I’ve been very busy the last couple of weeks and haven’t had the mental bandwidth to post entries.  A handful of items here to catch up:

• Three times in the last three weeks, Debra and I have been attacked while riding our bikes in the morning.  Some idiot in a truck is throwing stuff out his window at us.  The first time it was a McDonald’s drink cup with ice and the remains of a drink.  That hit Debra in the chest.  The second time was a clear miss.  The third time was Monday, when I was struck in the arm by an empty Gatorade bottle.  I saw that one coming, though, and got the license plate of the truck so I could report it to the county sheriff.  I’ll be watching for this guy in the future.  In over four years of riding my bike in this area, these are the only such incidents that I’ve experienced.
• I’ve been working on a .NET interface to the Microsoft CAB SDK, something similar to the Delphi component that I developed a few years back and published in my article Grab A Cab.  This turns out to be much harder than I expected.  I’ve finished the interface to the decompression portion and am working on the compression side of things.  Marshaling data between .NET managed code and unmanaged DLLs can be difficult.  Marshaling data from unmanaged DLLs to managed callbacks is really tough.
• I didn’t participate in the Hotter ‘N Hell Hundred last weekend like I had planned.  My riding partners backed out:  one with a broken bike and the other with an injury.  So I did my monthly century alone again, this time leaving the house at 5:15 am so that I could finish at the lake for my company’s annual summer picnic.  I ended up riding 104 miles, with a monster hill at mile 98.  Ouch.  Diving into the lake sure felt good, though.
• The United Nations Security Council recently has shown why people don’t take it seriously.  Their Resolution 1556 (30 July 2004) does a lot of reaffirming, taking note of, reiterating, condemning, urging, and expressing concern, and generally wringing its hands and blustering, but in the end does nothing to help solve the crisis.  Recent meetings on the issue are similarly lacking in substance.  At this rate, the problem will be solved by default before the Security Council pulls its thumb out of its butt.
• Just to prove that they can issue statements along with the best of them and make demands that they have no ability or intention of enforcing, the Security Council issued this press release condemning “in the strongest terms” the recent hostage taking in Russia and demanding the “immediate and unconditional release of all hostages of the terrorist attack.”  I wonder if the members of the Security Council understand that they’re being laughed at.  A demand implies some means of forcing the action, or at least some meaningful punishment if the demand isn’t met.  The Security Council can’t back up its demands.  It’s pathetic.