Axodys

Cool Tools had a great “post on Rails to Trails”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000905.php the national program dedicated to turning retired rail lines into paved bike paths. Last weekend my friend Jesse and I went for a 1.5 hour ride on the “Couer d’Alene Trail”:http://www.northidahotrails.net/CoeurdaleneTrail.htm# a 72 mile long Rails to Trails conversion that follows the Union Pacific Railroad‚Äôs right of way from the high mountains near Montana, down the Coeur d‚ÄôAlene River, along wetlands and the “chain lakes” and it was a lot of fun. I had no idea that there was such a nice and long paved bike path there so it was a pretty neat discovery for me.

Jesse and I started our ride at the little town of Harrison and followed the trail east along the Couer d’Alene River for roughly 7 miles or so before turning around. The ride was fairly scenic and definitely enjoyable, but a good portion of that particular stretch is bordered by cow pasture to the south which got a little tiresome, especially since there it was a hot day and there wasn’t much shade. There were a lot of little lakes along the way though that were much more pleasant to ride by and the shaded parts of the trail bordered by water were pure heaven. I would definitely like to go back and ride further on that trail in the future (and in both directions). I’ll bet the stretch that runs along the southern portion of Couer d’Alene Lake and continues on to Plummer, ID is pretty scenic and probably has some decent shade in spots too thanks to the many pine trees that cover the shores of Couer d’Alene lake.

It is painfully hot here in Spokane today. Especially for those of us who don’t have central air conditioning. Oddly enough I think my ongoing sea kayaking obsession was sparked in part last year during a similar heat late July heat wave. There’s just something incredibly appealing about going for a nice paddle on a nearby body of water instead of sitting in 90°+ house. Of course if your kayak isn’t finished yet, you have to spend the day working on it in the basement. Not exactly the best way to spend a perfect paddling day like today, but a decent alternative considering it’s still roughly 10° cooler down there.

The good news is that after today’s effort my kayak frame is finally ready to be “skinned”:http://yostwerks.com/Skin4.html. I still need to pick up some nylon line and maybe a hole punch tomorrow, but I have everything else I need. I’m really looking forward to seeing it come together. I think the black hull with green deck is going to look pretty sweet.

“BBC: Ice Lake Found on Red Planet”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4727847.stm
!/images/marslake.jpg(View of the 35 km wide crater.)!

bq. The highly visible ice is sitting in a crater which is 35 km (23 miles) wide, with a maximum depth of about two km (1.2 miles).

It looks like the ice lake is roughly one third the width of the crater. Given the estimate of 35 km (23 miles) for the crater diameter the ice lake is probably easily 7 miles (11.2 km) in diameter itself which is a pretty decent sized lake. I tried finding a Spokane area lake of comparable size using google maps and most of them seemed smaller. I think the northern most section of Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho might be comparable though. It’s definitely a sizable deposit of ice though and could probably sustain some kind of base on Mars for a long, long time if one was located there.

*Update:* “Even bigger pictures”:http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMGKA808BE_0.html at the ESA(European Space Agency) site.

“Gus Mueller”:http://www.gusmueller.com just announced today that FlySketch 1.5 for MacOS X 10.3.9 or greater has been released. What is FlySketch you ask? According to the official Flysketch wiki:

bq. FlySketch is a unique new application that allows you to draw on top of just about anything on your screen. Highlight words or paragraphs, draw shapes to help define what you want to say, and then drag and drop the results onto another application, or email it to a friend.

I played around with an earlier version and thought it was pretty cool, but based on the “What’s New in FlySketch 1.5 page”:http://flyingmeat.com/fs/flystashweb.cgi/99e78032-ff28-01d9-1ca2-c0cbe4c4fbfe there are a whole bunch of cool new features that I hadn’t known about. A few that jumped out at me:
* Pallettes (instead of the annoying drawer widget that’s not fashionable these days)
* Smooth Freehand Lines
* New Improved Color Picker
* Shadows On Individual Graphics
* “Upload to Flickr”:http://flyingmeat.com/fs/flystashweb.cgi/23f23e28-ec2a-01d9-16df-c0cbe4c4b0d0 (requires 10.4 and this “Automator action”:http://fraserspeirs.livejournal.com/869471.html )

FlySketch strikes me as a tool that would be great for putting together presentations and software documentation, but I think it could also be a pretty hand tool for the power weblogger who wants to occasionally add some graphical goodness to their entries. As extensible an application as it is I would think that it wouldn’t be too hard to get it to work more closely with blogging software like WordPress or MovableType for direct to blog image uploads. I may have to investigate that further at some point.

If any of this sounds remotely intriguing you can download FlySketch “here”:http://flyingmeat.com/download/FlySketch-1.5.dmg to take it for a spin. Current pricing is $19.95, but Gus has indicated that it’s going up to $24.95 in the near future.

bq. Rice said the outpouring of support for the popular Turiaf in Spokane has been “phenomenal. That’s probably been the most amazing thing to see. We knew everybody loved Ronny. Everybody’s just been so touched by it. The whole world stopped here in Spokane.

As just about everybody in Spokane knows, not to mention Gonzaga fans world-wide, Ronny Turiaf went in for open heart surgery yesterday. The great news is that it went better than expected and Ronny is expected to make a full recovery. The Seattle Times has a “pretty good article”:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sonics/2002404154_turiaf27.html covering the situation:

bq. A six-hour, open-heart surgery on Gonzaga center Ronny Turiaf was pronounced a success yesterday, generating hope that the 22-year-old Los Angeles Lakers draftee might play basketball again.

It also sounds like Ronny will be coming back home to Spokane and Gonzaga for his initial rehab work. It’s nice to know that he’s going to be well taken care of, but I kind of hope they can sneak him back into town. I don’t know if the kind of overwhelming greeting I could see him getting at the airport would be the best thing for a heart that was repaired a week earlier.

I’ve been seriously banging my head against “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org and the Connection theme the last few days, but I think I’m finally starting to get things into a solid form that I can comfortably move over to “axodys.com”:http://axodys.com. I’m definitely getting a better feel for the way WordPress templates work and I’ve been picking up some more PHP along the way too. I’ve had to delve into a couple different plugins to tweak a few things and make them work the way I wanted, but that wasn’t too painful. While the WordPress themes and their multiple template files can get a little hairy to deal with at times, I definitely like the plugin system because it’s really quite elegant.

The “Technorati Tags plugin”:http://boneill.ninjagrapefruit.com/wp-tag-plugin/ broke when I changed themes and it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do to repair it. Getting that plugin to work (and then work the way I preferred) ended up leading me into an investigation on automatic excerpts and replacement plugins. I ended up going with one called “the_excerpt_reloaded”:http://guff.szub.net/2005/02/26/the-excerpt-reloaded/ because it had quite a few features I liked, but it did have one bug that I had to fix. I also switched the automatic more link from a div tag to a span tag because I wanted the link to be inline and that seemed to be the easiest way to go about it.

I have Google AdSense ads working on individual posts now, but I wouldn’t call it completely finalized yet. I stil may add a row of the new ad links along the top of the posts or make some further adjustments to the sidebar. Speaking of the sidebar, I want to get away from the long list of month archives that’s currently dominating it. There’s a really cool javascript-based archive plugin that I’ve found, but I haven’t managed to get it working quite yet.

*Update:* I’ve now moved everything over to “Axodys”:http://axodys.com and it seems to be working fine. There are still a lot of little fixes to be done in the navbar and sidebar, but I think they can wait until tomorrow. Now that I think about it I will also need to place messages the old feeds alerting any subscribers to the changes. In the meantime everything is working well enough to go live. Let me know if you come across any major errors or problems. I’m planning on using comments a lot more than I have in the past.

*Update: 2* Looks like something about the way I have comments configured is breaking my single post layout. I just turned comments off for this post to see if I can confirm my suspicions. If they are the problem I’ll wait until tomorrow to debug the issue.

*Update: 3* It wasn’t the comments code. It was the way I was trying to refer to div and span tags above. I haven’t quite figured out a way to get WordPress to display html code with greater than and less than symbols showing without choking.

I made a little bit of progress on my theme modification project today, but I’ve still got some color tweaking to take care of before I’m anywhere near done. The original theme had a lot of green in it and I’m moving towards black and blues (as you can see from my header graphic) so that means a lot of tweaking. I wish I knew how to use “The Gimp”:http://gimp.org graphic a little better, but I guess that’s what practice like this is for. I did manage to its layers capabilities to my advantage already so that’s certainly something.

In other news I also installed a plugin that converts the WordPress interface into something more along the lines of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. It works pretty well and I definitely prefer it to the default interface.

I was shocked to learn this morning that former Gonzaga player Ronny Turiaf was “diagnosed with a life threatening heart condition”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/basketball/nba/07/22/turiaf.lakers.ap/index.html. For a guy like Ronny that just exudes so much energy and exuberance on the court it seems incredible that he’s been doing it with a heart that could have given out at any time. While it makes me sad to think that he may not be able to play basketball any more, I’m relieved that they caught this early enough to make sure that another Hank Gathers type of tragedy could be avoided. Sure, Ronny is an exceptional player, but as the Gonzaga and Spokane communities discovered during his four years here, he’s an even more exceptional person. Even if he’s never able to lace up his shoes and take the hardwood again Ronny has an ample supply of all the things he needs to lead a successful life. Hopefully with proper medical care he can make sure it’s a long one as well.

I’ve pretty much decided on an Axodys migration/update approach where I will setup everything at wp.axodys.com, get everything to my liking, and then move all of the WordPress infrastructure over to axodys.com when it’s ready to go. At this point I have all of my old posts imported and I finished cleaning up and refactoring all my categories this morning. I’ve tried out a few different plugins and have “technorati”:http://technorati.com style tags working, but I’ve reached the point where I need to start figuring out the ins and outs of “WordPress Theme”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes creation/modification so I can really start customizing the look and feel of things.

One new thing that I want to do while I’m setting up the design that will ultimately become the new axodys.com is to figure out how to incorporate Google AdSense ads in an unobtrusive way. I actually got turned down the first time I applied for the service back when it debuted, but reapplied this week and was finally accepted. I’d heard that they had relaxed their acceptance policy a little bit since my first attempt and with “guys making $10k a month”:http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/02/25/earning-a-six-figure-income-from-blogging/ off their blogs I decided it was time for me to see if I could get a piece of the action. I don’t have any illusions about making that kind of cash. At this point Axodys doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of traffic that is needed to generate significant monthly income and it isn’t doesn’t have a specific topic area, but AdSense seems worth experimenting with and if I can cover a portion of my hosting costs it will worth it.

My initial plan for putting AdSense into Axodys is going to be strictly at the archive page level. The front page and all feeds will continue to be ad free and will continue to feature posts in their entirety. I got this idea from Darren (who has a ton of good ideas on AdSense) over at “problogger.net”:http://problogger.net and it seems like a logical approach. Most of the traffic that could generate click-throughs on the ads come from google searches on specific topics that I’ve written related entries on and I don’t want to annoy the few loyal readers that I’ve been carrying with me these last 6+ years. Eventually as I get more familiar with WordPress, I may also look into having AdSense ads only begin appearing after the posts are a few days old.

Before I can get going with AdSense though it’s imperative that I get my new design figured out so I can begin implementing it. The default theme is nice, but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. Time to get cracking.

I guess this was on “gawker.com”:http://gawker.com a week ago, but I just “read about it”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/lang_whitaker/07/18/the.links/index.html today. Apparently NBA League MVP Steve Nash was heading over to the outdoor court at Hudson River Park to shoot around a week or two ago, but then decided to “join the pickup game”:http://www.gawker.com/news/culture/neighborhoods-landmarks/he-loves-this-game-112394.php that was already using the court. The funniest thing about the several pictures that someone captured with their camera phone is that Steve was clearly the tallest guy on the court. Anyway, good stuff on a guy that is currently one of my favorite NBA players.