I was feeling all kvetchy until I got on the Hudson River trail, when a tail wind lifted me into high spirits.

Didn't think much of it as I rolled over somethign that went POP! -- until I was parked at the corner of Hudson and 10th waiting for a light when my rear tire blew out. Just standing there. Sounded like a gun.

Luckily there was a bike shop two blocks away, friendly folk. Not only did the tube blow, but whatever it was that I rolled over at the beginning of the ride shot a big hole in the tire itself. Replaced both for $40. Whole new ride.

This was the first hot weather ride of the year, and I gotta say this is an activity done best in the heat. 11 miles later, I feel great!

Map: 11.10 miles, ride time -- 1 hour 29 minutes.

 5/27/2011; 4:38:02 PM.   .

One of the things on my todo list for a long time is to get systematic about backing up my Flickr pictures.

I've finally got an app that seems to be fairly bulletproof, I wrote it carefully to check on itself. There's no point having a backup if you aren't fairly sure that you've got everything. And all the metadata is backed up too.

Now I'm running the app. By my calculations it should take about 15 hours.

While I'm waiting, I wrote a little readout page that shows the last ten pictures that have been archived, in reverse-chronologic order. It's kind of interesting to watch them roll by. Especially because it picks them in random order, so there's no telling where or when you're going to go next.

http://myphotos.scripting.com/recentphotos

Feel free to watch along with me.

 5/27/2011; 1:42:22 PM.   .

Interesting sequence of tweets this morning.

First, I pointed to a NYT piece on the last minutes of the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic.

I don't remember why, this time, I prefaced the link with NYT. Doing that got me a reply from Dan MacTough.

Great idea to prefix links to NYT with "NYT" for those of us worried about the stupid monthly cap.

That isn't why I put the prefix there, but it's an interesting thought nonetheless.

I point to the NYT a lot. I'm not feeling the pain because I got a freebie subscription from Lincoln. I gather Dan did not get the freebie.

I pointed to the Times in this case because there was a lot of coverage of the recovery of the black box, and I chose the Times because I thought they'd give me less sensational bullshit than the others (and no annoying interstitial ads, it's often why I don't pass on links to Salon, for example).

We need to get organized about this stuff. The Times paywall has been here long enough such that we should have answers to questions like this by now.

 5/27/2011; 11:48:38 AM.   .