midtoad’s mess.ages
excellence in creative mediocrity

Got a GPS? Want to see your tracklogs on a map? Don’t have money for a dedicated mapping program? You’re in luck - there’s GPS Visualizer. Simply record your trip, upload to your PC using an app like G7ToWin, and then upload to the GPS Visualiser site. Within a minute or so you’ll have a picture of your trip overlaid on a nice map background or on a satellite photo.
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I received a new iPod Mini for a birthday present. Thx bro’! Good little player, except for one thing - half my 100 GB music collection is in .ogg file format, and Apple iTunes doesn’t do .ogg files. But, I found a way around this problem.
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The frustrating thing about running your own home network is that when trouble strikes, there’s no IT guy to call up and fix things for you. (Well, I guess you can always call Nerds on Wheels, but they’re $75 an hour). So you just have to get stubborn and not sit down till you fix what’s wrong. Sometimes, though, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for why things went wrong in the first place, which makes solving the problem all the more challenging.
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PHP is okay for whipping up something quick, but once I start getting into more complicated stuff, I start to feel lost. I’d rather work in Python. So I’ve begun the job of moving my BikeRoots site over to Python. There were a few things involved…
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The Bike Roots database is now in test. It only took the better part of an afternoon to modify the PHP code from the Flight Poetry website so that it could be used with my Bike Roots database. That’s the benefit of having used a MySQL database for both sections. I would have preferred to use Python instead of PHP, but it’s always easier to modify code than to write new code. Once I get up and running, though, I’ll have more time to make the switch at that time.

So far, I am only presenting a collection of routes, with no way (yet) for the user to submit new route information. I’m also not ready to present graphical images of the routes; that should come in the next few days. In the meanwhile you can check out the database here.

Visitors to this site may have noticed a curious phrase in the Quotes section (top-right of the page). The quote is by Nicanor Parra, and it says “Let’s not fool ourselves: the automobile is a wheelchair (No nos echemos tierra a los ojos: El automóvil es una silla de ruedas”.)

Nicanor Parra is one of Chile’s better known poets, in his 90s as of September 5, 2004. He’s survived socialism and military dictatorships, and so is well-equipped to comment on life in that country (or all countries).

The phrase in the quote comes from his book “Obra Gruesa”, released in the 50s. Interestingly, he recycled a number of his better-known phrases in a poem entitled Frases, in 2001. It appears here and is quoted below:

No nos echemos tierra a los ojos
El automóvil es una silla de ruedas
El león está hecho de corderos
Los poetas no tienen biografía
La muerte es un hábito colectivo
Los niños nacen para ser felices
La realidad tiende a desaparecer
Fornicar es un acto diabólico
Dios es un buen amigo de los pobres.

You can find more poems from the Obra Gruesa (and other works) at the Universidad de Chile’s Cultura website.

You might think that Nicanor was speaking strictly about the automobile as wheelchair, and conclude that he is dead right in his opinion. Millions and millions of able-bodied individuals are converted by the automobile from being active citizens to being slothful, overweight invalids who are apparently incapable of walking, running or cycling even a couple of blocks.

But it appears that Parra may have had a wider purpose in mind, with the automobile being only one symbol of a world of consumerism that turns us all into slavish addicts of the latest and greatest, thus crippling our ability to think for ourselves and determine what things are really necessary in life. More power to him!

First time I’ve written a post that has four categories!

I ran across a cool software project called Leonardoserver , hosted on Sourceforge. It’s a project licensed under the GPL that allows paragliding federations to easily offer on-line contests. You can find one example of such a contest at paraglidingforum.com.
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I’m in the process of kicking off a project called Calgary BikeRoots. It’s a website for and by Calgary-area cyclists and other non-motorised commuters such as walkers, runners and skaters.
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Surely no one can claim that getting mail working on a Linux box is easy. I’ve spent a number of very late nights on it - and finally got it working tonight thanks to some information on the Mandrake site.
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