Friday, November 14, 2008
Frustrations
We had our first argument as an engaged couple yesterday.
Essentially, what started as us both really wanting to talk to the other, but never having time to talk when the other was available, turned into Jillian getting very frustrated with the blog and worried about her ability to ride across the country.
The not having time argument was stupid. I tried to make time by talking to her while programming the assignment for the next day's programming class. I wasn't really paying attention. Totally my fault. We acknowledged that pretty quick, and moved on.
But that turned into some other frustrations. First, some back story about the blog. When I first set the blog up, I was using Blosxom. But I felt that the development community wasn't very active, and that many of the plugins weren't being maintained. But I loved the way we had complete flexibility over appearance, could configure absolutely anything, and could do multiple blogs on the same install. So I set this blog up using Pyblosxom, which is just Blosxom rewritten in Python. I spent quite a bit of time getting the template right (flavour, in Blosxom speak), and quite a bit of time making sure we could easily add comments and such. There was only one catch.
When you load a page here, Pyblosxom does a multistep process to assemble the webpage for you. First it loads the header. Then it determines which entries should be displayed, and loads each of those, then it loads the footer. Finally it writes that whole mess of stuff out and you see the page. This is a really flexible system. But it means that each entry needs to be written in HTML.
Now, I've been writing HTML since version 2.0, way back when I was in 5th grade. It's totally natural for me to put my paragraphs inside <p></p> tags. Sometimes when my class is talking, I just want to put </talking> up on my whiteboard and have them magically stop. Aside from a brief foray in college, Jillian has never used HTML.
I didn't think this would be too hard. After all, she wouldn't need to learn all the tags. She wouldn't need to learn css. She'd never need to tell anyone what our DOCTYPE is. But she would need to wrap paragraphs in paragraph tags, properly use link tags, and use image tags for pictures. But I wrote some CSS to make life easy. For example, all she needs to do is add class="pictureLeft" and the picture magically floats on the left side of the screen, at 30% the width of your browser window.
But we've discovered that we write things differently. I'm a computer science person. I write an entry, reread it once, post it, and then spend some time making sure everything looks exactly the way I want. Jillian is an English person. She writes an entry, edits it four or five times, and then posts. She wants to always worry about content, and never about presentation.
She got the link tags down, but the image tags are a little harder. Hosting images on our server costs us money (though not much, thanks to our hosting provider). To save a little money, we're hosting images on flickr. I had shown Jillian how to use image tags with locally hosted images, but never with flickr images. She needed an example that used an image stored on Flickr. So she emailed me. I emailed back that she had an example, not realizing that she wouldn't be able to translate the relative url in the example I had given her for local images to the absolute url that Flickr uses.
We resolved that a little later. I've since sent her an updated cheat sheet. I think the fundamental problem is that she doesn't want to go through all the little steps - resizing the images, uploading them, getting the url from Flickr, putting the tag in the post, uploading the post, and verifying that everything works. Hopefully some of these problems will be resolved when we're posting from the same computer. Gnome on Ubuntu makes it very easy to resize and post photos to Flickr. It's a two step process that doesn't even require opening a browser window. But until we're in the same place, that won't happen.
So on to the second, much less technical part. I think Jillian finally realized that the country is big. Not that she didn't know, already, but it finally hit her that crossing it on a bicycle takes a lot of time. We're looking at something like 3300 miles. Jillian has never done more than thirty-some in a day. We're looking at more than three times that, every day, for 40 days. You don't realize how monumental of a task that is until you really think about it. It seems impossible.
I've done long rides before. As a challenge to a complete stranger I met on an MS Bike ride, I rode from Gettysburg, PA to Lawton, PA, just 23 miles short of my goal (I quit due to safety concerns). I didn't ever think about the entire distance - 232 miles is too long to think about. I thought first about riding to Harrisburg, and trying to make it by dawn (I did, and the sun rising over the river was beautiful). Then I thought about making it to Sunbury before my support car did (I did), and then I thought about making it to Bloomsburg before my support card did (I didn't). The ride after that was easy, mentally. I was more than half way. All I needed to do was think about reaching the next major landmark. I never thought about the entire distance, never even thought about how far I'd come (except when my cheap cyclocomputer stopped registering new miles because it couldn't go more than 12 hours without a reset). I don't think Jillian has learned this trick yet, and it is a hard trick to learn. For this ride, I'm only thinking about the three days between the New Jersey coast and Frederick. None of the rides are long. All are fairly flat. But if we make it through that shakedown stage, then maybe we can think about riding to Ohio.
Anyway, Jillian was worried that we wouldn't be able to make it. And she has a point. While she is a ridiculously amazing athlete, she's not an endurance athlete. She doesn't have a lot of time on the bike. But she does think that this is a wonderful idea, and she does think that this ride will improve our marriage. Her most serious concern was that she'd get injured (remember, her nickname is Stitch). Injury is a distinct possibility, and there was nothing to do but agree to have a discussion about the circumstances under which we'd actually quit the ride. And to reassure her that a properly fit bicycle doesn't usually cause injuries. And to remind her that she'll probably be the stoker for most of the ride (the stoker is the rider on a tandem who isn't steering). The advantage of being a stoker on a Pino is that you get a rather comfortable recumbent seat.
So anyway, it was a minor argument. It wasn't even about the wedding. But it was definitely helpful to vent some concerns about the ride.
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| posted at: 17:00 |
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