Thanks to Bike Pittsburgh I have planned my route to and from work using the Bike Pittsburgh map. Illustrated by my friend Glen Johnson it maps every known bike path and safe road you can travel on as a biker in Pittsburgh.
Now I just have to do it!
View Larger Map
I went out on Saturday content with buying a used bike to begin commuting to work with. After browsing and realizing there is no such thing I dropped by a local bike store to see what they had.
Some backstory, I own a decent mountain bike already but have learned that its not very efficient to ride it on the streets of Pittsburgh. When riding up a hill as one must do to get anywhere in Pittsburgh, most of the bike’s energy goes into the springer fork. I want my 6 mile ride to be as efficient as possible so I will actually keep up with it day to day.
So after thinking I couldn’t get anything decent under $700 I came across the Trek Soho S. It is a single speed bike, very light and built for “urban” riding. Its bigger brother for $699 has 9 speeds and disc brakes.
The next day I checked out the Trek store near Whole Foods and found the Trek 7.3 FX which is also an “urban” commuting bike and with some tougher tires could be used on light trails. I took it for a test drive and was impressed. It was nimble, fast and smooth. I loved it. It comes priced at $549 and its little brother which is just has a down graded derailleur and different tires is only $459.
I am going to go back tomorrow evening to test ride a more expensive version as well as the cheaper FX bikes to see if they feel any different. I am really looking forward to spring!
I ran into an issue this weekend with IE7 not clearing my floats correctly. I had a wrapper with a background applied to it and then a content div with floated elements in it. The background was not repeating all the way down the page, and was ending before the content div. I was using my normal methods of clearing floats and of course the page worked fine in Firefox and Safari on the Mac.
After some searching around looking for why this was happening I discovered an article at Position Is Everything that introduced me to a new clearing method which is far more elegant than the solution I was using previously.
You apply the .clearfix class to any div containing a float and its cleared!
.clearfix:after {
content: ".";
display: block;
height: 0;
clear: both;
visibility: hidden;
}
.clearfix { display:inline-block; }
/* Hide from IE Mac */
.clearfix {display:block;}
/* End hide from IE Mac */
Roger Johansson also suggests adding the following code to a <=IE6 specific CSS file in order to make sure it works in earlier browsers.
clearfix {height:1px;}
Scott at East End Brewing Company in his latest newsletter announced that the wheat hop is coming back very soon. I am really excited for that beer. Its lower in alcohol, not too wheaty, nor too hoppy. Its really good. Can’t wait to get a growler.
So far my favorite events are Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE and Event.REMOVED_FROM_STAGE, they just makes things that much easier.
For instance, I have a SimpleToolTip class that all you have to do is addChild and removeChild to manage it. When its added to the stage, I initialize everything that I need to turn on, when I remove it I turn everything back off.
Its just nice and clean.
Its true and it seems to work perfectly. This makes my life a little easier until June when Exchange support is added to the iPhone. Now I can sync my work calendar to GCal, suck it down to iCal at home, then sync it on to my iPhone so I can be in the know when not in front of Outlook in the office. I like to wake up and know what is on my agenda for the day.
Thanks Google!
How is it that one of the largest software companies in the world can’t even get their updater to work properly?
The update cannot be applied to the product. Please re-install the product and try again.
Well played Adobe.
I decided to push up the new version of my site, it was starting to sit on staging and I had a feeling that if I didn’t get it up soon it would never go up. I have a few more things I want to implement involving Flash and Flickr, but those will take some time to complete and I didn’t want to wait. I know there are issues with the CSS, if you see something odd, please post a comment!
Something that I worked on and finished up before leaving sunKING is AE’s 77e New Music Weekly. It showcases a lot of really great bands and provides a few free mp3s each week.
