June 06, 2004
Helmet Hair
Went out to the North Downs for a bike trip yesterday, the first of the year for me. We only did a bit over 12 miles, but that includes some pretty slow slogging through sticky mud and such. As usual, there were (uphill) stretches where I found myself thinking "What the hell am I doing here? Is this supposed to be fun?" -- but on the whole it was. I even got a few pics.This was supposed to give some idea of a steep, rooty descent, but I seem to be unable to photograph gradients, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was hair-raising. That's Karen, by the way.
Talking of hair-raising, this is what I look like after a morning of sweating into my helmet:
Trusty steeds at rest afterwards, looking disappointingly clean given how much mud they'd encountered earlier:
And, of course, the obligatory out-of-focus wound shot:
On a completely unrelated note, I have, for no good reason, added a Wiki to this site. There's nothing much in it yet; why don't you do something about that.
Posted by matt at June 6, 2004 02:17 PM
Comments
I like your Wiki, although I would take issue with the markup for emphasis - quotes are for quoting, not for emphasis!
I don't know if you've read "Preacher", the Ennis/Dillon comic about a possessed minister. In that comic is a character who is utterly reprehensible in almost every way imaginable, but his response to a document which uses quotes for "emphasis" was to shoot it repeatedly.
I can sympathise with that.
But, running a wiki sounds like a good plan. I might have to set on up for some of my projects.
Posted by: Dunx at June 7, 2004 08:02 PM
Quotes are indeed for quotes, which is why emphasis requires two single quotation marks, ' ', and not speech marks à la "... these remain usable, as do single quote marks. I think.
Posted by: Stairs at June 7, 2004 08:57 PM
You're both right.
Several features of "classic" Wiki markup strike me as misguided, especially the abuse of single quotes. I considered rewriting the transformation rules to be more æsthetically-pleasing (which Friki makes pretty easy to do), but in the end decided it was better to respect established convention.
Wikis are neat tools. There are a great many implementations available, with lots of different features, or you could roll your own fairly easily. I'd certainly think about using one for collaborative projects, and even working solo it could be useful for note-taking, brainstorming, documentation and so on.
Posted by: matt at June 8, 2004 12:59 AM
My wiki of choice at least for that kind of personal wikiness is Kwiki, a Perl implementation you can find on CPAN. I've got it working on a Windows box at work and on my Mac, although I would be very nervous about using it for a public wiki because it's file based and not too clever about it so might lose changes sometimes.
It uses "*text*" for bold, "/text/" for italic, and "_text_" for underline, amongst many others.
And my hair looks worse than that after a few hours under a bicycle helmet, and worse yet after two hours under a running hat.
Count yourself lucky.
Posted by: Dunx at June 8, 2004 01:14 AM
Comments for this post are now closed, but feel free to email me if you have something interesting to say.
