Cathy

Is this justice?

What seems like a fair punishment for someone who comes onto another person’s property, forces the property owner to drag their dog from their home and tie it to a post, and proceeds to shoot the pet three times while the family looks on? It seems obvious that the person who did this either had murderous intent or was completely deranged or both. I would expect him to receive a life sentence, if he was not committed immediately to a mental institution for treatment.

I also have to wonder about the dog owner who went along with tying their dog to a post. I can’t imagine allowing something like that to happen to my pet without first being shot myself, but I don’t have any dependents other than my dog, and who knows how my bravery would hold up unarmed, against an angry man’s rifle.

The crime was committed in Felt, Idaho, in late 2007, by a Teton County Sheriff’s deputy. After pleading guilty last week, the deputy, Joseph Guitierrez, was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Seems like a light sentence given the brutality of his actions. But wait, 25 days of his sentence were suspended, and he has been assigned to a sheriff’s inmate labor detail for the other five. Sounds like he will spend a total of zero days in jail. He does have to pay a whopping $100 fine and serve a six-month UNSUPERVISED probation. If he completes probation successfully the crime may be removed from his record. Is it possible to unsuccessfully complete an unsupervised probation?

Is this justice? Apparently it is … in Teton Valley, Idaho, and not just in the mind of Judge Colin Luke. There is a poll on the home page of the local paper asking people if they are satisfied with the outcome of this case. It appears that this is not an important issue to Teton Valley News readers because there are only a few votes, but shockingly 71% have voted “Yes,” they are satisfied with the outcome of the case. They believe that $100 and 40 hours of work is fair punishment for this barbarity.

Printing crashes Internet Explorer 7

Every web developer knows that Internet Explorer does not comply with published web standards. IE7 is much better than IE6, but we still spend many hours restructuring code and/or writing specific stylesheets so that our web pages display acceptably on Microsoft’s browsers. I recently became aware of another problem with Internet Explorer; attempting to print some web pages can cause Internet Explorer to crash. If certain plug-ins, like Google toolbar are installed, “crashing” may be replaced by erratic behavior like redirection to the browser’s home page.

I learned about the crashing problem when one of my clients reported that trying to print a page on their staging site caused the browser’s home page to load; in this case Google. I ran the HTML and CSS validators on W3C with no errors or warnings, but the client was still redirected when they tried to print, and IE7 crashed on my test box when I tried to print. So basically correct, valid, accessible HTML/CSS caused a fatal error in Internet Explorer. The Google toolbar was catching and redirecting the error on my client’s computer which disguised it and made it more difficult to track down.

After much searching, I found a knowledge base article on Adobe’s site which describes this occuring with IE6. The browser “renders the page correctly but crashes when parsing code for the printer”. I believe IE7 suffers from a similar problem, although IE7 may crash on different pages than IE6. Adobe’s fix, adding media=”screen” to the css link tags, allowed the page to print from IE7 without crashing, but, as expected, all page formatting is lost.

Example of stylesheet link:

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="example.css" type="text/css"media="screen">

That is ok, even preferable, for most users. Even better would be a specific stylesheet to print a simplified version of the page with extraneous data such as background images stripped out. In fact, I have some clients who would purposely break printing of their site just to save trees, but this particular client wanted their web pages to print as closely as possible to the way they are displayed in the browser. My solution was to provide dynamic PDF generation for printing. I’ll write more details about that in another post.

Training Peaks

In January, I started using TrainingPeaks in addition to Polar ProTrainer which I have been using in some version for many years. It has been helpful for me as a Mac user to be able to keep my training log up-to-date without having to start up Windows in VMWare Fusion.

My favorite thing about Training Peaks is the Annual Training Plan. With a paid account you can use the ATP wizard. You first answer some basic questions about sports and training time, then enter your planned races and prioritize them A, B or C. The ATP wizard generates a plan for you which you can adjust manually. I was reading Base Building for Cyclists by Thomas Chapple when I started using Training Peaks. Chapple uses a similar approach to Joel Friel, who developed Training Peaks. The ATP was very helpful for backing out base building from goal events. The ATP and Friel’s “abilities” are very similar to Rob Sleamaker’s SERIOUS training for Endurance Athletes and the way he breaks up training time over the 7 SERIOUS components. I read Sleamaker’s first edition nearly 15 years ago and used a complicated Excel spreadsheet to allocate yearly training hours. The ATP wizard makes the process much easier and, if you haven’t done manual edits, you can play around with different variables to look at different plans.

Once you’ve set up an ATP you can use the Virtual Coach to recommend workouts. The VC only recommends bike and run workouts for me. Since I am doing a lot of skate skiing for base training (and fun!) I haven’t used the VC much yet.

I also really like the CNS score, developed by coach Rick Crawford, which is in the daily log section of the Classic version of TrainingPeaks. I am probably not using its full potential, but keeping track of those 6 subjective factors gives me an idea about how well I am balancing stress and recovery.

TrainingPeaks has a free trial if you’re interested and I highly recommend Base Building for Cyclists. It has more discussion of training for ultra-endurance events than any general training book I’ve read, which is not a lot, but a lot more than a single passing reference (or no mention at all), and it has a couple sample training segments for ultras. To me the big difference between Chapple and Carmichael, compared to older books like Sleamaker, Eddie B and Lemond, is not the idea of a training progression or training different skills for your sport, but the emphasis on low intensity base training. Chapple’s entire book discusses how to structure this part of your training year.

Not your average streak

Perry, the average joggler, is on day 74 of a joggling streak. His goal is to joggle at least one mile a day, but he usually runs further than that. 74 days is a great streak. I would be pretty impressed with myself if I’d run every day for almost two and a half months, but Perry’s goal is 1000 days! That’s nearly three years!

It doesn’t seem right to me that his joggling pace is faster than my running-without-juggling pace. I have yet to try running and juggling at the same time, but I imagine I would spend more time picking up my juggling balls than making forward progress. Check out Perry’s “drops” stat. After a 1000 days I wonder what his longest streak with no drops will be. I’ve already seen one of 8 days!