PolarLava::Blog

So out of the blue I got an email today from a former co-worker, Eric Nagel who stumbled into my site.  Eric felt my original lava lamp didn't look good enough.  So he was kind enough to send me a new one that actually matched my color scheme.  Cool, but it had a white background so wasn't going to workout immediately.  So from the double cool catagory, Eric sent me a new one with a transparent background.  So if you jump over to the PolarLava front page, you'll see this nifty little change.  Thanks Eric.  :)

Knowing the ills that having a "mailto" link on your site brings, I've finally gotten around to creating a Contact page.  These have their own set of potentially exploitable ills, but I believe I've got that covered via data validation and not using the PHP mail() function.  So there you go…yet another feature that will rarely if ever get used.  :)

So I finally managed to drag my butt out of bed and ride outside this morning.  Between the cooler weather, rain, tiredness and general laziness, I haven't been riding outside much.  So it was nice actually get outside and have a good ride in decent weather.  And it was a very nice ride the first 90% of the way…

But just before I got to Deerwood Golf Course, heading south on Sweeney St. a car passed me from behind.  Not a big deal, it happens all the time.  But this time of year it's still pretty dark even near the end of my ride (6:15am).  So once this car passed and just as I started to look up the road, I see a guy on a bike sort of weaving right towards me from the other side of the road!  No lights, no reflectors and obviously no concern for me or himself.  Fortunately I had room to swerve to the right and avoid plowing head-on into this assclown.  I really believe that many people who don't ride seriously have no concept of how fast you may be moving.  In this case, I believe about 22mph.  I don't think they want to know what getting hit at that speed feels like anymore than I do.  Regardless, this is easily the closest I've come to being hit on my bike since having a car pull out in front of me a couple of years ago.

Needless to say he was barraged with some choice words after the fact.  I don't know if he was just a clueless "I ride on which ever side there's no cars on" knucklehead and/or whether he was making a long (i.e. straight line) turn into the golf course.  In any case, I don't have a lot of use or respect for somebody out riding their bike in the dark without any lights or reflectors of any kind.  That's just asking to get killed, trust me.  I've been riding in the dark for a number of years now and making yourself visible is rule #1…and #2…and #3.  And regardless of the time of day, KEEP RIGHT!