• And A Bit Of Sun

    Posted on by Don

    Anne and I did the Sojourn thing today. We volunteered to monitor, and direct the bike traffic through, a busy intersection: Race and Lehigh Streets in Catasauqua. Race Street is a tiny two-lane road, but it’s insanely busy (it handles about 18,000 vehicles a day, I looked it up when we got home), and the riders had to go about two blocks on the street, before getting into a left turn lane and making a left onto Lehigh. My job was to direct the riders to their left turn, and Anne stood on the other side of the intersection, sending them on their way.

    It was an interesting, and sometimes hair-raising, day. The ride is billed as a multi-day ride on a towpath or rail-trail, and I don’t believe that many of the riders were expecting or prepared to ride on busy streets. Some few came through like champs, obviously able to ride as part of traffic: they took their lanes, controlled their situations, and made the turn with no problem. Others were able to pedal and steer their bikes, but had no real skill or confidence in vehicular cycling: they clung to riding the gutter and were trapped there by a wall of cars when it was time to go left. Finally, there were the riders who looked only marginally competent on their bikes, and were truly frightening to watch — they mostly ended up walking across the intersection.

    Anyway, we were out there for just over four hours. Then the last riders came through, Scott S rode up from the intersection he’d been working, and the three of us biked back to Bethlehem for some Lehigh Pizza. It was a warm and sunny day, and by the time it was over I got all the sun I’d missed yesterday, and then some. I now sport a serious “farmer’s tan:” white forehead, lobster-colored everything else.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Ugh, Rain…

    Posted on by Don

    I was going to be leading a ride today, up on American Standard in Jim Thorpe, but the weather — which was beautiful yesterday, and has been really nice and sunny all week, dry even, despite repeated dismal forecasts — just isn’t cooperating today: there is much rain coming down, and the radar says it’s going to continue. Oh well, the garden could use it; I’ll reschedule for another rainy day…

    Yesterday was “errand day,” meaning I drove around and bought things. I mostly picked up cleaning and yard products, but I also hit Cutters and Saucon Valley Bikes — I got new gloves, chain lube and other standard things, and also got new brake pads. Yesterday was my first time replacing the pads on this bike, and it seemed easy enough, though I may have to bleed the brakes at some point once the pads have seated. (I never know what problems I’ll encounter, or cause, when I start messing with real bike maintenance.) I also tightened some pivots and re-slimed the tires, things that I’ve been putting off for a week or so. “Errand day” sort of morphed into “bike prep day,” but that bike was ready for today’s ride.

    Meantime, on the mapping front: I got jazzed again about trail-accessible amenities along the D&L, mainly because we did an event with CAT at the Canal Museum and met some people, including a woman representing the Hotel Bethlehem, who would like to see the trail become a tourism draw. I also found out about a B&B outside Freemansburg, sort of a “rural retreat” kind of place, just a few hundred yards from an access point. I decided to add the B&B to my “accessible amenities” database, developed a workflow to do that fairly painlessly, reorganized my QGIS project …and then decided to update both OpenStreetMap and my database with new and missing restaurants, shops etc, in Bethlehem. In other words, things sort of snowballed.

    Tomorrow, which is supposed to be a sunny day (sigh), I’ll be volunteering again, this time to help direct bike traffic for the Rails-To-Trails Alliance “Summer Sojourn,” as they navigate the missing parts of the D&L trail near Catasauqua.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • I Can’t Stop

    Posted on by Don

    Here’s one I made, using Carto:

    This looks a bit closer to usable, though I don’t see much real style control when making the map. Maybe a little studying over at Carto…

    Meanwhile, I tried one of my demo web pages that uses Leaflet, embedded in a test post, and it (the map) worked great. Unfortunately, the map itself was only one part of another website, and stuffing the entire thing into an iframe caused some display/clutter issues, so I decided to write another demo to see what I can do. This can sit and stew for a while, I think I got whatever out of my system — it’s time for a ride.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • 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…

     


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • 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