PolarLava::Blog

An afternoon of hacking at it and the CycleLog now has a quick Weather Check page.  This little project simply looks up the weather in the database for a given date —generally today or something in the past couple of weeks.  Anything older than that won't exist as it gets purged except for weather data associated with a ride.  Way too much data to keep around otherwise.  To access a particular date you pass it as a "YYYY-MM-DD", "d" or "date" GET parameter, so for example "?d=2006-06-11" (2006-06-11).

Sometimes on days I take longer rides and the weather is variable, I will look up the most appropriate (prevalent) conditions during the ride.  This differs from my standard practice of using the closest hourly weather to when I finish the ride.  And now you can forget about this because I'd guess I'm the only one who really cares.  :)

In a rare night out —the last being my company Christmas party in mid-December, Mary Lou and I went to dinner and the Falletta Competition last night.  First up was an early dinner at Tsunami.  This is a well spoken of local Asian restaurant.  We started with a bottle of Francis Coppola Bianco Pinot Grigio, a Japanese Ginger Salad from ML and a Spicy Tuna Roll for me.  For our main course, ML had the Fresh Island Fish (with an avacado salsa instead of tomato bacon sauce) and I had the Hawaiian Butterfish.  A truly outstanding dinner accompanied by a first class waiter.

After dinner we were off to Kleinhan's Music Hall for the finals of the second biennial JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition.  This concert/competition featured Isaac Bustos (USA), Pablo Garibay (Mexico) and Masao Tanibe (Japan).  All three proved to be truly amazing performers and we had a wonderful evening.  Bustos finished third, although I had him ranked second; Tanibe, who clearly won the Audience Choice Award finished second —he was my pick to win; and Garibay whom I ranked third won both the Buffalo Philharmonic Musicians' Award and the overall competition.  Apparently I missed something!  ;)  But I obviously wasn't alone as Tanibe's passion and performance certainly wowed the crowd.  All in all it was a nice relaxing evening out with my beautiful and loving wife.  And it the end, that's all that really mattered to me.

The Artist

I'm looking over to see what's on your mind
Glance down your paper, it's written in the lines
Wish I had a moment to look out through your eyes
Just a single moment to share a single mind

You're the artist, born in this time
Sketch the wholeness, pictures never lie
With a story, it fits just right

One look at life, through an open mind
Reaching for a door, he shows another's life
Drawing to a conclusion, a place where it begins

You're the artist, giving what you think
There's nothing bogus, just life's dreams
Feel it floating, drifting in the air
Capturing moments, making it all so clear

You're the artist, your mind is clear
Paying notice to the things we wear
You never focus on your last despair
You've always known that there would be something more —somewhere

5/30/1982

Several months ago I raved about ig: The Google Drug, and as much as I liked that, I think I'm about to abandon it.  For I'm being lured away by a new net drug Netvibes.  It has a lot of what I liked about ig, but offers multiple tabs and some other things that I've grown to like.  Enough so that after playing with it for a couple of days I may make it my homepage (instead of ig) and see if it has the staying power to keep my interest.  Well worth checking out if you're a portal page person.

So what does the future hold for PolarBlog?  I recently was reviewing the PolarBlog Users page and checking to see who was still actually using it.  As suspected, there were a couple that have gone off-line and several that have switch to some of the larger blogging softwares.  At the time I found it rather disheartening, but in hindsight, I guess it's the reality of the situation.  PolarBlog certainly isn't for everyone and primarily was done strictly for my own edification.  I only released it publically because I knew the PWL was a dead project and this was a path forward for those who were also running it.

As for those changing to the big blog software, many left some kind comments on their blogs as they moved away from PolarBlog.  Examples would be this, this and this (down at the moment).  The simple fact of the matter is PolarBlog is a one man operation with the occasional input from others.  There is no possible way I can ever compete with the large blogging projects —some of which are built by professional software companies.  They have far greater resources than I can ever muster and will always have a much larger feature set.  My developement cycles are a lot longer and slower, but I'm trying very hard to meet the needs of both myself and those that are still using PolarBlog.  One thing I am proud of it that I have never had any reports of security issues with any of my projects.  There have been bugs, there are bugs and there will always be bugs.  It's the nature of the beast.  But to my knowledge there have been NO critical vulnerabilities in my software.

So what does the future hold?  Well…I'm still working from the PolarBlog: The Road Ahead document.  As previously noted, progress is slow these days.  I'm about 90% complete with the RBL comment integration —a feature that I don't believe any other blogging package offers, and I'm hopeful to finish that up over the next couple of months.  I'm doing what I can when I can.  I'd like to do more, but I simply can't.  I have a real job, I have a family, I have other projects, and I also have other interests.  I can only do so much.  So if there is some feature you really seek in PolarBlog, you need to either tell me or consider moving on.  I'm not quiting, but occasionally I get "when are you going too…" emails from users.  I generally try to address these requests, but my ability to respond has diminished in the past year.  Sorry.  And to those who have stuck around and intend to stick around, thank you for your support and kind words.