Aug 30, 2009
Silas sprints across a lawn out by the Clackamas Town Center mall.
—orc Sun Aug 30 13:42:59 2009
Aug 29, 2009
Aug 28, 2009
I put my lensbaby onto the Pentax when we were at the Captain Bogg & Salty concert on Wednesday, and there it’s been sitting since then. On Thursday, the only time I got out was to go down to the Ecotrust building to pick up a crate of peaches at the farmer’s market there, and when I was packing up to return home with my booty red-yellow came trundling down the street, so I had to take some pictures of it as it pulled up to the stop.
Late this afternoon, when I went out for my second bike ride of the day (I needed to go shopping, and how better to get to Seven Corners than to ride out to Gresham and back?) I stopped at the about-to-open Flavel St. station to see if anything would show up. Most of the time when I’ve stopped by there I haven’t seen anything, but today I only needed to wait a couple of minutes before I saw this train coming south over the Portland Traction/Springwater Trail overpass.
—orc Fri Aug 28 22:02:19 2009
Aug 26, 2009
Captain Bogg performing at Sellwood Park tonight.
—orc Wed Aug 26 23:51:18 2009
Aug 25, 2009
I went out for donuts this morning, and when I was coming back I reached Gateway Transit Center just as a pair of SD-70s were pulling out on a (non-revenue) trip downtown. So I stopped the bicycle, hopped off, unfastened the saddlebag, tried to balance the bicycle, pulled out my purse, tried to balance the bicycle, pulled out my camera, tried to balance the bicycle, cursed, dropped my purse, reached over and manually crooked the front wheel so the bicycle wouldn’t scoot away from me, and then finally took a few pictures as the train pulled out of the station and crossed over i205 on the way to downtown.
Yes, it was cloudy and cold out. Why do you ask?
—orc Tue Aug 25 15:34:51 2009
Aug 22, 2009
The bottom bracket on my bicycle had been making a little tick tick tick sound for the past 5-600 miles, and I finally got around to tearing it apart to repack the bearing races. Imagine my lack of surprise when I pulled the spindle out of the degreaser bucket and discovered these little impact craters (as well as 4 others; 3 at 90° intervals on the other side, and one more about 120° away from these two) in the bearing races.
I had to finish repacking the bearing, because without it I don’t have a bicycle, but I’m going to have to move my next trip to the LBS up a little bit so I can get some cartridge bottom brackets to replace the old cone & cup one with. (And then I might as well resell my spanner and pin wrench, because I won’t be needing them anymore.)
—orc Sat Aug 22 14:51:46 2009
Aug 21, 2009
An eastbound train scoots up the ex-Mount Hood Railway ROW towards the terminal at Cleveland Avenue in Gresham. There’s probably enough development east of Cleveland Ave to re-extend the line, but that would involve crossing Burnside and I’m sure that the thought of putting a railroad crossing there would cause kittens to fall yowling from the sky.
—orc Fri Aug 21 23:59:05 2009
Dust Mite explores a wretched hive of scum and villany.
—orc Fri Aug 21 23:38:42 2009
This afternoon I stopped in at my nearest local bike shop to buy a set of ball bearings to repack the bottom bracket with (my last few bike rides came with the constant music of the old ball bearings rattling against each other, and even if that wasn’t killing the spindle I’d still prefer it if the bicycle would STFU), and, while I was there, I decided that I’d ask about 650B bike tires (650B wheels are smaller than 700C, so there’s fractionally less toe overlap, and 650B tires are much larger than the sort of 700C tires I’m using now, which may be better on the horrible chipseal roads that infest Clackamas County) under the hope that they might have some available or would be willing to special order them.
So I asked if they had 650B tires. “Oh, sure, we’ve got lots of them!” and the salesperson scooted me over to the stack of tires and started pointing out lots of 18-23mm “650B” tires. I asked “are you sure you’re talking about 650B and not 650A or C?” and was assured that, no, these were definitely 650B because nobody used 650A or 650C tires.
So I looked at the offending tires, and, not surprisingly, they were all 650C triathlon tires; 571mm rim size instead of 584mm, which would have made for quite a bit of excitement if I had purchased them and attempted to put them onto 650B rims. So I pointed out that none of these tires were actually 650B and that I was looking for 584mm rim diameter tires.
The agent scurried over to a computer terminal, typed away, and said “Oh, we’ve got these tires in 25mm width at our downtown store! Should I have them shipped here?” and I said that, no, I could just ride down and take a look if I wanted them.
Which I had no intention of doing, because I’ve been thinking about 650B wheels since shortly after my birthday and I’ve done enough research into them to realize that the narrowest durable tire I can get would either be a Rivendell Nifty-Swifty, at ~33mm, or a possibly-vapourware ~30mm Michelin tire that, if it exists, doesn’t seem to exist outside of France. If there was a 25mm 650B tire, I believe I would have heard of it somewhere other than the sales floor of a Trek dealership.
It’s useful to have a local bike shop, because if something goes to hell on my bicycle I don’t want to have to either (a) wait for mailorder or (b) go over to the airport or downtown to get components from one of the local mailorder houses masquerading as local bike shops. But it’s slightly annoying when the local shop is staffed by people who don’t know what tire sizes are and think that everything in the world is 559mm, 571mm, or 622mm (even in a shop where you just turn around and there’s a Danish bakfiets sitting there flaunting its teeny-tiny front wheel at you.)
I have this nice gift card, so I’ve got an incentive to face the wall of ignorance again, but next time I want to get things from that LBS I’ll get printouts from the QBP catalog and say “this is what I want. Can you get them and how much do they cost?” instead of hoping that I get assigned the salesperson who has not spent their entire life in a barrel lined with copies of Trek marketing literature.
—orc Fri Aug 21 23:21:41 2009
Aug 19, 2009
This last sunday I decided, for the second time in 8 days, that I would blackmail myself into waking up early in the morning so I could try to get a not-completely-embarrassingly short loop in before the sun crashed into the sea (too early) in the evening. This time was the Portland Century (which, as best as I could tell, consisted of about 1950 people on gofast safety bikes, 49 people on gofast recumbents, and one person on a xtracycle) which I added 25 miles to to roll myself up over 200km for the first time this year.
Act One – getting there is a tiny fraction of the fun
I’d gotten all of my stuff ready the night before (warm weather & cool weather shirt, sweater (not jersey! – there are no back pockets in any of my shirts), vest, and two sizes of stripy socks, so all I had to do when I woke up at 5am was to make some tea, eat some breakfast, get dressed, and roll the Trek out the door. It was not pitch black, but it was pretty dark as I went up to downtown, barely encountering any traffic until I was on Broadway and trying to find the starting point of this whole shebang.
I was not quite awake, so it ended up taking me 23 minutes to go the 8km up to the starting line, which had opened (“for slow riders”) barely before I arrived.
Act Two – the Xtracycle isn’t all that slow on level ground
The course was open and I didn’t see anyone there who I knew, so I turned around and went blowing down Broadway, Madison, and out onto the Springwater Trail. The Springwater Trail is nice and level, with not more than a 2% grade at any point from downtown out to Gresham, so without even trying, I managed to make it out to Gresham in a little over a hour (30.5km in 1h12, and that’s including quite a few traffic controls on the Sellwood to Lents part of the trail,) where I pulled off at the first rest stop and realized that I would probably not be getting any tea or coffee for quite some time (I didn’t see anything, and I heard some other riders asking in vain about both of them.)
There was food there, so I ate a banana, and turned and rolled out for the next act
Act Three – On the other hand, it climbs like an anvil
Outside of Gresham, the Springwater Trail climbs a little more aggressively towards Boring, and then stops being paved, so the loop then diverted onto the chipseal hell that is Telford Road. Fortunately, the chipseal hell wasn’t very trafficked at 7:22am, so I was able to proceed past Boring and onto the gently hilly part of Aemisegger Road (which goes up, down, up, down, up, and then doooooown into the Clackamas River valley.) I wasn’t exerting myself very much on the little hills here, so I was passed by a couple of people, one of which commented (as I was pulling the anvil up a light grade) that Xtracycles don’t climb very well.
Why, THANK YOU, I never would have realized that, what with actually riding on one of them.
But the fun was only beginning. After Aemisegger Road plunged down into the Clackamas River valley, the loop turned sharp left onto another mass of chipseal that turned and climbed right back up the bluff that I had just come down. “My,” I said as I climbed the 100 meter ramp, “this is fairly unpleasant” – which was, I knew, a bit of an understatement because there were a couple of even more exciting ramps just down the road.
Judd Road (for this was the name of the chipsealed hell of the hour) was, modulo the initial climb up the bluff, a fairly pleasant grind uphill for ~12 kilometers, and it ended up with a fairly enthusiastic plunge down off the bluff to the second rest stop at Eagle Fern Park. 28.75 km in 1h19, and I was perfectly happy to pull up to the rest stop, inhale some more food, and strip off my cold weather gear for a short-sleeved shirt, a long-sleeved sweater, and my summertime stripy socks. It still felt like it was in the vicinity of 55°F, but I knew that as soon as I rolled out of this rest stop (where, as I suspected, there was NO EFFING TEA) I would be in no need of warm clothing.
Act Four – It’s an Xtracycle, and, yes, it doesn’t climb well. Thanks for reminding me
When I left Eagle Fern Park, I retraced my path to a side-road called Kitsmiller Road, which follows a stream as it it plunges vertically down the bluffside from the heights above Sandy down to the Clackamas River. Sandy is considerably higher than Boring, and the heights above Sandy are considerably higher than Sandy, so as soon as the road turned upwards I bailed down into my lowest alpine gear (40:32, or ~34") and crept up the ~10% grade at a whopping 5mph, while being passed by everyone and their aged grandparents on their omafiets. Most people just said “hi” as they crept up past me, but some people couldn’t resist pointing out that Xtracycles don’t climb very well. Gosh, really, that’s really good to know; I wouldn’t ever have realized this, since I was only plodding my way uphill on one of them.
300 or so meters later, I finally crested the top of the hill, and then managed to recover some time as I plunged down into Sandy like an anvil on roller skates. The advantage of having 50 pounds of bicycle on slick tires is that occasionally gravity
is my friend, and the only thing holding me back was having to lean on the brakes to
keep from ploughing into the masses of lightweight riders on their gossamer gofast safety bikes.
I began to get the feeling that the mere presence of the xtracycle was freaking some of these riders out when I got into a brief conversation with someone who volunteered that they thought I was crazy when they saw me riding that bike. Well, sure, that might be true, but I think that the craziness comes from doing acceptably-long bike rides early in the morning instead of the particular bicycle I was riding.
But, after 23km (in 1h19), the route led me to Meinig Park and the third rest stop on this ride, where there was, once again, NO TEA OR COFFEE, but there was cold pasta (on a cold day where it was spitting rain for part of the loop) that I could gulp down before heading out again.
Act Five – I am not going to leave Sandy without stopping at Joe’s Donuts
For some inexplicable reason, this ride passed within three blocks of Joe’s Donut Shop without making it into a checkpoint (or even providing donuts at the existing checkpoint.) Well, the ride might bypass donuts, but I won’t; Immediately after leaving Meinig Park, I jumped off the line, rode the three blocks down, bought a dozen donuts and a hot chocolate that was almost a religious experience, loaded the donuts onto the bicycle, and continued on my merry way.
“My merry way” included a plunge down to the Sandy River, where I was first passed by a pack of people on their gofasts, and then I had to apply the brakes to keep from overrunning them at the bottom of the hill (I was not going to pass them because I knew that the road would turn up immediately after crossing the Sandy River, and they’d just pass me again after that point,) then another plunge down to the Little Sandy River, and then an amazingly unpleasant climb up the bluffs out of the Bull Run watershed. An unpleasant climb out up the bluffs in my dump gear at 5mph, being passed by everyone and their aged grandmothers, and with the now-expected collection of incredulous commentary about my bicycle.
And then I went screaming downhill off that point of land, and ended up with an average speed of just barely > 15km/h (18.55 km/h in 1h04 travel time, plus about 10 minutes for donuts) for the leg from Meinig Park to the rest stop at Fireside Retreat.
By this time, my legs were more than slightly tired, and any substantial upgrades were pretty much guaranteed to force me to stop and rest along them. So I parked myself at this rest stop and took full advantage of the food they had put on, and then hopped back on the bicycle and headed off towards Springdale and points west.
Act Six – The other side of Oxbow Park
When I left this rest stop, it was still cloudy and cold. The clouds to the west were a little bit frayed, and some blue sky was flirting with being visible, but everything was still socked in. And it was all downgrade from the rest stop to where Gordon Creek Road came down to the Sandy River opposite of the camping side of Oxbow Park.
I was so cold coming down that hill (~220 meter descent) that my shivers were shaking the bicycle. And then I hit the bottom, started going up the short ramp on the other side of the park (not really that short – it was ~100 meters uphill, but it felt a lot shorter than the two big climbs on the other side of the last rest stop) and *poof* the clouds rolled back, the sun came out, and it was all of a sudden really hot.
Ugh. And me in my nice black Swrve knickers.
But more importantly the sun coming out meant that the wind started picking up, and a strong steady N/NW wind was my constant and loathed companion all the rest of the way up the Columbia River. I ground my way up through Springdale, then West on the Columbia River Highway to Troutdale (leapfrogging a few of the people who had passed me earlier on the upgrades, but being passed by many more) and on into the second to last “official” rest stop at Blue Lake Park, where I scavenged some food to eat (including some “science diet” mix which didn’t appear to do anything for me. I could have eaten some of the cookie bars I’d brought along, or the bananas I’d picked up at Eagle Fern Park, but I was pretty deep in a “I’m almost home now” mood and wasn’t thinking all that clearly.
This leg (24km in 1h) was as fast as I was going to ride for the rest of the day, because an unwelcome friend appeared as soon as I rolled out of Blue Lake Park and onto Marine Drive.
Act Seven – The Wind Blows. And Blows. And, oh G-d, Blows.
It’s not as if I wasn’t warned about the headwind. The weather forecast had been indecisive about how cloudy is was going to be on Sunday, but all of the forecasters were quite certain that strong winds were going to be blowing from the N/NW. So for the next 1h09, I crept the 25km upwind to the rest stop at Smith & Bybee Lakes, being passed by paceline after paceline, each one moving just fast enough so there was no chance I could jump on and be dragged upwind. It was not particularly helpful that the official route followed the Marine Drive trail, which dodges left and right of Marine Drive in such a way that it picks up more wind than Marine Drive does.
By the time I reached I5, I was parched enough so I had to stop at a fast food restaurant to get a soda just to get coolth and sugars into me. And after doing that (and waiting round in line long enough for my legs to start cramping up – oops!) I was able to stagger onwards to the stop at Smith & Bybee Lakes, where they had watermelon, water, and I managed to pick up my last sarcastic comment ofthe day (I flipped down the kickstand and got a “oooh, I’d forgotten those things even existed!” from some gentleman on a plastic gofast bike. Sigh, yes, I know. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that nobody commented on my stripy socks or toe clips.)
Act Eight – the wind will blow me slowly southwards(?), and then I’m done with the group ride.
I was hoping that the wind would blow me southwards, because my usual route up here does have the wind at my back when I leave Kelley Point, but the Portland Century Route creeps along the railroad and sheltered streets, so by the time the wind hit it was an unpleasant crosswind.
Except for the descent down Greeley I didn’t make any faster than 16mph, so I just put my head down and ground through north Portland, across the Broadway Bridge, and up Broadway to the end of the group ride loop, finishing this leg (16.5km) in 44 minutes and the century ride in about 7h45 (saddle time) / 9h30 (start to stop time.) I then turned my bicycle around and headed towards home, where I could sit down and figure out how much more I had to ride before I got my R200 finished.
Act Nine – Home again Home again clickity clack.
I wanted to get home quickly so I could get some lemonade and tea (not necessarily in that order,) drop off the donuts, and finish my loop. But I didn’t want to deal with traffic or any steep grades. So I dropped down Broadway to Madison, Madison to the Hawthorne Bridge, and then back onto the Springwater Trail to Sellwood, and from there on city streets to home. I was very tired, and needed tea, so it took me 30 minutes to go the 10km from PSU to home, at which point I collapsed in a heap and refused to move until I had sufficiently re-tea’d and lemonaded myself.
But I needed to ride another 16km, and I needed to get it done before 19:14, so my family made up a shopping list, put me back on the bicycle, and gave me a shove out the door.
Act Ten – Math is hard, let’s go shopping!
If I ride south to Tacoma, west to the Springwater Trail, north to Division, and east to the big big big store it’s a little less than 18km round trip. I rolled out the door at 17:39, got down to the store at 18:00, finished with the shopping at ~18:30, and then crept very very slowly back up the line to home, arriving at my front door at 18:57 after travelling 17.5km, or a grand total of ~202km in 13h13.
It’s a sign that I was a bit tired that I spent a good part of the return trip trying to remember if the randonneur deadline for a R200 was 13h or 13h30, and then trying to compute the deadline based on a 15kph minimum speed. But I looked it up, and I made it
despite spending approximately 4 hours on my butt at various controls and side trips.
The GPS, which is not completely trustworthy, claims 3304 meters of climbing and 10400 kcals consumed to push me around the loop. My achilles tendons, which are a bit more trustworthy, think it’s at least 2200 meters of climbing.
Postscript – the aftermath
On Monday I didn’t get out of the house until fairly late, but did a short loop which stretched out my achilles tendon and made it happy again. But yesterday, just before I was going to do out on the bicycle, I managed to sneeze and pull a muscle in my chest (WTF? WTF-F?), which dropped me completely offline for the day. Sigh I can run a 200km loop and end up with no aches and pains, but a simple sneeze takes me completely offline.
—orc Wed Aug 19 00:28:23 2009
Aug 16, 2009
When I was on my way home after the first leg of today’s 202km loop, I spotted the 1202 scooting down the track towards me. I was somewhat fried (thanks to the intervention of a series of multiples-of-100 meter ramps) so by the time the I’d gotten the camera out the offending Eng! had already passed me by and was receding northbound.
That didn’t stop me from taking pictures.
—orc Sun Aug 16 21:45:25 2009
Aug 15, 2009
A P&W eng! switches tank cars on the Astoria Branch.
—orc Sat Aug 15 21:08:48 2009
Aug 14, 2009
The famous paleontologist at work.
—orc Fri Aug 14 22:26:27 2009
Aug 13, 2009
The southbound Coast Starlight (led by a pair of twinkies and a F69phi) creeps past a piece of MOW equipment just north of the ex-Portland Traction overpass on the Springwater Trail.
—orc Thu Aug 13 22:32:11 2009
When I was waiting for the southbound Coast Starlight to come by this afternoon, I watched a parade of Yellow Menace MOW equipment roll off the Oswego branch and north towards Brooklyn Yard. Most of the equipment was short enough to be able to fit into the frame even with my 55mm lens, but this four-car (plus the flatbed truck locomotive) ballast cleaning unit was just too big to fit, at least without some software support. So I took for pictures and stitched them together with autostitch (via the open source ®©™ Hugin program, which has a traditionally incomprehensible open source interface, but which has the decided advantages of (a) my not needing to build up a Windows box to run it or (b) pay money for a single-machine license to run it.)
The Pentax was running low on film (I’d already wedged 200 exposures onto the rated-for-160 exposure flash card) so I didn’t wave the camera around to get photos of the upper right and lower left of the frame. Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow and get those missing pictures and fill in the remaining parts of the image (yes, it’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow – this will merely be an additional challenge for autostitch to work with.)
If you look closely, you can see the places where autostitch had its tiny brain explode due to the movement of the train between photos.
—orc Thu Aug 13 22:15:52 2009
Aug 12, 2009
Discount has been pushed up to version 1.5.2 with code changes to deal with two long-standing but obscure bugs. One bug is with how I implemented >%div% blocks (you could not have two consecutive >%div% blocks because the second one would be sucked up and treated as part of the first (with a bonus %div% in the output),) and the other dates back from the beginning of time when I misread the spec and thought that the link part of a footnote link only counted at the start of a block. This was not the case, and thus perfectly valid (if cosmetically horrid code) like
This is a paragraph
[footnote]: http://weblog.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/2009/08/12/000
that contains [this link][footnote].
Would not produce the proper (or expected?) output of:
This is a paragraph
that contains this link.
But would instead produce something along the lines of
This is a paragraph [footnote]: http://weblog.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/2009/08/12/000 that contains [this link][footnote].
Well, I rewrote some of the parser to handle this, and now it works like the reference implementation. Note that there are still some differences between my implementation and the reference implementation; the reference will not treat [footnote]: as a footnote link if the body of the link contains any whitespace, while I will accept whitespace. I am still thinking about whether this is a defect I have to correct, or if it’s a feature (like not parsing _’s in the middle of a word) that I want to keep.
But it’s New Code! and it doesn’t appear to break annotations or any of my test scripts, so it’s ready to make your machine explode, catch fire, and sink to the middle of the earth!
—orc Wed Aug 12 14:21:35 2009
Aug 09, 2009
I have been having a devil of a time actually motivating myself to get out on the line before it’s late in the afternoon, but I believe that I’ve managed to find a way to do it. It’s hard to drag myself out the door in the morning when it’s COLD and DARK (or it’s about to be HOT and DARK) just for the sake of being on the bicycle (despite knowing full well that when I’m actually on the silly device I’m perfectly happy to ride until I run out of sunlight or the patience of my family,) but a chance encounter with a Tri-Met “BUS STOP CLOSED FOR PROVIDENCE BRIDGE PEDAL” reroute sign yesterday afternoon gave me a chance to test what would happen if I put some money on the deal.
It cost me US$35 to register for the bridge pedal yesterday, but if I was going to actually take advantage of the bridge pedal I would have to actually wake up at 5am so I could get out the door and on my way up to the Fremont Bridge for a 7am departure (otherwise the US$35 would be completely wasted, because the website helpfully said “NO REFUNDS AT ALL, SO THERE!”)
It seems to have worked
This is not a perfect solution, for a couple of reasons
- I ended up being unable to go to sleep the night before because I was trying to figure out how fast I would have to ride to do the loop twice (based on the less-than-useful FAQ helpfully mentioning that the Fremont bridge would be returned to automobile traffic at 11:30. The FAQ could have mentioned that the Sellwood loop was going to be shut down as soon as the last full-route rider came off the bridge and turned north towards Macadam.) I did figure that if I could do the loop in less than 2h30 (I actually took 2h40, but that included a reroute because the Yellow Menace had parked a train across Naito Parkway, and if I was going to do a twice around I would have cut off at Russell St and avoided that obstacle completely) I could have /barely/ cleared the bridge before it turned back into i405. But by the time I’d figured all that out, it was already midnight, so it left me with about 4 hours of sleep before I had to wake up and start paddling northwards.
- TOO MANY PEOPLE and the xtracycle does not have the sort of nimble handling it takes
to quickly thread through clots of people moving half my speed.
- NO TEA – I rode up to the starting point, did the entire loop in one go (aside from one photo stop to see the 8:15am northbound Cascades come by on the east side, one stop to get a panorama at the top of the Fremont Bridge, and a third stop on Interstate to get a few pictures of EPT #501 before heading towards home and a pot of hot tea) so by the time I hopped onto the Springwater Trail for the last stretch towards home I was feeling really untearrific.
Next time around I’m going to have to set aside the material components for hot tea the night before, so I can have a few cups before I stumble out the door at 0dark30. And at least the next blackmail attempt conveniently routes right past Joe’s Donuts about halfway out, so I can refill with more tea and/or coffee, plus pick up some donuts to bring back home. (It is a cargo bike, after all, and I’ve carried donuts the long way home a few times already.)
—orc Sun Aug 9 23:04:47 2009
When I was finishing up a 50 mile loop this morning, I spotted this little green GE steeplecab switching at the grain elevator just north of the Broadway bridge. So I dodged out of traffic (“traffic”, in this case, was approximately 100 million other bicycles,) dragged out the camera, and started taking pictures. According to the name stenciled on the cab, this is Portland Traction #501, another non-electric, but this one isn’t from GM.
—orc Sun Aug 9 13:51:12 2009
Aug 08, 2009
A Mourning Dove sits on the railing at my parent’s apartment and wonders what I’m doing with the glassy clicking thing in my hands.
—orc Sat Aug 8 21:20:26 2009
Aug 07, 2009
A Beaverton-bound train emerges from the tunnel under i205 into the greenspace just north of Gateway Transit Center.
—orc Fri Aug 7 22:48:15 2009
Aug 04, 2009
The best was downtown this morning for jury duty and managed to snap a picture of a pair of SD70s running down the (ex-)transit mall. A Palm Treo is not exactly what you’d call a sophisticated camera, but the resulting picture has a sort of an old-timey flavo(u)r to it.
—orc Tue Aug 4 22:07:06 2009
Aug 03, 2009
Discount has, in quick order after 1.5 was released, been pushed up to version 1.5.1, because of a bug that Michael Granger discovered in the html output for tables. It turns out that I’d transposed the </tbody> and </table> at the end of a table, so the </tbody> was (illegally, at least according to the spec, but not according to the firefox rendering engine) ended up outside the table.
Oh, bother.
To sweeten the pot, I’ve briefly documented the table extension in mkd_extensions.7, and I’ve added a new compile flag – MKD_NOTABLES – that disables table processing if you really don’t want it.
It’s almost a no-new-code version of New Code!, with only NOTABLES standing between it and the release being a pure bugfix. If 1.5 hasn’t exploded on you, 1.5.1 is probably as safe as can be, and won’t kill your machine any worse than earlier versions.
—orc Mon Aug 3 23:47:37 2009
Aug 02, 2009
A pair of trolleys loop over (part of) i205 as they turn around to get into Gateway Transit Center at around 5pm today.
—orc Sun Aug 2 22:06:43 2009
I took a short trip to the hardware store to get some charcoal and topsoil, loaded them up, and then got to spend the entire trip home arguing that no, the bicycle should not just turn upside down out in the middle of the street. (I don’t know that placing heavy loads in the saddlebags causes shimmy, but I suspect it does. If I had to buy this bicycle all over again, I’d not even bother to get the saddlebags – I’d just get a couple of the xtracycle horizontal rack things, then sew up a pair of mesh saddlebags by myself and use them as wrappers to keep the load from tipping off the horizontal rack things.)
—orc Sun Aug 2 20:57:24 2009
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