I spent all day, a sunny day no doubt, staring at a beautiful blue sky through the office windows in Boston, feeling trapped by duty, responsibility, and an urge to plan for the future.

While simultaneously working on a programming project, I looked up and a single lonely cloud stared back, as if to say "I know, I feel ya!"

Uh, well, it wasn't exactly stolen in the first place, but it has been recovered. For whatever reason, Kea took it from my shed and rode it to work. Not more than 20 minutes after posting the previous post, she called and told me she took it and that she needed me to pick it up because it wouldn't fit in her car...

I'm glad that "you" doesn't specify a name, otherwise I'd be out $600. Now that I have a second chance, you can bet I'll be keeping my bike locked up... all the time.

I went for a bike ride today, came back home, put my bike in the shed, then left for about an hour. When I came back home, I noticed the gate wasn't closed tight; I always close the gate tight. I checked my shed, and sure enough, my $600 Specialized Mountain bike was gone. I'll bet you $600 it was the fucking people across the street that stole it.

It's my own fault though. I should have locked my shed. The feeling that my own backyard was safe made me complacent. I can't file a police report because I don't have any evidence proving the bike is mine. I have no serial numbers, no pictures, nothing. But that's the police. If I see someone riding my bike near my house, you can be sure I'm going to get out of my truck and confront them.

I setup a SHOUTcast music server at home today, so that I could stream my 90 gig MP3 library and listen to it while I'm at work. Feel free to listen in if its still up and running when you read this (requires Winamp, but may also work with Media Player, or iTunes). It has a cool interface that allows you to see the past 10 songs played, etc. I'm thinking of some how moving my entire MP3 collection to my Linux server (or rather, connecting to drive to my Linux server) and then streaming the audio from there. Although, if I do that I'll need to figure out an easy way to manage the songs remotely.

Rant alert.

As usual, I'm told last minute to get the laptop ready for the show. My sister Meera is leaving tomorrow morning at 8 or 9am, so it needs to be ready by then. It wouldn't be such a big deal if I didn't have to reload the entire laptop with a new version of the software. Its a long process that involves deleting and recreating databases, upgrading files, etc. Now I need to leave work (in Boston) early to try and get ahead of all the 5:00 traffic. I also need to workout tonight, and if I have time, visit my parents. I just feel like shouting but since I'm here alone it wouldn't be much good.

To top it all off, the market really sucked today and I'm considering selling my entire portfolio at a huge loss. I keep hearing a voice in my head telling me that it's better to be safe and at least have some money left over to reinvest in the future, than to be stubborn (and I am very) and lose it all by reassuring myself that everything will be fine.

*takes a deep breath*

Life is Good.

I was riding in my truck today, on a two lane road with another car to my left, both of us going about 45 mph. The song playing on the radio kept singing "death or glory becomes just another story, death or glory becomes just another story". Just then, a little bird, a sparrow I believe, darted across the front of my truck towards the car to my left. However, since I was about 4 feet ahead of the car to my left, the bird didn't see the second car and slammed into the front of the other car with a loud thump. I quickly glanced in my rear view mirror only to see the bird roll over dead onto the side of the road. The song on the radio kept singing, "death or glory becomes just another story, death or glory becomes just another story".

The sun started to peek through the clouds today so I rushed out to catch it before it went away again. While mountain biking (1 hour, 6.25 miles) I met a fellow biker. He told me he found a new trail that was made recently and that it was much more difficult than the others. I followed him to the start of the new trail and decided to take it. The trail was a lot more difficult than the ones I had previously biked on; going up big rocks, through streams, and down rocky hills. It was also longer than I expected; my 30 minute ride turned into a 1 hour ride. I felt beat to a pulp by the time I got back to my truck. I had no fuel to power my muscles any longer and I could feel them demanding energy. Mountain biking is officially my favorite type of cardio!

Now for my evening dinner, I made some magic food with half a can of beans and a slice of whole wheat bread. Yummy!

After some speed testing (thanks Phonexay), I came to the conclusion that hosting the gallery on my home server wasn't going to work. It takes way too long for the gallery images to load and I don't want to create any flashbacks of the 1990's era web browsing speed (56k). So after 6 hours, I managed to upload all 250mb+ of images to the same server this site is hosted on. I have updated the Gallery link to point to the new address. If you've already viewed the gallery, you should notice a huge speed increase.

https://raamdev.com/wordpress/gallery/

As an aspiring amateur photographer, I've always found it difficult to display and make available the hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures I've taken. A few years ago I switched entirely to digital photography when I realized I would always scan the pictures into the computer to display them online. My digital camera is a Nikon D50 and I use both an 18-55mm and 70-300mm lens. I also have a small point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix camera that I use when lugging around the bigger camera is too much to handle.

Yesterday I came across a small web app called picKLE, written in PHP, that creates a gallery based on the directory structure of your images. It automatically generates resized thumbnails and images using ImageMagick. All I need do is upload the folders of images. This is perfect for me because I don't want to worry about resizing images, creating HTML pages, etc. Since the program is written in PHP, I can modify whatever parts I need to.

I decided to host the gallery on my home server; mainly for storage reasons and for the time it would take to upload the images. I setup proftpd (an FTP server for Linux) on my server last night, so now I can connect to the server and upload the images using a standard FTP client. Since the server is on my LAN, uploading is lightning fast (3,500 kbps+!). It took me 3 minutes to upload 900 pictures (260mb). That would have taken about an hour had I been uploading to an outside server, such as my web host. I also realized that all of my pictures are of the highest quality; each file was around 2-3mb. I realized that was also a waste of space, so I resized all the images to 1600x1200. I don't think I'll need anything bigger than that. To give you an example of how much space I saved, the basement project gallery was 550mb before I resized the pictures. Afterwards, it was 42mb!. I used the Windows PowerToys Image Resizer application. Its an awesome tool if you have lots of images to resize. Right click on the images, choose Resize Images, choose the size and click OK. Its that simple!

To view the gallery, click the link under the pages section.

Ahhh, nothing like a nice 45 minute bike ride through a quiet national forest on a rainy Friday evening! As I expected, I was the only one there. I wasn't planning on going for a ride today because of the cloudy, cool (~65F) weather, but it wasn't raining hard, just drizzling, so I decided to go for it. My mountain bike has a little computer on it (go figure) that shows my speed, max speed, avg speed, odometer, trip odometer, and trip timer. Today I did 4.87 miles, 42 minutes, with a 7.5MPH average speed. That may not sound like much, but when you take into account that I was doing a lot of up hill and rough trail riding, it's actually an excellent workout. I'm even considering mountain biking as my only form of cardio! I'm also considering keeping a log of all my biking. Hmm, another reason to get MyFMO.com finished ASAP!

I can't remember the exact figure, but I remember reading that the lower body muscles make up a higher percentage of overall muscle mass than any other area of the body. That said, biking is an excellent workout!

Today I went to my parents’ house after working 8 hours on a programming project in Cambridge. As I drove from Cambridge to Lowell, the skies were very dark and the wind was strong enough to move my car on the highway. I had my windows down while I was on the highway and the wind blew sand in my eyes. That bothered my eyes for the whole ride home. The air was probably around 90% humidity and I was expecting it to start pouring at any moment. When I crossed the border into NH, about 10 minutes from my parents’ house, the rain started. Two hours later, as I was leaving my parents house, it started raining cats and dogs. Just as I was walking about of the house, the electricity went out. The lightning was so close; there was barely a second between the flash and the thunder. As I was driving though Pelham, the rain was coming down so fast I couldn't see more than 100 feet in front of me, even with my wipers on the fastest setting. Then, just as I was leaving New Hampshire and entering Massachusetts, the rain slowed. By the time I arrived home, there was no rain at all. In fact, the road was dry! Only 12 miles from all that rain, it was dry. I could still see the lightning and hear the thunder, but not a single drop of rain.

OK, enough of that.

Yesterday I went mountain biking again in the Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsboro State Forest. The weather was beautiful. Sunny skies, 80 degree weather, humid. The forest looked like something out of a movie. I found a little area off the trail near an opening to the big pond. I stood there motionless for about 5 minutes, and quickly became aware of all the life around me. I noticed 1/2 a dozen bullfrogs around me in the marsh, a huge 3' black snake basking in the sun on a rock about 15 feet away, I watched another 3' snake swim through the short grass sticking up through the water, and the birds... wow there were a lot of birds. I couldn't see them, but I could hear so many different kinds of birds.

I'm not sure what it is about the forest, but when it's so green and alive, it just feels right. It's hard for me to explain, but I've always loved being surrounded by green forest. There are an amazing number of scientific studies that show how beneficial to your heath breathing in clean forest air really is. I've decided to try biking at least a couple times a week, in the local State Forest, as well as other places.

Milk. I discovered its true negative effects on my body. I haven't drank any milk what-so-ever for the past two weeks, and ever since then my digestion has been great, my body feels cleaner and less clogged, and I just feel better overall. There is a book my Dad gave to me to read about the negative effects of milk. I never got around to reading it, but maybe I'll pick it up sometime and write a post summarizing the book.

You may notice this post is longer than usual. That's because I've been too busy lately to keep up with making daily entries. I sometimes find it difficult to come up with unique post titles for each post. The shorter the post, the harder it is to title. Anyone else have that problem? Sometimes I just feel like naming the post today's date, but that would defeat the purpose of the title.

I found a new favorite keyboard. Kensington Keyboard for Life. It's flat, has a good standard keyboard layout, keys are placed in logical places, it feels very sturdy, is spill resistant, and comes with USB or PS2 connectors. I'm pretty damn picky about my keyboards, so you can trust me when I say this is a good one. I'd write a review on it, but what more could I write about than what I've written in this paragraph? Search Google for the keyboard if you're looking to buy one. If you're local to me, you might want to take a drive to Microcenter in Cambridge and pick one up for 15 bucks.

After four days of being down, my DSL is working again. Verizon was supposed to come yesterday but they never showed. I'm at Panera Bread right now, using their free wireless network (the largest in the country), and I decided to try pinging my home server to see if the they had fixed the phone line. Much to my surprise, the ping replied back!

One of the big reasons I need my home server running is because I use it as a web proxy to secure all my wireless web browsing using Squid and SSH. I also forward my IMAP and SMTP ports so I can have secure access to my email. I recently setup a Linux server at WFCorp, so luckily I was able to use that as a secure proxy.

As I was writing this, the connection to my home server died. Now I'm unable to ping my home server, so I assume they are still working on the line. I just hope they didn't fix it and then break something before they left.

Yesterday a big truck drove by and ripped the phone line connected to my house right off the telephone pole. Then he kept driving as if nothing happen. I called Verizon, the phone company, and they said the earliest they can get someone to come out is Friday, between 8am - 9am. Great. No DSL for three days!

I was outside this morning war-walking my way around the yard, looking for a good signal to an open WiFi network. What was so important? I needed to make sure the margin call on my ETrade account wasn't still in due. After I found an open network, I was unable to get an IP address via DHCP, so I guessed the IP addressing scheme and set it statically.

While reading the latest NewScientist magizine, I solved a puzzle I had been trying to figure out. You may recall from my Weekend Activities post that I saw a huge crane and was trying to figure out what its name was. Well, its not a crane after all, but a Great Blue Heron. I guessed the one I saw had a wingspan of 7 feet. I wasn't that far off: 5.8 ft wing span.

I've always been one of those people who say "I'll believe it when I see it". That's probably why I have such a strong desire to actually visit the places most people are satisfied just seeing on TV or reading about in a book. When I watch a National Geographic show about lions in Africa, it’s very interesting and I enjoy watching it. But that’s not enough for me. I want to actually go there; I want to see with my own two eyes that such a place actually exists. At some point in my life I'm going to do a lot of traveling. Right now just isn’t the time. I'm too embedded and committed to certain things that dropping everything to travel just wouldn't be the right choice.

Adventure is something that runs in your blood. You can sit in an office all day, and yet still yearn for adventure. Adventure means different things to different people. For some, it’s merely getting away from the norm; trying new things. For me, adventure is exploring. Whether it’s driving down a road I've never been, or walking around a city I've never walked through. Adventure is endurance. Camping in the rain with the bare minimum, or seeing how long I can put up with my never ending headache before I give in and take a pill. Adventure is learning, something which usually happens while exploring or enduring. Whether I'm learning something about my own limitations or learning how something so common in our every day lives actually works and was created.

Life is an adventure.