Colourbombs, Torque Bombs, Forty Days On Moses Mountain

A quick recap, but just of last weekend: Friday night was the June Heels on Wheels ride and pub crawl -- much fun was had in Bethlehem! Saturday we got up bright and early (uggh) and drove down to Baltimore for Liz's wedding, Liz being Anne's niece: that night we went to the rehearsal dinner (party) in Baltimore's Little Italy, and Sunday was the wedding itself, and a short reception, on board a Carnival cruise ship -- the wedding party and a bunch of friends sailed off to Bermuda and other points after the reception. To each his or her own I guess, but my short experience on board didn't change my view of the whole cruise thing...

 

(Pictures soon, I promise.)

 

Tonight is the start of the Southside Film festival, and this weekend we are heading to Ithaca for another wedding and, if all goes well, a much-needed bicycling getaway.

 

Pop Fizzle 2: Electric Boogaloo

Took my phone apart the other night (OK, took the battery out and left it open), then I cleaned the screen yesterday, and when I put it back together it worked, no problem. No trip to Verizon last night, and one less thing to deal with, though I will be keeping my eye on the old boy...

 

No lawn mowing last night either: Anne and I did a nice 26 mile ride north of town instead, going out Jacksonville Road and eventually returning through Northampton and Catasaqua. Beautiful night for a ride, and it was something we both really needed. Tonight I may try for an SMB ride if the weather holds.

 

Reading #1: China Mieville's Iron Council. I finished Perdido Street Station and, even though the next in the series is The Scar -- next in order of being written, and next in the historical chronology of New Crobuzon; the books themselves are not necessarily connected except in their setting -- the next book I have is Iron Council so that's what I started. Pretty good story so far, good but not great, an easy read; these books remind me a little of the Dragon Tattoo trilogy: they're page turners, guilty pleasures, summer reading even if they're not quite trash. This one went with me to Massachusetts, and at home I've been reading it in the living room.

 

Reading #2: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; I picked this up in Northampton MA, on our standard bookstore-tourism run. I'm surprised to say this but -- well, meh. I'm still pretty early in the book, but it's less meaty than I expected, but I suppose that's good because I'm reading it in the bedroom.

 

Reading #3: Never Mind the Pollacks by Neal Pollack. Re-reading actually, in the bathroom. Still funny, but I think it lost something over the years, maybe a case of relevance drift...

 

Listening: I usually tell anyone who'll listen that I loathe fusion, but the other day I got a hankering for some Return to Forever so I downloaded "Majestic Dance," and then I turned around and downloaded Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow. Still not sure why I did, but they were a good listen, they still sound great -- when I'm in the right mood.

 

Sooner or later I'll write something about the similarities I see between old exploitation films and the marketing of current pop culture (which was my intention when I picked this post's title) but I don't think it'll happen today.

 

Incommunicado

Well, it looks like I will be getting a new phone tonight.

 

My droid seemed fine yesterday at work, though admittedly it doesn't get much use until my commute home, when it does double duty as my MP3 player, and that was when the odd behavior started: songs would jump around unexpectedly, or my preferences (shuffle, repeat etc) would suddenly change. The problem went away when I shut off the display, but when I got home the situation got worse, and looked for all the world like some invisible fingers were randomly touching my phone's touchscreen.

 

Turned it off, turned it on, the problem was still there. Pulled the battery for a few minutes and the problem seemed solved, but it came back later in the evening, and culminated in a post-midnight pocket dial -- sorry Donna! The entire interface was frozen by that point, not responding to anything but those invisible fingers, so I pulled the battery again and went to bed.

 

The problem might be something in the software, maybe even a virus or malware screwing things up, but I really suspect a hardware issue, either bad contacts or a short somewhere. Given all the rain we've had, maybe it's been damaged by water or moisture in some way.

 

Last night was a short towpath ride, followed by the VMB meeting at Hello Burrito, where the food seemed much better than the last time I was there -- maybe they're getting past their growing pains. I met Mike P on the towpath and we rode together, and then we bumped into Joe G in town, and the gang was all together at the meeting, which had a much smaller attendance than last time but was still good. After the meeting we regrouped at Brew Works, where I met up with Anne, and Emmi, and Donna and Debbie and Matt -- we also saw Pete H and his wife there, so there was quite a crowd at our section of the bar.

 

It's really nice today, and seasonally beautiful for the first time in more than a week, but I think I may blow off riding in favor of some much-deferred lawnmower duties, and follow that with a trip to the Verizon store.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Smackdown of the Odious #1: Randall Munroe takes on Ben Stein.

 

Smackdown of the Odious #2: Savage Love vs The Guy Who Can't Get Laid. (The comments are good too.)

 

Smackdown of the Odious #3: And it's Doghouse Riley with the winning run!

 

So last night Anne asked me what wisdom I would impart to someone just starting out in adult life. She had a list of things that she thought were important in life, but I took a different approach:

 

1. Get a job to pay the bills, and do fun and fulfilling stuff on your own time.

 

2. Find and patronize a nice, quiet local pub.

 

3.  If you're into something athletic or outdoorsy, train during the week so you will be able to enjoy the big events on weekends.

 

4. (Maybe an expansion on item #3.) Most worthwhile things/activities are more rewarding the more you put into them, but you will not get anything back at all until you give above a certain minimum threshold. A good example of this is the computer; a mediocre example would be the bike, which is always fun at least, even if other rewards are unavailable.

 

Anyway, that was at the Brew Works. Before that I rode the towpath, starting in good weather, which held until I was on the way home -- slight rain at first, then a half hour of thunder, wind and torrential rain. I must have rode right through the front, the storm was over by the time I got home. Pretty cool actually. I've been trying to get back on the fitness wagon, especially in terms of biking, and starting at the beginning of May I'd been holding medium-high mileages (100 miles/week), at least until last week's deluge-fest, which I took as a rest week. This week and next are supposed to be around 120 miles/week (and it goes up from there), we shall see -- tonight is the VMB meeting, when we talk about bikes instead of riding.

 

Graduation

Well, here I am again, in the Haymarket Café in Northampton MA, on a Sunday morning. I remember the my first time here, up visiting with Anne, an early "relationship challenge" -- I'd ordered this laptop but it hadn't arrived yet, so it must have been the Fall of 2008 (I hadn't yet committed to move in because I required a computer at my place, wherever that place might be), and I was using her laptop after eating -- and that trip, and that brunch, was the first time Ben and I actually met and hung out together. If I remember right, we all had our noses in the books we'd bought the day before.

Yesterday was Ben's graduation from Hampshire College. We came up on Friday, in time to see his final presentation: he and his friend Jason had translated the works of several early-20th-century Russian poets for their senior projects, and they talked about the issues involved, like sound vs. meaning, grammatical structures and themes and plays on words -- it was pretty fascinating, how they chose between various compromises and emphases, to bring the essences of the poems into English. We had a bit of a party at his dorm afterward, students and parents, burgers and hot dogs and 2 pony kegs of Pennsylvania homebrew.

Commencement was yesterday, on the Hampshire campus, and it was really nice despite the weather, and far less formal than most. (I realized that there's a lot to be said for having the graduation ceremony on the college campus, as opposed to my graduation, held all those many years ago at the Garden State Arts Center.)

We came back to Northampton, and regrouped for a bit before heading over to Jason's for another party, this time fewer parents and more intimately student-oriented. We really got to hang out and BS with the kids -- it was pleasant to be around a diverse crowd of intelligent, and intellectually curious, youngsters, and fun to see how their tastes were informed by their intellectual curiosity. (Banjos and fiddles in the corner, Art Tatum jamming on the boom box, and all sorts of Russian posters, presumably Jason's, on the walls.) We were the fools who brought the fake mustaches, and they were a big hit...

Anyway, now it's downtime -- it was a great few days, but there was also a fair amount of stress involved, and now we're gearing up for a long drive home with a car full of Ben's dorm room. I think we could use a staycation next weekend.

Updater

Yet another fly-by. I've been super busy again -- or super busy still, I can't even remember anymore... Some highlights:

 

A trip to Wyoming for work, that was the end of last week. Tuesday I'm asked to go, and Wednesday I'm on the plane to Salt lake City. Work Thursday, and I'm home by Friday evening, in time for the "Heels On Wheels" ride and pub crawl. Needless to say, Saturday morning was spent asleep. We went out to Anne's sister's house Saturday afternoon, for a surprise retirement party for her sister's husband.

 

Sunday? I rode.

Oh Bondage! Up Yours!

RIP Poly Styrene, you totally rocked. I think I know what I'll be downloading tonight, my original -- vinyl, when that's all there was? or maybe it was a cassette? -- whatever it was, it's long since worn out and disappeared. Anyway, towpath ride last night with Anne, followed by burgers & beer with Anne. Tonight is the VMB meeting.

Golgotha Virus

"Men have an extraordinary, and perhaps fortunate, ability to tune out of their consciousness the most awesome future possibilities. The Roman farmer, ploughing the slopes of Vesuvius, gave no thought to the mountain smoking overhead. Half the twentieth century lived with the  Hydrogen Bomb -- half the twenty-first with the Golgotha virus." -- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise

 

So Easter has come and gone...

 

I had Good Friday off, and had rescheduled the VMB "beginner ride" at Jim Thorpe to Friday morning, but the day was cold and threatened rain, and it was only Anne and myself that went, so instead of doing the Broad Mountain loop (beginner stuff on Jeep roads) we rode the first part of the American Standard singletrack and had a blast. It was a cold day but we warmed up enough to remove jackets etc, then in the last mile or so we were hit with snow flurries.

 

We went to Easton that night to see the Great White Caps playing at Porters. We met Donna there, and saw many from "the old gang" (actually, from several different "old gangs"): Lee and Dave and Rathi, and Marty, and Danielle and Tara and Tabitha, and Courtney who got many congratulations on her engagement. Plenty of others there too, familiar faces whose histories I kinda-sorta know but not their names -- the place was packed. Later in the evening I noticed it was thinning out; I thought "wow, dinner crowd is leaving," looked at my phone and discovered it was after midnight. Oh well, time to go home.

 

Saturday morning we slept in for a bit, no surprise. Anne did some baking once we did get up, and I worked some more on the plans for the outdoor masonry oven we're putting in; the afternoon was a trip down to visit my parents for Easter. My brother Chris was there too with his family, as well as my uncle Pat and my sister-in-law's parents. Ham and turkey dinner, cake and coffee, hanging out with the family, and then the evening drive home. My mom gave me some new books for my birthday -- thanks Mom! -- so the evening was spent reading.

 

Reading: Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. Combination steampunk/fantasy, the first of a series set on the same (non-Earth) planet, by the guy who wrote Kraken, which I read and enjoyed last year.

 

Anyway, Easter Sunday was a trip back to Jim Thorpe, for an early Easter dinner at Anne's mom's house, with a bunch of her brothers and sisters, and their kids and grandkids. Lots of people and lots of fun, but things were pretty much winding down by mid-afternoon, and we were home by 5:00.

 

The day seemed sunny in Bethlehem before and after our visit, but it was weirdly humid-warm and rainy in Jim Thorpe. When we got back to the sunshine early enough for a ride I ran to get ready, but in the time I took to prepare the bike (slashed rear sidewall needed replacing) the JT weather caught up with us. It was warm enough so I went anyway, and did 10 miles in a steady drizzle followed by another 10 in a raging deluge of a thunderstorm. Crazy fun, actually...

 

Our usual haunts were closed last night, so we hit the Hotel Bethlehem, which never seems to work for me, but it was there or nothing last night so in we went. Pretty nice for a change -- unless you counted the table of obnoxious child-men, probably business travelers, yelling at the TV -- and the hamburger I got was very good. A better beer selection and it might be a decent place to hang out.

 

"Language is a virus from outer space." -- William S. Burroughs

Hello Sunshine

Morning weigh-in: 184#, 13% BF (remember these?)

 

Sun came after work yesterday, so I blew off yoga and went for a short ride at Jacobsburg instead, with Anne and Donna. It was a bit wet/muddy in places, and the horse poop issue continues unabated, but we had fun. We passed Brew Works on the way home and saw cars with bikes on them, the post-ride libations of some fellow bike club members, but we'd been out Monday, and Tuesday, and we were tired and dirty, and so last night was a night in.

 

It's beautiful out right now. I have the road bike here with me today, and we have a group ride planned for Jim Thorpe tomorrow; it looks like the bike doldrums are starting to fade even if the weekend is supposed to be wet.

 

Bittersweeter

I met Anne and company for dinner last night, good times including the ubiquitous "Bittersweet Symphony" -- we hear it at least once every time we go to the Brew Works, and we're there quite a bit...

 

Partway through the evening Anne got a call: some guys were up from DC to buy her and Ben's Pedi-Cabs, so we went over to the parking garage where she keeps the bikes, and we did the deal. She'd been trying to sell them for over a year, but I think even I was a little sad to see them go, and she and Ben had been doing this together since 2003.

 

Anyway: haircut, tacos (3 for $3), Pawnshop Porter, Richter's Red. Tonight is yoga and probably laundry.

Been A Long Time Been A Long Lonely Lonely Lonely

Whelp, I guess I didn't have as much downtime as I thought I would... super-busy at work the past few weeks, and lotsa running around afterward left me no time for blogging -- this was probably my longest dry spell ever.

What's been going on? Well I went to Missouri for work about a month ago, then I went to Washington, DC for my birthday weekend; I've been trying to get in some riding in the meantime, but the weather has been less than cooperative.

Reading #1: Elements of Mathematical Ecology by Mark Kot, a birthday gift from my mom -- thanks Mom! Yes, I am back on the Lotka-Volterra kick again...

Reading #2: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman. This was a gift from Anne, and it's pretty awesome: just a long string of slightly bizarre, almost-pointless anecdotes so far, but I totally can't out it down.

We hit a bookstore in DC, and I picked up a new copy of Gravity's Rainbow (wore my old one out years ago), as well as an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace.

Listening: Just downloaded some Shins album last night, their first I think. It's pretty good, and strange how I already know most of the songs. (I also recently got "License to Ill," and the first Stone Roses album, but those were more like replacements.)

I'm off to get a haircut in about two minutes, then heading down to meet Anne and the knitting crew for Taco Night.

Just A Spring Clean For The May Queen

I'm back, again. Where have I been? Well last weekend we went down to Rehoboth Beach to hang out at Dogfish Head's brewpub -- insanely good beer, acceptable pub fare, verdict: worth the trip -- but the real answer is "nowhere in particular, right here," though I have been busy.

The world is getting ready for spring, despite the recent crazy weather here (rain, snow). I did some trail maintenance at Trexler two weekends ago, basically clearing invasive brush from near the trails, and last Sunday I did some work (and got in my first ride) at the new trails being built at Nockamixon. Sweet!

Unfortunately, the industry -- my employment industry, not the bike industry -- seems to be gearing up for summer as well: I was scheduled to travel for a plant inspection this Friday, and they tacked on another trip, so here I am at the airport waiting for my first flight. I am out of town until Friday night, which is exactly why my tooth broke on the way to work this morning. Classic!

I expect to have quite a bit of downtime over the next few days, stay tuned for more updates...

And The Judge And The Jury Said "Blah Blah Blah"

An evening of running around last night, starting directly after work: over to Whitehall to pick up some altered clothes, Tulum for a take-out burrito, up to Lehigh for the VMB meeting -- I am now the new club secretary -- and ending at Two Brew Tuesday with Anne and (some of) the ladies. A chunk of the VMB crew came in for dinner too, so we all grabbed one of the big round tables. We got home sometime around midnight, and for some reason I slept in this morning, trading morning coffee & breakfast for a little extra sleep. Crappy and rainy this AM, perfect for catching a little extra shut-eye.

 

Anticlimax: I was working on making a set of GPX tracks for all of Sals about a week ago, and there was a lot of tedious repetition at one step, repetition and tedium that I knew I could avoid if I just automated the process. Unfortunately, and for reasons that aren't important, the usual ways to automate this wouldn't work. I thought about it, did some quick research, and figured out a way to to do what I wanted. Hours of thinking about it (at work, no access to my laptop), five minutes thinking through and typing out the command, hit return and -- ding! The job was done in the blink of an eye.

 

Pi R Round

Chuckle! Snort... Happy Pi Day! Stupid engineering jokes, can't get enough of them...

 

Yesterday was a bit of a low energy day for me, sitting in front of the computer watching the world end (and in case you want to do something for the people in Japan, here's a good roundup of charities). I finally got my act together later in the afternoon -- we got up at 11:00, so there really wasn't that much time spent vegetating, unless you count sleeping in -- and did some TLC on the bikes. I also put in some time cleaning up the basement workshop, then the last few hours of the day were spent on Sand Island, watching the water.

 

I brought my road bike in to work today, to take advantage of the Daylight Savings. It's a bit cold and windy but no longer raw, the weather definitely feels springlike. Some trees are just about ready to bloom, daffodils and crocuses are already up...

 

 

Seven Hundred Dollars Later...

...and I have a new work wardrobe! At least part of one: I bought a bunch of new shirts and and slacks at the local Men's Wearhouse. Shirts came home with me, and the pants will be ready for a Tuesday pick-up.

I also need to pick up a few new pairs of corduroys, which are my go-to choice for casual work trousers. I tried hitting the Army-Navy Store, but they had nothing like that; my next foray will be to Sears or the Mall or something like that.

Not much to say otherwise, just hanging out at home today. I was going to do a Jim Thorpe ride but I think the ground is still too wet and I don't want to trash the place, and we did a road ride yesterday. Maybe the gym later? Or possibly some yoga at home, we'll see.

Tomorrow I think I'll bring the road bike to work, take advantage of some of that Daylight Savings Time.

By the way, new photos are posted, from a Friday walk along the Lehigh Towpath near Sand Island. Not quite the disaster scene I'm used to from my Easton days, but there was some serious flooding going on.

Like In The Olden Days

Like way back when, my pre-yoga days... I took a yoga class last night, and I knew I would be out of shape, but I was surprised at how stiff I had become: really stiff, can't-touch-your-toes stiff -- one more wake-up call. The workout felt good though; I think it's what I need right now. (One thing I didn't need was the mirror on the wall, showing me how big my gut had become -- back in the fall of 2007, I got  a new mirror in my living room, and walking past that mirror every day, seeing myself, was one of several factors that drove me to lose weight that winter.)

 

Noted in passing: Besides being my brother's birthday (Happy Birthday, Kevin!), Saturday was the 5 year anniversary of the ankle incident. You bet I was thinking about it, every icy patch on my ride Saturday.

 

Meanwhile, today is my last day at work before Daylight Savings Time. It's pouring, today through tomorrow, so I'm hitting the gym tonight, and I'll probably get in some more gym/yoga/errands/chores before the nicer weather hits on Saturday. Green Blaze? Allamuchy?

 

 

A Steppenwolf Christmas

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 16.5% BF

 

I suspect that I'm fully hydrated for a change, since that body fat number looks about right -- that is, it's not what I want, but at least the BF is accurate.

 

In case anyone was wondering: Kraftwerk Thanksgiving. I'm gonna miss Achewood, if I don't already...

 

Map Fun: One thing I've wanted to do with my Garmin is put a map of the Sals trail system on it, one that I could then follow on my rides. (Not that I need it, but it would be cool to follow along, and it might come in handy as something I could give to others.) The Garmin has one big drawback though: trails are added via GPX files, but there's no way to just take a file containing the entire trail system, and just copy it into the unit, and have that be all you need to work with -- each individual trail segment (and there may be over a hundred) must be loaded into the map one by one, turned on so it shows on the map, and color chosen for that segment, the whole process done over and over using that clunky 2-button-and-a-joystick interface.

 

Once loaded, the Garmin mapping info is stored in somewhere other than the original GPX file. (GPX doesn't normally store color but it can handle extensions; this shouldn't have been too hard.) Something like that -- having the Garmin's map info in the same file as the trail data -- would have been useful, because then the file, with all its hard-won map info, could be copied for someone else to use, or moved off the unit and reinstalled later -- but nope.

 

So OK, using a trail network, as produced by GRASS or TopoFusion, is impractical.

 

The next thing I tried was from a "How-To" I found online: trace over the trail network using Google Earth, doubling back or tracing over the same segments as required to make the trail system one huge single loop. Save and convert to GPX and plop it into the Garmin, and you can get the whole trail system onto the map with one iteration of the installation process.

 

This worked well, apart from the one-time tedium of re-tracing the trails, and had only one disadvantage: the entire trail system must all be the same color. This would usually be no big deal, except that the Sals trail system is composed of color-coded subsystems, and I wanted each trail on my map to have the same color as the trail blazes you'd find in the woods.

 

The compromise I came up with was to do the "retrace in Google Maps" thing for each subsystem, then load (and assign colors to) each individually. This worked out reasonably well -- it wasn't the one-shot setup I wanted, but it was a lot better than the alternatives I found so far. I tried these on Saturday's ride, and they looked and worked great.

 

Last night was the gym, and tonight is a towpath ride, to be followed by Taco Tuesday.

 

Pierogi Fest, The Kraftwerk Mardi Gras

There will be no morning weigh-in today: too many pierogis were consumed yesterday for any mens sana in corpus sano step-on-scale soul searching this AM...

 

We had a good time though. Anne and a few ladies from her knitting crowd decided they needed something to get through the last of the winter, and that something was -- pierogis! A five course meal, with pierogis in every recipe: Deb brought bacon-wrapped pierogi appetizers, Amy brought chicken-pierogi soup, Anne made pierogi lasagna, Liz had a bunch with various traditional and non-traditional stuffings, Donna had pierogis and string beans, and for dessert we had Anne's homemade pierogis with fruit filling, plus Donna's apple-pierogi pie. (The rest of us just brought our hungry but lazy asses.) That, and the last of our keg of "Hanseatic Doldrums" Baltic Porter, and it was a long fun dinner party -- and strangely enough, despite the heavy, filling qualities in every bite, there were almost no leftovers.

 

We tried to come up with a theme (Mardi Gras sort of came and went), with appropriate music and dress code for the party (the dress-up part was also DOA, thank goodness -- everyone wore what they always wear). The first musical iteration was polka, which was a disaster, then we tried "techno, like they listen to in Europe," but I didn't know any techno so I told Pandora I liked Kraftwerk, and let Pandora pick the music. It worked, pretty much.

 

(Speaking of music: I downloaded some songs from the Dum Dum Girls and listened to them on the way in to work this morning. Nice.)

 

Maybe it had something to do with what was in my belly when I went to bed, but I had the craziest and most fun post-Apocalyptic dream ever. Most of it faded when the alarm went off, but it was a sort of mix of Steve Austin / Mad Max kind of thing, in a world where the Federal Government had sort of merged the NBA and senior housing. I was a refugee, possibly via time capsule / escape pod (Polaroids of my previous life all around me in the dust, when they found me unconscious), and my tape-recorded debriefing, at a dusty outdoor basketball court, hoops mounted on palm trees etc, slowly morphed into a narrative of a visit to (and guitar jam with) a bunch of dolphins swimming in what looked like a brightly-lit, subterranean reactor core. I was saying the words "even unto the Gravity Well" when the alarm went off.

 

Saturday was pretty nice too: we went to Easton and hooked up with my HS buddy Mike and his family, in town to visit the Crayola Factory, and we had lunch together at Pearly Baker's, which gets a substantial clientele from Crayola, with kid's menu to accommodate. Mike's kids were adorable, but I think he was monitoring them very closely for signs of "long day meltdown," and took off before any anticipated crash. Shopping, home, a quick Sals ride -- remember them? -- and then we went to Spanky's "I'm tired of winter" party. Awesome, and warm enough that we could hang outside. Spring's coming.

 

Friday -- maybe by next week I'll say something about First Friday, if I remember. Tonight is the gym, and one week from yesterday is Daylight Savings Time.

 

One-Brew Tuesday

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#, 15% BF

 

Weights are still high, but since I dropped a half pound after Two Brew And Tacos Tuesday, I thought I'd take the win and record it here.

 

Busy night last night, lots of running around: straight to the gym from work (where I added legs for the first time in a while), then walked over to Eskandalo for a haircut (calling my niece for a birthday greeting on the walk over), then home to change, then finally walked over Brew Works to meet up with the post-knitting crew. Normally I get the tacos (a Tuesday bargain at 3 for $3.00), and I did last night as well, but I skipped the sour cream and guacamole, and instead of two beers I only had one, so between the leg workout and the evening's belt-tightening...

 

I don't know what's up for tonight, maybe a run with Anne.

 

Transitions

Morning weigh-in: 185#, 15% BF

 

Happy Birthday to my God-daughter, my beautiful niece Olivia!

 

Much done, nothing said for a week... The weekend before last was probably our last hurrah on the skis, with trips to Jim Thorpe (icy but OK conditions) and the Poconos (nice snow); on Sunday and Tuesday we ran outside. Thursday I did an indoor trainer class at Cutter's Bike Shop, then Friday I got out for a bit of icy towpath riding (and finished in daylight). Saturday was windy so we did some chores and housecleaning (dinner party that night, it had to happen anyway), but on Sunday Anne and I did a short morning run, and then an awesome afternoon bike ride. Nothing crazy, about 20 miles through Wassergas and Williams Township, and it was chilly when we weren't moving, and it was still a bit breezy, but with that ride it finally felt like spring was coming. (Of course, Sunday night through today has been more cold and more snow, which raised Anne's hopes for one last play-in-the-snow storm, but even this feels like a last hurrah.)

 

I Need A New Toy: On Saturday night we had some friends over for dinner, and to test our new Baltic Porter, "Hanseatic Doldrums," and among the guests were a few from the biking crowd. Talk drifted to training, and GPS and HRM, and, for the women in the room, privacy issues with web-based training analysis.

 

(I use Garmin Connect and MapMyRide, and I do keep my GPS data private for the most part, especially if the ride starts/finishes at home, but I make the data for my "away rides" publicly available (it's only fair: I search among other public tracks to learn new trails), and I'm comfortable with even the ones marked "private" being stored online. Then again, I own a mirror, and I know have less to worry about, in terms of someone studying my habits and training routes for purposes of sexual assault, than do some others in the conversation.)

 

Anyway, the conversation turned to privacy settings on training websites, then to methods of just keeping the data local and using analysis software on your home machine -- I believe I actually blushed when I realized I didn't have any training analysis software on my machine -- unless you count TopoFusion, and I don't because it's more like mapping software --  and I didn't even know if any was available on Linux.

 

Not to worry, I found a bunch online, and last night I fixed my lack by downloading SportsTracker. It looks pretty decent, I think I'll be giving it a try over the next few weeks to see how it compares to the online ones, and maybe grab some more for comparison purposes. Strangely enough, the SportsTracker mapping uses OpenStreetMap, which actually shows a lot of my local singletrack -- bonus!

 

Now all I need to do is get out there and ride, and run, and hit the gym, and get back into yoga, and also find time for my previous obsession/acquisition, GnuCash. Did I mention I picked up a guitar chord reference book, one I used as a kid?

 

Tonight is the gym, followed by a haircut, followed by Two Brew Tuesday at Brew Works.