Improving Outlook

Well, after yesterday's meteorological anomaly (the photo is a Tulane person coming in to work yesterday), we awoke this morning to clear skies, a comfortable mid-40s temperature, and a vastly improving outlook through the weekend. This is good. Rain and slush and cold are a lot easier to handle when they're dished out in nice small doses, interspersed with long stretches of great riding weather. Of course, I overdressed a little bit, as usual. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that I will consistently overdress as a coping mechanism for my chronic cryophobia. That's just the way it is and I guess it's easier to just live with it. So it took me a little while to actually get out the door, and I arrived at the top of the levee maybe a minute or two late. It looked completely deserted, which didn't surprise me too much, although one might have expected to see few of the guys who had not ridden the last two days because of the rain. I was actually just fine with doing my own solo ride anyway, since it's Friday, so I continued down the bike path without giving it a second thought.

Well, I wasn't too far out when suddenly I saw Erich M. who moved back to NOLA from Athens (the one in Georgia, not Greece) not too long ago and is trying to get back into shape. As he whizzed by he said something like "is this it?" to which I replied, "nobody else was there." So he turned around and we pushed on into the northwest headwind, debating where we would turn around. In the end, we decided we may as well go all the way to the regular Friday turnaround, since at the pace we were going it wasn't like either of us was risking undue exhaustion. We never quite made it there, though, because soon after Williams Blvd. we saw John and Taylor coming the other way. Apparently I had just missed them thanks to my tardiness. So what had started out as one ended up as four, and with a nice little tailwind just to sweeten the deal. Now I'm looking forward to a weekend that promises some great Winter riding weather -- the Giro on Saturday and then a long Northshore ride on Sunday.

Meanwhile, back at the office, I just spent about an hour cleaning up the mess I made of my trusty little Palm Pilot T/X yesterday. You see, I have it set up to sync via wireless to Tulane's Outlook server so that I can keep the calendar and email, along with a variety of "in-progress" files, up to date. It's been working great for at least a year, but I really messed it up yesterday. I was sitting in The Wife's office after having taken some photos of the "snow event," and wanted to send them to some people. The trouble was that they were on my camera and there was no card-reader around and I didn't want to have to fire up my laptop just to transfer the images via the ad-hoc wireless. So, what to do? Suddenly it dawned on me that the camera and the Palm use the same kind of expansion card. So simple. So I put the camera card into the Palm and voila, I could send the photos as attachments from the Palm. Unfortunately, I then forgot to switch the cards back. Later in the day I connected the camera to the computer and saw that there were some Palm folders on the card. I figured they were there because I had sync'ed the Palm with Outlook while the camera card was in the Palm, so I deleted them. A while later I finally realized that I had never put the cards back where they belonged, so I had actually deleted some of the folders that the Palm needed. Bottom line was that I had to set up the Palm to sync with the Outlook server all over again, which is a rather mysterious process that involves guessing at the right mail server name so that the calendar and other stuff will sync along with the mail. Of course, I could have called someone for help, but hey, that would be like rolling down the car window to ask for directions when you're lost. Guys just don't do that until all other options have been exhausted.