A total half-marathon recap is coming up tonight. With pictures! For now, I'm still trying to recover from Martin publishing our wedding photos for the internet and all its friends. Specifically, the ones where I'm smuggling a watermelon.

The light switch in most cars has three positions. Off, parking lights and driving lights. True, lots of new cars out there now only give you the option of off, running lights (which is head lights on but no tail lights on) and regular old everything on. For all the other cars out there there is still that middle setting called "parking lights" because it only lights up these little, orange lights in the front and your tail lights in the rear.

Let's start by examining the name of this middle setting, PARKING lights. The intent was that if you pull over on the side of the road or up to someone's house in a dense neighborhood you could turn on your parking lights and 1) be safe so you are seen and no one plows into you by accident and 2) not offend anyone by shooting lasers into their eyes. Also, they are supposed to let oncoming cars recognize that you are parked and NOT actually moving. That way they can take appropriate action to avoid you. Lastly, when you turn on your parking lights, the interior lights in the car also go on so your gauges, etc. are lit up. This is nice in case you need to look at a map or whatever.

So, what clown started the trend of driving with these?

I don't understand the appeal... Is it supposed to make you look all understated and shit? "Look, I'm driving with my parking lights on so that you can tell I know it's getting dark out or the visibility is crap but I don't want to actually be seen or anything so my headlights are still off." Nice.

Hello...! Why does every automotive insurance company on the planet not only recommend you drive with your headlights on 24/7 but also give you a discount if your car has running lights? BECAUSE IT'S SAFER, THAT'S WHY. Car lights help you be seen, even in direct sun light. Doing a quick search showed me this:

• Austria - running lights are required 24/7 or you get fined.
• Denmark - ditto
• Estonia - ditto
• Finland - ditto
• Iceland - ditto
• Italy - ditto
• Croatia - ditto
• Lithuania - ditto
• Norway - ditto
• Sweden - ditto
• Slovenia -ditto

Germany has this bit of legislation up for a vote and in France and Switzerland it is recommended but not required to have your lights on all the time.

Why? Because it works, that's why.

Here is what I see all the time... It's dark. And I mean I'd tell you what time it is except I can't read my watch dark. What comes down the road? A car with only the parking lights on. You just KNOW that this genius turned them on when it was dusk 'cuz it's so damn cool/euro/whatever and then as it got darker they just never figured it out BECAUSE ALL THEIR GAUGES ARE ALREADY LIT UP. Sheesh. And if you plop this joker on a street that has street lights and the road is that kinda half-assed low light where you can't tell if your headlights are on or not, he'll never figure this out.

And mind you it isn't men that posses exclusive rights to this derangement, many times I have seen a women behind the wheel flaunting the same massive brain power.

It's been required on motorcycles for years, what's the hold up for cars?

Shelley just sent me her results from this race today:

http://results.active.com/pages/oneResult.jsp?pID=29165020&rsID=50503&pubID=3

I am so impressed! She has not had much time to train at all what with work and her heinous commute and trying to schedule stuff for us to do together around my exercising so to only be a couple of seconds slower than the Iron Girl 10 km run she did earlier this fall is awesome. Way to go.

Yes! Timing really is everything.

A few weeks ago I was thinking, "It's been a long time since I've spoken with my good friend Chance..." so I gave him a call. Unfortunately (actually fortunately as it turned out) he did not answer and I had to leave a message.

Some time later I saw him reply to a post on a tech support list that I subscribe to at work. It reminded me that I had not heard back from him since I left my voice message so I sent him an email to follow up. After another email follow up Chance finally replied. He apologized profusely calling himself a "technological and social retard" which I think is going too far and besides, no apology necessary. We all get hung up on stuff and besides, I'm the king of letting things slide... I was just happy to hear from him.

ASIDE - Chance is an interesting (read: funny) guy. He's a self-professed Luddite and yet he started Formix which specializes in high-performance computing. Now from my vantage point, anyone that can design and implement a high-performance computing cluster is pretty savvy when it comes to technology. But being able to build computer clusters obviously does not equal knowing how to program your VCR. Or retrieve your voicemail.

So we decided that Shelley, Chance and I should go for a beer at the Stumbling Monk.

Practically the first thing out of his mouth was, "Do you two want to go to Whistler?"

Do I ever...!

So it's looking like we're not only going to be there but be there for New Years eve - what a blast! Chance has been staying in the same cabin for the last like five years:

and it looks really nice. I guess the owner had a chance to turn over the renting of the property to some developer or property manager or something ages ago and just wasn't organized to take them up on the offer before it expired. D'oh...! Chance tells me he could have doubled his money and kept the property. You know it won't last long but at least we still have this one year to enjoy it.

One of Chance's favorite things about Canada is that everything is labeled in English and in French. Like this tomato juice:

One of my favorite things about Chance is that he says stuff like this. And one of my favorite things about Canada is that it contains Whistler. Oh man, I can't WAIT.

I'm half German so it stands to reason that half of my family is German. And while it's certainly true that most of my German relatives don't even have Internet access much less the time or inclination to read this blog, it still makes me think about language more than maybe some other people. Maybe. Anyway, while I would say that my German is pretty fair, like anything else that you don't use on a regular basis it is rusty. So when I came across this translator on techRivet I thought it was perfect.

Just like Babel Fish or Google Language Tools the Windows Live Translator lets you paste in text and translate it into most languages. The gee wiz functionality for me was that you can add this to your web site with the following code:

I just added this to our blog near the top, right corner. Now my German relatives can continue to not read this with the benefit of translation. Neat.

Just this morning I was exercising outdoors and the sun was peeking through the clouds. Now my neighborhood is under 4" of snow. What do you do when it snows? You go play in it. I love this!

When Cameron and I arrived at TT Minor Park these two guys were already rolling a HUGE snowball around the playfield. The way it was picking up snow it looked like they were rolling up carpet or something.

You know how much that snowball weighs? A lot!

While they got to work on the center piece Cameron started packing a snowball by hand.

Here they are staging the middle piece.

Cameron helped by building the head.

So, if the middle section is too heavy to lift onto the base, what do you do? You build a ramp of course! When they were originally trying to lift it up I made the comment that it looked like the Atlas Stones event from the World's Strongest Man competition. They laughed. A little. And then got back to building the ramp.

And then you roll the damn thing up!

Nice. Now you just need to fill in the gap between the middle and the base a bit so the middle section won't roll off the base and you're good to go.

At this point my hands were numb and bloodless so I had to head home. Cameron hung around and helped these guys put the head on top and make some arms. Now that's the holiday spirit.

Too funny...

Having just implemented a permanent 301 redirect on my web server so that users who browse to criminale.com get redirected to www.criminale.com a co-worker shows me this:

It seems some other people think what I found cool to be stupid. That's the neat thing about the web, you can start a movement. And get people involved. You can make things happen. You can sway people's opinion and enlighten their minds. About really, really important stuff.

My only saving grace is that they say:

"...several websites choose to forward traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com for branding reasons and that's just fine with us. As long as they don't simply block all HTTP traffic on the bare domain name, they're OK in our book."

Thank goodness, looks like I'm in the clear. [deadpan]

For 'branding' (like I need that...) and for consistency and because I think it's kinda cool and old school like a classic car or something I wanted everyone that browses to criminale.com to get redirected to www.criminale.com. Here is what I did.

• In IIS, I changed the name of my site to www.criminale.com.
• In Properties > Web Site > Advanced I removed the criminale.com host header.
• I then created a new site called criminale.com and for now pointed it to the same directory as the www.criminale.com site. The only host header for this site is criminale.com.
• In Properties > Home Directory of criminale.com, I selected "A redirection to a URL".
• In the Redirect to: field I put http://www.criminale.com$S$Q. More about that below.
• I also checked the "The exact URL entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" boxes.

All done.

The $S tells IIS to take the subdirectory location e.g. /martin/cycling/training.asp and the $Q grabs the querystring. It seems intuitive not to check the "The exact URL entered above" box but if you don't you get a very different result.

Here is the Microsoft knowledge base article that I used as a guide:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313074

When I was much younger my mother used to beak gingerbread and we'd spend some real quality time decorating it with candied fruit, nuts and icing. I remember thinking that the icing she made was so cool... it was 1) an incredible glue and 2) perfect for making icicles.

Well a few days ago Shelley got this authentic German gingerbread house kit and Wednesday evening Cameron and us put it together.

The icing was one egg white (beaten), as much powdered sugar as you wanted until the consistency was right and then a few drops of lemon juice for extra stickiness. It was surprising how easy it was to make and it was also surprising how many memories of my Mom came back just from whisking a damn egg white.

Anyway, I can't wait to eat this!

I also can't wait until I start using my digital camera instead of my phone to take pictures - man is that a ghetto shot.

Sometimes, after years of not finding what you want you come across it in the strangest way.

I was riding the bus home today and grabbed a copy of The Stranger to read on the trip. Now I love ads, often they are far more interesting than the articles in any magazine. So as I'm paging though the latest issue I saw a cool, little  black and white line drawing of an ad and promptly checked it out when I got home. It was for swrve cycling clothing. And they rock.

Ever ridden your bike in jeans? It bites. Seams rub you in all the wrong places, they bind and you have to roll them up so you don't coat them in grease or snag them in your chain and launch your self over the bars. And when your work place is close enough to home to make putting on the official cycling clown suite a humongous hassle I'm always looking for the perfect "ride to work and then still be able to wear it without looking like a fool" outfit.

I'm going to ask Santa for a pair of knickers for Christmas!