Wind

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Some days I drive part way to work and ride a bike in the rest of the way. I won’t do this if its raining. This week it was the wind. 20 mph gusting to 30 mph. I rode in Monday and Friday this week on the days it was the ‘weakest’.

Friday after work, a friend of mine gave me a ride to Razzoo’s where I had this huge 32 oz. beer. Riding back to my Honda Element, I felt this shimmy run though the bike. It felt like the back wheel was coming off. I’ve suffered the consequences of my shoddy workmanship before.

When I was young, my parents gave me a Sear’s ‘No Hassle’ Bike. This meant everything was quick release and you could take off the wheels and seat post with no tools. I had a flat on the front tire and fixed it with ‘No Hassle’ by removing the front wheel and replacing the tube.

The next day I was out riding and popped the front wheel over a curb. As the front wheel was in the air, I watched the ‘No Hassle’ feature activate and the front wheel disengage from the bike falling forward and away from the fork. I remember thinking it was interesting that the front wheel moved forward faster than the me and the rest of the bike.

As I watched the front fork descend towards the ground, I thought that this wasn’t going to be good and decided to try for a full flip onto my back rather than a face plant. I did a full flip over the handle bars slapping the concrete with my arms and the balls of my feet. My walkman radio and bike scattered into pieces of debris. Nothing on me was broken but I laid there stunned.

While lying there, I was aware of 2 younger twits who started gathering and reassembling the pieces of my walkman. They turned it on and exclaimed, “it works!” I groaned and they seemed to notice me for the first time. I put my hand out and they handed me the walkman and ran off.

With little to ‘No Hassle’, I reassembled my bike and rode off.

Yesterday, remembering that, I pulled the bike over and checked the back wheel. It must have been the beer and the wind, it felt solid to me and I made the rest of the way back with all the pieces staying attached.

Monday Fall

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On my bike in full biking paraphernalia including cool helmet and sunglasses, I pulled out of the parking lot crossing half way across the street. Waiting for the traffic to clear so that I could turn left, I was moving forward very slowly with both feet clipped into the pedals.

I started to fall to the right and my foot was stuck in the pedal. I thought “trapped, dang, brace” During the slow fall in front of several bemused drivers, I tucked in my elbows and gritted my teeth. I took the fall on as many points as possible including my shoulder and the outside of my right arm and leg.

The pain went through my body and was completely absorbed by my ego. Totally physical pain free, I got back on my bike and rode away, fast.

Why don’t you google how to be cool?

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Cindy and the girls got themselves hooked on this season’s American Idol. Last night Cindy took off to book club, leaving me to watch the TV show with the girls. I was trying to undermine the commercials and on one of the car ones I said, “I wish I could have that car so that I could be cool just like him.”

G, our 7 year old, told me to go to google and google ‘how to be cool’. I told her I could be cool without google’s advice.  She gave me a look.

Excel VBA Intersection Range Tricks

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Excel VBA supports Intersection and Unions of Ranges. Sadly, it doesn’t support inversion of ranges. Anyway, here are some useful things built on Intersection. (I use Excel Macros to get stuff done and really don’t care a twit about understanding the nuances of yet another programming language — be carefully with these).

Intersection returns a range which is the common area of all the ranges given as an argument to the Intersection function. Using range.EntireRow or range.EntireColumn lets you pick out cells within a target range by columns or rows of the range.


Function GetRowsOfRange(startRow As Integer, endRow As Integer, rng As Range) As Range
         Dim fullRange As Range    Set fullRange = Range(rng.Cells(startRow, 1), rng.Cells(endRow, 1))
         Set GetRowsOfRange = Application.Intersect(fullRange.EntireRow, rng)
End Function

Function GetColsOfRange(startCol As Integer, endCol As Integer, rng As Range) As Range
         Dim fullRange As Range
         Set fullRange = Range(rng.Cells(1, startCol), rng.Cells(1, endCol))
         Set GetColsOfRange = Application.Intersect(fullRange.EntireColumn, rng)
End Function

The Range.Offset function shifts the entire range by the offset. Combining this with Intersection lets you remove rows or columns from a target range. Here are some subroutines that illustrate this.


Function BumpDown(numRows As Integer, rng As Range) As Range
     Set BumpDown = rng.Offset(numRows, 0)
End Function


Function RemoveRowsFromTopOfRange(numRows As Integer, rng As Range) As Range
     Set RemoveRowsFromTopOfRange = Application.Intersect(rng.Offset(numRows, 0), rng)
End Function


Function RemoveColsFromLeftOfRange(numCols As Integer, rng As Range) As Range
    Set RemoveColsFromLeftOfRange = Application.Intersect(rng.Offset(0, numCols), rng)
End Function

End

Code plugin

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Pulled down the Code Markup plugin from http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/code-markup-wordpress-plugin/

example_func(int t) {
  int i;
  for (i=0;i<1;++i) {
     printf("%d\n",i);
  }
}

Hope this looks ok.

Catching up

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A long time friend wrote me one of those here’s what’s happened in the last 5 years email.  I was at the computer when it arrived so I know what was happening here as he wrote it.

As he was describing how his youngest was taking violin lessons and planning on performing with the youth symphony my oldest was out back creating a standby cemetery for my youngest to play in so she wouldn’t defile the real fish cemetery.  While his oldest was experimenting with electronics, my youngest was writing “I hate you Mom” on a piece of paper.

In Cold Blood

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My grandfather is dead.  He died in Garden City Kansas several years ago.  When he died, they talked about him on the radio because for something like 40 years he did a weekly radio show.  He was well known and respected by the Kansas farming and agriculture community.  He worked with the universities and the farmers to improve yields and farming techniques.

He is mentioned in Capote’s book.  He was one of a group of people who went and cleaned the house after the killings.

The Button Test

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In front of you is a button that is the culmination of millennia of human knowledge and effort.  Using amazing complex mathmatics, mathematicians and physicists, who you know personally, have proven that there are only two outcomes of pushing the button: total knowledge and bliss for all humans living and dead or the total and instantaneous annihilation of the universe.

Your friends have left you alone with the button.  What do you do?

Turning 40

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Who knew that I would live this long. Really, at age 9, I didn’t think that I would make it past 30 given my chosen profession of ninja-kungfu-secret-agent-fighter-pilot. But what do you know, I ended up not being a ninja-kungfu-secret-agent-fighter-pilot and here I am full of wisdom on the eve of turning 40. For example, “its nice not being shot at.”