I've been trying to modify the style and appearance of my blog in Moveable Type to see if I can change the appearance of the my blog. If I can control my blog, the next step will be to set up a second blog and see if I can control the appearance of that blog independantly.
I think I have been mostly playing with the style-sheet.css in my root blog directory. I've used Arvind Satyanarayan's Style Generator to create a custom style sheet. I've tried saving the style sheet directly in my blog directory. And that seemed to work for a while.
The I went and rebuilt my blog site (after doing things and looking at others) and when I went to my blog all my text on the home page had disappeared. Now the quest is to get the text back and see if I can figure out what I did to make a mess of things.
]]>I've ended up skipping breakfast this morning. That's not a great thing to do, but something that frequently happens.
While it isn't good for my diet, it makes writing up my breakfast pretty easy.
]]>I think that my thermometer was a bit closer to what I experienced than the announced 37. It was cold outside and quite cold on the bike at 35 mph. I'm somewhat use to the inside of my helmet fogging up on these cold days. What was interesting about this morning's ride was today the fog from my breath didn't do as much condensing on the visor, but it swirled around inside the visor creating a fog immediately in front of my eyes.
Steering and general riding was fine, but I did have some trouble remembering to down shift when coming to a stop. At the first stop light, at Business 70 and West Boulevard, I completely forgot to downshift. I was concentrating instead on the right side and breaking with both the front and rear breaks. This focus on the breaking, caused me to attempt to start off, once the lights turned green, in third gear. My bike didn’t like that and stalled a couple of times.
Once I got past that intersection, the bike ride went smoothly. I did forget once more to downshift while I was coming to a stop light. But, fortunately, I remembered to get the shifting done before I started up again.
As I rode on, it remained cold, but as I passed the thermometer behind Perry Chevrolet, it read 33. Perhaps the radio was right, and maybe my home thermometer was right as well. I live in a valley that is frequently cooler than the surrounding “high lands.”
The ride was a blast and I’m looking forward to the warmer days to come when more and more frequently I’ll be able to ride my bike to work.
And now I get to ride back home.
In addition to getting to ride home, I got to ride to lunch. It's 63 at lunch time, warm enough to make a full winter level riding gear hot. But the ride was a great deal of fun. I love riding up and down Rock Quary Rd. It has the perfect combination of curves and hills for some fun bike riding. (As long as the bike is motorized.)
The ride home was wonderful!!
I left work at 2:30 to stop by the barber shop. I've figured out the secret of not waiting at the barber shop - - Go with plenty of time and a book to read. I walked into the barber shop and even before I could get my helmet off, I was being offered a chair.
Robin was planning a Valentine's Day surprised asked me to get home about 4:00. This gave me 45 minutes in which to go riding about and that was really very fun to have that much time on a perfect biking day to get out on my bike and simply ride. I did about 35 miles over the back roads north of my house.
I wished that Robin had her helmet already and I would have suggested that we ride the bike to Ruby Tuesday for dinner.
]]>I didn't drink any tea yesterday. So when I went to make tea this morning, I found last Friday's tea sitting in the tea pot. Not very cool. It was dark brown and slimy. I had to rinse out the pot before I made my next batch of tea.
There is a possibility that I'll be eating lunch at "cheap Chinese" today. If not, I'll be having left overs from yesterday's dinner.
I was correct in the "cheap Chinese" expectation. At our regular "cheap Chinese" restaurant, a large plate of General Tso's Chicken (including fried rice) is only $4.40, including a bowl of very good hot and sour soup. Today's hot and sour soup was extremely hot - in the spicy way. Lunch was quite filling.
Robin really blew our diet away during the evening meal. We went to Ruby Tuesday where we enjoyed a full meal and a yummy Chocolate Tallcake. The meal and the service were excellent.
]]>I've needed to moderate my consumption of food and increase my exercise for a while. So it's begun.
I intend to use this blog as a combination Food and Exercise journal as well as comments on the process of dieting. The Mikes (Mike Harris and Mike Sullivan) like to point out that the first three letters of "diet" are "die". I don't think it's that bad. Actually paying attention to my diet (meaning my consumption of food) I will be eating better and that should lead to an improvement in general health and feeling of well being.
I say this as I look into a tub of "rabbit food": lettuce, cabbage and carrots for my lunch. Fortunately, I’ve got a sprinkling of cottage cheese (about ½ a cup) and some croutons on top of the greens. Salt and pepper round out the meal. For dessert, I’ll have my tomato. This is actually a pretty nice lunch. Hopefully, it will be sufficiently filling to carry me easily through to dinner.
I had a really nice breakfast of two eggs, two strips of bacon and ½ of a bagel. I would estimate that there was about 2 ½ to 3 tablespoons of cream cheese on the bagel. According to Ann Collin's Weight Loss site there are 50 calories in a tablespoon of regular cream cheese. Kraft Foods and I wasn't able to find anything from them about the calorie content of their cream cheese. A Google search found a reference to this page but being an Austrailian web page, the calories comment was:
To determine the fat content and calories content for recipes made with cream cheese, check the package. Regular (full fat) PHILADELPHIA Cream Cheese has 10 grams of fat and 100 calories for a 30g serving. 1/3 Less Fat PHILADELPHIA contains 6 grams of fat and 70 calories per 30g serving.
I did find some interesting features at Kraft Foods' Healthy Living site. They have in their logs and journals sections for "Weekly Way-In", "Interactive Nutition Diary" and "Activity Log" . This could be an interesting resource for people who traveled (or didn't) and wanted to count calories, but didn't want to do everyting by hand.
For dinner I had a wonderful meal cooked by Robin. We had rice, roast pork and stir-fried veggies - peas, green beans, onions and zuccin. Dinner was really delicious.
I was pondering what to have as a dessert / evening snack while staying some what faithful to my diet. I would have liked almost anything somewhat sweet. Chocolate chips melted on digestives was high on my list. As was cake, pie, ice cream. Making a bowl of pop corn corssed my mine, but I thought that I didn't need the three tablespoons of oil that introduced. Then I remembered the apples in the fridge. I had one of them and it meet my desire for something sweet perfectly.
Well I seem to have survived day one.
]]>It's possible that I may be able to get a ride in tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 14) as the low tonight is to be just 30 and the high tomorrow is to claimed be up to 57. It would be really nice to get a ride before I head to Seattle for the rest of the week. It looks like it should be cold and wet in Seattle - including the possibility of snow by Friday and Saturday.
]]>I have a no-bike policy when the temperature is below 30 degrees. Although the return ride from work is normally above 30, when it is below thirty even the directly to work ride is too cold.
This morning there was a wonderfully fluffy snow that covered the ground and trees and floated gently down. The flakes were huge at 5:30 and a couple of time through out the morning, the big floating flakes returned.
Unfortunately, the forecast for the coming week remains cold. I may just have to take the bike out for a ride in the afternoon to keep the bike and me in shape.
]]>However, today was different, it was a wonderful 44 when I got up. That temperature, when fully suited with my winter jacket and "snow" overalls is very comfortable. The forecast claims that it will get up to 55 today. I wouldn't be too surprised if it reached at least that temperature, if not higher. Yesterday's high temperature at Sanborn field was 59.9 degrees. A temperature that I call delightful.
It's be a rather gray winter here, so the full and glorious sun is very much appreciated. I imagine that Seattle would love to have one of these nice sunny days. They have had a lot of rain and a lot more in their forecast. According to the Weather Underground (Seattle, WA) forecast there will be rain through the rest of the week with the "driest" day being next Sunday where the chance of rain is only 40%.
For those of you who don't know why I'm interesting in Seattle's weather, I'll be going there later this month for a couple of days of training and site seeing.
]]>On the way home, I usually take the long route home.
]]>Installation was relatively easy, but there were tricks that it took quite a bit of fiddling to resolve. One of the was the installation of the /mt-static/ pages in their own directory outside the /mt-cgi/ directory. This solved all the problems I had and everything has gone nicely since then.
The Configuration of the MoveableType doesn't mention anything about making modifications to the web server's configuration file. I had to add several sections to get everything working.
I also don't know where these blog entries are going to end up being stored.
]]>