We are blessed at PointClear to have some serious, hard-core athletes. Lee Farabaugh is a star member of the North Georgia Cycling team.

Also, Donnie Gooch has completed multiple Ironman competitions, was a track star at Samford University, and challenged and defeated the great Jess Lanier offensive lineman ‘JaJa’ (who was about 6-4, 310 lb in the 9th grade) as a defensive nosetackle for Gardendale High.

Anyway, I know Donnie and Lee will appreciate this event at the amazing Barber Motorsports Park, which I think both serious athletes and amateurs will enjoy.

Ride to Live Metric Century-Fun Ride & Road Race
Saturday, April 7, 2007 at theBarber Motorsports Park

Come ride your bicycle on one of the top road courses in the world

and fight cancer at the same time!
Family friendly riding, including kids from 8:00am - 12:00 noon, then USCF races start at 12:30.

The track will be open from 8:00am - 12:00 noon. You may ride on the track as much or as little as you like or ride the metric option (62 miles) which starts and finishes on the track then leaves the property for a 40 mile loop. Special children’s area for riding with a kids bicycle safety course and an Easter egg hunt!

Ride T-shirts and lunch guaranteed only with pre-registration. Lunch will be provided for riders, and available to spectators and racers. Spectators can watch the ride in the viewing tower on monitors that cover the entire course. A full day of bicycle riding and racing, rain or shine.

The Ride to Live will benefit the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Go here to see the Ride to Live site and get more information on registration, etc.

Hope to see you all there!

If you are a computer geek of certain age, you probably first learned to interact with computers via the command line. This is also especially true if you have a background or continue to use Unix or some variant hereof. I thought I’d pass along some really rockin’ geeky command-line tools (for Windows) that have helped make my life writing code in Visual Studio more efficient and more fun. Some of these things you may have seen if you follow blogs like ScottGu or LifeHacker.

First, there’s Start++, an enhancement for the Instant Search bar in Microsoft Vista. Have you ever wished you could sudo a program on Vista to run it with elevated privileges? (If you have–seek help!–I know of a great counselor I can recommend). Well, check this out:

Start++ is chock-full-o’-goodies, which I won’t fully describe in this article. Check it out.

Next, there’s Windows Powershell, sometimes referred to as Microsoft SHell or MSH. I was interested in this when I first heard of it as ‘Monad’ back in 2005. If you’re used to the power of other shells like bash, tsh, etc., I think you will be most impressed with this. In fact, Powershell is so feature-rich, I haven’t really had been able to absorb all it can do. The coolest thing to me is that it is C#-esque in its scripting language and it exposes a lot of the .NET API directly. In this sense, it is rather like the Command Window from Visual Studio on steroids.

One thing I forgot to mention about Start++ is that it is available from the command line as well. So, here’s a example of using Powershell and Start++ together:

Finally, while reading the Virtual PC Guy’s Weblog the other day, I came across this entry. Now, I remember Tank Wars, but Scorched Earth is totally the Mother of DOS Games. Though I haven’t tried tricking out a Virtual PC instance to run the old Scorched Earth, this did lead me to Scorched Earth 3D. If you want to kill your productivity, by all means download this wonderful homage to the original. Better yet, once you’re addicted, make sure you save up $150k in the game and buy a ‘Dr. Strangelove’. Hehe.

Information architects have a unique sense of humor and way of looking at the world, for certain. I found these IA witticisms from Bruce Sterling’s talk at IDEA in the Adaptive Path newsletter for March 16. Here are a few of my faves:

“I like to think of data as a big block of tofu. On its own, it’s devoid of all substance.”

“How do we deal with an explosion of choice? I’m going to do that through a series of incredibly tenuous metaphors.”

“Everything that can be located will be.”

“To be connected is to be alive, to be recognized, to matter, to be in an artificial sense of constant crisis.” (tell me again why I got a Blackberry?!)

“Want shorter meetings? Install some whiteboards and remove all the chairs.”

For more wisdom from Bruce, check out the podcast or view a full transcript of the talk.

I am a Mac devotee - ever since I got an iPod and experienced the superior customer service, I have been a convert. I decided to put my money where my mouth was and invested in a PowerBook 13 inch during grad school because I could get student pricing and it fit in my purse (a girl’s gotta have her priorities).

The PowerBook got replaced in August with a shiny new MacBook Pro. I love it, even though I had to get a bigger purse. The reason I got the MacBook Pro was the dual-core Intel processor. I was so excited about running Mac and Windows apps alongside each other. I installed BootCamp and got up and running, but there were issues. I hated having to reboot to use my Mac apps. Invariably, I would get started in Photoshop on the Mac side, and need a file that was attached to an email in Outlook, on the Windows side. So, when I started running out of hard drive space (I didn’t give Windows enough space in my hard drive partition) I took it as an opportunity to revisit my setup.

Enter Parallels. When I first installed it, it was love at first site. Photoshop ran right alongside Outlook - amazing! But, as so often happens when one falls in love, quickly I discovered little things about Parallels that irritated me. There was lag which was especially annoying when using the shift key, I couldn’t use both monitors easily, and my headphones sounded absolutely terrible under Vista.

However, love has prevailed. We are both mature players in this relationship. We’re learning how to work around each other’s flaws. I allocated more memory to Parallels…no more lag. I did some research and found that that the headphone issue is actually Logitech’s problem. They haven’t come out with Vista drivers for the USB headsets yet. The monitor thing I’m still working on. I think that over time this too will work out. I found Parallels tools and got my clocks to match up. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there.

My colleagues are threatening to have a technology intervention with me. They’re going to show up in my living room with a PC laptop and a Microsoft headset. But maybe I can get them to hold off. Maybe this time they’ll believe me that “I’ve got it all under control” (er, command).