First night - Half Moon Bay

Starting from Japantown in San Jose, I pedaled 55 miles over the mountains and back down again to the beach. Robin met me here to camp together for the first night.

The redwoods were beautiful and thick. My descent down the misty mountain was gorgeous, but on a very rutty road called Tunitas Creek, where this photo of the Champagne Trucker was taken.

I'm letting go...of making this blog do everything I want

Well, I've made the transition from buggy buggy Wordpress 2.5 (hosted flawlessly by pioneercreative.com) to Google-hosted Blogger. The post-by-email function here works, but the problem is that all themes are ugly. I think I'll just change it all the time.

82times.com redirects here. Blogger will host your stuff and use your own domain name, but I certainly couldn't get it figured out and have let go of that idea until the fall. I am at peace with this business.

flickr stuff oughtta work alright.

This gabcast thing...is supposed to post to this blog automatically when I call in and make a recording. It may or may not actually do that, so here's the link to listen to them:

And the feed to subscribe.

...and, I never got around to putting together a real map for the first leg of the trip, but here's the first draft version that has had many alterations but you get the gist. If you're going to be near this path in June, please be ready to wave at me, speeding by at a breakneck pace of 13 mph.

View Larger Map

test post

testing the blog by email function...with a picture

Tiny Applescript: toggle iChat status

This script toggles your iChat status between (away, "totally walking around") and (available, [whatever you had as your available status before]). It even works with Current iTunes Song(!).

If your status is available, then it writes your status message to a hidden file (.temp_iChat_status) in your preferences folder and changes your status to away and your status message to "totally walking around". Conversely, if your status is away, it reads whatever's in that temp file and sets it as your status message and makes you available.

Attach this to a keystroke trigger (via Quicksilver or the like) and life is grand.

Here's the script. And there you go. Here's a unicorn from Eeyore's Birthday in Austin.

Today I pulled this from the trash for you

 

Tiny AppleScript: play iTunes video in QuickTime

I really dislike viewing videos in iTunes. It's clunky, there's no support for multiple displays, I'm picky.

I wrote this little script to open and play the selected item in QuickTime, increase its played count by 1 (which marks podcasts as played in iTunes), and pause any music you might be listening to.

tell application "iTunes"
set theTrack to item 1 of selection
set theFile to (get location of theTrack)
set theCount to get (played count of theTrack)
set played count of theTrack to theCount + 1
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
if player state is playing then
playpause
end if
end tell
tell application "QuickTime Player"
open theFile
activate
play document 1
end tell

Ahh, that's better. I set this up with a Quicksilver trigger and am no longer grouchy. Ever. Download the script. For some reason, the playpause (or play, or stop, or anything else I tried) wouldn't work if I put all of the iTunes stuff in one tell block...so that's why there're two of them.

Tiny AppleScript: add current track to playlist

Three lines, real simple:

tell application "iTunes"
duplicate current track to playlist "srsly partytime"
end tell

And then you can create a Quicksilver trigger to run the script; so, anytime you hear something and think "yo, that's my JAM" you don't have to leave the keyboard to make sure it gets in the rotation for your upcoming birthday party. A couple of tracks that should be on there right now:

1. Crystal Castles - "Crimewave"


2. Foals - "Olympic Airways"