PolarLava::Blog

I can't help but be disturbed by the television commercial I saw this morning by a local attorney.  It's not the first time I've seen it and surely it won't be the last.  But the basic premise of this commercial is to compel people who are in debt to declare bankruptcy.  Why?  Well, Congress is working to change the law to make it more difficult for you to declare bankrupcty.  Gasp!  So if you've been fiscally irresponsible you might want to act fast before you can be held accountable for your actions.  Or in more real world terms... If you've been stupid enough to dig a big hole using credit cards to live beyond your means, then you should be able to walk away from it and leave someone else (i.e. me and other responsible people) holding the bag.  This is just brilliant!  Welcome to America, where no one is responsible for their own actions.  I will agree, as pointed out in that last link, that the banks also shoulder a certain amount of responsibility.  Why are they giving credit to people who don't have the ability to pay their bills?  I think the answer is self evident...they don't want you to be able to pay for it.  Credit card debt is like crack in the banking industry.  Those high interest rates and low payoff rates guarantee them a steady flow of profits.  Just imagine what would happen to them if even 50% of those with outstanding balances paid them off.  The last thing they want is for you to be debt free.  But the bottomline is still the fact that if you used the credit, you're responsible for its repayment.  The government making it more difficult to declare bankruptcy isn't a disservice to those who have been irresponsible.  Quite the opposite.  It's an effort to save those of us who ARE responsible millions of dollars.  Because everytime someone declares bankruptcy, the banks don't just eat it as a loss, they simply pass it on in  the form of additional charges for the rest of us.  The only bankruptcy I see here, is the moral bankruptcy of those who are encouraging others that they don't have to be responsible for their actions.

Dear God,

Please stop this kind of madness!

Thank You,

Kevin

Can't you people find something more productive to do with your spare time? Write some useful code, clean your monitor and keyboard or even go for a walk! Anything would likely be a more productive use of your time. Unless of course Pierre-Philippe Coupard is under the age of 12. In which case my apologies and congratulations on doing something productive instead of playing video games.

eWeek has a pretty good article on the Deep Space Network entitled The 100-Million-Mile Network. This network is what is used to talk these two wonders as well as many other space probes.

As mentioned in my previous post regarding the CycleLog Search.  The Summary, Latest and Random Ride pages of the Cycling section (CycleLog), have been updated to the new code base.  Now begins another bigger task, the conversion of the "Add Ride" section to the new code base.  This section when complete, will also add the ability to allow editing of previously entered rides.  A much needed feature that currently does not exist.

[Updated: 07:47am EST, 24 Feb 2004]
One more hill climbed…I've now completed the "Edit Ride" feature and have linked it to all single ride display screens with a form button.  This now allows me to edit any single ride without having to manually edit the database.  This also covers 90% of the new "Add Ride" section that still needs to be completed.  What does this all mean to you?  Probably not much because you can't access that section!  But, it does allow me to correct any data errors so you can sleep well at night knowing that my cycling data is accurate.  ;)

[Updated: 12:44pm EST, 8 Mar 2004]
And here we are at the top of the "Add Ride" hill!  Also in the "you'll never see this" category.  I actually completed this about a week ago and never got around to posting this update until now.  I also fixed a problem in the Edit Ride section that occurred to me.  What happens to the mileage if you change bikes when you edit a ride?  Bad things, that's what!  I've now changed this to keep track of the original bike in the ride record and do a decrement on the original bike and then an increment on the new bike.  If the bike ID doesn't change, it does it in a single step.  Previously if you changed bikes, the newly selected bike would have it's mileage adjusted if that had changed and the original bike would not be affected.  Whoops!  All better now.

This effectively completes the CycleLog V2.0 upgrade.  Moving forward I would like to implement a "Bikes" section that will document my bikes and allow me to keep a maintenance history on them.  But that will have to wait as I've now decided to undertake a complete rewrite of this blogging system which will be known as "PolarBlog".  So until that is done, this project will be on hold.

[Updated: 12:33pm EST, 19 Jan 2004]
I know you were all concerned about the problem with the cycling search function.  What's that?  You weren't aware of a problem!  Well never mind then that the search results would return a link to individual rides by their date and not their entry ID.  Why is that a problem?  Well son, on those extremely rare occassions when I would have two rides on the same day, you could only get to the first one.  But don't you fret…I've fixed that all up.  And I've also fixed that annoying problem where entries without any heart data would display a Heart Data block with empy values!  I'm sure you'll rest more comfortably now.  You can go back to sleep now.  :)

It's been a long time coming, but the new CycleLog Search page is finally done! And looking into it a bit, I find that it was just over a year ago that I mentioned the shortcomings of the previous search utility.  The new search now allows you to perform all sorts of date based searches.  You can now locate a specific ride, date bounded rides, X number of rides forward or backward from a specific date, as well as all rides on or in a particular month, day, year or any combination of those parameters.

More important than this just being a new search page, this represents a new beginning, effectively the start of CycleLog V2.0.  There is an entire new code base that drives the search utility and ultimately, the entire project.  Everything from here forward will utilize object-oriented PHP, a template engine and will be XHTML standard compliant.  This has been a long time in the making, but well worth the effort.  The next step will be to update the simpler section of the site: Summary, Latest and Random Ride pages.  Then a new edit/add section will be built to replace the existing add only section.  This will make life much easier as currently I have to manually edit the database to correct any data entry errors.

Oh, happy day!