My talented friend Jamie has started building Bakfiets (dutch style cargo bikes). The cycles feature  a large box for hauling groceries, kids, concrete, whatever and are popular in Europe and South America, but hard to come by in the US.

The bike you see here is one of his working prototypes and was recently featured at the Oregon Manifest bike show. It has also received a fair amount of press online:

• Bike Portland article (This is the 3rd time Jamie’s been featured here)
• Tree Hugger feature
• Even a Wired Blog Article
• EcoVelo blog mention
• Metrofiets website

He brought the bike by on Friday and I got a chance to take it for a spin. Even with a full load, the bike is smooth and easy to pedal in city traffic - thanks to internal gears, disk brakes and other modern features. The beautiful lines and whimsical color are also a real head-turner.

So you have some feeds and want browsers to be able to find them using autodiscovery.

The problem

Unfortunatly, you have static pages and would have to update each one to add the <link> tag. At PCC, we have a site composed of tens-of-thousands of pages. Some are static, some are dynamic applications we can alter, some are closed vendor products.

The solution

Like I said - we have many different types of pages. However, they all use the same JavaScript library!

JS is really good at inserting content into the page. We use the jQuery library, so adding a feed is as easy as:


/* add feed autofind! */
$("head").append('<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="News Releases | Portland Community College" href="http://www.pcc.edu/about/feeds/news/" />');

We can now add/remove feeds at a later date without opening every page on the site. If desired, the script could check the URL and only display the feed on appropriate pages, but for now lets put them everywhere.

Final Thoughts

I looked around the web, but didn’t see much discussion on this meathod. It seems to work in all modern browsers, but let me know if you find any problems.

For the forth, we went down to the waterfront to watch the fireworks. Portland puts on a pretty good show. I forgot to bring a camera - but found that the iPhone takes pretty good firework shots:

Is the boat on fire again?

This weekend was beautiful.

The temperatures in the valley peaked Saturday close to 100. This is considered surprisingly hot for the Portland area. It is even more surprising when you consider that less then a moth ago it was still threatening to snow.

The long winter and quick warm up has caused the rivers to swell due to the rapidly melting snow in the cascades.

Friday

On Friday, I took the motorcycle out and road along the Clackamas river. At Barton, I stopped to watch several groups launch rubber rafts into the river. Floating the Clackamas is a fun during the summer. Yet, with waters at 40 degrees and levels nearing flood stage - I just hope that everyone knows what they are getting into. The waters are fairly calm near the launch point, but can get very rough in the miles that follow.

Saturday

On Saturday, Samantha and I decided to do some swimming. Rather then settle for the brown Calcakamas, we headed to a spot I knew about on the Washougal River in Washington. This particular spot has a deep pool and an overhanging cliff allowing for a 25-30ft plunge into the cold blue waters. To get there, take a right at Dougan falls and continue a few more miles on the dirt road. It is approximately here

Remember to point your feet

For over 15 years in Portland, I have stared up at Mt. Hood.

Each winter, it becomes covered in a fresh blanket of white snow. I have gone hiking, snow camping and even snowshoeing. But, until this year - the most traditional of snow sports (skiing) had eluded me.

This was my third time and what they say is true: “you get exponentially better each time.”

The details

Sam my parents and I, all managed to have the same Friday off. So we piled into a single vehicle and headed toward the Cooper Spur resort on the north-east side of the mountain.

This is a great little place for beginners. The runs are short, the lines are decent and the price is half of the other places on Mt. Hood. Unfortunatly, after the 1st of March - they are only open on weekends!

So we continued all the way around the mountain and eventually stopped at Ski Bowl. Rentals and lift tickets are twice the price, but there are far more runs.

Everyone did great (nothing broken) and the sun even came out for a bit.

A big weekend.

On Saturday, we went urban-lumberjacking again. On Monday, Fish flew out to his new home in Land-o’-lakes Florida. Between those two, I found some time to do a little paddling.

Jamie and I went to the Elk Rock Island dock that is about 5 minutes south of my house.

When you launch here you have two good options.

• Head south, toward Willamette falls the clear waters of the Clackamas river (7 miles).
• Turn north, toward OMSI, the bridges and the brown waters of downtown Portland (7 miles).

Instead (for some strange reason) we choose to paddle up the tiny flow that is Johnson Creek.

This trickle flows through SE Portland and is notorious for yearly flooding. Near my home, it joins up with the Crystal Springs and becomes an actual stream.

At the mouth it is about 20ft wide, but as we found, it quickly narrows and could easily be jumped in places.

It is also very shallow at many of the “rapids”. However, this increase the fun as we tried to crawl up them. My only regret is that I banged up my carbon-fiber paddle when pushing myself up river.

On the way down, we surprised some teenagers that were trying to sneak a beer on the bank. They quickly tossed the cans as we approached. “Hey”, I yelled… “Don’t Litter!”

Last weekend, I went with several friends (Sam, Poarch and the disgruntaled Mr. Fish) up to Larch Mountain. Less then 45 minutes outside of Portland, this lush area is just inside of the Mt. Hood national forest. It also happens to be some of the highest elevation around. In winter, the snow falls here first, which makes it a prime place to go snowshoeing.

However, the weather was still good and we weren’t looking for snow - we were looking for mushrooms! (more…)

Paul Dempsey, Dickinson College

He asks the crowd, “Who has good maps/directions to your campus”. No one in the audience raises a hand…

Google maps was launched in Feb. 2005. API released in June 2005. The “terms of use” mean that the service is available to both non-profit and commercial sites. However, they do reserve the right to place ads on your maps at a later time. But, is it really likely that they will do this… Especially to educational institutions? I really hope not.

He goes over the basics of creating your first map.

Then the cool features:

• map overlays
• event listeners
• info windows
• events and windows

Now:

• creating icons (this is very cool, you should check out his slides)
• polylines
• javascript extras (you can set up your own functions)

Overlay of building footprints - Tphoto. This is something that I have been looking for. Unfortunately, it look like it is not being actively supported.

Oh, and by the way, Portland just got added to street views. Here is my house. Too bad the tree is in the way.

Back in March, I spoke about the the Ghost Chilies that I had planted. Like many peppers, these thrive best with a long, hot growing season. Unfortunately, this summer in Portland provided neither.

Now chilies, will grown in the Pacific Northwest. You just have to plant them early and protect them from the frost. Last year we had a bumper crop of Red Thai chilies. This summer was just strange. It was colder and wetter then normal. Our corn did horrible and the peppers just started to properly flower.

Despite the weather - I noticed that my ghosts do have a few fruit. However, they are only a few millimeters in length.

Remember that I gave many of the plants away? Well I just checked up with everyone. Nobodies peppers have done great, but they all have nearly full-size green fruit. Below is a comparison. On the left is the original photo from the New Mexico Pepper Institute, on the right is a photo my mother sent last week from her garden.

Last November, I read this article on BoingBoing about the crowning of a new capsasin king. At a 1,000,000 scoville units, the Bhut Jolokia from southern India is over 100 times hotter than any jalapeño. I soon found myself searching for seeds. The Bhut goes by several other names including “Ghost Chili” and “Poison Chili”.

It turns out that the New Mexico State University has a “Chile Pepper Institute” that sells the rare seeds. Priced at 10 seeds for $5, these things arn’t cheep. This is compounded by the fact that most articles stated that the seeds had a low germination rate. To be safe - I bought 20 seeds.

Come March, all 20 seeds had sprouted…

Not needing twenty plants, I gave most of the seedlings away. My parents planted 2 and a friend working on a farm south of Portland took the rest. Of course, I let everyone know about the possible potency of the final fruit.