Forward Progress

We were twelve miles down the road before I turned off the headlight this morning. Although a few of the usual suspects were missing today, such as Rob, Howard and Todd, we had a good-sized group and the pace stayed pretty fast all the way out. Mark G was still on an adrenelin rush following his win in Monroe last weekend. Perhaps he was also looking forward to the annual MS Tour coming up this weekend, too. I think that was his wife who was in the paceline today, too. She looks like a good rider. Charlie D was there too. Turned out he won the Cat. 1,2,3 time trial last Sunday! Not too shabby, even if the turnout was a little low. Jaro and VJ continued their tradition of doing time trials within seconds of each other. This time Jaro was only two seconds behind. Don't you hate when that happens? I mean, you KNOW you could have gone two seconds faster, right? At least when VJ beats you in a time trial you can always chalk it up to the titanium brakes or some other piece of unobtainium hardware! VJ has some nice stuff.

I was feeling fairly decent and had a pretty good ride. Once again we had two flats - one on the way out that the front part of the group never knew about and another on the way back. Both happened just after we had ridden through the gravel at the "dip" where the bike path dips down to street level. If you're at the back of the group when we hit that section, and the pace is fast, you really can't pick your line very well and you end up riding right over a lot of big rocks and things. Guaranteed to pinch-flat. Anyway, it was a pretty good ride even though the warm humid air is back in force lately. I got the results from last road race and time trial in Monroe up on the website this evening, but I still have to get the "official" results with USCF numbers for those two races plus the Raising Cane's road race from a couple of weeks ago so that I can update the LCCS results and upload results to the USCF Results and Rankings database. All that ain't likely to happen tomorrow, I'm afraid. There were a couple of people taking serious photos at the road race, so hopefully we'll see some of those shots at some point.

So this morning I dove back into the Microsoft Exchange / Outlook transition. As soon as I started up Outlook, I got a rather cryptic error message about another program conflicting with Outlook. Once I tracked down what that error really meant, a little lightbulb lit up above my head like in the cartoons. You see, the error was related to the MAPI, aka messaging application programming interface. Eudora, my old mail program, uses its own MAPI instead of Microsoft's, and can either swap them out when it needs to, or leave its own one in place all the time. I had always set up Eudora to do the following. Well, turns out Outlook chokes on the Eudora MAPI, so, long story short, I finally got the PalmPilot to sync via WiFi with the Exchange Server, and also via cable with Outlook. This was definitely some needed Forward Progress for my own personal Exchange project! Later in the evening, after setting up the laptop at home to connect to Tulane's Exchange Server via its html interface (some sort of security issue), practically everything is working. The PalmPilot can sync via WiFi with my Tulane email and Calendar. Outlook on both the laptop and the desktop can sync with the Exchange server to pick up email and calendar items.

Around 3 in the afternoon I got an email from Baton Rouge that THE check was ready for pickup, so first thing tomorrow morning I'll make the drive up to Red Stick to pick up a check for $13 million that I'll gladly put in the anxious hands of our CFO. I think the folks at the Office of Community Services were as excited about it as we are! Somehow I have to come up with a presentation for the President to give to the Louisiana Recovery Authority by the end of the day too, so I'll probably be up rather late tonight. At least we're making a little forward progress this week!