The first ride of the season might be a shaggy dog

Finally, some time in the saddle this weekend! I managed to prep my bike for spring today, and enjoy 30 miles of parkway riding in Minneapolis' 50 degree weather, just in advance of the six inches of snow expected tomorrow. (No, I'm not kidding.)

I'm astounded by how much joy riding brings me. The last few weeks have been hell at work, I was woken up at 3 am by a woman buzzing my doorbell so drunk she didn't realize she was in the wrong building, and I've generally felt crabbier than normal over the last few days. Yet ten minutes into riding and my helmet can barely contain my grin. As intrigued as I was by the idea of riding, as much as I enjoyed being a passenger on Bumblebee, I simply had no idea how much I would love riding motorcycles. The rush of joy rolling the throttle makes me feel silly, a little inept at my loss for words to describe it, and very tempted to become an evangelist for giving a motorbike and an open road to every grumpy, downtrodden person on the planet.

Speaking of grumpy and downtrodden, I spent my Saturday at what might be the most disorganized DFL convention I'll ever attend (one that went so far past its allotted time that it finished in the parking lot after the building closed). There were some terrific results, though, most notably that Jeff Hayden, a guy with a spectacular gift for getting people organized, energized and motivated (very often while laughing their asses off) won the DFL endorsement for the Minnesota House of Representatives district 61B, a seat being vacated by Rep. Neva Walker.

I've gotten to know Jeff through our work together at Hearth Connection, and there are few people I know with his gift for quickly grasping complex, dynamic situations, and for intuiting the missing information that helps make sense of the whole. As he looks ahead to the election in November, I am tremendously excited by what his leadership will bring to Minnesota.

Speaking of leadership, I learned this morning that the good folks at The Google have created a new tool to synchronize Google Calendars with Microsoft Outlook. This is great news for people like me, who are chained to Outlook through work and the iPhone, but want to be able to use Google apps for their access-anywhere and sharing features. It's remarkable how long it is taking for our mainstream software vendors to work out how to have their widgets and applications all play nicely with one another, so that those of us on the user-end can pipe, store and update our information wherever we deem fit. I know, first hand, that data integration is never as easy as it sounds, but it's shocking that there hasn't been more progress already among some major, mainstream applications to have transparency between them. But then, that might make user migration to the best application a little too easy, and that might hurt the bottom line, eh? In any case, this news, combined with the iPhone's big software upgrade due this June, promise to make my appointments and calendars work the way they should.

And speaking of tech working the way it should, my home PC is not. I spent the morning and a chunk of this evening verifying that's it's got a nasty case of malware. Despite multiple levels of network security and resident antivirus software to prevent something like this in the first place, and throwing about five different anti-spyware suites to try to diagnose and cure it after the fact, it looks like the only viable solution is to format the hard drive and start over. (This time, with Linux as the foundation, and only using malware-comes-right-thorough-the-Windows via virtualization for the apps that aren't available for Linux.) Wish me luck.

My fingers are crossed: for better security, for better synchronization, for Jeff and -- good lord! -- for more riding weather soon.