Like An Angel, Standing In A Shaft Of Light

Back from my California vacation. I flew out to LA with Anne's sister Lorraine, picked up her daughter Vicky and drove to meet Anne in San Diego. Spent a few days there, then an overnight in Thousand Oaks before driving to Pismo Beach for a few days, and finished with a day or two in LA before heading home. I took about 300 pictures, many of which were either multiple shots for stitching into panoramas, or attempts to get a good shot of some nesting birds -- night herons were nesting in the tree outside our hotel window at Pismo Beach, and I have about 40 blurry photos of the (enormous) chicks -- but I should have about 150-200 good photos to post after the final cull. Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath...

 

So-Cal: First Impressions Three things impressed themselves on me right away: The first and biggest was that the traffic was far heavier, everywhere, than I expected. The second was that Southern California, though not particularly hot, is intensely sunny (and my hair is much thinner than it used to be, so I now own a hat like the ones that little-old-lady gardeners wear, bought in San Diego, and I still managed to get a serious full-body-plus-scalp sunburn) and though I knew the region was a mountainous desert, it was more mountainous, and far more desert-like, than I expected. And the third? The people I met and saw were nowhere near as "California" as I'd hoped -- they were pretty much like everybody else, oh well. Uggs seem to still be in style though, and there were one or two common male hairstyles that we don't see back home.

 

I did some mountain biking, not as much as I would have liked but we got two good days in, renting bikes and riding in Topanga Canyon, on mixed singletrack and dirt roads -- including the famous Mulholland Drive, which is unpaved at one end. Not particularly technical except in a few places, but was very hilly, and very scenic.

 

Most of the rest of the trip was nice but uneventful (we had a great meal at Bo Beaux in San Diego, where Vicky knew the chef, and had a nice day sightseeing in San Luis Obispo), but there was one unexpected highlight: The Getty Museum in LA. I'd never heard of it but Lorraine wanted to go, and we did that on our last full day. The artwork inside was almost an afterthought, the architecture and outer gardens were so beautiful.

 

(My laptop battery basically reached the end of its life last week, holding only enough charge for 20 minutes or so off the grid, so I ordered a new and better one on vacation, and it was waiting when we got home -- I went from 20 minutes to over five hours, which I verified yesterday. My car also got worked on while I was away, another burden off my checklist.)

 

We got home after midnight Saturday night, and spent yesterday just hanging out -- reading, browsing the web, and gardening (that last was Anne, even though I do have the hat for it now).  Later in the afternoon we biked out to the swimming hole near Freemansburg, and we ended the day with a visit to Brew Works to see some friends.

 

Anyway, I'm home now, and back at work, listening to the Penn State fans weasel-wording their way around the latest revelations in the Sandusky scandal.

News

Well, I made my decision: I'm not racing the Wilderness 101. So what does this mean? I still want to do it next year, so I have more time to get back in the game, or go further away from being ready for that matter, but there's no longer any training pressure this summer -- I still plan on training, and hopefully I can keep on improving, but I am no longer under the gun for the late-July due date. This also frees me up for a bunch of other things, like maybe that trip to Vermont, and maybe a bike tour with Anne (though she already has planned, and it looks to be a girls-only event). We shall see...

 

They Are Penn State Actual quote from accused pedophile Jerry Sandusky's lawyer, part of his opening statement: "Jerry loves kids so much that he does things most of us wouldn't think of doing." Well, that's kind of why he's in court...  I guess this proves that even his lawyer hates him.

 

(Meanwhile, there are still a lot of JoePat sympathisers here, moaning about how he was dissed -- that saintly man! winningest coach ever! railroaded! --  and how this was what finally broke him and killed him. I think that they're putting the cart before the horse here: he kept the lid on this scandal for years, for as long as he still had all his faculties, and the scandal broke when it did because he, with his health failing, was no longer able to squash it.)

 

One more decision made: I found a lightweight XML library for C, which I think I'll use to write a translation program, from an XML-style data file to the old-school punched card input format used by that FORTRAN program. This way I can either hand-write my own XML input file, or make one (or more!) input programs to create this new-style data file, then just pipe the data file through the translator and into the original program. I'll probably write a second translation program to go the other way, that is a card->XML translator as well as an XML->card translator, for the sake of completeness.

 

Tonight I'll be hitting Sals, maybe chasing after some of the VMB crew, who will be starting earlier on a group ride. Brew Works afterward...? The South Side Film Festival is also happening this week, maybe we'll go see a few movies tomorrow or Friday.

 

Memento Moritori

Whew! Emotionally tough weekend -- I won't get into it now, but I am actually glad to be back at work this Monday morning.

 

FORTRANNING: I got that program up and running for real now, it seems to work for any data set I give it, though the data I give it has all been generated in the past -- I have yet to create my own data set and run it. Data input, especially the fact that was designed around punched cards, and so the input file is very difficult to read/edit, is the Achilles Heel if this program right now; I think my next task will be to either rewrite the program to deal with a better input format (my inclination is to leave it alone), or (more likely) write some filter that takes a more user-friendly input file and translates it into the old format. I was also thinking of building a graphical user interface to create/edit the input files, and started playing with Glade to see how that might happen, but that will probably be a winter project.

 

Riding/Training: I am still on the fence about where I stand in terms of fitness. On the one hand, my monthly miles and hours took a dip in May, and fell off the cliff for June, and on that same hand I find myself off the back and hurting even on fairly easy rides. On the other hand... well there really isn't much on the other hand, except that now and then on a ride I feel good about something I used to have trouble with. I can see that there have been improvements, but I am nowhere near where I was two or three years ago, and more to the point, most of my improvements occurred in the Base training section -- when it came time to take it to the next level, my training regimen fell apart, and now I am nowhere near where I need to be. I worry that I will not be ready for W101, and may need to make the decision, within the next few days, to bag it.

 

Listening: I downloaded Blunderbuss the other day, and though I do like it, it's really just "meh, more Jack White." I downloaded the first Florence + The Machine album at the same time, and find I like it a lot more, though I do still like Ceremonials better. Anne said the other day that she needs new music, which she felt was more like she needed to find some new music to want, and get it, and I think I am in the same boat. Any suggestions out there?

 

By the way, I just posted the photos from Sarah's wedding on Flickr this weekend. Enjoy!

 

 

Newport: There She Sat

We were in Newport this past weekend for a wedding. It was the daughter of some of Anne's friends, to a young man with an apparently wealthy family, since the wedding and reception were at his aunt's summer home, and by "summer home" I mean one of those bazillion-dollar-mansion "cottages" that Newport is famous for -- we were in fact next door to the famous and exclusive Bailey's Beach, and just down the street from The Breakers and The Elms. It was really nice, a very pleasant setting and not as over-the-top as it might have been, and the reception was a total blowout. Photos to follow -- stay tuned.

 

(I'm mostly caught up with photos by the way, just posted a few oven shots on Flickr the other night. I have basically just a few gnome home shots from a recent ride -- don't ask, you'll have to wait and see -- and the wedding shots I took over the weekend, and I'll be up to date.)

 

Away from the wedding, the rest of the town of Newport was not as impressive. They make a big deal of of their history as the center of Gilded Age summer-home society, and they expend a bit of effort keeping the place quaint -- and there are a lot of really fine old Colonial-era houses that are still up to code and in use in town, in addition to the preserved Gilded Age "cottages" -- but the vibe in town was relentlessly tourist-trap commercial, a more upscale version of the Jersey Shore. The tell (and something I first spotted in Florida, likewise in a wharfside setting): lots of nice-looking pubs and bars and restaurants, but no good beer. Luckily, we found one exception...

 

Friday was a travel day, including a lunch visit with Anne's sister in Milford CT, Saturday was some touristy exploration followed by the wedding, and Sunday was more touristy exploring with some friends, a hike along the cliffside trail that runs behind the mansions, before the drive home. Traffic was typical for New England: awful.

 

Computer Fun: I've been trying to get an old FORTRAN program to work on my laptop, and I ran into some difficulties when some subprograms couldn't be found; I decided after some Googling that my best bet was to just rewrite them from scratch. Two of them just looked like old-timey "standard library" routines, and were fairly easy to emulate, but the other two seemed to be custom subroutines, part of the program and probably in some missing file, and it took a little sleuthing to even dope out what they did... (Basically, they were poorly-conceived workarounds, written to ease the transition from punched cards to file I/O. Yeah, it's an old program.) Anyway, I was messing with these over the weekend, planning & researching at the B&B, and the wharfside coffee shop, in between our other activities, and then last night I sat down and wrote the subroutines, and they worked fine -- if not on the first try then at least before I went to bed. The rest of the program is still hanging up, but that might be because of calls to some missing database, a project for another weekend.

 

How's Your Bike Training Going? Don't ask...

 

It All Turns On Affection

Morning weigh-in: 182#

 

"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know." - Wendell Berry

 

So we went down to Washington the weekend before last, to see Wendell Berry give this year's Jefferson Lecture, and we decided to make a long weekend of it, Saturday through Tuesday evening. (I had Friday off, and we were contemplating maybe playing one night in Philly beforehand, but I had a bunch of weekend chores and Anne had some 24-hour bug, so we kept it to four days.)

 

We took the bus to Philly on Saturday morning and hopped the train to Union Station in DC, where we met Emmi. Lunch was at the Native American Museum.

 

Dinner was at the Bier Baron, a rathskeller-type place we found last time we were in town. Our dinner guest was Liz H-D, and she was vivacious as ever, and she seems to have acquired a new poise or confidence -- she seems to be thriving in DC, and we were graced with an hour or so of exciting conversation between the garden party she was coming from, and the "Nineties Party" she was heading to. ("Nineties Party" -- am I really that old?)

 

Sunday was rainy, and we spent the day at the National Gallery of Art -- two big wings, hundreds of famous paintings both modern and classical/historical, lunch in the underground passageway/cafeteria between wings, and they let you take pictures... (BTW I already posted most of those pics over at Flickr, go wild.) It was awesome but in the end exhausting, and I had little energy left when we hit the African Museum afterward -- and not much time either, we got there with only an hour left until closing. It was Earth Day on the Mall, and in our peregrinations we caught bits and pieces of it but the rain put a serious damper on events: even Cheap Trick attracted just a handful of stragglers.

 

That night we had dinner with Emmi's old college friend Amanda and her partner, at another awesome local place called Meridian Pint. This was Amanda's recommendation, but I'd done my homework and knew that it was considered one of the best beer bars in DC, and it didn't disappoint: food and brew choices were both unbelievable, and the service was both casual and top-notch. Amanda, outspoken and vivacious in her own right, also seems to have matured, mellowed even.. It was really nice to catch up with her, she with her newly-minted admittance to the bar and Emmi with her own brand-new PhD.

 

We hit the Smithsonian on Monday, but just the Museum of Natural History. (Another overwhelming experience, stay tuned for pictures.) Anne and Emmi went shopping beforehand, so I found myself in a DuPont Circle institution -- Kramer Books -- bought Bill Bryson's Notes On A Small Island, and kicked back for a while in their coffee shop. The girls joined me for lunch there, and then we were off to do the museum thing. We were there long enough, even just scratching the surface, that were pressed for time getting to the Kennedy Center for the lecture.

 

Tickets were free, but you had to reserve them months ago, and then claim them an hour or so before the lecture or they'd give them away to someone else. We got there in time and retrieved our tickets (walking through literally hundreds of people camped out waiting to grab unclaimed tickets), then we had some time to check out the Kennedy Center -- I mostly sat on the stairs outside the auditorium, where Amanda joined us again. (Anne's friends Lois and Mary Lou were also in town for the lecture; they drove down together that day from the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't see them until afterward.)

 

The lecture was titled "It All Turns On Affection," which was itself a quote from E.M. Forster. (You can find the lecture here.) It really was very moving, and he was quiet and soft-spoken and seemed to become choked up from time to time -- maybe he was rallying his resources, he's not a young man -- and he held us spellbound in our seats for the duration. The lecture ended on an ironic note when the head of the NEH came out and announced that 'the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the US Government or the NEH." (More on the lecture here.)

 

Afterwards we (Anne and me, Emmi, Amanda, and Mary Lou and Lois) all had dinner at Meridian Pint's sister establishment, the Smoke and Barrel. This was another of Amanda's recommendations, and it was a good one (though I think Meridian Pint was the nicer of the two), and we also got to see some of Anne's old neighborhood from when she lived in DC.

 

Tuesday morning it was finally nice out again, but we were heading home. We said goodbye to Emmi, who was off to a job interview in Maryland, grabbed breakfast in Union Station, and took the train for Philly. We had some time to kill there, so we walked around, hit a few bookshops, and had a long lunch at the White Dog Cafe. One last bus ride, a quick hike across town, and we were home.

 

I have to say, I really liked that train ride.

 

On The Beat Down Beat

I raced yesterday, once more unto the Michaux Maximus... I took it as a training  race, which was good not only because I could use the experience -- it's been two years since I raced, or participated in any large-scale cycling event for that matter -- but also because if I had to take my results seriously I'd be pretty upset: I basically got my ass kicked, if not dead last then close to it, even in my age group.

It was a fun day though even considering the smackdown: the weather turned out to be perfect, and course conditions were as good as I've ever seen them there, dry (for the most part) but still pretty tacky where you needed it. The course itself (you can see my GPS track here) started a little different than the way I remember it, but it still hit many of the familiar trails: the Huckleberry, and the Fuzzy, and Dead Woman Hollow and Three Mile Trail, and it finished with the usual climb up the Log Sled Trail.

I really can't complain too much: my biggest problem right now is fitness (which I knew going into this, and which this is supposed to help address), followed by a general aversion to riding too close to other people -- I stopped a few times to let riders pass, and often paced the guys in front of me rather than muscling my way through -- but I think that this aversion could also be attributed to the fitness thing, since I blew up whenever I put out a truly competitive level of effort, especially in the first section, where there was a rapid succession of short steep climbs, so that ""fighting i n the pack" mentality really wasn't working ofr me.

I was more than a little gratified though -- shocked, even -- at how well I did on the technical stuff, especially in comparison to the people I was riding among. This was a real switcheroo: I used to be pretty bad at technical riding, and made up for it with better climbing ability;  yesterday, I struggled to keep my place climbing Dead Woman Hollow, got passed by a few guys, but then I utterly dropped them, and a few others, on Three Mile Trail.

They all caught me before the end though, either on the long, rolling dirt road stretch that came immediately afterward, or when we were climbing the final mile on Log Sled Trail, or at the point  in between, probably the easiest part of the whole course, when I suddenly needed to pull over and hurl. (Apparently I still have a few kinks to work out. When I got back I skipped the free meal...)

My ride time was about 3:15 and my time on the course was probably around 3:30, no worse than I expected but I do see I have some work to do. About par for the course.

Brown And Green And Pink

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 184.5#

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 185#

 

Those were the colors I saw on the way in yesterday morning: off to my left at the bottom of Jugtown Mountain was a plowed field, sort of rolling ground, with just a nap or fuzz of green poking through, looking almost like folds of multicolored velour. The earth was a wet-dirt brown and the green was early-spring green, and just to my right was a tree, maybe a dogwood in bloom, the light flowers almost like cherry blossoms. The sky was blue with white puffy clouds, it was beautiful.

 

So I got in a good ride on Sunday after my trip to Arizona, and Saturday's do-nothing-as-the-rain-falls-fest. (I missed 100 miles for the week and 300 for March, but I was just too tired to go out for a training ride in the cold rain. Oh well.) It was a good tempo ride, 75 minutes in Zone 3 -- I got down past Wy-Hit_Tuk Park and back to the Forks of the Delaware before my time was up -- then did a nice mellow bike path ride before meeting up with the towpath again at the public boat launch. Three hours or a bit more, thirty five miles, pretty nice and the day was very pleasant.

 

 I was pretty happy with this ride's HR zones after my last ride, which was supposed to be the cruise intervals -- the new workout for this period -- but was a disaster: HR not going up after the first interval, and the workout not being properly set up on my Garmin; I ended up doing an easy ride out after the first interval, and a series of standing sprints on the way back. An OK ride for what it was, but not what I had in mind... Tonight is another go at the cruise intervals.

 

More on Arizona in a later post...

 

Back To The Old Nose And Grindstone

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

The second rest week is behind me -- last night was an hour of towpath E2 on the Turner, and tonight will be this new period's first new training ride: M2 or "cruise intervals." I'll be doing three 10-minute intervals in Zones 4 and 5a, two minutes easy spin between each one, and will probably follow it up with another hour of Zone 1/Zone2 spinning. Each new period ups the intensity a little...

 

Luckily for me, this is the first week of the new period, thus a low-volume week, since I will be out of town for work starting tomorrow morning -- the trip is to somewhere in Arizona, north of the Apache National Forest, for a plant inspection. I'll be home Friday night though, and should be able to do a longish tempo/endurance ride on Saturday, and a real MTB ride Sunday, maybe American Standard. If all goes well, I should break 100 miles for the week despite the trip, and break 300 for the month of March.

 

I'm blowing off a few things this week to make room for the trip, and a few others to make room for the rides that I don't want to blow off because of the trip; one thing that must go overboard is the VMB board meeting tonight. I feel a little guilty, but I really don't have time to do everything I need to and still make the meeting, so I have to skip the meeting, ride or no ride, and I might as well get my ride in. However, I was at two officer meetings last week when I should have been doing other things, including trip preparation I'll be doing tonight, and I made one of two trail maintenance days over the weekend, so I don't feel too bad. I played catch-up a bit with my club secretary duties last night too, posting preliminary copies of the minutes for the February general and board meetings.

 

(It was kind of cute, Anne and I typing away on our laptops at the dinner table last night, me on the minutes and she on her latest project, which involved her taking notes from the handwritten transcripts of the Molly Maguire Trials.)

 

Meanwhile, on the computer: Over the weekend I became a bit obsessed with the question of how much a tee (tee as in piping) weighs, based on a weight take-off for work, which I did with a quick and dirty estimation of the weight of two intersecting hollow cylinders. I got to wondering how accurate my estimate was, and what the actual, exact volume of intersecting cylinders would be. I could have found the volume by integrating, but thought that someone must have worked this out before... Googling took me first to a whole lot of nothing, then to pages and pages about Steinmetz solids (close but no cigar), and finally to a general formula for the volume of two intersecting cylinders.

 

The formula is straightforward enough, but unfortunately it involves elliptic integrals, and I could find no elliptic integral functions in any spreadsheet program I owned. This looked like a job for octave, but my version didn't have the functions either -- they were available through a package, one I hadn't installed, that accessed the GNU Scientific Library. OK, install the package, a "learning experience" in its own right, figure out how to use the elliptical functions, and... the actual computation I was trying to do, once I got this far, was a piece of cake. The final result: weights based on my quick-and-dirty estimation method were about 1% off from the exact solution. Which is probably why no one ever bothers to use, or even talk about, the pain-in-the-ass exact solution.

 

See you in a few days.

Hold Steady

Morning weigh-in: 183.5#

 

There may be a bit of suppression of a different kind in that weight: I ran out of steam last night, ate a bowl of cereal and crashed. No ride, but there's not supposed to be a ride, it's a rest week. Tonight is Taco Night at the Brew Works, and I suspect that number may go up a bit by tomorrow's weigh-in.

 

 

Time For Another Rest Week

So last week was the third and final week for Base 2 training, and I think I'm finally getting the volume up where it should be: 105 miles, 9:25 ride time; I was in the saddle six days last week. It was a good end to the period, and now I'm more than ready for a well-deserved rest week.

 

Saturday's tempo ride worked out just fine (as did the beer brewing), then Anne and I stayed in, skipping the St Patrick's Day festivities in favor of some reading and an early bedtime. I'd sent out a text to a bunch of  friends about riding in JT, but got no bites except Greg H, who said he was riding Prompton in the early afternoon with a few people, and I was welcome to join them. I wanted to do American Standard to basically check out the map I'd made, see how accurate it was, but I also didn't want to ride alone, so...

 

Sunday morning was cold and overcast, and it looked like rain, which was completely different from the forecast I saw Saturday night, but the revised forecast said that this would all burn off and the day would be warm and sunny, so I went anyway. I met Greg at his house, then followed him up to the meeting place north of the Poconos -- sure enough, the day changed dramatically as we drove -- and there we hooked up with the rest of our crew: Robin R, Rich B, Jay, and Greg's friend Mark. We parked some cars, consolidated the bikes and riders, and continued on to Prompton, which is sort of northeast of Scranton.

 

It was a beautiful day. Prompton State Park is basically an artificial lake with some of the surrounding land included, and the main trail circumnavigates the lake, with several other trails looping off the main trail. The terrain is rocky, and somewhat hilly, but very rideable -- in some ways it reminds me of Allamuchy. I was worried that I would get stomped by the rest of the riders, and for the first half hour or so I was sucking wind at the back, but after that I was fine. We were all in the same early-season boat anyway, and considering that it was still winter I think we all rode rather well... We were out for about 4.5 hours, of which only 2.5 were spent actually moving, so there was a lot of social time in there as well. We finished at around 6:30, just as the afternoon was starting to wind down. Most of those guys were going out to eat -- they all lived a lot closer, no biggie for them, but I just drove home and met Anne at the Brew Works. (She had been over at Steel Stacks to see "Bicycle Dreams," which unfortunately I'd completely forgotten about.) A chicken cheese steak, a mug of the new Pilsener, and it was time for bed.

 

I'll do a recap of this training period some time in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that things are working out rather well.

 

Fun With Map And Calendar

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 183.5#
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 184#

Happy St. Patrick's Day! -- or, as the bartenders call it, "Amateur Night."

Monday night was a "recovery ride," about an hour of easy spinning on the towpath, then Tuesday I did my 75-minute "muscular endurance ride," 24 miles in just under 1:40 total time (probably close to a personal best for the last year or so), and last night was an hour of E2 ("aerobic endurance") towpath spinning on the singlespeed, which almost drove me nuts with all that hamster-leg spinning, but it was also the first after-work ride of the year where I didn't even bring lights. Unfortunately, Sunday night was a chicken cheese steak at Brew works, Monday night was a regular (ie beef) cheese steak, same place, and Tuesday night was two-brew Tuesday, though I did eat at home. Baby steps, but one of my problems is obvious...

Bottom line though, I was lighter Thursday morning than I've been at any time since last July, and I feel a lot stronger on the bike than I did even a month or so ago.

Thursday night I was exhausted, and the ride was an easy on the towpath, mainly Zone 1 on the Turner, and again without even bringing lights, and I cooked myself tuna and wilted spinach over rice for dinner -- Anne was out with Donna -- before passing out. Yesterday had rain in the forecast, so I made it a rest day: got a haircut and did dry cleaning, the usual usual Saturday-type chores so I can ride today. (Of course the evening turned out fine, but my decision was the right one.)  It's beautiful out now, and sometime today I'll be getting in my last tempo workout (90 minutes in Zone 3) for the second Base period; tomorrow I'll probably so some real off road riding, like maybe American Standard, and then comes my second rest week.

The rest of today is being taken up with brewing; we're actually making two 5-gallon batches, one an Orval clone and the other an Irish red ale.

My quest for good training/analysis tools continues, or rather I should say it got complicated by new information. In a reply to my post about that TCX to HR zone data converter I wrote, someone mentioned a program called Golden Cheetah, so I downloaded it. It's very power-meter centric, but seems to have a lot of really nice analysis tools built in, especially when it comes to graphing ride data, though it doesn't quite do what I want it to do. I did notice though, that my favorite web tools, and my favorite programs in general, seem to involve maps, or calendars, or both. (The training programs all have both, for what should be obvious reasons.) I wonder if there's a market for something like that, a diary/blog program, with geographic data capabilities and a user interface that includes both map and calendar. I'm not sure what a program like that would even be expected to do (other than maybe be used to record rides and analyze training), but I know that I'd love to play with it.

Back From Knoxville

Not giving my morning weigh-in...

 

Four day weekend, and we had an awesome time visiting Emmi in Knoxville: Ben came down from Massachusetts on Tuesday, then I took Thursday off, and we piled in the car and left for Tennessee in the morning. One loooong drive later -- even though we made good time this time, that trip always feels like forever -- and we were there in time to meet Em for dinner. It was a bit awkward, since her dad and his girlfriend were also in town (and at dinner), but it was nice to see her.

 

Friday was the day we came down for: Emmi gave a public presentation of her research on the Tree of Heaven. (Actually, I should say that this was the public presentation of her research; it wasn't quite her doctoral defense, which is coming in April, but something similar and a major milestone on her way to her PhD.) Her housemate and another student also gave presentations that morning, shorter and less formal ones involving temperature response (her housemate) and hearing response to predatory bird calls (the other student) in invasive lizards, and we checked them out too, then after lunch came Emmi's presentation, which was about an hour long plus some time for questions afterward, and was totally amazing.

 

Her fellow grad students took her out for a beer afterward, and we tagged along for what was some very esoteric bar conversation, at least by our standards, then Emmi's advisers took us all out for a celebratory dinner that night: Anne and I, and Ben, Emmi and Matt, and Em's roommate Laura, and her colleague Mark, and her dad and his girlfriend, and of course her advisers Jen and Joe, who were just as proud of her as the rest of us. Strangely enough, dinner conversation was mostly about music.

 

Saturday was a ride day, Anne and I on our mountain bikes with Ben on my 29er. We did some road and some paved bike path then found ourselves at the "Forks of the River WMA," where we played on real singletrack for a bit. Lunch with Emmi and Matt, then I went back to the hotel and took a nap while Anne did some shopping with Ben and Emmi -- I caught up with them later for dinner in Old Town.

 

Sunday we said our goodbyes, drove all day, and were home by about 7:00 -- in other words, before dark. Daylight Savings!

Hump Day

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Lunchtime.  I get through this afternoon and tomorrow, and I'm done for the week -- we are heading down to Knoxville, to see Emmi's presentation on her invasive species (Tree of Heaven) research.

 

Fed Up: I finally had enough. I have an older relative who doesn't email much, but his emails are inevitably of the "FW:FW:FW:FW:LOL!"  and "NEW SCAM ALERT (confirmed by snopes)" variety that have been rattling around the Internet since 1998 or so, always bullshit and usually very annoying. Well, I just put in a filter on my account; from now on, any email from this person that also contains a "FW" anywhere in the subject, gets tossed in a dead-letter file without me ever having to see it. I sure hope he doesn't send anything important...

 

Anyway, last night I did a decent tempo ride on the towpath, 45 minutes nonstop in Zone 3 (plus another hour in Zone 2 on the return). Tonight is an aerobic endurance ride on the Surly followed by a visit to Brew Works, and tomorrow is another tempo ride. Weather and ground conditions are excellent right now.

 

Speaking of feeding, this weekend I had two of the best cuts of beef ever: Saturday was a steak of some kind, and Sunday was some round cut cooked in the pressure cooker. (I had leftover steak sandwiches last night.) This has been going on for several weeks, ever since we split that cow with Donna -- best idea ever, a freezer full of local meat.

 

Walking On Springtime

Walked out the door this morning, and it was a beautiful, springlike day -- a bit cool, but sunny and the air felt like May or June instead of March. Everything is still sort of brown bit it's pretty obvious that we are starting -- starting! -- to leave winter behind.

 

In terms of training, last week was a disappointment: I got in one good "tempo" ride, then had bike club meetings after after work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I was too tired to ride after work, and when I went out Friday night, supposedly for another tempo ride, I couldn't get my heart rate up, and bagged the ride after about a half hour. I rode Saturday but skipped Sunday, and other than a few Saturday errands, drycleaning and oil change and such, it was basically a lost weekend: going out late, sleeping in and being coffee-starved and headachey all day. I've been burning the candle at both ends lately; I think I'll have to let a few things go if riding is what I really want.

 

One thing I did finish was that Perl script to extract heart rate summaries from my ride data. I'll be going back over the past training period and getting my analyzing done soon... Tonight is another tempo ride, tomorrow is aerobic endurance, Wednesday is tempo again, and on Thursday we're off to Knoxville to see Emmi's dissertation defence on Friday. We'll probably get a ride in on Saturday (I hope).

 

So Far So Good, Part Eleventy-Bazillion and One

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

I guess I was pretty used to those towpath SS rides, where my legs would spin out trying to maintain even a moderate pace, since I was really worried about last night's "tempo" ride, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. (I was on the Turner, of course...) Higher gears and I'd move along, just below needing to breathe hard; my speed wasn't too high The plan is to do 30 minutes, then 40 at my next tempo ride -- there are supposed to be two of these rides each week -- then 65 and 75 minutes next week, and both tempo rides for the third week will be 90 minutes. I should be running out of towpath by that point, even if out and back are both in the training zone.

 

Speaking of the Turner... I'd been having progressively worse and worse a time with the rear shifting -- didn't seem to be the cables, or that pain in the ass derailleur I have on there, or anything I could find -- then at Trex a few weekends ago the rear wheel started making amazing rubbing/grinding sounds. Intermittent but loud, it sounded like the rear tire was rubbing on something (a sound I associate with a broken frame), but there was nothing I could see rubbing... Home and on the stand, I gave the cassette a little wiggle and found out my freehub was shot. Luckily, I have a spare rear wheel, so I moved my cassette and tire over, did a little brake adjustments, and now everything seems to be working out fine.

 

Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day, but I did today's ride last night because tonight is the monthly VMB meeting. It should be a real shit-show -- stay tuned...

 

Break Time's Over

Morning weigh-in: 185.5#

 

Yesterday was the only ride I did last week, which was the rest week for my first training period; it was also my opportunity to do that Lactate Threshold test again (I plan to do the LT test monthly, basically as part of each period's rest week), and I found my heart rate at  LT has gone up by 6 beats per minute, from 159 to 165 BPM. I guess that's good news... I haven't really seen, or been able to figure out, anything, one way or the other, about changes to LT heart rate, whether up or down is good or bad or whatever, but hey -- I had a number, I trained, and the number went up. I win!

 

Tonight starts my first night of Base 2 training, and it's the first ride with the new (harder) HR zones based on my new number, and the first training ride outside of Zone 2: I'll be doing a "tempo" ride on the towpath, 30 minutes or so in Zone 3 after my warmup. We shall see.

 

Grabbed My Coat And Grabbed My Hat

No morning weigh-in today: I overslept and was in "run through the house with my hair on fire" mode, trying to get out the door this morning, so there was no time for the niceties like coffee, breakfast or the scale. It was all for naught though, since there was an accident on Jugtown Mountain, the highway was a parking lot, and I was a half hour late to work anyway. Oh well, I'll make up the difference tonight...

No ride last night -- and there will apparently be no ride tonight either, since I forgot to charge my lights -- but I did have some success with the elevation profiles I was playing with. I haven't quite figured out how to use all of Gnuplot from octave, but I output my data to a file, which I used inside Gnuplot to make the exact plot I wanted. I then made a quick plot of my map, and combined the two for a really decent mockup. I'll post it here tonight.

After that it was Miller time, or at least, Brew Works Type A and fastnachts time... I met Anne and the crew (Donna, Erin, Brian, Jen, Nick, and later Matt and a friend of his) down there, pleasant evening.

Not sure what tonight will bring, maybe some laundry and some bike TLC -- the Turner and the Surly both need cleaning and lubing at the very least.

UPDATE Here's that map/profile:
 

Back To The Plotting Table

Morning weigh-in: 187.5#

 

Happy Phat Fastnacht!

 

So how did I spend last night, the first evening of my first rest week? Plotting more elevation profiles, of course! Part of what I want to do is use the more powerful Gnuplot features, and I also wanted to use octave to do any post-GRASS processing -- conveniently enough, octave uses Gnuplot to do its plotting, so that's two birds with one stone. (I also refined my method of getting the data out of GRASS and into a more standard CSV file, basically by piping it through an awk one-liner. In the end I might just use a simple awk script to do all the post-processing on the fly, and just pipe that output to Gnuplot. We'll see.)

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... On Sunday I chose Trex after all, and it was good but in some ways it may have been a mistake: despite the "Trex is never wet" hype, big sections of the place were a muddy mess, the trails were too short, and too steep, for the real "long slow distance" I needed. It was fun though, and I ran into a few other guys riding, as well as a kid on a unicycle, and Andrew, the guy building the trails. Beautiful day too.

 

Tonight is maybe a short recovery ride, or maybe more plotting fun, then it's Taco Night at the Brew Works.

 

February Recap

Morning weigh-in: 187# (not good)

 

Today starts the first rest week in my training program, so I thought I'd do a quick recap of where things stand:

 

Week        Workouts    Hours     Distance   Calories

1/23-1/29         4           5:02         52.0         3413

1/30-2/05         3           4:30         53.1         3412

2/06-2/12         4           8:14         81.6         6645

2/13-2/19         4           7:34         78.0         5531

 

(There are four weeks in there instead of three, because I started my first "week" early to make up for training time lost to a business trip.)

 

Not too shabby, though I notice two things:

 

1. I seem to max out at four rides a week (my plan currently calls for 5-6 rides a week). This may be because it's not the best time of year for riding right now, with weather, daylight and other outside conditions putting a damper on my available ride time, or it be just how my schedule works out -- I have plenty of time on my days off, but not so much during the week. I suspect that both of those come into play, but at bottom it's a motivation issue. We'll see what happens as the weather gets nicer.

 

2. Right now I should be putting in my biggest weekly hours in the saddle, with lots and lots of low-intensity riding to get me ready for the tougher stuff coming (which will be shorter, harder, and need more rest days). My target is about 500 hours for the year, but if these are my "above average" weeks in terms of hours, I'm in serious trouble.

 

Well, things might not be as good as I'd want -- especially considering that this kind of training is less effective, in fact it might even be counterproductive, at lower training volumes -- but here's a look at my February stats going back a few years (to when I first started using the Garmin):

 

Year     Workouts      Hours       Distance    Calories

2009         12             13:37          127.6         8894

2010           5              6:21            88.8         6462

2011           6              6:44            54.4         3075

2012         11             20:26          212.7       15588

 

So in terms of volume, I'm pretty much on target right now to double my best distance/hours/calories from the past few years...

Funny How Things Work Out

Morning weigh-in (Friday): 186.5# (oops!)
Morning weigh-in (Sunday): 186#

So Thursday night I had an itch to scratch, and ended up playing with the computer instead of riding. Oh well, but at least I managed to get some results, as well as managing to break Topofusion...

Our Story So Far: What I want to do is take a GPS track and create an elevation profile of it, sort of what you see here or here or here. For the geekier cyclist, it's now normal to ride with GPS and upload the ride's data to some website, where you can see the data analyzed (ie graphs of elevation, heart rate, speed, etc), maybe even compare it -- read: compete -- against the rides of others. That's all good in its way, but what if you want to create your own standalone graph, maybe for use in some other project, and screen captures just won't do?

There are a few options. One of the best programs around, for playing with maps and cycling data, is a thing called TopoFusion. It can read ride data from a variety of formats, draw routes, and analyze either one in terms of elevation, distance etc. Unfortunately, it's a Windows program, and though I got it to work on my Linux laptop, recent upgrades caused it to become pretty flaky -- and then my attempts to fix the problem caused TopoFusion to stop working altogether.

(There is another problem with TopoFusion: GPS tracks consist of a bunch of individual points, and TF finds the elevation for each of those points and then makes a "staircase" graph of those individual data samples. When there are enough data points, like the GPS track of an actual ride, it's not noticeable, but with only a few data points the profile looks like a staircase. Worse, if you define a track by two points, say miles apart, with a mountain and valley between them, you will not get any of that profile, just the elevation at the first and second points.)

My next plan was to use an open-source program called Quantum GIS, which is supposed to be pretty good, with all sorts of functionality that can be added via plug-in modules. Unfortunately, it had no direct way to generate a profile, and the plug-ins I could find to make profiles refused to run without more added software, usually versions of stuff not easily available to my Ubuntu distribution -- for a variety of reasons I am deliberately behind the times with my upgrades, and this is one of the few times it worked against me.

Anyway, I finally punted, and went with the thing I initially had a lot of resistance to: GRASS. It took me a long time to get the hang of GRASS, and I still think that the interface is a pain, but it's big, and flexible, and programmable, and though it never "just works," when you do things right it can be very powerful.

I did some Googling and found some people dealing with similar problems, and I eventually found a way to do what I needed. It involved some indirect steps (convert the track into a series of points, adding extra points to fill in the spacing as needed when my original points were too far apart, then interpolate Shuttle Radar elevation data to convert the 2d points to 3d points), then I had to dump the results of that into something else for the actual graphing -- the example I followed used the statistical program R, which worked fine but wasn't very pretty, so I eventually switched to a spreadsheet. It was exactly, or almost exactly, what I need, though I may use GNU Plot to do any final graphing. It was strange to me that the clunky workhorse that I'd tried to avoid was just the thing that got my job done. Another life lesson I suppose...

Anyway, that took up a chunk of Thursday night, and the other half was taken up with a trip to Brew Works. Anne had gone up there to see Deb and Donna, first time in while that the old crew was together, and it was raining out, and I hadn't seen Deb in a while either... and there you have Friday morning's weight.

Friday night I hopped on the bike as soon as I got home, and did a moderately long towpath ride, then we went down to Black & Blue for dinner with Donna again, plus a few friends from out of town. Turns out it was Kelly-Jo's birthday, and they had cake and cupcakes, and we sang, and it was good. Yesterday I got up early, did some chores and hit the towpath again, this time doing about 34 miles of mixed towpath (Lehigh and some Delaware, though it was in bad shape) and bike path.

Right now I'm tending the bread oven's fire ( I just put some more wood on, and I can see the fire from the living room window), and debating what ride to do today. My choices revolve around doing more towpath (blech, but probably the smartest and best choice), a road ride (meh) or a real MTB ride, maybe at the relatively bomb-prof Trex. Tomorrow starts my first rest week, and I'm stuck between going out with a bang, or going out with more of what I'm supposed to be doing.

These Things Go In Cycles

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#

 

Played around with the computer last night, more frustrations but I think I'm at least eliminating possible problems from my checklist... I was fooling around until about 8:00, didn't get riding until a half hour later, but still managed to get in a halfway decent towpath ride, another "singlespeed E2 on the towpath" ride as I label it: "singlespeed" for the bike, "E2" because it sort of follows "endurance workout #2," and "towpath" because... 14.08 miles in 1:18, more than an hour in my "aerobic endurance" zone. I need more, like a lot more ride volume, but I was glad I could get myself out. Tonight is more towpath, same ride only longer.

 

Next Steps

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Skipped the ride last night, did some computer stuff -- I tried some new things to get TopoFusion to work right, which didn't work -- then worked on the bikes, Turner & Surly, mostly just cleaning and lubing. We ate at home, went out for drinks a bit on the late side, and ran into a few friends at Brew Works, but still managed to make an early night of it. Tonight I'll be hitting the towpath; I've already missed one day on my highest-volume week in my first base month so I might make this a longish ride.

 

Meantime,what else? Uhhhh...

 

Word Salad Surgery

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Happy day, all you lovers!

 

I looked at my "Garmin to spreadsheet" perl script last night, and I think I spotted the problem: if I'm not riding according to a specific workout, the Garmin will temporarily stop recording whenever it thinks my motion has stopped for more than a few moments, and when that happens, each lap in the TCX output file contains multiple sets of tracks within each lap, one for each separate period when it thought I was moving. My program assumes that each lap has only one set of tracks, which is true for most of my training rides, since "stop recording when not in motion" is almost always disabled -- everything worked fine until I did those "Stop And Smell The Roses, Or At Least Catch My Breath" rides this weekend.

 

So I now know what the issue is, I just have to think of a good way to fix it. Maybe this weekend.

 

Last night was also pick-up-my-pants night -- I'd gone to the local Men's Warehouse last week, and the new dress slacks I'd bought were ready to be picked up last night. I spent so much time playing with the computer that I almost missed closing time, but managed to get in under the wire, and now I have increased my work pants inventory by 50%, not counting the bottom halves of my suits, or the corderoys I also wear to work but plan on phasing out. I'm not really upgrading my image, but I did need to upgrade the quality of my work pants, and those cords were no longer cutting it.

 

Dinner last night, brisket sandwich, on rye bread from Anne's Sunday baking. Tonight is usually knitting for Anne followed by Tuesday Taco Night at Brew Works, but since it's valentine's Day, and knitting is cancelled, we might just stay in tonight.

 

Oh, The Woes

Morning weigh-in: 186.5#

 

I've been looking for better cycling training software for a while now, but I've been finding that most of what's out there is either a bit "meh," or unavailable on Linux, or both (usually both), and the web-based stuff seems just as lame -- I've tried a few of the free-on-a-trial-basis ones, and none have impressed me enough to want to upgrade to the paid version.

 

All I really want is one more feature than what's already present in Garmin Connect, PyTrainer or SportsTracker: I want to be able to see a breakdown of my heart rate data by heart rate zone, basically how many minutes in each zone, on a lap by lap basis. I was fooling with a Perl script I found online that converts Garmin data to Excel file format, trying to get it to work -- of course it didn't at first, it was poorly written -- and while I was on my new voyage of discovery I realized that a rewrite of this script would be the best way to extract the data I wanted.

 

It took me about two days, mostly because I didn't really have a big enough block of time to just sit down and do it, but I finally had something that seemed to work well with my sample data, and gave me the results I expected. Then yesterday I tried it on my actual training data, and got incomprehensibly wrong results. Oh well, back to the drawing board tonight, good thing today's a rest day.

 

Meantime, my new computer upgrade did wonders for TopoFusion, which as a Windows program needs to run in an emulator (and I guess the new emulator works a lot better), but then I did something and -- TopoFusion is all out of whack, and now maps and GPS tracks don't line up. I tried removing and re-installing wine (the emulator), and upgraded to the latest version of TopoFusion, but got very little relief. This is all happening now that I've committed to help Bob and Doug with mapping duties for an upcoming race, and I'd planned to use TopoFusion to do that work.

 

There's still always GRASS, or maybe QGIS.

 

The Comeback Kid Goes Lactic

So it's been about two weeks of training, two weeks of about twenty eight. I am already seeing results -- and of course I am already deviating from what I should be doing...

I'm mostly following Joe Friel's The Cyclist's Training Bible, and that means that right now I am doing a whole lot of "base riding:" lots and lots of easy rides (difficulty measured in terms of heart rate), and one day a week of spinning drills. I'm finding that, here in hilly Bethlehem, I can't go easy enough on the road to stay in the lower heart rate zones, so I've been doing a lot of cruising up and down the towpath; I kill two birds with one stone by riding my singlespeed, getting in a good, moderately-high-RPM spin workout while I'm out. Back and forth, night after night, by myself after work, up and down the towpath with the  hamster legs going and the heart rate monitor beeping at me to take it easier -- I'm already sick of it, and there's three months total of base work...

So this week I mixed it up a bit. I had Friday off, and took the Turner down the towpath to Easton, where I met Larry and we did a bike path loop. Social pace, maybe a bit faster than the training would have allowed, given the occasional hill and Larry's running slick tires on his bike, but really a nice break in the routine. I took the towpath home again, and followed the rules.

I skipped riding yesterday, and today I was going to meet Arnie and some others for another towpath ride -- and probably another violation, since those guys are usually on 'cross bikes and like to push the pace -- but instead I slept in, and later took advantage of the cold temperature and frozen ground to go ride Sals.

Technically, this ride was another violation, though I took things easy, and stopped whenever my heart rate went above my lactic threshold -- which means I stopped a lot, but it was a beautiful day, stopping to enjoy the view wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. The ride felt awesome, conditions couldn't have been better and I had a blast, and when I completed my usual loop I decided I wasn't done, so I hopped on the towpath and got in an hour or so of the training ride I originally should have done. Bonus! -- Though I suppose that was really more like eating diet food along with your nachos.

But: A month ago, a towpath ride like Fridays (but shorter) beat the tar out of me, and I actually had to bail on a Sals group ride about the same time. Some observations:

1. There really was a pulmonary issue going on, and a few weeks of that new maintenance inhaler has made a big difference. Today I was out in all my trigger conditions: cold, windy, and I was breathing hard, but I had no "incidents."

2. It wasn't all lungs: I'd been getting further out of shape the longer the asthma issue continued, and we're talking almost a full year here, so this new inhaler hasn't enabled me to pick up where I left off; I still have to start over at the bottom, only now I'm healthy.

3. Concentrating on "aerobic endurance" early in the season, lots of easy rides designed to encourage the cardiovascular system to prepare now for the harder workouts later, is already paying off. Maybe I'll mix a little fun in now and then but, despite the boredom involved with this phase, I am on the right track.

The Whistler Past The Boneyard

Morning weigh-in: 186#

 

Wassap...

 

Reading: I'm working through a shit-ton of books right now, mostly Christmas presents. Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Beautiful Struggle and James Wolcott's Lucking Out, two memoirs from Baltimore ex-pats -- Wolcott looking back at his twentysomething years in late-Seventies NYC, when was writing about movies, punk, porn and ballet for the Village Voice, while Coates writes about coming of age in Baltimore, at the height of the Crack Years in the Eighties -- are the two main reads right now, the bedroom and bathroom books, but I'm also working through an economic-travel-detective-journalism story by Michael Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World), and a lit-crit look at Thomas Pynchon as a writer of historical fiction. There's also a primer on open-source GIS in there, and a couple of novels are on the back burner. So of course I picked up Gravity's Rainbow again, and began re-re-rereading...

 

Actually, what I'm really reading is The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, a novel in which children's speech becomes toxic to adults. I just started it, at Anne's insistence, after she wolfed it down in about three days -- she found it compelling, beautiful and disturbing, and it was interesting to watch her be totally absorbed  (and freaked out) by the book. I think it's interesting too so far, but I'm definitely not as freaked out (so far) as she was. Then again, I never had kids, and I am not the word person she is. We shall see.

 

Listening: More Christmas presents here too, mostly Anne's presents from me, at least for the new stuff -- I've been getting myself a whole lot of 70's AOR, Bowie and things like that, from E-Music lately. Of Anne's new music, most of it was stuff Emmi played for us, back at Thanksgiving when we all visited Ben: the latest from The Builders and the Butchers, The Tallest Man in the World, and a "folk opera" by Anaïs Mitchell called Hadestown -- my own personal favorite.

 

On the way in this morning, Jethro Tull's "The Whistler" came up on random play, and I cranked it.

 

On-The-Bike: Yes, listening to "The Whistler" means that I am back to training, or "training," as the case may turn out. I've been reading and studying up, mostly Joe Friel's stuff, The Cyclist's Training Bible and things I find online. My goal, as in past years is to do well, or "well," at the Wilderness 101. (Long time readers may remember that last year, and the year before, I didn't even register, while in 2009 I had my only DNF ever at mile 89.) I'd like to break 10 hours, my target the last time I did it, but I think it's more realistic to say "my goal is to finish, and breaking 12 hours would be a bonus."

 

I think my biggest problem these past few years has been lack of time in the saddle: I should be putting in 400-500 hours a year, meaning I should be riding 5000-7500 miles a year. I've been doing about half that since 2009, and I think that things like that "time-crunched cyclist" plan were no substitute for chamois time. Unfortunately, finding time to train might be my biggest challenge -- I was thinking of starting my regimen next week, and so of course I am now scheduled to go on an emergency business trip next week...

 

Last night was the first step though: I did a towpath ride, one in which I did a simple test to find my lactate threshold -- 10 minutes warmup, followed by a 30 minute time trial. According to the Internet, my lactate threshold should be close to my average heart rate over the final 20 minutes of the time trial. The towpath was a muddy mess, there was creepy barking in the woods where I recently saw dogs kill a deer, and I took the road home, but I came home with a number: 159 beats per minute, close to my guess of "about 160."

 

Computing: So if we're talking training we're talking heart rate, and that means Garmin, maps and plenty of data crunching. I've found some Excel templates online, plus a few programs to extract HR data in spreadsheet-usable form from my Garmin's TCX file format, and I've broken out both PyTrainer and SportsTracker -- both of which work much better after that system upgrade -- but I have found no real, comprehensive, training analysis software for Linux (yet). Maybe Training Peaks? Strava?

 

I have, however, downloaded more mapping software.

Breathing Easy

Morning weigh-in: 188#

 

(Ha! You probably weren't expecting that! Too bad the scale is out of whack, or needs batteries or whatever, or I'd have a percent body fat for you too. I'm on it...)

 

My breathing has been OK-but-not-great for about a year now (starting about when I got the other allergy problem -- eczema -- under control, how convenient), with breathing problems worsening with the onset of the colder weather and mostly abating by spring. It got bad enough for me to complain to my allergist about it this past November, at my semi-annual skin checkup (skin being really the the only reason I go to her), and she gave me a "spirometry" test: breathe into a tube and the device figures airflow vs time, lung capacity, things like that -- it connected directly to her laptop, and pumped out a bunch of results and graphs.

 

The graphs meant nothing to me of course, but my allergist took one look at the results and said "Huh. That's not asthma!"

 

Next thing you know, she has me signed up for a chest X-ray and a more sophisticated version of the spirometer test (and others) at the hospital, and has referred me to a pulmonologist. Gulp! She tried to be reassuring, but I went home and Googled what I remembered of the test results, and came down with a bad case of hypochondria on top of everything else...

 

Fast forward to this Tuesday, when I saw the pulmonologist. (Anne came with me, so she could hold my hand while they told me I had emphysema or whatever -- it didn't help that the other patients were all overweight elderly with oxygen tanks.) Nurse takes my height/weight/pulse/blood pressure, then comes a long interview with a PA, all my asthma/allergy/medical history, review of those test results, listening to the lungs etc. He disappears for a while, presumably conferring with the pulmonologist, then the both of them come in to announce that I do, in fact, have asthma (and nothing else), my allergist was right to refer me, but the test results were close enough what they'd expect that they don't think anything else is going on.

 

They put me on a new, twice-daily maintenance inhaler, and gave me a new type of rescue inhaler -- one of my complaints was that my regular rescue inhaler didn't seem to do much -- and I go to see them again in six weeks to check on my progress. In a year or so, I'll probably be repeating those breath tests.

 

There was a definite feeling of letdown after all that drama, and I am not happy with the new inhaler regimen -- and it's hard to see "you do have asthma" as the good news -- but I'm slowly starting to feel like a weight is off my shoulders. I plan on giving these medications a few days to kick in, then I'm giving them an on-the-bike stress test over the weekend. Last year was terrible for me in terms of cycling and mileage, maybe this year will be a bit better.

On The Bleeding Edge

I updated my laptop's operating system the weekend before last, something that needed to be done and that I'd been dreading for months. The process took a while -- two hours of downloading stuff, plus another hour or so of computation -- but the process was mostly automatic, and happened while I was out riding, and the result was a surprisingly smooth transition to the new distribution.

 

(I use Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, and the way Ubuntu handles upgrades is: there is a new release of Ubuntu every six months or so, and the support for an individual release ends soon after the next release comes out -- you are supposed to stay on top of the upgrades. If you do, you can automatically keep your installed software up-to-date fairly automatically, but when the support for the version you're using ends, your only option is to upgrade to the next version.

 

Every two years there is a "Long Term Support" version, which means that it's supported for about three years, and this is a great way to keep from getting caught in a constant upgrade cycle -- OK, it means upgrading every two years rather than every 12 months, but still -- though they eventually shut down the support for even these LTS versions. That's what happened to me: I upgraded to the April 2008 release some time in 2009, when my original release was discontinued, and support for that April 08 release was finally discontinued this past May, so my software hasn't been updated for months. I remembered the previous upgrade as being fairly painful, and I needed to do a comprehensive backup of all my data before I did any kind of major overhaul, so I put off the change for as long as I could stand. There's also been some controversy in the Ubuntu community regarding changes to the interface, so I wanted to let all that work itself out before I made the change -- I'm OK with being a somewhat early adopter, but I prefer the cutting rather than the bleeding edge.)

 

Like I said, a smooth transition: none of the software I was already using disappeared, even though some of it had been discontinued from the default version of the release, and I haven't found any weird discrepancies/glitches so far, except for a problem with the fingerprint recognition software. Right now I'm going through the system, looking for new or upgraded goodies, and checking the software repositories for fun new stuff to download.

 

The one thing I've discovered -- rather, been forced to face and acknowledge -- is that I really need a good backup solution. Right now my "backups" are a bunch of files scattered across several memory sticks, SD cards and free cloud storage sites, I have (or had, at the time of the backup/upgrade) no real backup software, and while I was at Staples paying $80 for a 32GB micro-SD card, I saw that I can get a terabyte drive for less than $200. So now I have less than $200 burning a hole in my pocket...

 

Some other things: we missed the Great White Caps / Start Making Sense show on New Year's Eve, but Anne and I saw our first indoor concert at Steel Stacks this past Friday, when we saw Chris Smither with Ellis Paul in the Musikfest Cafe. An awesome show, in what amounted to a nightclub or dinner theater atmosphere.

 

Saturday was brutally cold, so of course I went for a ride... It was the VMB pre-party ride at Sals for the annual holiday party, which we have a week or two after the regular holiday stuff calms down. A really fun ride, though I was a hurting puppy right from the start; there were about 15 people in all, and when we split into fast and slow groups I was the slow guy on the slow ride... I think it's going to be a tough spring. The party was pretty cool too, as Spanky's parties tend to be: garage converted into a "disco," a (very welcome) fire in the fire pit, plenty of good company.

 

Sunday was also cold, but this time it was an indoor day as Anne baked and I played with the computer.

Pow!

Wow, with this post I actually break 60 for the year!

Anne is off, with Emmi and her boyfriend, to their family's Christmas get-together, and I am here at home, fighting a cold which is slowly getting into my sinuses and chest. I think that the worst is past -- I always think that, as it gets worse and worse until I get antibiotics -- but this time I think it's true. I'll be going to bed in a few minutes, just in case.

Find Out What It Means To Me

Continuing my vacation, recent developments:

We did the Ride Of Respect last Thursday night, the memorial/tribute ride for Patrick Ytsma, a local rider and bike advocate -- known to be a stickler for legal and safe cycling -- who was run down by some old lady on the New Street Bridge.

 (It was a sad and chilling thing to hear first the rumors, then the hard news of the accident as it made its way through the local community -- the general consensus was that he probably was doing everything right, and if he could get hit then any one of us could, and I'd been over that bridge myself only an hour before...)

The ride itself was kind of neat -- it started next to Sand Island, not too far from our house, and the literally hundreds of cyclists assembled in the dark with their riding lights blazing was a very inspiring sight as we rolled down the hill into the parking lot. There were about 300 riders, including maybe 40 or so from my bike club and another 50 or so that were friends with either Anne or myself. We rolled out around 7:00, rode through downtown, over the bridge and then back again, and ended up at City Hall, where there was a memorial service. The police chief (who is also a bike cop) spoke, as did Steve from CAT, some fellow cyclists from the Lehigh Wheelmen, and Pat's widow. Definitely a sad event, but a beautiful tribute.

We ended the event with about 50 bikers in the back of the Brew Works, our version of an Irish wake.

Keeping It Real: I really love my Logitech Squeezebox, but it seemed to have one really annoying quirk which I couldn't find a way around-- it just would not play, or even acknowledge the existence of, certain songs on my laptop. (What made it worse is that every other music player played these songs no problem, and the same music files, on Anne's laptop, would play fine through the Squeezebox.)

I had no idea what was causing it, until things came to a head last night when a new CD I'd burned would not play. I went nuts looking for the problem -- wrong file type? wrong sampling rate? -- there was no pattern to it, until a Google clue had me look at file permissions. Turns out, some CD rippers were setting the file permissions so only I could read the resulting MP3 file, or the containing folders, and since the Squeezebox software runs as if it were a separate user on my machine, it couldn't even see the jiggered folders and files.

The solution was easier than I thought it would be, considering the offending files were randomly distributed throughout my music file hierarchy:

$ file . -type -d ! -perm 755 -point0 |xargs -0 chmod 755

$ file . -type -f ! -perm 644 -point0 |xargs -0 chmod 644

Bang! Less than a minute and the problem was solved. There's a reason tech guys, solving computer problems, first ask if the thing's plugged in...

...aaaand This One Goes To Twenty Two

This has been my worst year for blogging: over the years my output has gradually dropped from a high of just over 250 posts a year (in the mid-aughts) to somewhere around a hundred a year, and this year's precipitous drop means I'll probably finish this year with less than sixty posts.

Why is that? I've been very busy this year at work, which left me no time -- I used to post by email during my lunch break -- or mental energy for posting, but the main reason is probably because I have someone to talk to, and do things with, and the need to spout off into the void has waned over the past few years...

Right now I'm home, done with work until the new year; I've been off this whole week, but I spent most of the time either decompressing or shopping (ie "re-compressing"). What's been going on:


Computer Play: The first thing I did when I got home from work (for the end of the year) was plunk myself down in front of the computer and fire up GRASS (huh huh, do they still call it "grass," man?) to build a map of Trexler Nature Preserve. Once more unto the breach etc, and I have to say that tasks that once seemed hard have become much easier, and I learned a lot more about other (new) things I wanted to do.

The few weeks before the end of the year saw me doing a lot of calculations at work, using a powerful but old and unwieldy in-house program that needed to be bamboozled (by tweaking the input data in a rather artificial manner) into doing what I needed. So, for my own edification and to scratch a certain itch, I spent a lot of time playing with Octave to re-do the calculations on my own at home.

Bike and Exercise: Riding, but not really all that much. We've been doing that P90X workout, and I have to say I've seen results, but not spectacular ones, but then again our (read: my) commitment to the program has been less than spectacular -- I never followed the diet, and the rigidity of the workout schedule made me basically rebel and skip days when I wanted to do other things (like bike), so there's that. I really can't wait for this to be over, about two weeks from now. (This really comes down to a question of timing: This would be a great off-season conditioning program, but we started too soon, while we were still in riding season, and we'll finish too soon, smack in the middle of when there's not much to do outside, even in terms of off-season cross training stuff like XC skiing.)

Meantime, I've been battling allergies and asthma, so I've been taking it easy on the bike anyway. Next season's base work is going to be a long tough slog...

More layer - maybe! Right now I'm going for a ride.

This One Goes To Eleven

Happy Nigel Tufnel Day! A-and a big birthday shout-out to my main squeeze too -- Happy Birthday, baby!

 

Nothing much to report since yesterday's rant. Got home, did some P90X -- which has become much more enjoyable after we switched the sound off, but we're still lapsing rather fashionably: we do it about 4 days a week instead of six, and are constantly falling behind schedule. Afterward we hit Brew Works for dinner, where we saw Deb & Scott.

 

Tonight is a small get-together at our place, and tomorrow is one of Anne's great-nephew's birthdays. (We got him a Strider, which seems to be this year's buzz product for the cycling-parent-with-toddlers set -- though admittedly it may just seem that way because I've been around that sort of crowd more lately, what with Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day and the Nox Grand Opening. It is amazing though to watch kids, even young ones almost too young to walk, zip around on those things, on and off road.)  Sunday is trailwork and a ride at Trex.

 

Candyman! Candymaaaaaan!!!

Morning weigh-in: 188#, 13.5% BF

 

Happy Anniversary, Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald! (The event itself, not the song, which surprised me, years after its release, by being about a contemporary event -- I always assumed the song's story was made up, or old folklore. I do think the song is awesome, but today is not the anniverary of the song.)

 

Meanwhile, back in Happy Valley: This is just crazy -- Joe Paterno's long-time #2, and heir apparent, had apparently been raping young boys, groomed through a youth organization he founded, for years, and was forced into retirement in the late 1990's when allegations first came out, though no one blocked his access to either the campus facilities, or the young boys in the youth organization. Fast forward to 2002, when a graduate assistant coach basically caught the guy in the act of raping a 10-year-old boy in the college football facility showers. He reported this not to the police but to Joe Paterno, who then reported it to his superiors, and so on up the Penn State chain of command. The child rapist was forbidden to bring young boys on campus anymore, though if I read the news reports right he was still holding overnight football camps there as late as 2009.

 

Some parents caught on and confronted this guy (with police listening in), and after a three-year investigation he was busted the other day, as were several others in the Penn State football organization for their roles in a coverup. Joe Paterno and the college president, both of whom who cooperated with the grand jury, were found to have acted within the letter of the law (really? I still have trouble believing this), though in moral terms they are guilty of monstrous acts, allowing this activity to be swept under the rug -- and thus to continue, with the pedophile racking up more victims -- as the expedient way to protect the Penn State brand, and have been denounced as such by all local opinion that does not have a vested interest in that brand. (This is Penn State territory, and you should see the heads spinning around here right now.)

 

Demands were made for heads to roll, Paterno's as well as the president's, while the University's Board of Trustees were busy investigating the whole affair and trying to decide what to do. Paterno released several mealy-mouthed and self-serving press releases lamenting "recent developments," and finally announced he would retire at the end of this season. I took this as a slap at the Trustees who were trying to decide his fate, and I guess they took it the same way, because they fired both him and the president late yesterday.

 

So last night, some 10,000 Penn State students showed how they felt about things by rioting in protest of Joe Paterno's ouster, breaking storefront windows, knocking down lamp posts, lighting at least one small fire, and overturning a TV news van -- you know, the real culprits behind this scandal. So I guess that means that there are about 10,000 sociopaths at Penn State, who are fine with child sacrifice going on somewhere offscreen as long as it lets their party continue, and who throw a tantrum when their supplier is taken away.

 

(Hey, wasn't yesterday the anniversary of Kristallnacht?)

 

Parting Shot: Penn State alum and former Senator Rick "Santorum" Santorum once gave this Sandusky guy an award for the way he ran that youth organization.

A Milestone

The oven is still not quite finished yet, it still needs insulation and a roof, but today was the day we fired it for real. I'm getting good at splitting wood with the axe, and Anne is now a veteran firestarter, and we got the thing up and roaring in no time: first a small "starter" fire in the morning, then a bigger one, the first real one, this afternoon. Apart from one mishap -- the chimney flue cracked under the thermal load of the big fire, but apparently that's common and not a big deal -- things went swimmingly, and we now have bread baking in the oven!!

Seven loaves, to be exact, as well as two potatoes and two sweet potatoes roasting in the ash bucket, and we'll also probably make a couple of pizzas before the evening's over.

There are a number of bugs to be worked out of the system, and more infrastructure we need to put in place (plus the roof, hardware for which we bought today), but we now have a fully functional oven in the backyard.

A Month In Review(s)

Well that went pretty quickly, I didn't realize it had been a full month since my last post. Work has been insanely busy lately, and I've found myself with little time or inclination to write anything here: all my resurces have been used up. Not much worth noting has gone down either, not that that has ever stopped me before, when I'm in the mood to write, or had the strength.

Right now I'm on vacation. We drove down to Asheville, North Carolina on Monday, and we're here until Friday, when we go to visit Emmi in Knoxville.Monday night was a bit of night life, yesterday was a 40 mile road ride (20 miles uphill, then turn around and coast back) on the Blue Ridge Parkway, followed by more nightlife, and today is a sort of rest day / weather break so we've been checking out the local downtown scene in the daylight, brunch and bakery and coffee shop, and my batteries have recharged enough to check  in here...

Listening: I got that SqueezeBox I was talking about. It was kind of a compromise between what I wanted and what's readily available, but it seems to do the job as advertised. The biggest -- and really, the only -- disappointment is that I can't seem to just transparently stream sounds through it from my computer: it has a special server I had to install on my laptop, which reads music files (from the same music collection my "real" music program uses) or internet radio, and sends the results to the Squeezebox. The server has a browser interface which actually works very well, and as time goes by it's pretty much become my "real" music program.

We've been listening to a lot of music lately, including some radio stations Anne likes that we can't ordinarily get, as well as internet-only stuff like Radio Paradise (Strangely enough, we're listening to Radio Paradise right now, in an Asheville bakery/coffeeshop.) The next step is to get Anne's music available through the Squeezebox, which should be pretty easy once we get the server installed on her laptop.


Doing: We've got about a month of P90X under our belts now, Anne and I; we've been doing it together most weeknights after I get home from work. We are basically through the first of three phases, each lasting three weeks with a "rest week" in between. It's pretty hard, but I've done harder workouts (back when I was younger).

The biggest positives so far have been that the workouts, especially the "cardio" ones like Plyometrics and Kenpo, are really fun, especially when we're working out together, and that I am starting to see some difference in my arms, which had been suffering a bit of neglect over the past year or so.

Negatives? There are two: one is that the program is extremely rigid, so there's no real "wiggle room" in case I want to, say, do a ride, or maybe just take a rest day, instead of that day's scheduled workout. (We tried doing them in the morning to leave the evenings free for other things, but that has its own downsides.) The other big negative is the trainer himself, Tony Horton. He seems to know his stuff, and keeps the workout moving along, but he's an old stand-up comic and it shows -- his constant stream of banter, workout slogans and bad jokes becomes wearing after a while. Anne and I have taken to repeating his expressions as inside jokes...

New Bike: The new trails at Lake Nockamixon finally had their Grand Opening complete with food, music, guided trail tours, and a raffle -- and I won the Grand Prize, a Specialized Hardrock Disc 29er. So far I've only played with it by riding around town, but as soon as I have it dialed in, and install some clipless pedals, I'll be hitting the local trails so stay tuned for a full report.

Autumn In The Air

Morning weigh-in: 188#, 14% BF

 

It's been really nice the past few days, more September-like than September's really been so far: sunny, cool verging on brisk (we've been waking to chilly mornings); my favorite season is just around the corner...

 

My Mom's birthday was yesterday and we visited for a little celebration dinner, and we decided to make a day of it:

 

Our first stop on the way down was the Englishtown Auction, which I'd been talking about a lot after bumping into some High School friends at a recent party. (The standard joke was that every teenager in Manalapan worked either there or at Raceway Park at some point; my friends and I worked at both, and lived within walking distance, and we had many teen adventures at both places and the surrounding woods, now long gone.) It's been years since I was there, and Anne had never been there, so we stopped for lunch at the good old burrito stand in the Yellow Building. I parked a bit towards the back, and we walked through the farther sections of the outdoor stands -- we were late, and things were winding down, but it seemed like the place was smaller than I remembered. Over to the taco stand, where the burritos also seemed smaller than I remembered, though still delicious, then we wandered back to the car by cutting through the buildings.

 

Next stop was Allaire, where we put in just over an hour of exploring. It was a perfect day for a ride, and we a great time, even with the World's Largest Vuvuzela blasting at intervals int the distance -- not annoying or anything, just weird, like maybe there was a factory with a horn, or some football game with fans blowing horns, nearby. Sandy soil and twisty trails over moderate terrain, we had a lot of fun until we realized that it was getting late, then had to find our way back to the car.

 

Luckily my parents only live a couple of minutes away, and we arrived only a little late... It was us, and my parents, and my brother and his wife and her parents; snacks and and small talk, ziti and meatballs, and a birthday cake -- I gave my mom Wolf Hall and In Hovering Flight. We were home by 11:00, and asleep about two minutes later.

 

Tonight we both start the P90X program.

Itch 2: Electric Boogaloo

My computer play has been pretty desultory lately: I keep sitting down in front of my laptop, wanting to do something "computerey" and creative, and I can think of nothing I want to do, and I just end up surfing. But, finally driven by rainy-weekend boredom, I decided to take a look at that GRAMPS genealogical software, and sat down Sunday morning to figure out my family tree.

 

I'm totally hooked. It took a while to figure out how to use the software, but it seems logical enough once you get the hang of adding data and navigating among people and relationships. I input the stuff I knew, the low hanging fruit like my family, parents and grandparents, brothers and their families, cousins etc, with birth dates if I knew them offhand -- this "vital statistics" kind of biographical info is a big part of genealogy, and the genealogical software, but I know very few birth, death and marriage dates for even my closer relatives -- then broke out a history of my father's family (written by my mother) and spent Sunday afternoon and Monday parsing it for stuff I could use. I exhausted that family history, got in touch with some cousins on my mother's side, who'd done their own family tree research and got some online stuff from them, and in the course of that I contacted someone at Ancestry.com, who has info about the ancestry of my father's paternal grandfather, but needs info on his descendants and is willing to trade (I'm waiting to hear back)...

 

Like I said, I'm hooked; I found something to scratch my itch. I think I have most of my ancestors, their names at least, to about four generations back, and pretty much all their descendants; now I just need to start fleshing them all out with vital statistics, photos, and family stories.

 

Here's a story: My father's father died the year before my parents met, but my paternal grandmother was still alive when I was a small child. According to my mom's email, she died in August of 1967, which would be when I was four years old, and the month before we moved to Englishtown, and about the time of my earliest memories. (The earliest memories that I can date are of Kevin and me, arguing over whether I was still older when we were both three for a time, which means it would be late March or early April 1967, and some from the summer of 1967, when we visited the construction site for our new home -- but those might be mixed up with photos and 8mm movies of those visits.) So I'm guessing then that the one time I remember meeting my grandmother was (obviously) before August 1967, but not too much before.

 

It's just a few jumbled images: she was in a wheelchair, and maybe that wheelchair was on a a sort of dais or podium, and she seemed out of it, or possibly just unable to communicate, but happy. She had longish white hair and was maybe wearing a brownish cardigan; the walls might have been a light green but floor and furniture were brown wood, and the wheelchair seems to be wood and wicker in my mind's eye. My mom and dad sort of introduced us and put me in her lap, and she held me for a moment. They probably did the same with Kevin and Chris but I don't remember. It was the only time I can remember meeting her, and it was possibly the only time I ever did meet her.

 

Speaking Of "The Itch:" My dad tells stories about a really downscale second-run movie theater in his childhood neighborhood, nicknamed "The Itch" because it was a good place to end up with lice if you leaned back in your seat. I googled it once, and found that it was a generic NYC name for that type of theater back in the day. Who knew?

Why Can't I Just Have What I Want?

I'm looking to set up a wireless music connection to the stereo at home, a bridge receiver, or media bridge, I think it would be called. Something that connects wirelessly to the home network, and has audio output for the stereo, so we can stream music wirelessly from our computers -- my Ubuntu machine as well as Anne's Mac, plus Emmi's or Ben's, or any visitor's, laptop. Sounds simple, right?

(This is actually what we have right now via a Bluetooth receiver, which shows up as headphones on your Bluetooth-enabled laptop or smartphone:  You have your music program send the audio signal to the "headphones" instead of the normal speakers and it comes out the stereo. Very simple and easy to use, and music quality is OK, but the Bluetooth range is so short it's almost useless -- I usually just use my phone's music, and lay the phone on the stereo while things are playing, so I might as well have connected the phone to the stereo by headphone jack. The range issue is why I'm thinking of going with wifi.)

 

Some parts of my wishlist make this less than simple, though: I would prefer that no additional software needs to be installed on any computer, and I would also like the music to be played (ie, the file decoded and turned into an audio signal), or at least controlled, by the music program on the laptop, and the system must be usable with Linux, Mac and Windows systems.

In other words:

1. Data enters the hypothetical device via wifi, and leaves via some audio jack.
2. The device can be accessed by any computer connected to our home network, and can play any music stored on those same computers, without having to modify those computers (ie add new software:,I would prefer if the device were controlled by the standard music player on each computer).
3. The device either simply pumps an audio signal from the network into the stereo, or can handle audio encoding formats besides the standard MP3 -- I'm thinking specifically of FLACC and Ogg Vorbis.

The biggest problem I've found so far is Apple. ITunes is ubiquitous, but the Mac stuff has a lot of DRM in the way, and Macs work best -- or at all? -- only with the Mac-approved products. My Linux laptop can handle the reverse engineered Apple protocol (DAAP), at least earlier versions before Apple re-crippled it, as well as the more common DLNA/UPnP, which actually seems more like what I want anyway.

My solution: It's not a perfect match to my needs, but I just bought a Logitech Squeezebox Touch. It needs special software to run, but that software is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the interface is via web browser. (There are also Squeezebox controller apps available for smartphones, so our iPhones and Droids can be used as remotes.) I don't know what the story is yet about oddball file formats, but I guess if it comes down to it I can do some kind of on-the-fly transcoding.

The main thing is that it receives the music via wifi -- the only other serious choice, the Sonos ZonePlayer 90, does not use wifi but its own wireless network, so at least one component of your system has to be physically attached (by Ethernet cable) to your router, and what that means is that if the router and stereo are not near each other, you either have to run Ethernet cable between them or buy a second Sonos device for a non-wifi wireless connection.

Anyway, we should be up and running by next weekend.