Evenings Are Kind of Nice Without the Internet

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The bus gets me home every night at 5:45 PM. I usually start dinner about 5:55 PM, and eat around 6:30. Then I usually sit back and listen to Marketplace on NPR, then walk down to the Bethlehem Public Library, which is 6/10th of a mile from my home. Then I play or work on the Internet until 8:45 PM when the library starts shutting down. From there, I walk home, then if the weather is nice, I do a 2 ½ mile walk around the High School, finally getting home around 10 to 10:15 PM. I then work on the blog for a bit, make some maps up, or do some coding until 11 PM, which is bed time.

Delaware Ave

It actually works quite well. I get a fair bit of walking and physical exercise in during this time period. The Internet is fast at the library and free. The library has comfortable desks to work at, and my Linux-based laptop is secure and works well. It’s probably even more secure then having Internet at home, because my laptop isn’t connected to the Internet most of the time, reducing the risk of hacking or virus greatly. Every time I go to the library, I make sure my laptop’s software is fully up to date – which is easy with Ubuntu’s apt-get.

End Navigable Waters

Come summer, I probably will spend several nights a week down at the town park reading, rather then at the library with the laptop. That’s always nice for a change. Maybe by summer, I will be able to find an open signal out in the parking lot by my place, and I can set up a lawn chair in the evening, after reading and my evening walk. If not, I don’t mind missing out on the Internet from time to time. I enjoy the quiet to read, write, or work on maps.

Between walking down to the library, working on my laptop at the library, the evening walk, and dinner, I'm rarely home for more then half hour doing nothing.

Still Working Out Bugs in the Blog

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It’s winter. That means heavy renovations on blog are underway. You might describe it as being the a South Mall style-project, where the whole blog is operating on planks and orange caution tape and under heavy construction for months on end.

While I use the core of WordPress for my blog these days, all of the media code is written and managed by myself. Unfortunately, the code is pretty complicated with a mixture of AJAX powering the interface. I am increasingly using common libraries to reduce the amount of coding – such as jQuery, but there is always room for bugs to crop up, and for things to go wrong.

YOmDuDVOnce the weather gets nice, I will give up on messing with the guts of the blog. But for now, while the weather is cold and miserable out, I figure I should renovate it as much as possible. It can be a bit difficult to live test at home without the Internet, but I do get a lot more coding done without the distractions of the Internet – even if at times I have to use my clunky, minimally smart phone to find out answers to coding questions I might have.

The good news is the winter will soon be over, both outside and on the blog. Like roadwork, most all work will cease on the internals of the blog, and I will be spending my time in the wilderness.

Every time I think I have found all the bugs in a code, another one pops up. It's more then a little annoying.

Good Morning! Happy Friday.

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If you look at the calendar, today is February 28th, the last day of the most depressing and awful month of the year. One thing about the seasons is they always come back around on the calendar. A month from now will be March 28th, and a month from there will be April 28th – when the landscape should be greening up and things will definitely be tilting their way towards spring, especially in the city.

Down Cole Hill Road

Another bright and sunny and supposedly cold day out there. Not like I ever spend much time outdoors when it’s this cold out – as I am one who gets out the bus stop only seconds before the warm pre-heated bus comes past my house. The bus takes me almost directly from my house to work in about 20 minutes – it’s actually faster then driving a car downtown by time you factor in parking – even in the garage near where I work.

When you look at the weather, you see the weather is almost 50 degrees colder today than it was a year ago, when we had one of several warmer winters. This year, we’ve moved into a more typical pattern, a bit a colder one. Weather cycles are incredibly complicated things that man doesn’t fully understand – consisting of solar activity cycles, pressure differentials, and the increased amount of energy we are releasing into the air in the form of carbon dioxide.

Another bright but cold winter day. But at least this morning, I caught the express bus downtown, and did not trip on my way down to the bus stop.