I bit it on my bike today, boy was that embarassing. At a stop sign, a car on my right crossing the intersection hesitated a second, and I did too, and I wasn’t able to unclip fast enough and so I just fell over because I wasn’t moving and I can’t do the super cool track stand. ( A bike track stand is when you can stay upright on your bike without moving, so named because it’s an important skill for velodrome track sprint races).

Also I’m enjoying Star Wars more than I thought I would. I’m getting some severe crashing issues, but aside from that, the gameplay is pretty good. Although looking at the message boards, it seems that the crashing problems are prevalent, which means that they released the game too early.

Today is release day for Star Wars Galaxies. Although I think my copy will arrive tomorrow. I haven’t been playing the beta much lately because there was some issue with downloading updates that kept getting cancelled, and I couldn’t get it running.

Here’s the official results from the San Jose International Tri. Me and Kojo’s results are summarized here.

          Hubert   Kojo
Swim      00:28:20 00:24:34
KPH       2.65     3.05
T1        00:03:10 00:03:31
Bike      01:12:37 01:07:50
MPH       20.5     22
T2        00:02:08 00:02:03
Run       00:51:08 00:43:56
Min/Mi    8:14     7:04
Final     02:37:25 02:21:56

Well I finished the San Jose International Tri in 2:37 and change. I’ll put up the official results and splits when I get them. Once again Kojo smoked me, with a fast run this time. The course is just about the fastest course I can imagine. It’s quite a contrast to Alcatraz, which was the toughest course I can imagine.. The swim was the most chaotic of the events I’ve entered this year. There was a lot more kicking and grabbing in this swim than Alcatraz, where I had to look around many times, just to see if I was lost and if there were people around me. The swim was in a small, calm, warm lake, very pleasant water. This was my first freshwater swim, and it was nice to not feel gross from swallowing so much saltwater. The bike course was fast, not quite as super fast as I had heard, but still very fast, on the way out there was a pretty stiff headwind that slowed us down more than expected, but at the turnaround point when it switched from a headwind to a tailwind, my speed jumped up from 17 to 25 mph. That was a really nice emotional boost. There was only one hill and it was less than a mile. Usually I do well on the hills, but I didn’t feel that stong there today. But I think my bike time was respectable. Respectable would be how I’d describe my whole day. I didn’t blow away any parts of the course, but didn’t bonk on any either. I was a little disappointed about my effort level on the run, but my 8:30 mile splits weren’t that terrible. I just need to do a couple more high intensity runs. Kojo is running like a maniac, doing some sub 7 minute miles, damn him.

Ah. I found a great new utility for me. CenterICQ is a multiprotocol instant messaging client that does it all in a console window. So now my main window is a single gnu screen window, which has in it CenterICQ, IRC, and mutt for mail. With CenterICQ, I can log on to AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger(though I don’t know anyone who uses it, so I don’t bother).

So I can sit down at any computer, and attach to my screen and get all my messages, irc, email all at once, all without ever having logged off.

Oh and the San Jose International Tri is tomorrow, so I hope I’ll do well. The bike course is super fast, me kojo and bluesage are doing it.

So after all my mail problems, I switched from fetchmail to getmail. And my problems with attachments appears to have gone away. While I still believe that fetchmail is correct and the POP server that AT&T uses is probably the source of the problems, it’d be nice if fetchmail were a little bit better about handling the issues. I suspect that fetchmail is taking a rather unforgiving approach to things which are not complying with the standards. There’s a question of design principles. Is it better to try and punish something that doesn’t work, or do you let it pass and hope for the best? Getmail would also be useful if you didn’t want to run a local Message Transport Agent(MTA) which is something that having fetchmail requires, but which is what gives fetchmail most of its flexibility.

So I got pictures from Escape From Alcatraz courtesy of one of the race photographers. They are not very flattering really, but does anyone expect to look good after 3 hours of working out? In this case, the photographers are using BrightRoom.com to distribute their pictures. As you’d expect, they use all digital photography because it’s so expensive to print out photos. However, as I have done, it’s possible to take the photos without paying for them. I wonder how this has affected their business. On the one hand, their storage, mailing and printing costs are lower than they used to be., because they don’t need to send out proofs to everyone to try and convert a sale, on the other hand I’ve taken the photos without paying for them.

They use an interesting, but ultimately futile way of trying to prevent me from copying the images and storing them locally. The way that I initially tried to get the pictures was to use the “Save Image As” function of Mozilla. But when I did this, it gave me a blank image. So knowing that there has to be a way for me to save the images that I’m already displaying on the page. I try the “Save Page As” function, and that saves the whole page along with the images, and then I put those images into my gallery. I’m not sure how they distinguish between HTTP requests for just that image and HTTP requests for the whole page, but somehow they serve up a bogus image when the request for only that image comes through, and they serve up the right image when a page request comes. Interesting, but in the end, it doesn’t really add any security.

Christ. I go to Circuit City for my printer cable, and they charge me $26 freaking dollars for a USB2-USB1 cable. And that was the cheapest one, the more expensive ones were $35+. These printer cables ought to be better than sex for that price. It’s not much cheaper online.

I’m pretty annoyed that I bought an HP PSC 2210 printer, and it doesn’t come with a printer cable. It used to be justifiable because you wanted either a serial or a parallel interface and the cables were each $10-15, so they had you order a printer cable separately. These days, all printers are USB, so there’s no need for a choice of cables, and the cable prices are pretty cheap, they probably cost less than $5. So now I have to make a separate run to the local Best Buy or Circuit City to get the damned printer cable.

By the way, if anyone wants an email address at chen.net, you can email me.

So I had to spend a couple annoying hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my email. Someone sent me a large attachment that I failed to get. And it turns out there’s something wrong with my configuration that causes this problem. Here’s an explanation of how my email works. All my important mail goes through Earthlink, which then forwards to my cable modem provider AT&T soon to be Comcast. From there, it is stored, until I use fetchmail to download it to my linux machine where I then use procmail to send it to bogofilter to filter out spam. Then finally, I read it with mutt. My way is kind of odd, but it’s evolved from several different needs. Here’s how they came up chronologically.

I kept running out of server mail space. I needed to download my mail to a local machine instead of running the risk of bouncing mail because I kept running out of space. This needed to be done automatically, otherwise I go on vacation and I’ll start bouncing once my mail filled up which is especially problematic with all the spam that gets sent. So I use fetchmail to download mail.

It’s stored on AT&T’s servers until I can download it. I don’t want to run my own primary mail server because my cable isn’t quite reliable enough for that.

Reading mail in a console window ensures that I will never set off some stupid webbug.

I need a solid spam filter and I like mutt and reading my email iin a console window. Client side mail filtering is pretty idiotic, so it really has to be done on the server.

Unfortunately, my current problem is that somewhere when fetchmail is getting my email from the AT&T server, large emails get cut off unexpectedly. I’m pretty sure it’s not in fetchmail, simply because Eric Raymond author of fetchmail is one of the most talented programmers the open systems world has. And fetchmail works well with almost every pop and imap server there is. I’m pretty sure the fault is somewhere in bizarre proprietary AT&T’s pop mail server, but I can’t change that without altering how my mail works. So the summary of it is, you can’t send me big attachments like pictures. If you want to, send me email telling me you’re going to, and I’ll give you a separate email address to send to.