After a few months of pondering and looking around, we took the plunge and bought a 2003 Honda Metropolitan scooter from some friends. The economics were a pretty easy call for us, since my other motorized alternative is a Suburban. Considering only gas costs, the scooter costs about .04 per mile while the Suburban costs about .27 per mile. At a savings of .23 per mile the scooter will pay for itself in about 4,300 miles. I've already put over 150 miles on it in a week. (The previous discussion assumes 90mpg for the scooter, 15mpg for the Suburban, and gas at $4).

Besides the money savings, the scooter is just plain fun! I love zipping around town, running errands, parking in any little alcove. I look forward to my daily work commute. Most nights I take one or more of the kids out for scooter rides around our neighborhood. Everybody seems interested in checking it out, and I've even gotten some waves from motorcycles headed the other direction. Ah the biker camaraderie, heh.

Fort Collins is a great place to ride, with bike lanes on many streets. As a bicycle commuter, I already had a pretty good mental model of the best routes through the city. Nearly all the same habits apply when riding the scooter, it just gets there a little faster and doesn't make me work as hard. On that note, I need to get past this honeymoon period and back onto my (pedal-powered) bike pretty soon. If I don't, I may be that 300 pound guy riding around town on a Honda Metropolitan!

Our New Scooter

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Here are the pictures I took of Dewey Bridge on our way home from Moab in April 2008.

Dewey Bridge, After the Fire

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Ever not true to just leaving things alone and working, I upgraded to Dokuwiki 2008-05-05 this morning. For better or worse I see very few visible changes. For better, the wiki still works. I did a quick experiment to see how Google Reader did at picking up the RSS feed and it seemed promising, though the default view was the page diff rather than the current version of the page. An odd choice for a default value.

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After some brief consideration of Dokuwiki as a complete replacement for my old thegreiners.com web site, I wrote one rewrite rule, edited a few wiki pages and – tada! – here you have it.

Truly the old site was soooo old and neglected that this implementation was immediately superior, even if only because it had been touched in the last year while the other site had not. Truly, it was nearly that bad. And I am very psyched about the Dokuwiki feature set. So far it's handling all my top-tier requirements. I even tweaked the template up a little, though I don't want to make that the priority. I may tweak a little more and then put the site into a new code lock-down for awhile. Just use it for a month or so and not spend all my time modifying the tool rather than writing.

And even if everything goes to pieces on the next Dokuwiki update, I'll have all the pages as .txt files so I won't lose any content. No matter what solution I choose, I always end up investing some extra time to learn the ins and outs. Perhaps it's more enjoyable for me to tweak up a fun, open source tool like Dokuwiki rather than clicking around the vox site all evening looking in vain for a way to export my posts or search only within my blog. Plus I love the wiki concept so I'm not limited to blogging in terms of sharing and organizing content. All good fun.

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I took a great trip to Moab, Utah at the end of February / beginning of March with a small group of friends. I still haven't uploaded all the pictures, but here's a sampler:

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Sold! Yeah!

Know anyone who needs a road bike?

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After praising dokuwiki in my earlier post, it promptly fell over sideways and refused to work properly for the blog plugin. Then I was reminded of the hassle of not having root access on my shared web server at A Small Orange. All my dokuwiki files were created as the web server user, not my own user. No love chmod/chgrp'ing the files so that I could edit/modify/delete them.

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I've lived in Colorado since 1974 and still I am amused by the weather. It's 9:10 a.m. on April 25th. The day started sunny, but cool, perhaps in the 40s (F). It is now snowing and blowing. Today we have a particular interest, since we'll (theoretically) be outside for hours with flag football and soccer. And weather at the soccer complex is almost always more extreme than here on the west side of town. Of course by game time it'll probably be sunny and 60s…

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As little sense as it probably makes for me to continue maintaining my own software installations for things like blogging, wiki, photo galleries, etc., there is a certain satisfaction in doing so. And since we use dokuwiki at work, it seems like a good choice for my personal wiki.

I just installed the blog plugin via the Blogsuite Bundlehub and it is pretty slick. At least until the next update of any of the plugins which will then take an hour to install due to my own customizations, plugin changes, complete rearchitecture of dokuwiki, etc.

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Just to follow up yesterday's Moab rain news from Steve, Dave Harris uploaded a set of ride pictures from the St. George, Utah area. Here's one with his friend crossing a low spot carrying his bike. Steve also mentioned that the Colorado River was very full, as were irrigation canals, etc. along the western slope of Colorado. C'mon Utah – think sun, think sun, think sun…

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