Craigslist and Google Maps

Found a pretty decent Google Maps mashup called Housingmaps.com. It puts apartment listings from Craigslist on a Google map. The site has a few options to limit the criteria that you use for searching such as price or if the listing has photos. If you are like me and pick apartments more on the area that they are located than anything else then this might really help.

Ok I'm Over It

It's come to my attention (thanks JK) that I kind of left my self open to harassment by getting so worked up about Vino. For anyone who is curious, I'm over it. I'm still pissed about all the drug shit going on at the tour this year but my depression is over. Yay.

Vino

When I got to my desk this morning there was a newspaper article sitting on my keyboard. The first thing I noticed was the triumphant grimace of Alexandre Vinokourov winning Monday's mountain stage. I thought that that stage was one of the most exciting I'd ever seen and 'Vino' is my favorite current rider in Le Tour. The second thing I noticed dropped me into a severe bout of depression. The headline of the article was "Tour rocked as 'Vino' fails test". I absolutely can't believe that *any* rider would mess around with doping or drugs after last years tour and all of the negative press that it has generated for cycling. That it was my hero, an absolutely brilliant and exciting rider, who was busted this year makes me want to walk away from watching the sport.

Cycling is such a great sport and in the past I have loved watching the Tour de France every summer, but lately it seems to have lost its spirit. The fact of the matter is that drugs are tearing the sport apart. I have read articles from "wronged" riders claiming that the process isn't fair and I have read articles from the cycling bodies claiming that they need to be harder on riders to prevent doping. It seems to me that every cyclist who is caught will deny deny deny. That only makes it tougher because if the *did* cheat, they are despicable for not owning up to it, but if they *didn't* then your heart goes out to them for getting screwed. The fact that there is no real way to know sometimes really bothers me, which is how I feel about Floyd Landis. I also feel that way a bit about Lance. There are just too many people claiming he doped that it makes me wonder. I know he never tested positive, but is that because hes clean or because he was the best cheater?

I'll watch the rest of the tour this year but now there won't be that thrill that I felt just two days ago watching Vino win that stage. My eyes teared up for him as he crossed the line and I thought it was a brilliant ride. Now it seems that I was hoodwinked into getting excited about a cheater. I guess you live and learn, but I wonder how many more times this needs to happen before all cycling fans are too jaded to be excited about even the most impressive rides. When there is always that doubt in the back of your mind about whether a rider is on the level, you can't really invest yourself as a fan. It seriously makes me bummed.

Firefox Stylish Plugin

Today for some reason I remembered that it was possible to define a custom css stylesheet for a web page in Firefox. When I was researching how to do it I found a guide on Tech Reads about the Firefox plugin Stylish. Stylish really streamlines the process of setting up custom styles for different sites. It seems that the mecca repository of those styles is located at Userstyles.org. Using this plugin and the custom styles that are out there on the net it is possible to easily customize your favorite sites on the internet. This will make you cool, I promise!

Once you have installed the Stylish plugin you can add new styles by hand or automatically at userstyles.org. I installed one for Google that is fantastic. It is a dark gray theme that looks amazing and also helps functionally by hiding advertisments in the search results. To use it you go to the user style page at userstyles.org. If you click the "Load into Styleish" button it will pop up the Stylish plugin with the custom css loaded. Go to Google and then click Preview on the Sylish plugin. If you like the way the page looks then save the style in Stylish, otherwise just hit cancel. So far I've customized Google, gMail, and YouTube. I had to customize the gmail one a bit because google had changed the name of one of their images. I can see that maintaining these custom styles could be a bit of a pain as they could potentially break every time the site is updated. I guess thats just the price you pay for being awesome though.

Boilermaker Post Race Party

In my post about the Boilermaker I did not elaborate on the post race party. The mayor of Utica always claims that the race is "9.3 miles to the best party anywher!" or something corny like that. The thing is, hes not that far off. There is something completely amazing about free beer at 9:30 in the morning after a hard 9 mile race.

Every time I've run the race its been hot and sunny, which makes the cold Saranac beer at the finish the ultimate reward for all the hard work you've done. SLU always has a large crowd that gathers there after the race to talk about the race, catch up, and do what we do best, drink! A few times I've attempted to have as many beers as the miles I'd ran (rounded up of course). I passed on that this year but I did have quite a few. Its so cool to be drinking beer at 9:30 in the morning with over 10,000 other runners. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone.

Sercice Start/Stop Script

I just wrote a few scripts to start and stop my IIS services so that I don't have to keep them running all the time. I realized that it was pointless to keep opening up the service manager and manually turning off the ones that I thought had something to do with IIS.

Starting and stopping services with a script in windows is incredibly easy and there are plenty of guides out there for it. I used one from Tech Recipies and one from TweakXP. They basically just tell you that NET START "Service" is the format for starting and NET STOP "Service" is the format for stopping. I just made a file called IIS_Shutdown.bat which consists of

@echo off
NET STOP "ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server"
NET STOP "ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Agent"
NET STOP "ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Server"
NET STOP "ColdFusion MX 7 Search Server"
NET STOP "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)"
NET STOP "World Wide Web Publishing"
NET STOP "ASP.NET State Service"
NET STOP "IIS Admin"

and to turn it back on again I made IIS_Startup.bat which consists of

@echo Off
NET START "ColdFusion MX 7 Application Server"
NET START "ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Agent"
NET START "ColdFusion MX 7 ODBC Server"
NET START "ColdFusion MX 7 Search Server"
NET START "Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)"
NET START "World Wide Web Publishing"
NET START "ASP.NET State Service"
NET START "IIS Admin"

That is all there is to it. So simple and yet I like it so much.

Boilermaker '07

Yesterday I ran the Utica Boilermaker, a 15k running race with over eleven-thousand people in it. This is the fourth Boilermaker I've run and I think it was my slowest time. As always it was hot and sunny during the race, and over all a great day!

Tora, Andy, and I left Boston on Saturday to go to Utica and met up with Tora's parents in Albany. We had some time to kill before they arrived so we went to the Apple store in Crosgates Mall to check out the iPhone. The iPhone is totally amazing and we all wished that we had one.

After we got to Utica and picked up our race packets at the Expo, Tora's parents Steve and Tracey wanted to go to the Saranac Brewery. Saranac is a big sponsor of the Boilermaker and the race ends right at the brewery. We had only planned to swing by the gift shop there but a nice tour lady convinced us to do a tour. I had done the tour once in high school with my Aunt Lois and Uncle Tom but I guess I wasn't paying much attention that time. I learned a whole lot about the brewery and had fun checking out the gigantic tanks of beer.

On Sunday we had to be down at the parking spot by 6:30 AM in order to get to the start on time. It takes a lot of coordination to get 11,000+ runners all to a starting line and they were running shuttle buses from various parts of the city to the start. We managed to snag a great parking spot near the finish and catch a shuttle down no problem.

At the start they break everyone up by their seed time and put them into starting pens. This way the faster people get out first and don't run over the walk/run type people. Tora and Tracey were in the last pen, I was in the second to last and Steve was one ahead of me. We all broke up a little before the start and headed to our places. Steve and I were planning on meeting up after the start and running together but there was such a crowd that this was like impossible.

The race went ok for me, but I was bummed at how out of shape I am. I purposefully took it easy for the first 3 miles because I didn't want to die on the last few. I actually felt pretty good going up the only major hill from 3 to 4 miles. During that push I looked up to see Jeff and Alyssa in front of me so I ran up and slapped Jeff's ass, which was excellent. Coming off the hill felt pretty good and it was nice to stretch my stride out and actually pretend that I was a runner in good shape.

After that downhill I basically went into survival mode and just cruised. I had one mile where I felt terrible because it was slightly uphill and blazing hot, so I ran an 8:54. That was humbling. I chased Dennis and Morgan for a bit which was kind of fun, but they got away from me before the finish. When I went through the line I actually felt pretty good. This didn't really surprise me because I hadn't been pushing it, just trying to finish

My mile splits were:

1. 8:03
2. 8:05
3. 8:05
4. 8:26
5. 7:09
6. 7:45
7. 8:54
8. 7:47
9. 8:25

My total time was 1:15:17, which is right what I thought it would be. I'll post about the post race party later when I get some time.

CSS sucks

My css style is not all that I thought it was. I just clicked on amurica and realized that my main content box has nothing to do with the size of the nav bar. Or maybe its the other way around.

Regardless, this means I'm going to have to dig into my template again and fix it. I know its just a stupid thing but it will bug me if I don't. I might spice up the page a bit while I'm at it. Maybe I'll put some sweet images and whatnot. Maybe not. I like it really really simple.

While I'm making a post I'd like to link an article I just read by Wikipedia founder Larry Whales. He gives a shoutout to wowwiki so I'm a big fan.

A good example of this is a successful wiki called wowwiki.com , a wiki about the online computer game World of Warcraft.

here is the rest of the article about Online Collaboration.

A little 4th of July Advice

Here's some advice from Alen:

Remember: if you light it and nothing happens, just back up and walk away.

Makes me wish I had some fireworks from Wisconsin. Keep an eye out tomorrow and remember, if you aren't drinking by noon you are letting the terrorists win!

Doing a little bit of a blog overhaul.

Trying out some of my very limited css skills to get this blog looking a little nicer. Maybe if the site is in soothing grey I will feel better about updating it. I also attached a little javascript to show what my latest twitter is. I think I'm a much bigger fan of twitter than of blogging. I like to write the twitters and I like to say "twitter" because its a fun damn word, but I'm really not that sure what the point of posting them is. I guess I just do it now because I like it and it makes me feel all web 2.0 warm inside.