• New Maps Marker Plugin Test

    Posted on by Don

    Here’s another map plugin, called “Maps Marker.” This one is also based on Leaflet, but seems to have many more features, at least at first. Here’s a simple map:

    [mapsmarker layer=”2″]

    This may take some work to bring it up to speed: you have to load your own marker icons etc, and many features (e.g., GPX tracks) are unavailable, unless you get the Pro version — at €249 for the license, no thanks! Meantime, the actual markers didn’t even show up on the map (though they did show up on the post preview), let alone the pop-ups — again, this may be a problem with my theme, though explicitly creating a map for one specific marker does show up (sans pop-up or tooltip):

    [mapsmarker marker=”3″]

    It looked for a second like we were getting close, but still no cigar.

    UPDATE: I added some experimental CSS to this post, which at least made the pop-up content show itself more reasonably.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged

  • New Leaflet Plugin Test

    Posted on by Don

    I’ve decided to make my own maps here for posting about rides, and maybe for some other mapping tasks I might want to do, so I’m experimenting with map plugins. The first one is something called “Leaflet Map,” let’s see how this looks:

    Hmmm, seems OK, but there aren’t all that many options straight out of the box — I especially would like to be able to center the map, for one thing, and the map design (on the back end) seems pretty text based. Default tile server is standard OpenStreetMap, but there is an option for Mapbox (with a place for your API key), as well as other map tile providers — though I don’t see how to set the API key for anything other than Mapbox. This could be a problem for, say, ThunderForest tiles, which are my favorite map tiles and also require a key.

    Meanwhile, try clicking on the marker: a pop-up appears, but the pop-up is apparently only one letter in width, and its background is transparent, and I don’t see any easy way to change these. (These may be due to issues with my WP theme, but I like my theme and I don’t want to change it.) Like I said: Hmmm…

    If I keep using this map plugin, I may have to build a custom container for it, div tags and custom css, with a place for titles, etc. I have other plugins to try before it comes to that.

    UPDATE: I added some custom CSS for this one post, and it seemed to at least allow the pop-up content to show up. So there’s that…


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Memorial Day Fly-By

    Posted on by Don
    old cemetery with city in background
    St Michael’s Cemetery, with Bethlehem Steel in the background and Martin Tower in the distance.

    Took a rest day today, as Anne did a road ride with Julie G. I had my party yesterday, when I joined a few friends in an MTB pub crawl: Riding up the hill through South Bethlehem and into SMB, out to Lost Tavern and Hop Hill in Hellertown, then taking Black River Rd and SME to Yergey’s and Funk’s in Emmaus. We did some more riding in Allentown, but the bars were closing — it was Sunday afternoon — so we took the towpath home. Here’s the first half, before my Garmin died:

    Pretty good time, even if I did feel sketchy and tentative in the more technical offroad stuff. Cheers!

    three men drink beer at outdoor table
    Dave, Scott and Lou enjoy some samples.

    Reading: I’m almost done with Jeff VanderMeer’s book of short stories, The Third Bear. This is working out a bit like N.K. Jemisin: after reading an awesome trilogy, I picked up the author’s freshman effort and found it a chore to read. I’m finding that VanderMeer is big on weirdness — I’d read before bed, and every night I’d finish one story and say “Well, that was fucked up.” — but he isn’t really into closure or answers, and in a short story format, where things keep starting over, over and over again, it wears thin.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings day by day the sporting life

  • Rebuilding My Empire

    Posted on by Don

    I just got my new eyeglasses in the mail, from Zenni Optical. I love them! What I love best — aside from the fact that I can see again: the prescription hasn’t changed much, but my old glasses were pretty scratched up — is that one frame cost $9.00, and the other cost $6.00. (Stylish too, they’re not low-priced dogs.) There were other costs in there, total cost was probably ~$60 each but that’s still pretty hard to beat.

    I also ordered a new thru-axle adapter for the bike rack, one that is the correct size for my bike; this should come with in a few days. I am now also contemplating new summer sandals — my Tevas are getting a bit worn — but that’s for another day.

    Anyway, carry on…

     


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  • Moar Books!!

    Posted on by Don

    I picked up Authority, the second in Jeff VanDermeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, a few weeks ago at the library. This one sort of picks up where Annihilation left off, but focuses more on the moribund bureaucracy guarding and studying the mysterious region, and reads a bit like a spy story. The main protagonist is brought in to direct the Southern Reach as an all-around fixer, but he’s more of a hapless pawn in some an inter-agency turf war. Maybe it’s a spy-story trope, but this character reminds me of Milgrim in William Gibson’s novels: the same sort of wistful, daydreaming victim, with the same sort of personal weaknesses and demons, and the same sort of occasional, non-lateral competence. The book is nowhere near as creepy as the first one, but then in the final 50 pages or so it more than makes up the difference.

    I also got Persepolis Rising, the latest installment in the “Expanse” series. I am having a bit of trouble getting into this one: compared to “The Southern Reach” it seems prosaic, the language is a bit dull or stilted, and the story, which will no doubt have a lot of plot twists, already seems formulaic. I put this on the back burner for now.

    Acceptance — he final book in the “Southern Reach” trilogy — became available just before we went to Durham, and I read it while we were down there. Again, this book was a bit different from the others, in style and in theme, but it picks up where the second left off. There are also a few flashbacks, “explaining” the origins of Area X and the actions of the Southern Reach. Again, super-spooky, and also a great read.

    (After having read all three books, I see where some of the things in the movie came from, but it still bugs me how poor the movie was compared to what might have been.)

    NEXT UP: We made our traditional visit to The Regulator Bookshop while we were in Durham, and I now have two more books on deck: Ron Chernow’s Grant, and something called The Joy of Mathematics.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings

  • Just An Experiment

    Posted on by Don

    Here is a test of an embedded Strava activity:

    There’s noting special about this particular run, I just picked it as an example to see what it looked like in my browser.

    Here’s another example of an embedded map, this time from Google Maps:

    Again, there is nothing special about this map — in fact, I’d be wary of using it, as it’s probably years out of date — I just picked it out from a bunch I made once. The point is to notice that the embedded map showed up.

    One more embedded map, this time from Ride With GPS:

    They all just seem to work, right? Contrast these with this one from Garmin:

    If you have anything other than Firefox, you may see the embedded activity (inside the box I added for clarity), but if you’re using (a more modern version of) Firefox you should just see a gray line and a blank space in the box — Firefox is blocking what it now considers an insecure script coming from Garmin. I talked to Garmin tech support, and they say it’s a Firefox problem — that is, their insecure script is really a Firefox problem — and they won’t be fixing it.

    This screws up about a half dozen pages here, and a few more on my old blog, and maybe even some other websites where I’ve embedded Garmin rides over the years. I think I may be going back and re-doing my ride pages in RideWithGps. Ugh, work… Oh well, lesson (re)learned: avoid counting on Garmin, especially their website.

    UPDATE (12/3/2018): Well, whaddaya know — now it works!


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk the sporting life

  • Back From North Carolina

    Posted on by Don

    We just got back, this afternoon, from a trip to visit Emmi & Kyle, see their new house and help them paint the interior. Drove down last Thursday, then did four days of camping in their new place — they haven’t moved in yet; the only furniture was a card table (with four folding chairs) and an inflatable mattress — but we got four rooms prepped and painted, and we even managed a little bit of sightseeing, dining out, etc.

    We  also did a bit of exploring: their new neighborhood is next to a preserve along the Eno River, so one night we walked a trail to the river, which led to a large and popular swimming hole. After we were done yesterday we went back for a well-deserved dip. Our work was indoors with the air-conditioning on, but it was still hot: the weather down there was upper 90’s and sunny. Sweltering…

     


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • In Memory of Two American Badasses

    Posted on by Don

    Yesterday was some awesome mountain biking at Merli-Sarnoski Park, just outside Carbondale. I rode up with Scott S, and we met Mike K and Renee E at the park. This place is pure northern Pennsylvania, hardwoods-and-granite singletrack, with rocky surface and plenty of climbing. Those guys rode like the monsters that they are, and I managed to hang on the back…

    Merli-Sarnoski State Park is named after Gino Merli and Joseph Sarnoski, two local guys who both won the Medal of Honor in WW2. I found no biographical information about these guys on the park’s website, which I thought was strange, so I Googled them:

    • Gino Merli (1924-2002), one of the inspirations for The Greatest Generation, left high school and fought his way from Omaha Beach to the Battle of the Bulge. Along the way, in Belgium, he covered his comrades with machine gun fire as they retreated from a German attack. His position was overrun several times — he feigned death as he was bayonetted, then when the Germans moved forward he got up and shot everything standing. Twice. When the Americans counterattacked the Germans surrendered, and his comrades found him still at his gun, surrounded by enemy dead. After the war he returned to finish high school, and later in life he worked as an advocate for veterans.
    • Joseph Sarnoski (1915-1943) was the son of a coal miner. He joined the Army in the 1930’s, became a bombardier, and when war came he was assigned to lead training and practice missions in Australia, where he started volunteering for other missions. In June 1943, with three days left before being sent home, he joined a B-17 flight crew on an unescorted photo-reconnaissance mission over Rabaul, where they were attacked by Japanese fighters. (Photography means the plane has to be flown straight and smooth over its target — no evasive maneuvers, they’d just have to fight it out as the cameras roll.)  Blasted from his station and mortally wounded by 20mm cannon fire, he crawled back to his guns and continued firing, while the mission continued, until he died at his position.

    It seems fitting to recognize them here, and it was good to remember them as we rode in their park. I have no idea what they would have thought of mountain biking, but I’m glad that the Merli-Sarnoski trails have not been dumbed down; they are as badass as the men they were named for.

    Anyway, back to our ride: it was really fun, and (luckily) uneventful. There were no serious crashes, no mechanical problems; the only mishap was when I looked at our ride time and distance (seven miles in three hours, according to my GPS), and panicked because Scott said the ride was 20 miles long — we had another six hours of riding to go! I actually volunteered to bail, so they could finish the ride at a more reasonable pace. They talked me into continuing, and the pace picked up, though not by much, as the trails became a bit easier in the second half — and then, just like that, the ride was over. My GPS read 12.9 miles total riding, but since it calculates distance by connecting the dots between location measurements, it was cutting corners and under-reporting distance on the twisty trails. Well, live and learn.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Two Books And Some Living History

    Posted on by Don

    We just got back from a mid-week vacation to Colonial Williamsburg. Verdict: meh. The buildings and the grounds were nice enough, but for all the fuss I’ve seen it get over the years, I would have thought the place was much bigger, and much more active. We were there mid-week of course, and maybe also off-season, and that may have been all that was really going on, but it did seem somehow smaller than its reputation. (It didn’t help that the surrounding area was a sort of corporate/suburban strip-mall hell, with not particularly walkable streets — biking wasn’t much better, despite the faux “bicycle friendly” sharrows in the gutters — and a dearth of decent, non-chain restaurants.)

    There was also a fairly strong whiff of self-congratulatory propaganda throughout the historic district, of the “we have inherited the virtues of our all-wise WASP ancestors” sort, which had to also contend with more modern understandings of Colonial history — slavery and the African American experience, Native Americans and genocide, and so on. This led to a Disneyfied narrative, with much use of the passive voice, and a defensive tone to gloss over the tough parts: “The colonists did this-and-that, and were welcomed by the Indians. But then war came… Did you know, a slave could buy his freedom? Also, slavery was OK in Africa…”

    This may have just been the result of our off-peak visit, so that we were interacting with newer or less skillful guides. But then, we also visited the nearby Jamestown Settlement, which was basically an indoor-outdoor museum, with permanent exhibits, and the place was actually worse — it fairly dripped with that self-congratulatory/defensive tone.

    Reading #1: Annihilation

    I had Annihilation (by Jeff VanderMeer) on hold at the library, and it arrived in time for our trip. This book was much better than the recent movie, and so creepy and suspenseful it gave me — well, not nightmares exactly, but some very strange dreams… The story is a little more complicated, and a little more well-built than the movie (this parallels my experience with Altered Carbon), and there is more suspense (and less action/horror) than in the movie, but the plots pretty much follow the same outline: a group of women, on an expedition to a mysterious abandoned region in the southern US, are slowly overwhelmed by the weird phenomena they encounter. Great book, first in award-winning trilogy, and I am going to get the second book from the library today.

    Reading #2: The Big Sleep

    This was the first of Raymond Chandler’s “Phillip Marlowe” detective novels; I have it in an anthology that I bought around 1992. I’ve read it many times over the years, the last time being probably more than a decade ago: it has not aged well in that last decade. The novel is still a pretty good read, and because of the quality of the writing it’s a cut above your typical detective story, but the basic plot, the basic behavior of the characters, is outlandish by modern standards: blackmail and killings are involved as secondary crimes, but the primary criminalities are pornography and homosexuality. It’s almost quaint, and the underlying “of course it’s evil, he’s a fag!” tough-guy moralizing grates, and comes across — especially knowing something about the author, who was a bit of a mama’s boy — as a sort of Walter Mitty overcompensation. Looking back now, the most criminal activity (other than the shoot-em-ups) is all the drunk driving done by the protagonist. As Anne said — and this could apply as well to Williamsburg, reconstructed around the same time that The Big Sleep was written: different times, different mores.


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