Ride for the Roses Once Again..

Jane managed to goad me into coming out to the RunFar monthly time trial at the S. Mopac loop on Tuesday. It seems they have the results up already. It didn't go too bad -- ok, I think. 21.6 mph. I had no idea what my average was going to be, as I can't seem to get the Cateye unit I bought last fall to reset and work correctly (Jane has the same unit, and the same problem!). If I can start riding again and get an additional 1-2 mph, I'd move way up the list. The fastest guys there were pretty crazy fast, though (29.9 mph average around the loop??).

I think there is lots of room for improvement though: if you count only rolling time, I averaged 20.1 over the entire Hotter 'N Hell Hundred course (quite flat) a few times ago. The weather was much cooler than normal that year, admittedly...making it pretty similar to the weather during Tuesday's TT, actually. Perhaps I can get close to that again at this year's HH100.

Livestrong was running a promotion yesterday to get people to sign up for this year's Ride for the Roses -- the registration fee was halved for yesterday and yesterday only. They wanted to get 500 new registrants on May 16...and it looks like they ended up getting over 1200. The fund raising requirement is not halved, however. It's gone way up since the last time I rode it (2005, when it was $100), now up to $250. People should expect to get fundraising emails from me on this one!

Windows Picture Viewer Doesn't Play Nicely With Orientation Flags!

All of my titles were pretty short, so I went with a long, descriptive one.

The past few albums I've published have had an annoying problem -- all of the thumbnails always look fine, but the larger (but still scaled) image that is displayed after clicking on the thumbnail sometimes was completely messed up: it was clearly the same picture a thumbnail had been displayed of...but now all in green and pink and black! It seemed like a small minority of the pictures were this way, and I wasn't sure why.

I published a new album today (http://cklempay.homeip.net/gallery/05_08_2007, containing pictures from Jen's visit to SF, her birthday, and her new bike), and some of the pictures had this same problem. I then realized: the pictures that appeared in green were all of the pictures that I had rotated in Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. I went to the JAlbum support forums, and promptly found this thread. Apparently, some software does not correctly update the orientation flag when rotating pictures, and Windows Picture & Fax viewer is one such program. It turns out that JAlbum correctly does the rotations, and will do it automatically when it comes across photos taken sideways (I could have avoided all of that manual rotation entirely!).

In other news, Jen thinks this ad is completely about me. I didn't know Budweiser had even heard of me!