Something quite interesting (slightly scientific) for the start into the new year! This kind of stuff fascinates me đ
Found at: Beads Are Weird as Hell – Cheezburger.
Yearly Archives: 2013
New design and winter
In the last 2 days I already tested the Software Update on my laptop and while doing that I discovered the new 2014 design and I liked it.
Today I migrated my live website and used the new design. While updating, I also changed the color scheme to winter blue, like I always do in December.
The winter-picture in the “headline” was taken in April 2004. We (my mother, sister and I) were in Nesselwang, AllgĂ€u, on vacation at that time. The picture shows “Reichenbach”, a vacation estate where we had booked a house. We arrived on a Friday and in the week before (in April!) it had snowed almost one fresh meter of snow!
Cathedral of Barcelona
After the spanisch course in the morning, we had a guided tour through the old part of the town, called the gothic quarter, which is close to the old cathedral.
The autumn start with gray rain-weather
During the bike tours last weekend the nice autumn colors in the trees, with yellow, brown and red, already became visible. I wanted to change the style of my web-site, but forgot. Today there is totally gray rain weather, so there is time for “admin stuff” ;-(
Bike Season 2013 finished
For me the bike reason goes from October 1st to September 30th. So today was the last tour of the season, all tours still coming in 2013 will count to the season 2014 as “winter training”.
So whatâs the statistic for the year?
- At the end of December and in January, a couple of times working on the Ergometer in the living room, 960km to be more exact. Not enough to really conserve fitness into the spring, so I had to start slowly again.
- Road-bike:
- 5225 km in total, 57 tours, average 91,7km per tour;
comparing to last year, a bit less km, fewer tours, but longer tours. - In total 210 hours of riding time; 25,22km/h total average speed
- 43.300 meters total altitude
- 34 Tours < 100km (Ă 70,1 km; 555m altitude, 25,19 km/h)
- 23 Tours > 100km (Ă 123,6 km; 1063m altitude, 25,26 km/h)
- 5225 km in total, 57 tours, average 91,7km per tour;
- Mountainbike: only used 4 times, 130km
Already looking forward to the next season (and hopefully that starts on coming Thursday) đ and a “golden autumn”.
Link to my biking-page
Schneier on Security: Metadata Equels Surveillance
In case you need to explain the topic to someone… Bruce Schneier just wrote an excellent short summary on why it is not “just meta-data”.
Schneier on Security: Metadata Equals Surveillance.
Thanks, Bruce. Last time I tried to explain it took 5 minutes and still wasn’t clear. Yes, it’s just so simple!
The bitterness of poor quality remains …
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”
Another quote from Benjamin Franklin… Wisdom from a long time ago, valid still today.
via Quote Vadis – Quotes, Inspiration, Wisdom.
Black Forest Tour
A few weeks ago on a Saturday tour, we found out that we have a common week of vacation. We, that is Brigitte and Hartmut Krist-Priem, we were on Mallorca in spring this year. So… what not ride a black-forest tour? Like ordered, the sun came out today, after two cold days, and presented a nice summer day. After my weekly biking announcement, another cyclist joined, Michael Strang.
So we started out at 10, still a little cold. After the first downhill, the first real UPhill section, from Station Teinach to Sommenhardt helped to warm up. The typical black forest terrain, up, down, up, down, … helps to stay warm further đ
We reached Simmersfeld early enough, shortly after 1pm. I had announce that here we can decide how to continue… as we felt OK, we decided for the slightly longer tour. So we took the downhill to Enzklösterle, nice and freshly paved, I was here 2-3 years ago the last time. The uphill via the “Poppeltal” is not steep, rolling upwards easily pedaling.
After the next downhill part, we reach Erzgrube, where we can refresh with some cake, coffee, and typical local mixed fruit drink (“Schorle”). Re-charged, we continue the fast way down to Altensteig, Nagold, Wildberg… we had enough hills now. Just a last climb via GĂŒltlingen to Deckenpfronn and then rolling home.
In summary: 161,9km with 24,5 kmh average 1545m altitude.
I think all of us liked it, for sure I did! đ
(German version including GPS-Track also on our RSG-Website)
Migrating the multi-languange plugin
In the last 2 days I did some maintenance work on my Web-site (as I’m on vacation đ ). About 2 years ago, when I started using WordPress, after an evaluation phase, I started to use qtranslate as WP-Plugin. It did exactly what I wanted, lightweight, and well supported, making it easy to blog in multiple languages.
About 6 months later the author obviously got a new job and had no time anymore for the plugin maintenance. Soon after the problems started, and it became a pain. With WP 3.6 it will stop working altogether… so I had to migrate.
So I had to go back and evaluate plugins and decided for WPML. I bought the “CMS” Version and since yesterday work on the migration of the live-site. Sunday/Monday I did several test migrations on my laptop to verify what needs to be done.
Conclusion: it works, but the migration causes a lot of manual cleanup work.
Current status: the “pages” should all be OK (meaning status as before), but the blog-entries are not yet “clean”. Some of the German entries contain all 3 languages beneath each other, but the entries do not show up at all in their respective translated versions. This needs to be cleaned manually.
If I have time and feel like it after finishing the work, I may write a more complete report, how the migration worked step by step.
Black-Forest Tour via Altensteig and Simmersfeld
The tour today: from the bike-club in Böblingen via Ehningen, Kuppingen, Mötzingen, Iselshausen, Unter-/Oberschwandorf, Egenhausen to Altensteig. On the road downhills from Egenhausen to Altensteig there is a great view on Altensteig, good opportunity for a small break and calorie-intake in form of a Banana.
Afterwards down to Altensteig, but immediately up the hill again via Ăberberg to Simmersfeld. From there onwards via Aichhalden, Hofstett and Neuweiler to Bad Teinach. From there it’s one last uphill section via Wildberg and GĂŒltlingen to Deckenprfonn… and then rolling easily back home via GĂ€rtringen and Ehningen.
After the flat but very fast tour yesterday (Saturday), this was a pretty heavy tour today, pretty tired legs in the end. But it’s always very, very nice in the black forest, worth it, every kilometer: 127,6 km with 1340 meter altitude and avg speed 24,2 kmh.