Testing Waterproof

I decided to ride my bike to work yesterday morning because I was up early enough to beat the heat and the forecast wasn't showing rain. It was a really nice ride in with cool weather and little traffic and I made it to work in a little over 20 minutes.

The weather forecast changed throughout the day, and eventually there was some rain moving in. A few minutes after leaving work it starting sprinkling rain and got steadily harder all the way home. By the time I got close to home, the rain was coming down with face pelting hardness and I could barely see. I was soaked and it was actually fun to be riding around. I was riding with my Timbuk2 messenger bag and this was about as good a test for its waterproof-ness as anything. There ended up being a few drops in the bottom of my bag, but everything else was dry. I'm not sure how the water got in there, but it may have been road spray sneaking past the top flap. Overall, pretty impressed.

Kuzca usually gets all excited when I get home after work but yesterday she stood back when she saw the water dripping off me.

Gear Engine

And you thought you wasted time on Steep And Cheap. Check out GearEngine.com. New gear every 3 minutes. You can sell your own gear on Gear Engine too.

LCD

We finally broke down last night and got an LCD monitor to replace our 17" tube. I'm glad I waited for the prices to go down because Best Buy had a 22" Westinghouse widescreen on sale this week. It looks great and takes up way less desk space. If nothing else, it was nice to carry the monitor up to my desk with one hand. Try doing that with a CRT.

LJ-cut in RSS readers

Does anybody know how to get a LJ-cut to work for RSS feeds? My last post had stuff behind a LJ-cut, but anyone who is reading on an RSS reader gets the whole post.

Deathly Hallows

I finally finished reading the new Harry Potter book (Christine had to help me sound out some of the bigger words). It was good and all, but I could have done without the Hollywood/Happily Ever After ending. I think it would have been way more compelling to end it with the chapter where Voldemort "kills" Harry.

I was put off by how contrived things were in this book. It was like Rowling was inventing the rules that govern that world in order to build a story, which I guess is one of the nice things about writing about a fictional world. The loopholes in the wizarding "physics" (that somehow hardly anybody in all the years of wizarding had figured out) was hack. Maybe I'm no fun and that's why I prefer non-fiction on the rare occasion that I actually pick up a book.

I don't know how the Harry Potter licensing works, but I would expect to see some spin-off books involving the children in that were introduced in the (shiny, happy) epilogue. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a prequel (a great way to rehash beloved characters that got axed in the last installment).

High and Dry

Wow, did it ever rain last night. Christine and I (and Kuzca) have a dog training class in a park on Thursday nights. It started raining on our way there, and when it didn't look like it was going to let up, the class was canceled.

On our way home, it start raining harder than I've ever seen. On top of that, it was really really windy. There were a couple times when I couldn't even see two feet in front of me. And then there were the trucks driving by that throw a huge wave of water on car windows.

Kuzca isn't a fan of rain. She's not scared of it, she just doesn't like getting wet. It's pretty funny. She just wanted to hang in the back of my car until the rain stopped.

I didn't see any damage around my house, but on the way into work I saw a huge tree limb that had fallen over. There were literally rivers running down my street and this morning I saw the small landscaping rocks from one yard had been carried all the way down the road (and around the corner).

Fun in the sun

The Environmental Working Group did an interesting investigation of sunblock:

In a new investigation of 785 name-brand sunscreens, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found widespread evidence that many products on the market are not safe and effective, including one of every eight high-SPF sunscreens that does not protect from UVA radiation. We have also identified 130 products that offer very good sun protection with ingredients that present minimal health risks to users.

Check out the data here.