So, I got the new bike home, as you’ve already seen. Well, it was the cheap $80 Target bike (albeit with full suspension, which isn’t bad for a bike at that price, even if it does feel kind of cheap), with the cheap seat. I couldn’t stand to put my full weight on it, and the combination of trying to hold half my weight up while pedaling meant I didn’t get very far (maybe a few blocks) without becoming exhausted and having my legs cramp up.

So, I went back to Target and bought a nice padded seat with a little bit more width. It worked out even better than I thought. Maggie and I biked all over Somerset last night and I didn’t even break a sweat.

Later this week I’m going to try going to and from work (hills!) and see if it’ll really be a viable transportation option at the moment or if I’m going to need to work up to it.

So, much to my relief, the battery was the culprit, so a simple battery exchange fixed the problem (and I got a new battery with zero charges out of the deal, so I guess I can’t complain too much!)

Speaking of power, Parallels Desktop may very well be the best piece of software I’ve ever used. I’ve been running Windows XP in Parallels for a few weeks, and it’s great. The main thing I use it for is work e-mail; the Java interface to the City’s Lotus Notes server doesn’t run perfectly in Firefox; you can read mail, but not send. At least I’m using IE7, so hopefully the security is at least a little better.

So, I’ve imported this into Facebook. Quite a nifty feature when you think about it. Hello facebookers! Now you get to see the kind of scary person I really am, with no extra effort on your part!

Well, my computer decided last night that it didn’t feel necessary to run on battery power anymore, so I get to run down to Des Moines today and have them look at it! GREAT!

At least it’s before there’s anything major to do for school. Still reeeeeally annoying though.

So, today was the appointed day for me to buy my first bicycle since early high school.

As we were exiting the store, we realized…

Is it possible to get a full-size, fully assembled bike into a Dodge Neon?

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Ingredients:

1 lb. pork tenderloin
Marinade or brine of choice
Hickory wood chips (May try this with mesquite)

1. Prepare marinade or brine. If brining, soak meat overnight; with marinade, at least four hours, no more than 24. The hotter your marinade, the more ass-kicking your tenderloin.

2. 1 hour before cooking, soak approximately 3 cups of wood chips in water.

3. Heat coals. Distribute over one side of grill. Sprinkle with about 1 cup of soaked wood chips.

4. Place meat on side of grill grate opposite coals, and cover grill. Grill for 30 minutes, turning and adding 1 cup additional wood chips every 10 minutes

5. Remove from grill. Wrap loosely in aluminum foil, allow to sit NO LESS THAN 10 minutes.

6. Enjoy.

So, when we moved in here, the internet was ok… nothing special, but better than dialup. We were getting around 50-60k/second downloads, just like at the old place (which was about what we expected, since both places went through ICS).

So, I sit down and start downloading XCode 2.4, and then go to other things, thinking, hey, there’s no way this’ll be anywhere near done before I need to go to sleep. Less than 10 minutes later, I go look at it, and it’s 100 megs through the download.

I’m getting download speeds of 300KB (yes, kiloBYTES) a second.

I hope this is permanent.

//edit: in the time it took me to write that post, it downloaded almost another 40 megs. I could get used to this.

//edit2: click. appear. click. appear. That’s it. I really hope this isn’t a fluke, because papa’s got a taste of honey, now he wants the whole hive

//edit3: over the course of the night, it worked its way up to 4-500KB. Yuuuummmmmm….

Well here it is for your enjoyment.

Less than 10 minutes into the Keynote, the Mac Pro makes it’s appearance. I wonder what the rest of the 60 minutes will be spent on.

//edit: Holy shit. The specs on this thing are surreal. I want one!