Folks with Series2 TiVos will soon be able to program a show to record with a Verizon cell phone. That’s pretty cool, although they didn’t plan a media event for this one. Hell, almost anything’s worth a media event if the KidZone was. 😉

Apple has a pretty complete intro tutorial to Ruby on Rails on its website. While this is strange on one hand (Apple has its own web development toolkit), it’s also sort of fitting (each of the core Rails committers use Macs).

The tutorial uses the recently released Rails 1.0, so it’s a pretty good way to try it out, complete with Mac-specific things you’ll want to do along the way.

Berry Stevens has posted the work schedule for Water Dog this year. Here it is:

Here it is, hot off the press, or at least, my fingertips. The NEW Trail Work Schedule For Water Dog Lake, in Belmont. The Land Manager is friendly and appreciative, it’s close & easy to get to and we’re building trails with our interests & needs in mind. It’s a cozy place, but full of destination quality trails. Come out & help make this season’s project a reality and then come out & ride it. We will be working on Sundays this year and will be meeting at 9:00 AM.

Schedule as follows: Feb 19, March 4, March 26, April 16, April 30, May 14

Please e-mail Berry Stevens to sign up for the date of your choice, or call him, with questions or your eager desire to volunteer.

I didn’t see this when it was first posted, but it appears there was some pretty severe flooding in Downieville a couple of weeks ago. The hotel that most of the people we went up with got flooded out. Ouch. At least the trails are doing well….

For those who remember the old Doctor Who series from way back, they brought the show back from “hiatus” (it was taken off the air in 1989) last year. The new series (which was quirky, but good) was named Best Drama Series in the UK.

The show has been picked up by the SciFi Channel, and will show starting on July 4.

TiVo’s going to be rolling out a new undelete deleted shows feature.

Embarrassingly enough, I got my first bike ride of the year in this morning. Beau and I managed to get our asses out of bed and out into the cold and enjoy a nice easy ride at Water Dog. The place isn’t too muddy, although it was enough to get Beau’s previously pristine bike dirty. 🙂

Despite getting my crap together last night, I still managed to forget my mountain bike shoes, but still rode. Riding in the wet/mud with Keens isn’t recommended, but I didn’t fall.

We rode up Fatboy/Upper Ridge to Car/Rambler. At the split, we cut to New French/Ohlone and back to the cars. Ohlone was pretty soggy and the mud there has historically been slicker-than-snot. It still was, but the trails are holding up better than I’d expected, and it was all rideable. I’m looking forward to getting out as much as possible with all the wet weather we’ve been getting.

A PowerBook replacement was announced this morning at MacWorld. They’ve gotten rid of the monicker they’ve had since the PowerPC transition.

• 2 Intel processors in each one. “4-5x” faster.
• 15.4″ LCD that is “bright as a Cinema Display.”
• Built-in iSight camera.
• IR sensor and Apple Remote.
• Thinnest Apple laptop available.
• New Power Adapter is magnetically held in. If yanked, comes right out.
• 5.6 lbs.
• Will drive a 30-inch Cinema Display.
• 1.67 GHz Core Duo, 667 DDR bus, ATI x1600: $1999
• 1.83 GHz Core Duo $2499
• Shipping in February. Taking orders today.

I told Val that if they introduced a new pro laptop, I’d buy it. I just ordered one with VeriSign’s discount. Here’s what I got:

• The 1.83 Core Duo model
• 1 GB 667 DDR2 – 1 SO-DIMM (it’s got another slot that I’ll fill aftermarket)
• 100 GB Serial ATA drive @ 7200 rpm (This is a BTO upgrade—the stock HDD is 5400 RPM. They have a 120 GB option, but it’s only 5400, and I’d like the speed.)
• ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 – 256 MB GDDR3 (Woo! Double the VRAM of my old BTO PowerBook.)
• iWork ’06 preinstalled (I actually use Pages.)

They showed it at CES! The bad part is the release date: “mid-to-late 2006.” 😞

This is the TiVo with CableCard support, which would allow HD over cable. Like the HD DirecTiVo, it has 2 ATSC (over-the-air HD) tuners and 2 NTSC tuners. On top of the 2 CableCard tuners, for a total of 6(!). It can only record two shows at a time, despite the number of tuners.

Other highlights:

• Backlit peanut remote.
• SATA interface for additional storage add-on.
• Great looking box with LCD readout of what the box is doing.

But damn, I miss my TiVo, and was holding out for the new box. They’d previously said early 2006. 😞

Charles Jalgunas, formerly the service manager at Trail Head, now has his own shop in Belmont called “Passion Trail Bikes.” (In fact, his shop’s website is hosted right next door to this one, and is also Rails-powered.)

Charles believes that you should never use a hose to clean your bike, ever. Here are his suggestions for cleaning a muddy bike.

My grandfather passed away right before Christmas, so Val and I went along to New Mexico for the funeral to support my dad.

This was the longest trip we’ve taken Minnie on, and among the least planned. We decided to do the trip about 2pm or so on Friday, and left by 7. Of course, we forgot a few things, but nothing too terrible.

The original plan for Christmas had been to take Minnie up to my parents house where my dad, who is very handy with wood and stuff, was to help mount the LCD TV in place of the old CRT and big wood cabinet. I’d already torn down the cabinet and old TV, leaving a clean wall (except for the mounting screw holes and a little cabling) in its place. When the new plan surfaced, I quietly cursed that the trip would be TV-less. We ended up watching a couple of movies on the PowerBook, which wasn’t too bad.

I drove until about 2:30 in the morning, and my dad (who had gone to bed early), got up and started driving at 7 AM, so we only stopped for a little bit. We pulled in to the Albuquerque KOA about 9 PM or so.

The KOA, at $47 a night was way more expensive than we’re used to paying for a spot, and not really as nice as most KOAs are. But, it was right in town at a convenient spot and it had free wi-fi (which Val and I needed, since we planned to work remotely early in the week), so we ponied up for it anyway.

The weather was surprising—while the Bay Area was getting dumped on, New Mexico had blue skies and was sunny, getting into the high 50s and the occasional 60° during the day. It’s normally bitter cold and often snowy there this time of year, so this was a nice surprise. We didn’t even hit any snow in Flagstaff while en route, which is very unusual.

It did get pretty cold in the evenings—probably the coldest temps Minnie’s been in. Minnie’s got central heating, which worked well to keep us warm. The windows in the front radiate a lot of cold air into the cabin and the thermostat is in the back, so the front is colder than the back. Not perfect, but not bad enough to really cause concern. Once we knew this, we close a couple of heater vents in the back and turned the heater up a bit, which seemed to help balance things a bit better.

We covered about 2,500 miles on the trip in total, crossing 10,000 total miles on the way back. While we definitely set out to use the RV a lot when we bought it, I’d not have guessed we’d crank out 10,000 miles in the first six months. Eight nights in a row is also the longest continuous time we’ve spent in the Minnie. Overall, it was comfortable and convenient, and nice to have ready to go on such short notice.

Pictures from the trip are here.

You might have noticed that the site was down a little bit today. I did a quick update to Rails 1.0.0 as well as changed the deployment strategy to use Switchtower, which I’ll describe later. All-in-all, it’s pretty sweet. Anyway, let me know if you see any bumps using the site.

Ruby on Rails, the web framework I used to create this site, among others, has reached version 1.0. This is a big milestone in what has turned out to be a movement instead of just another web framework. If you haven’t looked at Rails before (and are programming-inclined), now’s a good time.

(AKA Sedona Thanksgiving 2005)

Val and I headed out to Sedona, Arizona for a 9-day trip with a group of mountain biking friends. It’s a repeat of last year’s trip, but longer, and this time we have the Minnie.

We took our time getting out there, initially leaving later than anticipated, and we arrived in Sedona late Saturday afternoon. The drive itself was smooth and uneventful.

Sedona is absolutely one of the best places on Earth I’ve gotten to ride, and is really, really beautiful. Among the things to be thankful for this trip were:

• 70° weather with blue skies the entire week.
• Our bikes had only one flat the whole trip, in the only of our 4 tires that wasn’t running Slime tubes.
• No other mechanical breakdowns, despite Sedona riding being very hard on bikes.
• Only one crash between us, and no injury or damage to person (me) or bike.
• Marvelous trail conditions, and not a ton of people using them besides us. 😃
• Good company and good food the whole time. (Dave cooks the meals in the rented house each day, and everyone chips in for groceries. We paid $100 for both of us to eat home-cooked meals all week long).
• Getting to fly over Sedona in a small plane, courtesy of a guy who owned it and agreed to give us an aerial tour if we took his gear out for him in the RV while he flew. Awesome! I’ve got pics that I’ll have up soon.

We rode four 5-hour days, and one 3.5-hour day. None of it was easy going and, while exhausting, I can’t wait to get to do it again. The rides were epic every single day, and the other people were very high-quality riders that knew the area extremely well. I’d leave with a CamelBak full of food and water (and I’ve got a big CamelBak), and it would come back each day dry and almost devoid of food. I was completely spent at the end of each ride (and a couple of rides, I was spent before the end 😉).

A lot of the riders were shooting with digital cameras, so I didn’t take mine on the rides. One of the guys (who is still out there) is collecting them all, and is going to give me a copy, which I’ll share when I get it. I did shoot helmet-cam video on 2 days, and I’ll put up some samples soon.

All-in-all, it was a great way to spend Thanksgiving. I’m lucky to have Val, who was a good sport on a trip full of hard core biking and mountain bikers (and the associated tech and trail talk).

Update:Here’s the photo album of the pics from the trip.

TiVo added a new feature to standalone TiVos called Overlap Protection. It basically helps with coordinating conflicts when stations stop their shows at 8:31 to screw TiVo users. Nice touch.