook.

For the uninitiated, Facebook is a social networking website where you can create a network of friends, amongst whom you can post short status updates, photos, notes, and generally stay in touch with each other, all on one messy website "wall". 

After a week, I really enjoy it.  I have re-met up with friends that I haven't seen in 10-20 years. If you haven't tried it, I encourage you to give it a run. And if you do, be sure to add me as your "friend".

Most of us have a wireless router at home, usually stuck in some corner or by the sole remaining desktop in the house.  Most of us are very content to let the thing sit and ignore it, as long as it is working. But some geeks end up loading custom firmware on it.  As mentioned in a previous article, I loaded dd-wrt on my router a few years ago.

Wanting a few more features, I decided this weekend to change to Tomato firmware for my router. So far, I have been very pleased. The upgrade went smoothly. Many settings where transferred over from dd-wrt.  Read the docs about the password before you upgrade though!  A few of the advantages that Tomato has over dd-wrt follow:

• Bandwidth stats and graphs that will save to a SMB share, so they are kept even through a power loss (dd-wrt had bandwidth stats, but they were not saved)
  
• Dynamic DNS will update 2 servers (dd-wrt only did 1)
• Dynamic DNS will update OpenDNS (I didn't see this on dd-wrt)
• Ability to write and save scripts to the router firmware
  
• Very clean, simple interface
• Hopefully, stability -- time will tell (dd-wrt would occasionally lock up on me)

All I need now is the Ketchup firmware!

Our church website was just given a face lift a couple of days ago. I wish I could take credit for the design, as it turned out quite nicely in my opinion. The only part I was responsible for was the sermons portion of the site.

Colleen has been working very hard on creating a new website for the library, and it also is turning out very nicely.