Captain’s Blog

A couple years ago now I decided to stop hosting any sort of public web service (like this web site) on my home computers. Residential broadband connections were still a bit flakey, upload speeds were low, and as cool as it may be to have total control over things… I didn’t want to deal with mundane day-to-day maintenance.

So I bought a few years of dirt-cheap hosting at GoDaddy and installed WordPress. This made it easy to post new info (since the browser is also the text editor in WordPress), and the GoDaddy people take care of keeping everything online.

Then I started to get comment spam. So I installed the Akismet plugin… and although I’ve continued to receive over 8000 spam comments… none have been posted.

Then as I started to post more info and pics to the page… I got worried about unrecoverable failures. So I installed the BackupWordPress plugin, which performs a backup and emails a compressed copy to my Gmail account daily.

Then I installed the WP Super Cache plugin: just because I like the idea of caching and compressing content to make the most of the precious commodity (bandwidth) while burning off the resource that’s effectively free (CPU time).

Finally, about 30 minutes ago, I found a WordPress plugin that became my new best friend. I hadn’t upgraded WP in almost 2 years… just because I thought it would be too much of a hassle… even though I knew I was running a version with bugs and known vulnerabilities (perhaps one reason I had so much comment spam). WordPress Automatic Upgrade did all the heavy lifting for me: now I’m running the latest version and all my posts and pics have remained intact!

All this software is 100% free to use, and has a vibrant community surrounding it. Although I haven’t tried any of the competitors of WP, I think WordPress is a great tool for making your own little home on the web!

Last week I was sent to Denver to spend just over a month helping a customer with a new project. I’ve been to Denver before… but never for more than a few days at a time… and this is my first “real weekend” in the area.

I drove around a bit on Saturday, and picked up some tourist info, but didn’t really do anything interesting. This morning I decided to go for a walk and get some fresh air. Just down the road from the hotel is a small undeveloped park area with a couple walking paths, so I decided to explore. The trail looked a bit boring…along the side of a hill covered in short grass… so I wandered down the hill to a little ravine where I could see a creek and many more trees:

I was following a small trail on a hill beside the edge of the creek, when I looked up and saw this guy. Not scared of at me at all, and walking on the same trail I was on. I think he was just waiting for me to get out of his way:

That first picture wasn’t zoomed at all… he was standing about 20 feet away, just sort of looking around… probably out finding something for breakfast. I walked up the hill and around him… giving him lots of space…. both of us occasionally eyeing the other up I don’t remember if I’ve ever seen a Coyote before…

I didn’t see anything else with legs for the rest of my walk… except for what I think was a rabbit… but was moving way too fast to get a pic. Trees, water, and strange weeds and cacti:

Next weekend I’m going to see if I can go on a half-day quad ride up the mountains. Can’t wait!

Two weekends ago I was invited out for another Ganaraska ride with 4 other guys. The weather was perfect… and because there wasn’t so much rain I didn’t crash once! . Other than a short problem with gas pouring out the side of the bike… and new gearing that was a bit too high… it was a perfect day: here’s some pictures:

Then last weekend I attended a TrailTours Dual-Sport training day – it was a special price for ODSC members: for $50 I couldn’t say no! I learned I needed a lot more practice at low-speed cornering (slow as you can go, lock-to-lock). I was expecting a lot of larger DS bikes… but almost all were 450cc or lower dirt-oriented models.

I drove out to Ganaraska an back both days and had no problems on the road with the WR. The only issue was the batttery died (brand new one-week-old model) at TrailTours, so I had to kick-start it whenever I stalled… which was a lot with road gearing installed. I’m not 100% sure if it was a battery failure… or if maybe something else was screwed up (i.e. a problem with the charging system). I’ll look into that this weekend.