I was having some trouble with RokBox and RokNewsRotator. On the CRBC site, we use RokBox to display inset thumbnails for expansion directly from our Section and Category pages, but since we do the inset first in the content, RokNewsRotator was stripping out the tags and leaving the image path in plain text, including it in the RNR teaser.

The solution was to strip out RokBox and everything between the RB tags first by making the following change in helper.php:

Original

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Modified

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // remove rokbox references
        $regex = "#{rokbox\s(.*?){/rokbox}#s";
        $text = preg_replace( $regex, "", $text );
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Works great so far!

In the run-up to Mother’s Day, Gareth let me know that he wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies for Mom. This sounded like a perfectly wonderful idea to me as Gareth and I had never baked together before and because I knew there would be plenty of leftover cookies for me to eat.

We went with the dough-in-a-tube variety of baking since there would be less kitchen mess and, as a result, less stress for Brandy.  Even seeing a disaster in progress will throw her off kilter until such time as the disaster is resolved.  

I busted out the cookie sheets, the tube of dough, a spoon, and some parchment paper.  I wanted this to go as easily as possible.  While the oven was preheating, I put the parchment paper out on the sheets, sliced open the dough, and got Gareth in there to help me spoon the dough out onto the trays.

During this process, he started looking up at me and gesturing, which is usually his way of telling us he needs his letter board.  I grabbed the letter board, put his hand in mine, and let him go to town.

D - O - Y - O - U - N - O - W - W - U - T - Y - O - U - R - D - O - N - G

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

Come on, really?  All we have to do is scoop out dough and plunk it on a cookie sheet.  What’s there to know?  But I had a good laugh at his moxie and we kept on with the baking.

The oven was ready, so I popped our cookies in, setting the timer for 5 minutes so I could rotate the trays mid-bake.  When the 5 minute point hit, I opened the oven only to see a cloud of smoke rapidly exit from within, clouding the kitchen and making its way to the smoke detector.

Letting the oven door slam shut, I threw on the ceiling fan and grabbed something to wave smoke away from the now blaring detector as my family wondered what the heck was going on.

After things settled down a bit, Brandy came out to the kitchen to see exactly what happened.  I professed innocence, saying I did nothing wrong, but then she asked, “Did you put parchment paper on the trays?”  Yes, yes I did.  ”That’s not parchment paper.  That’s wax paper.”

Sure enough, it was.  Turns out that if you’re using wax paper, it’s best to have the entire surface of the paper covered by whatever you’re baking on it.  It’s also best to not exceed 350 degrees when using it.  I violated both rules of wax paper use and paid the price.

Amazingly, I did spare the cookies!  But now, when my son looks at me and asks if I know what I’m doing, I’m going to seriously consider his question and make sure that I can answer it with confidence.

To celebrate Bike To Work Week, I did just that - I biked to work from Pleasant Gap to Pine Hall Road on May 1st. It was my first bike commute in Centre County, and it will likely be my last.

Not because of the distance. No, that was a mere 11 miles. Not because of the time involved, as it required only an hour (the same time it would take using public transportation). It was all because of two words: College Avenue.

Pleasant Gap to the Nittany Mall wasn’t all that bad. The shoulder along that stretch is very wide and almost always kept clear of gravel and other obstacles, except for the occasional dead animal.

But after reaching the Nittany Mall, College Ave turns into Death Race 2000. There’s no taking the lane on this 45mph legal/60mph actual stretch of road, and the shoulders, while often generous, are so covered in gravel from the winter season that one has to stick to the line for most of the ride.

Sticking to the line doesn’t work too well, though, since there’s barely enough room in the lanes as it is. There are just some times when you’re pulled to a stop at a light only to have an 18 wheel truck slide in inches from your elbow that makes you think, “This was a bad idea.”

Whenever possible, I ditched College Ave, cutting through parking lots or taking back roads that weren’t going to add miles to my ride. Certainly, that helped, but the stretches where I had to be on College were enough to make my testicles ascend. Everything from Decibel Road to just past Elmwood made me feel like a very small bug being approached at high velocity by a very large wind shield.

It begs the question - why did I use that road at all? The alternatives weren’t all that attractive. I could have veered off onto Decibel Road and taken back roads to Lemont, which would have dumped me out on College Ave again anyway. Or, I could have taken Shiloh Road and followed back roads up to Park Ave, which itself is a fairly high traffic area as it is an entrance/exit point for 322.

In order to not constantly feel like I’m about to die, I would have to take College to Shiloh to Houserville, take Puddintown to Orchard to Park, ride through campus and across the IST walkway, and then take West Campus to Blue Course where I would, inevitably, have to ride College Ave to Science Park to Pine Hall Road. That would reduce my exposure to College Ave greatly, but also take me on back roads that have no shoulder at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to ride, but getting from point A to point B in this case is severely painful. It’s enough to convince me that driving isn’t so bad after all.

So what would make me feel better about making such a commute in the future?

1. Take my trike. Sure, it’s lower to the ground, but I have a far higher degree of confidence on the trike. I’m sure the lack of confidence on my Speedmachine played into my fears that day.

2. Form a multi-municipality committee to create a pathway from the outlying burbs to downtown State College. Of course, that’s what the Bellefonte Central Rail Trail was supposed to be before it was halted by property owners along the proposed route. Besides, doing this would take 20 years.

3. Choose a new, longer, less exposed route. I don’t really want to have more than an hour of travel time to get to and from work. It’s a shame I can’t use the most direct route, but I can’t.

4. Realize that I ride my bike for fun and not to make a point about saving the planet, so it’s okay to drive my bike to safe riding locations. This is the most likely solution.

Yes, I could make a public stand and decry congestion, the dangers of distracted drivers, and convince others that the more cyclists there are, the safer the streets become, but I have a very strong sense of self-preservation that makes me want to hide out until a bunch of other brave souls do the hard work and make things safer for me.

I never denied being a lazy opportunist. And yet, I feel some degree of guilt in the matter, as though taking on the label of “cyclist” brings with it a certain requisite sense of representing a population of people who pedal. But I don’t want to be a representative. I just want to be a guy out on his bike not worrying about death.