Monthly Archive for September, 2007

This morning I went for a bike ride along the Minuteman trail. My intent was to check out the part near me that I didn’t know existed, instead I would up going all the way to the end. A few miles in I came upon a girl who was going at my same pace, and I ended up following her all the way out to Bedford. I stopped for a drink of water and then turned around, only to find that she had just started back as well. The path was beautiful: amazing foliage and great weather and light traffic (at least at the beginning). I just sort of kept going, with the mysterious rider ahead of me urging me on, going the perfect speed, passing all the slow pokes and joggers and people with their kids, until a few miles from the end I stopped at Trader Joe’s for some groceries and she kept riding, disappearing into the distance.

The ride felt easy, but I guess by the end I was more tired than I realized, because a quarter mile from home I ran into a railing and fell over, which was pretty embarrassing, and then a few hours after I got back I fell asleep. Still, 20 miles and no aches or pains (besides where I hit the ground), so I guess I must be getting into better shape after all.

Photo by presta

It’s “in beta” but they’re offering high-quality 256kbps VBR MP3s, album artwork, and *no DRM*. They have a ton of music, most of it priced at $0.89 per track and $8.99 per album. They have a simple little downloader app that automatically adds the music to iTunes (or Windows Media Player). Since it is DRM free you can put it on any portable device or computer you’d like and even share songs with friends and family. Except for selection, Amazon’s new MP3 store is superior in every way to the iTunes Store.

I’ve been growing dissatisfied with the design of this blog for a while now, but was never able to come up with a new design that is both visually pleasing, more functional, and, most importantly, easy to implement.

A few weeks ago I came up with a design I’m really happy with. I designed it with the powerful and customizable K2 theme in mind, and am actually sorta surprised that I’ve been so successful in overlaying my design and functionality on top of that very powerful but visually restricted theme.

The new design is going to bring some important improvements: a wider page, larger, more readable text, and, my favorite, a much better way of posting and displaying links, quotations, pictures, and the like. I think that putting all the different types of content I like to post on an equal visual footing is going to be really useful. Unfortunately it means I need to go back through my voluminous archives and reformat a ton of posts to match the new way of doing things. Which is going to take some time.

Still, with any luck, I hope to have the new design up and running in the next week or so, even if some of the older entries aren’t going to display properly (at first). Stay tuned, its an exciting time.