On the Road Again

There are no pics this week.

We had decent weather this week. The roads were clear, and I was on them. That’s not to say the rides were uneventful.

I checked the forecast early Monday morning and saw rain would start about 1. I planned to leave about 10 for a 2-hour hill loop. I checked the weather again close to 10, and saw the rain had been delayed an hour. I decided to start my normal 4-hour Monday ride, with a weather update at a McDonald’s about half way out. When I stopped at the McDonald’s, the rain had been delayed another hour, so I went on to my normal Monday destination in Glenarm. I looked at the weather while eating lunch. Rain was forecasted to start about 6, and certainly no earlier than 4. That’s how I knew the stuff I ended up riding home in wasn’t rain.

Tuesday was a much nicer day — a little cooler, but sunny. It was a perfect day for my normal Tuesday 4-hour hill loop. Unfortunately, I got a flat. It was caused by one of those little glass shards that are the byproduct of all those fender-benders occurring when roads are snowy. I considered myself lucky for two reasons. First, I got the flat just as I was pulling into my lunch place. They have a wonderfully large and sunny parking lot with plenty of out-of-the-way space for flat fixing. Plus, as a bonus, I didn’t get the flat Monday in the middle of heavy showers.

Another reason I was lucky Tuesday was because my bike pump almost stopped working. Air was leaking out of the top of the pump. But if I angled the pump a different way, the air didn’t leak and I could inflate the tire. So I got my flat fixed, plus I got a new pump within two days. Thank-you, Amazon. Bike rides for the rest of the week were blissfully boring.

I have been working for many weeks on software for our website directory. I settled on a program called Ultimate Member. I’ve been working on it in a test website on my laptop. I finished working on Ultimate Member, and did a test install on our production website. Our production website has separate pages for each of our 6 condo boards. It uses a security program called “UAM” to prevent somebody in one condo from accidentally changing information for another condo. That’s when I saw that Ultimate Member conflicts with UAM, allowing anybody to change information anywhere on the website. I either had to change the directory software or the security program. I turned to a different security program called “AAM”. UAM is much easier to configure, but ease of configuration doesn’t count for much if the security doesn’t work.

I installed AAM and spent several tedious hours configuring it for our website. That’s when I realized I did it wrong. So I spent several more tedious hours un-configuring it, so I could spend still more tedious hours configuring it correctly. Fortunately, everything looks good. I moved my biggest ally over to AAM to make sure everything works as expected. If everything looks good, I’ll move the rest of our folks over to AAM in the next week or so.

Well, retirement isn’t all work you know. Sometimes retired folks get to have fun. We went to a modern dance performance at UMBC last night. It was interesting and quite different than what we normally do. We’ll be watching the game tonight (and also the ads). We have a neighborhood Superbowl party every year, but we can’t really show video to a large audience. I like to actually watch, so Danita and I have our own private Superbowl party. We’ll be rooting for the Panthers, in solidarity with Jul & Pat.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

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