Mountain Bike Technique - track stand

A track stand is something I really need to practice:
http://www.mountainzone.com/videos/category.asp?cid=401645

More related videos here (the "Beginner" section is kinda funny to watch... The lady doing the stuff is just strange)
http://www.mountainzone.com/videos/category.asp?cid=300545

The advanced technique also describes bunny hopping in good detail.

And the drop:
http://declinemagazine.com/visuals/fluidride/fluidride_vol1.htm

Various technique:
http://www.goclipless.com/techniques/


After that, I'll work on these:

http://www.trashzen.com/bunny-hop-blunt.php

;)

Temp file in Perl

Use the following to generate a temporary file in Perl:

use File::Temp;
my $fh = tempfile;

print $fh "temp data";

Also, this finds the directory of the Perl script being executed:

use FindBin;
my $program_dir = $FindBin::Bin;

This, and some other useful Perl things, are found here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/05/29/treasures.html

Auto Repair

Just changed a wheel bearing on the Impala, thanks to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-TsTn-3ktk

Also came across this good blog:

http://free-auto-repair-advice.blogspot.com/

perlboot

Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial

It's a pretty nice tutorial accessible via 'perldoc perlboot'

As usual, it's also available on the web, for example:
http://perl.active-venture.com/pod/perlboot.html

Picture Backups

Just wanted to mark down my backup command... I also throw SSH in there sometimes to backup to a remote machine:

(cd /cygdrive/c/my_backup ; tar czf - Pictures_Backup) | gpg -o - -c - | split -b 512M - backup_

I noticed the flavor of "split" varied between cygwin and RHEL.

UPDATE:

A couple of new notes:

tar cvzf - DirToBackup | gpg -o - -c - | ssh me@some-server 'cd /backups/backupdir ; cat | split -b 512m - date_tar_gz_'

Then, use the following to produce "differential" backups:
tar cvzf - --newer "YYYY-MM-DD" DirToBackup | blah blah blah


(note to self: one canine pound)

Linux Kernel Modules

Just some info about Linux kernel modules. This faq gives some small examples to write. I'm just jotting it down because it's something I'd like to know a little more about in the future:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/kernel/x571.html

Perl and Dates

Just a quick code snippet I through together to remember some of the date parsing modules that seem to come standard with Perl 5:

use Date::Parse;
use Date::Format;
use strict;

my $date = "2008-12-30 05:00:00";
my $machine_time = str2time($date);
my $week = time2str("%U", $machine_time);
my $month = time2str("%L", $machine_time);

print < < EOF;

Date is: $date
Machine Time is: $machine_time
Week is: $week
Month is: $month

EOF