Got A New Toy

The Setup: My laptop runs Ubuntu Linux, which has an automatic update feature, part of what's known as the "package manager" for installing/updating/removing software. It's usually very handy, but the other day it was running and couldn't finish what it was doing: most of the updated packages did just fine, but one was listed as "broken," and there were bunch of error messages, which didn't resolve when I followed the instructions for fixing it, and didn't resolve by just leaving the thing alone, letting the next automatic maybe fix it for me (I initially suspected that the updated package itself, as it was sent to me, was what was corrupt).

So the next update didn't help, and I took a harder look at the error message. Basically it said that there was a problem with a perl script (technically, a perl "module") needed in some way or other. I don't know much about perl, and I didn't know that the package manager system even used perl, but some googling of what looked like  important parts of the error message (mainly a problem with something called a "bareword") led me to forums where others were asking about similar messages in various contexts; these discussions led me to believe that the perl script in question had been corrupted.

So, the next step was to find the script on my laptop and open it -- gedit couldn't open the file, which might indicate a problem, but emacs handled it fine, though it showed a bunch of non-printing characters here and there -- and then search the internet for the same file. I compared the two: the non-printing characters weren't supposed to be in there, so I fixed my file to look like what I found online. I ran the package manager again, and the offending package installed just fine...

But how and why did that perl script get corrupted? I hadn't messed with it, and couldn't figure why something would poop gibberish into the middle of the file unless the disk itself was starting to go bad. Uh, oh.

To make matters worse, the package in question was an iupdate of the kernel, the little program that makes the rest of the computer work. What if my fix didn't solve the problem but only masked it; if the update failed without saying so and the kernel somehow became corrupt, rebooting could break my system. I couldn't let my computer shut down until I figured out what to do if things went wrong.

An Interlude: Anne's back has been slowly getting better since she pulled a muscle a few weeks ago, but she currently prefers to sit on an exercise ball because it less uncomfortable than regular chairs. I was home yesterday by myself, playing around with the weights, when I saw the exercise ball over by the dining room table and decided that I should add it to my routine... I started doing crunches on the ball and I heard a sudden  crunch-pop sound -- I'd pushed the ball up against some knitting needles and put a hole in it! Great, I just broke Anne's only chair.

Out I went to the local sporting goods store, where I got a replacement ball. No big deal, but the stores next door were a Best Buy and a Staples, and I thought well, while I'm here...

The New Toy: I went into Staples, determined to get some form of backup system for my laptop's drive. Big external drive, tape drive, whatever. I did some looking around, and some discreet Internet research while in the Mass Storage Aisle, and decided to get a Seagate Central NAS. Three terabytes of storage, wifi connection and provision for multiple users, and it was said to be fine with Linux; my only remaining question was how it would work with the Squeezebox. I go up to the help desk with the empty box ("display container only, ask for assistance") where they couldn't answer my question but assured me that returning it would be OK if things didn't work out. Then they go to get me one, and -- they don't have any in. Oops!

Oh well, I go next door into Best Buy (where I bumped into a co-worker, who was having trouble returning a broken phone -- let's hope it's not foreshadowing) and purchase the 2-terabyte model sitting on the shelf.

Epilogue: There's not much to tell -- installation basically meant turning the device on and plugging it into the router, configuration was done using a web browser interface and it was beyond simple; and backing up my laptop was really easy using luckyBackup and an ssh connection, though it seemed to take forever. (I'm not sure how fast things are supposed to be, but 125 gigabytes took about 14 hours.)
The only downside so far other than the speed -- if that's even a problem -- is the poor integration with the Squeezebox Touch. I think I can live with that for now, and may solve it by installing squeezeserver on the NAS, if its brain can handle the extra load.

I also made myself a rescue disk, and when all my pieces were in place, system backed up and disk where I could reach it, I crossed my fingers and rebooted. That was about an hour ago, and it was a total anticlimax: everything was fine.

Doug and I were talking a week or so ago about smartphones and tablets, and the thrill -- for a little while -- of getting a new app to play with, how it's almost like a sugar buzz. The last two days were like that for me; it was as exciting as my first thumb drive.

That's Notta My Boat

Running the year down, this post gives me one more than last year's low of 44 posts, not great but at least I'm trending in the right direction...

That program I was working, you know the one that was "finished?" Yeah, about that... I decided to add a few more features, mainly getting material properties from a database. This meant learning how to "do" databases, such as MySQL, hence that book Learning MySQL.

Getting off the ground proved to be remarkably difficult, I had a lot of trouble just starting the program and connecting to the database engine (the mysql daemon runs on my machine as part of the system) -- it didn't help that I apparently had already played with MySQL some time in the past, set a password and then forgot it. Luckily, it was easy enough to guess, and once past this learning-curve road-bump it was smooth sailing, in fact using SQL is so easy I'm now surprised it had me intimidated.

Right now I'm doing some experimenting with the API for C, before my next big step, which is to build a materials database -- a small one, just a few common materials  with their temperature-dependent properties -- in preparation for re-doing the materials portions of the header program.

Anyway, Happy New Year! See you in 2014.

Snow Ride

I haven't been out on the bike since November. Part of the reason is that it's not in the best of shape, with brake problems (the pistons are sticking), shock problems (the stanchions are worn, and the forks are too obsolete for easy replacement), in addition to general maintenance issues: I just replaced the shifter cables and housings, which improved shifting 100%, or would have if the rest of the bike weren't in pieces...

I've slowly been trying too get this situation under control, and brought the brakes over for service, ordered new tires, started looking into getting new brakes, and -- started shopping around for a new bike. I stopped by Cutter's Bike shop and picked up their Specialized 29" full-suspension demo bike yesterday, with plans to ride "first thing" this morning.

Well, one thing led to another, and I didn't feel well this morning (allergies/sinus/asthma/headache, but mostly headache), and it was all I could do to get out of the house by 2:00 -- I was immediately glad I did, despite the cold, the weird "not my bike" feel of the demo, and the painful realization of how out of shape I was. My headache disappeared almost immediately, my nose and chest opened up as I got warmed up, and the day itself was beautiful, with just a dusting of snow on the ground and flurries falling through scattered sunlight. (I rode at Sals, by the way, which could explain both the beauty and the beatdown.)

The bike? It took some getting used to, it certainly doesn't corner as well as the Turner (it held a wider turn radius than I usually intended, and I didn't really feel confident enough to get aggressive), and the shifting/braking were a little different, but by about halfway through the ride I started to get comfortable with it. I have it for another day or so, and I'll see how we adapt to each other over the next few rides.

This is only my first test bike. I have a feeling I'll be getting a 29-er, so this was a good way to test the waters, but we'll see what further research brings.

Four Books

By the way, Merry Christmas everybody!

Also by the way, I've been posting lots of pictures to Flickr. I don't think I'll make my goal of getting my photos up to date by the New Year, but I suspect I'll be done with our Ireland photos by the time I go back to work on the 6th. Enjoy! And stay tuned for more...

I've been trying to teach myself a few now computer skills lately, and my main teaching resource has been O'Reilly Publishing. I got myself Learning Java about a month ago, and have been working my way through it, then the other day I got myself Learning MySQL, then my mom & dad got me Learning Python (freakin' huge book) as well as Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, & CSS.

I think I'll be busy at my laptop for the next several months at least...

Three Books

Another day, another book report, but first: It's a rainy day here, but I got up full of pep anyway, resolved to do, among other things some laundry, some yoga and weights, and some dusting & vacuuming -- the vacuum, busted for a few weeks, just got fixed and the general dust/dirt is enough that even I noticed (that's bad).

Anyway... jumped out of bed, tossed in some laundry and got the coffee going, and then Anne, washing some spinach for breakfast, noticed that the water coming out of the tap was brown. Brown! Blech. She called the water department, and they said there was a water main break that they were trying to locate & fix; in the meantime we shouldn't drink or cook with the tap water (not that we would have...). OK, throw out the coffee and tea, start over with some stored water from the basement, and get on with our day, resolving to redo the laundry when the water's fixed.

Some recent reads, in the order I read them:

The Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver

The first two were sort of recommended by various political blogs; I knew that the likewise blog-celebrated Nate Silver had a book out and bought it without any additional recommendation when I saw it (at Penn Books, during our last foray into Philly).

Long story short: the first was meh, the second maybe even meh-minus, but The Signal and the Noise was (or is -- I'm not finished yet) awesome.

I got Twilight of the Elites (subtitle: "America After Meritocracy") maybe a year ago, expecting to read about the problems caused by our current power structure and how it maintains itself. That's pretty much what the book delivered: problems such as baseball scandals and the housing bubble are analyzed in terms of what happened, who screwed up and why, and who did or didn't get held accountable; the main premise is that our "meritocracy" -- or as I'd rather put it, our "so-called meritocracy" since some of the supposedly meritorious things are really just class markers or the result of unexamined privilege -- leads to an elite that is overly competitive (too ambitious, too envious of the next level of success), prone to cheat (since incentives are based on measurable "performance," which can be gamed), and convinced that they are truly the elite since they won their positions based on "performance." He further points out that existing power structures use their positions to work the system in favor of their own members (think private day-care undermining the level playing field of education), which I guess gets back to my point about privilege.

So far I'm with author (though the problem as he puts it looks more like an example of what's wrong with Management by Objectives than anything else), but somewhere in there he seemed to lose focus, and the second half of the book really lost my interest; I had to push to finish it. Too bad really, because the end of the book had some prescriptions for fixing things, including the idea that more equality would help a meritocracy work as it should -- though my own feeling was that meritocracy itself is fundamentally flawed.

Anyway, I finished the book, which is more than I can say for The Victory Lab. This was the story of how the Obama campaign used new concepts from Big Data (automated polls and constant monitoring of the electorate's mood, microtargeting, etc) and an emphasis on evidence in campaign decisions. All well and good, but my expectations was that it would be about the data and tools, and it turned out to be about the people involved, which consultant came up with what insight that led to the idea of microtargeting in some other campaign etc, with only the vaguest idea of what the actual methods were -- just a few Time Magazine-level examples and oversimplifications, like "algorithms" being defined, essentially, as weighted averages. (Poor old Time Magazine used to hit a nerve all the time with me whenever they had an article touching on something I knew anything about: their descriptions and explanations were so plausibly written, but were oversimplified to the point that their meaning was the opposite of whatever the case really was in the thing they were explaining. Drove me nuts.)

The author also had a maddening habit of introducing new actors into the story, then going through long digressive backstories on the new guy's history and CV. The constant jumping back and forth broke up what should have been the straightforward flow of the narrative, and it also eventually became hard to keep track of all the characters involved, both of which made a fuzzy story even fuzzier -- once again, the author couldn't maintain focus.

I got most of the way through before I started skimming, and finally just managed to "finish" the book by plowing through the last few pages in a row. I guess The Victory Lab would make a good read if you're interested in the Obama campaigns themselves and especially the personalities involved, but that's not my cup of tea, and it wasn't what I was looking for in this book.

Luckily I saved the best for last: I picked up The Signal and the Noise on a whim, and before I was done with the introduction I was hooked. Nate Silver is a very smart, personable guy, with a good grasp of the concepts he's writing about, so it's not a surprise that he could write clearly on his subject -- if poor writing is a sign of poor thinking, the converse is probably also true -- but even above that, he's an accomplished and engaging writer.

The book itself is about predictions and forecasts, why so many go wrong and why some don't (to paraphrase the book jacket), and he breaks the book down into two main parts, the first being a description of the problem (bad predictions) over several chapters, and the second part looking at a way to improve the situation (Bayesian statistics). The problem chapters are case studies of political punditry, baseball -- two subjects in which the author really made a name for himself -- weather forecasting and earthquake forecasting, and so on, all totally fascinating. The start of the Bayesian part is where I am now, and it looks to be at least as good.

I can say that I see the appeal of the first two books, and I can see them being enjoyed by the right personality, but The Signal and the Noise is the one that gets my wholehearted recommendation. Take my advice and read it.

(By the way, I finished Bleeding Edge, and I have to say I'm glad I did.)

Two Books

Books, books books, I gotta lotta books for Christmas, better get on it...

What I've been reading lately is Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, basically a historical fiction, semi-detective story about"Silicon Alley" in New York, in the era between the dotcom crash and 9-11. I'm not so sure I like it: it started out slow, then got really good towards the middle, but it's now winding down and it doesn't seem to be coming to any conclusion -- or maybe climax/revelation/resolution would be a better way to say it, unless "life goes on" is the conclusion to the book, and the ending just peters out to the new post-911 normal.

It kind or reminds me of his latest before this one, Inherent Vice, which was also historical fiction (the 60's), and a detective story, and was so -- can I even say this blasphemy? -- boring that I didn't even finish it. I promised myself I'd finish Bleeding Edge, and if it seems worthwhile after that, I might even go back to Inherent Vice. We'll see. I often think he alternates between good and mediocre books, odd=good/even=meh, but this is now two in a row. I still love him, and maybe this is a deliberate branching out, into a better art that I can't appreciate, but this isn't (as far as I can tell) the Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow.

Odds & Ends

Still here, doing some computer organizing -- among other things I just put up our wedding photos. You can find them here. Enjoy!

(The music -- on my squeezebox, which I spent quite a bit of time trying to get working again after setting up a firewall here -- just seg'ed from Titus Andronicus's "A More Perfect Union" to M.I.A.'s "MIA." Nice.)

Anyway, carry on. It's still snowing, BTW.

Tuesday Snow

So the Sunday snow morphed into a "wintry mix" as expected. I drove in yesterday and the roads were pretty icy, especially the side streets, but things got a lot better as the temperature climbed and the mess turned to plain rain and wet roads. My carpool buddy asked if I wanted to drive today, since we were expecting more snow -- a real snowstorm this time even if accumulation wouldn't be much -- and I was fine with that, I prefer my own car, and my own driving, to his in this weather. But then...

We both started smelling a car burning oil on the way home. I thought it was the car ahead of me, then some other car ahead of me, but no, it was me. Got home, checked the oil, and there was none. Uh oh...  Googling gave me a bad case of car-hypochondria, and I took today off to bring it in to the shop.

Just got the the estimate. Basically everything I was worried about came true: Subaru's do tend to develop oil leaks over time, and mine got pretty much all the ones my old Outback had (rear main seal, oil pump, head gasket), except all at once instead of happening over a period of years. Bottom line: $2500. Ouch! I'll take the hit this time, the rest of the car seems OK, but I guess I'll have to start thinking about a replacement sooner than I expected.

The snowfall had slowed a bit, but now it looks like it's picking up again. Sure wish I had a car that would drive through this stuff right now...

Sunday Snowfall

Hanging out at home, watching a really light snow fall. It's not expected to last though -- this stuff is supposed to morph into a "wintry mix" (ie sleet and freezing rain) sometime this afternoon. Oh well, maybe they'll be wrong.

So last time I checked in (other than my two two clean-out-the-closet posts prior to this one), I was working through a bunch of books, and since then I of course bought a few more...

We went into Philly with our friends Donna and John last weekend, meeting them at the White Dog Café for lunch, and then hitting Penn Books, which is just around the corner, before checking into our hotel. Anne got a bunch of books, but I limited myself to three: Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon's latest, Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and World War Z. So even though I finished that giant book of SF short stories (also purchased at Penn Books, by the way), I am behind the eight-ball once again, at least in terms of my reading.

(The rest of the weekend: Nodding Head Brewpub and Local 44 on Saturday night, and Sunday brunch at Sabrina's before hitting the Philladelphia Art Museum.)

This weekend we stayed pretty local: we tried Aria, that new Afghan restaurant in Allentown, with Doug & Lori and Scott S on Friday, then met Sally & Joe last night at Black & Blue. Errands and chores in the mornings, naps in the afternoons...

Think I'll go out and stand in the flurry fall, which sadly looks like it's already ending.

Another Blast From The Past

This, like the preceding genealogy photoblog, is an orphaned post I found on Blogger from last year; it was originally titled "And So This Is Christmas Eve." It's obviously unfinished, and I was going to toss it but I liked the turducken photos.

Well, it's getting a bit quieter here, though the bread is still a-baking and the table is still covered with food. We're down to Emmi and Ben: Jaime left for Pittsburgh the day after the ""end of the world" party, and Amanda just took off for Washington about an hour or so ago. So we're now just winding down to a silent night...

Me and the Turducken

The turducken came out great by the way. Here's a shot of the turkey getting stuffing, with the duck waiting in the wings, so to speak, and one of the chicken still waiting in the brine:

We got a huge new pan to cook it in, one that just barely fit in our oven, and the turducken barely fit in the pan. Here it is before cooking, with my head for comparison -- we estimated we had about 35 pounds of meat and stuffing to cook.

Turkey Getting Stuffing

Brining the Chicken

The final result was beautiful.

The Finished Turducken

Turducken: A Cross Section

Anne and I had started the cooking and other preparations the day or so before, with a firing of the oven to do some slow cooked ribs, and of course going to the Allentown Farmer's Market to get the ribs, turkey, duck, chicken, and other supplies... Anne boned all three birds and we put them in brine to soak overnight, got the ingredients ready to make stuffing, and by the time we put the ribs in the oven it was past 1:00 AM. At 6:00 AM we got up, did the stuffing and Anne sewed the birds back together, and the birds went in the oven maybe around 9:00.

Blast From The Past

These are my maternal grandfather's paternal grandparents: Heinrich Barth was born in Leese, Germany. He was a 30-year-old a sailor living in New York when he got married in 1869. His bride was Helene Euschen, a 23-year-old originally from the tiny German village of Moringen. They look a a bit older than that in this picture, but I have no idea when it was taken.

This other photo is of Heinrich Barth, much later in life and probably taken in Brooklyn.

Being Thankful

Don't want to get too earnest here, but do I have a lot to be grateful for -- don't worry, there won't be a list! Sometimes though, it's good to just register in your mind how good you have it...

Remembrance Of Skills Past

I didn't really have a reason to do this, but I decided to see if I could get that program to run on my SDF shell account. It shouldn't be too hard, SDF is pretty similar to my home computer, but since my program makes use of the Mini-XML library (non-standard,  and not installed on SDF), I would have to find a way to get that installed -- without administrator rights, and without messing with any part of the SDF system outside my account's little turf. This also shouldn't be difficult, I'd done similar things before, but I just didn't remember how.

Here's how: In my home directory I made my own "bin" and "lib" directories, then I downloaded and unpacked the compressed mini-xml files, and then did the configure/make process with my home directory as target. That got the new libraries installed in my "lib" directory.

The next step was to download my program code and make the file. No problem, though I changed my Makefile to know about my lib directory.

The final step -- the one I forgot, and the one that took a while to find with a Google search, since most instructions assume you have root access and are doing things in the standard way -- is to set the library search path to check my personal lib directory as well as the others:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/my/home/directory/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

(I also put that in my profile and exported it.)

Anyway, it worked like a charm, and now I can play with my program anywhere I can access SDF -- like my phone, thanks to ConnectBot and much to Anne's chagrin while we were out last night...

(Hopefully, if I need to remember how to do something like this again in 10 years or so, or if someone else looks for a solution to the same problem, this will come in handy.)

The Book Of Lists

Here's a list of the books I'm reading:

The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Daimond
The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
The Year's Best Science Fiction (30th Edition), ed by Gardner Duzois

On deck:

Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan (a loan, so I better get it finished)
The Game of Thrones series (also  a loan)

Recent Music:

Lately I've been downloading music I hear on Radio Paradise, so recent acquisitions include Younger Brother, Alt-J, VAST, and Beth Orton.

This is in addition to recent efforts to round out my collection: the B-52's, Radiohead, Negativland, Big Star, Midnight Oil, and the Stereo MC's.

Also: Australia's Triple-J brought me to Seth Sentry and Art vs. Science.

Reviews of all the above to follow, eventually. Maybe.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Cafe Redux

Back again at The Joint,  waiting for Anne to get here from the library. Let's see...

I applied to Northampton Area Community College yesterday, and went this morning to the "Open House" at their main campus. My plan, or maybe rather aspiration, is to get some new skills -- we're talking mainly programming and applications development here -- so I can be ready to change careers if I need to; my first order of business was to have been learning Java, but after looking at the course catalogs I think I might want to take a few other courses as well, like databases, client-side scripting (ie Javascript), and server-side scripting (PHP), which are all parts of their "web applications" program.

Unfortunately, at the Open House I found out that the Java course is not available in the spring semester, the other courses will be be available but not at night, and the only one in the program available online -- thus the only one I can take next semester -- is the "intro" course, which I  was thinking of trying to get exempted from having to take...

All is not lost however: I talked to the Computer Info professor, and the intro course doesn't sound too bad, and covers a bunch of stuff I think I'll be interested in, and needing, so I might take that in the spring, as well as an introductory accounting course (just because, and also because it's online).

Meantime, we went into Philly yesterday afternoon. We stopped in at the Penn bookstore, then met Ben at the White Dog for a late lunch. Afterward we hit a few other bookstores that Ben knew about, and also visited Jaime at the coffee shop where she works. All in all, a good way to spend a rainy day.

Coffeeshop Ramblings

I'm sitting in "The Joint," a somewhat new coffee place in Bethlehem, opened by friends, and local restaurateurs, Bill and Tabitha. It isn't all that new anymore, but I got out of the habit of hanging in cafes after I left Easton, and when Wired closed I really lost the habit, so this isn't my usual Saturday routine -- let's call it, if not quite "new to me," then "outside my usual third-space options." Anne probably eats lunch here once a week though, and I can see why: I just got a sandwich, and it was excellent.

Blogging Will Be Somewhat Light Last Quarter My usual habit for years was to blog during lunch at work, usually just a few short paragraphs a day, but trying for every day. They eventually blocked blogs at work, and blogger.com, but I found a way to email posts from my Gmail account, and so the lunchtime posts continued, more or less, for quite a bit longer. Within the past few months, though, they started blocking Gmail as well at work... I guess if there were a will there'd be a way, but my blogging interest has waned, and so I haven't done much to find alternatives.

What's (Been) Up: Well, Anne and I spent much of the post-Ireland summer training, and we ran the VIA Half-Marathon in early September. I came in around 2:30, and Anne beat me by about 15 minutes. Once again, something I had a great deal of trepidation about, but when it was over I was glad I did it -- I may even do another one, but not for a while. One bad side-effect was that the biking suffered during the training period: I just didn't feel like going out for rides in the afternoon/evening after getting up and running 5 miles extra-early in the morning. Luckily, my cardio didn't suffer, though my technical skills sure did.

After the run I made a push to get my bike mojo back, doing a number of MTB rides in Jim Thorpe and other places, and having some fun watching the change of seasons from inside the forest.

Also: Just before the half-marathon, Anne and I got in one pretty big bike ride, a cycling tour to Philadelphia. Our original goal was Rehobeth Beach, but we had such a miserable time in the NJ towns south of Trenton (creepy and depressing, weirdly impoverished, no places to eat, skeevy motels, and on and on), and we realized on the second night that we'd have just enough time to cross the state, touch our destination and come back through the misery zone, that we changed plans and went to Philly. Great idea (though the ride through Camden was hot and unpleasant), and we spent two nights there, avoiding some rainy days and visiting with Ben & Jaime. The home trip was a bit tough, about 70 miles in one day (remember, we were fully loaded with touring stuff, clothes and camping gear etc), with hills. I was glad to be home!

'Puter Time: Remember that program from work that I was trying to understand? Well, the biggest problems with it were that it was written to accept data from punched cards -- no lie, it's that old, and the data formatting was never updated -- so the input format was cramped to the point of obscurity to fit in 80-character chunks, and major parts of the program were huge hodge-podges of nested IF blocks and GOTO statements mainly to parse that data, so I decided to look into rewriting these parts (in the original FORTRAN), and that eventually snowballed into rewriting the whole thing in C, taking XML data as input and producing output similar to the original program, but in a somewhat improved format. That's been going on for months, maybe for the whole past year, and lately I've gotten to the point several times where it was mostly done, except for maybe a bit of tweaking here and there... Well today I basically realized that it was done, it worked exactly right and did everything that the original program did, and more. (I added other connections, like our newer weld styles, and organized the program so that other new styles could be added easily, an impossible task with the old program.)

So now that I have it, what am I going to do with it? Not much! I've tried the program with a bunch of example projects, as well as some test cases (to see how well it handles bad data), and I'll probably play with it at home, using actual real world examples from work, but that's about it. I realized that I don't want to show it to anyone at work, because to show it -- show the code, that is; I don't think the program would run as-is on the machines at work -- is to basically give it away, and I think it'd be pretty hard to get them to pay me for this thing I did in my spare time. (I'm fine doing it for nothing, as long as I consider it an at-home professional development learning experience, but if it's to be used in a production environment I'd expect to be renumerated.) I'm also sure that the actual programming could be a lot better, and despite what I said about completeness, it's really not ready for prime time -- it matches the core FORTRAN  program, but there's no user interface, and no database lookup of material properties, things that we have at work thanks to a sort of "wrapper" program that prepares jobs for and runs the core program. Maybe that can be something I can work on now.

Meantime, I'm hanging out here, about to get my next cup of coffee. I'm on my own for the weekend, as Anne is off with her sisters and sister-in-law at a knitting convention. I went out last night with Doug & Lori, and Scott S; we went to Black & Blue, and had so much fun I think I might stay in tonight. I'll probably try to get in a ride somewhere tomorrow, as well as some autumnal yard work -- did I mention that Anne and I just built a shed? Well, she built it, but I helped...

My First Race...

...was the 1992 God's Country Classic, near Coudersport in Potter County, Pennsylvania.

I was pretty into riding by that point, even though I'd only started that spring, and my friend Mike and I decided we wanted to try a race. I have no idea how we picked this one, or even found out about it -- racing was popular at the time, even if we didn't know much about it, and there were tons of races closer to home, but this was the one we found and did. My guess is that Mike saw something about this one, maybe an advertisement somewhere, and it piqued his interest.

Flashback to a few weeks before the race: I spent a lot of time riding the towpath that summer, and a few other, similar places, and I was fitter and stronger, after a summer of rising and losing weight, than I had ever been before -- but that was a low bar, and I also didn't know much about "real mountain biking," as in what I'd now call singletrack, or more technical terrain and how to handle it. So what I d was sign up for something called the "CAM Fat Tire Rally," put on by Cycle Across Maryland, ie CAM, which I think is now defunct but they used to run charity rides across Maryland (get it?) to fund helmets for inner-city kids; this was their first offroad event, and it was held at Patapsco State Park.

Me at the CAM Fat Tire Rally, 1992

 

I actually got there a little early, and ended up helping with minor setup, mixing the energy drink jugs etc, then as things got started I met a few people to hang out with -- they all called me "Jersey" after seeing my license plate -- checked out some workshops on safety/etiquette/nutrition/technique/trail maintenance/etc, then went out with the "beginner" ride.

That was pretty cool, but it seemed a bit basic to me. After lunch -- tuna sandwiches, and a speech about what CAM does, which included a homily on MTB helmet safety -- I hooked up with the "intermediate" afternoon group ride, and was pushed beyond my skill and fitness level, almost losing my lunch before letting myself get dropped. All in all a good day, and I remember being exhausted on the drive home.

That was mid-September. In mid October -- Friday night of the weekend of October 10th, to be exact -- Mike and I drove up in his van, camped out with everyone else in the fields around "Potato City Airport," and on Saturday morning we went down to register.

Me at the God's Country MTB Classic, 1992

The guy who took our registration forms was in one of those "broken neck brace" halo thingies, which gave me a few qualms, and I also remember looking around during the racer's meeting at the fancy bikes -- I'd seen my first full-suspension bike at the Fat Tire Rally, but now I saw more of them, as well as plenty of suspension forks -- I was riding my fully rigid Giant Iguana with toe straps, and wearing sneakers, tube socks, really-old-school baggies, my lucky Jaegermeister tee shirt and a windbreaker, plus helmet and gloves. I thought I looked obviously out of place, and remember checking out some guy's disk wheels and feeling really clueless and inadequate...

Finally the race started, and started with the only section of actual trail on the course, about 50 yards long and complete with mud puddles and one rider already down, I mean face down in a mud puddle, with a pool of blood spreading through the water from his face while other riders were crouching and saying "You OK? You OK?" - yikes! I started thinking harder about that guy with the broken-neck halo at registration...

The rest of the course was actually pretty easy, jeep/snowmobile trails, and somewhat wider than doubletrack -- it was pretty much the towpath with elevation changes and turns. I started feeling better and more  confident (though the long climbs were tough), and at the halfway point we came to the "mandatory" stream crossing -- there was a bridge right next to where we crossed, and course officials making sure no one used it -- and I went through the stream without a problem just behind Disk Wheel Guy, who hit the water and was immediately swept away by the current. Bonus!

Immediately after the stream crossing was the biggest hill on the course, and I ended up walking, but I felt OK, and took the opportunity to carb up with my damp, rock-hard Snyders of Hanover pretzels. The rest of the ride was pretty much more of the same, climb and descend on wide dirt roads, and finally there was the finish line: my final time, something I couldn't tell you for almost any other race, was 3:03:01. Twenty-five miles or so, and about 3000 feet of climbing according to the advertisements, and I'd done it.

Mike finished about an hour later -- he told me actually took a nap on the course at one point, he was so whooped -- then we went back to our campsite and exchanged vainglorious tales with the guys in the next tents, whose names, strangely enough, were Donald and Kevin. The next day we hit the road for home, and we were so stoked we decided to do the race at Allaire State Park, practically in our backyards compared to Potter County, in November.

Epilogue: Mike and I raced Allaire together, but he didn't go with me again to God's Country; I went the next year and finished in 2:45, and the year after that I did it in 1:45. My last time there was when I went with Brian in maybe 1998 or so, after the race start/finish had moved from "Potato City," whatever that even was, to Lyman Run State Park. My time was about 1:40.

How/Why Did I Start Mountain Biking?

Morning weigh-in: 188.5, 12.5% BF

 

My right calf was really sore after Tuesday's run, so yesterday was a rest day: after work I got a little further along on that big program I was writing -- remember that? I almost forgot what it was I was doing -- then I took a nap, and then Anne and I installed the bedroom air conditioner -- the hot weather finally broke us, and last night was our best night's sleep in probably a month... This morning was a 4 mile run, and tonight I may do the towpath.

 

Here Is My Story: I saw several interesting questions recently on the Mountain Bike Review Forums, with some cool answers in reply, so I thought I'd play along here... The first two questions were: when and how did you get into mountain biking, and what was your first race?

 

I started bicycling in March of 1992. I'd been living in Easton for a bit over a year at that point, and working in my "career" job, my first job after college, since 1990. I'd never been active, and I became less so in college, and even less so after I moved out on my own and started working, but I never thought of myself as "out of shape," even when I was pretty much shaped like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Until one day...

 

I was on a site visit with my 65-year-old boss, out to a power plant that had just come offline a few days before, so it was still pretty warm. I had to climb inside some enclosed space to take some measurements, up and down ladders and through crawlspaces etc, and I was pretty hot and exhausted when I was done. I was sort of fantasizing that my boss would be waiting with a soda and a "good job" when I got out, but when I did get out I found that he'd been swinging around the furnace, hundreds of feet up, in a bosun's chair -- a job that was, if anything, more strenuous than anything I'd been doing. I realized then that it was me and not the activity, and my lack of fitness was actually becoming a threat to my health, to say nothing of being an impediment to my work.

 

So that's the set-up. While I was worrying about all that I noticed my upstairs neighbors going out on bike rides, and I asked them what it was all about. Steve and Jane were a few years older than me (we're talking 32 years old to my 28), and were somewhat like yuppie mentors, and it came out that they liked to ride the local bike paths on their hybrid bikes. They had an extra one, and one day they invited me on a ride... I remember it was probably early March, I was wearing jeans and we rode out to the locktender's house on the north side of the Lehigh bike paths, and I remember keeping up, and even sort of sprinting on the small hills back up to Southside, and I thought "This is fun! I can do this!"

 

I borrowed that bike a few more times, then I decided that I needed my own bike, so I went to Genesis, the main bike store in Easton. Steve and Jane told me to get a hybrid, since you really didn't need more than that to ride the bike paths, but while I was in the store I started looking at the "real" mountain bikes, and how they seemed so much more sturdy and well made than the hybrids, and I finally settled on my first bike, a 1992 Giant Iguana, which I still have, and which I rode just this Sunday.

 

That spring and summer I rode and rode and rode, starting with Steve and Jane but eventually farther afield and without them, on all the bike paths near Easton, and along the Delaware Towpath to Reigelsville, and the Lehigh Towpath to just before Freemansburg -- the Lehigh Towpath was a very different thing back then, being mostly what I later learned was called "singletrack," and it was probably a good thing I had a real mountain bike. In the early spring I found out about the migrating Canada geese (and I still remember a dream I had -- in color -- involving the geese), and I saw more and more of the slow unfolding of the natural world all around me as I rode.

 

I lost 30 pounds that summer: I went from 185 pounds to 155, it completely changed the way I looked, and after that I was hooked.

 

Next up: my first mountain bike race.

Monthly Diary Entry Sez

Morning weigh-in: 189#, 12.5% BF

 

The weigh-ins are back, at least for as long as there's good news...

 

Did a short ride last night, about 15 miles on the towpath (to the new boat launch and back), didn't go nuts with dinner, and did a three mile run this morning. There may be some suppression weight loss in there, but it's better than the opposite -- like Sunday morning, after our party and a weekend of chores instead of exercise, when the scale said I was 192 pounds.

 

Party: Yes we had our "wedding party" this past Saturday, mostly in the afternoon though I don't think the last guests left until after midnight. We spent Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday morning getting ready -- this included gardening, mowing and straightening up the house, hitting the Allentown Farmer's Market for meat on Friday, getting more wood for the oven, firing it up Friday evening, and getting up before dawn on Saturday to get a huge amount of ribs, pork shanks and brisket slow-cooking for later. We also had a keg of homebrew, a case each of cider and blueberry ale, the fixings for mint juleps and gin-and-tonics, and the usual soft drinks plus well over 200 pounds of ice. Add 60 guests or so, stir, and it was quite a bash.

 

Training: Needless to say, in all this prep-and-party, and also with all the brutally hot weather we've had, last week was a bit light on the exercise, but otherwise the training is going well: we're up to Week 4 of a 12-week training regimen to prepare for the VIA Half Marathon, and I think I'm starting to see results: last night I was riding faster than usual, with less percieved effort, and this morning's run was a bit faster than other recent runs. (I'm not worried about speed, as long as walkers don't pass me in the half-marathon I'll be fine. My big goal is to have the endurance I'll need -- I've ridden hard for 15 hours straight, but this race is triple my longest run.) Anyway, tonight is probably another towpath ride if the thunderstorms hold off.

 

Re-Re-Re-Thinking

OK, here's the situation...

 

A few weeks ago a friend asked me about the kind of GPS / heart rate monitor I was using, and I sent him a fairly long email about my choice of the Garmin Edge 705, its suitability for biking but not for other things (I think he's looking for something to use with running), and why I went with the 705 rather than the newer Edge 800. My reason: "I went with the 705 because its data files are basically XML while the 800 uses binary files."

 

What that means is that the 705 produces output that is basically alphanumeric text, readable/editable by any text editor or word processor. Granted, the text is a bit hard to follow, but the basic idea is just a version of extensible markup language, like:

 

<SomeTag>

    <SomeSubTag>

        here's the data

    </SomeSubTag>

    <SomeOtherSubTag>

        here's more data

    </SomeOtherSubTag>

</SomeTag>

 

It's structured almost like an outline, except instead of numbers and letters for headings and subheadings, there are named "tags" like <Track> and <HeartRateBPM> and <Location>. A little bit of patience and you can find your way around most XML-based files, and there are also may programs and tools that recognize XML and can work with it as structured data.

 

By contrast, the (binary) file created by the Edge 800 is something that isn't in any human-readable format: it's just a bunch of ones and zeroes, meant to be read and understood only by specially designed programs. (Other examples of binary files would be things like image files, or MP3 music files.) In other words, I couldn't just fire up a word processor and look at my ride data, and -- more to the point -- I couldn't put together my own simple programs to find or extract data from the files, at least not easily.

 

This decision, to go with the text-using 705 rather than the binary-file 800, was one I made a few years ago, when I needed to replace an earlier Edge 705 that I'd lost on a ride. Partly it was because I would be getting an exact replacement of what I'd already had, but my main reasoning was ideological, as in "Information wants to be free!" I wanted to see my data without anyone's help.

 

After writing my friend though, I got to thinking about my decision, and realized that my reasoning really didn't carry much weight: after one or two experiments, I almost never actually looked inside my data files, or analyzed them with my own home-made programs. I would upload my ride data to the Garmin site, or use standard training software like everybody else. Being able to "look under the hood" of my data files was a nice option, but I no longer had the desire, or need, to actually do it.

 

Until...

 

Anne and I did a road ride a week ago on Saturday, and for some reason the Garmin website wouldn't recognize the data, and neither did any of the training software. Uh-oh. I Googled the problem and found out that sometimes the Edge 705 doesn't correctly record certain pieces of data, and so one of individual data records was screwed up and the file was "corrupt." The solution is easy: just remove the offending record -- you'd lose one second or so of ride data, but otherwise the file would be as good as new. I opened up the file in Emacs, found and removed the offending record, and things worked fine from then on. So OK, maybe it is useful! -- though it would be even more useful if the 705 didn't create corrupt files.

 

Since I've had the "new" Edge 705 for a few years now, and since I also have a spare, after someone found and returned the one I'd lost, the question was mostly academic, but we did a ride yesterday in Jim Thorpe on some rocky, overgrown trails (we did Green Blaze), and my Garmin popped out of its mount somewhere along the way. When I noticed it was gone I considered going back to look for it, but it could have been anywhere, under rocks or in the brush, at any point along a 10 mile section of trail, so forget it man, it's gone. So, now I'm down to the spare GPS and a handlebar mount that I no longer trust -- and the Edge 800, and the even newer Edge 810, both have a better mount -- and binary file be damned, I think it's time for an upgrade, especially since they stopped making the 705.

 

"Chi Wên Tzu used to think thrice before acting. The Master hearing of it said, Twice is quite enough." -- The Analects

That's All In The Past Now

Busy weekend, mostly errands and chores and such like, playing catch-up from being on vacation:

 

I had off Friday, which was spent shopping for food and other things (ie getting propane for the grill at Lowe's), doing laundry and cleaning the house etc; since we had the grill working again we grilled sausages and veggies for dinner, then hit The Mint with Doug and Lori. Saturday was lawn and garden stuff, followed by a medium-level road bike ride (30 miles or so, about two hours -- the GPS data file was corrupt so I couldn't document it) and dinner at Black & Blue, where we told Larry & Kelly-Jo about being married... Sunday was a brewing day, which meant a lot of downtime, so Anne spent some more time in the garden while I organized our vacation and wedding pictures, and Debbie came over later in the afternoon with her bike -- I cleaned it and lubed it and generally gave it some TLC while they pulled weeds. We did some grilled chicken for dinner, then ended the weekend with a trip to Brew Works.

 

Uh, Wedding? Yes that's right, Anne and I got married. (We did it secretly back on April 19th to avoid the fuss and commotion of a conventional wedding, then when we were in Ireland we picked up wedding bands so the secret is now out.) It was a simple but very sweet ceremony: Anne's sister and her husband were our witnesses, and a good friend of hers officiated (we got married in Philadelphia at the Federal Courthouse, where her friend is a judge), and after that we celebrated with an evening in Philly. Not much more to tell about the event but it was nice. Pictures to follow...

 

Yikes! Anne talked me into running a half-marathon with her in September. We have about 10 weeks to train, and our first training run was this morning. Pretty easy so far, 2 miles at a very slow pace, but that's likely to change soon enough.

Clare Days, Ennis Nights

On the train again, heading for Dublin and our last night in Ireland. I've had a great time, but last night I dreamed of leprechauns and I'm really starting to miss home.

Ennis turned out to be nicer than my first impression. The town is walkably small, with the town center, a commercial district in among medieval streets and lanes, being only a few blocks long and wide - this was not a tourist district, though there were plenty of pubs and restaurants, but the place where locals (probably including people from the nearby countryside) conducted their business. Downtown is where we rented our next bikes - clunkers again, unfortunately - and where we'd begin and end every day, with breakfast from a bakery and dinner in a pub.

During the day we'd ride our clunkers out into the Clare countryside. We had two days: our first day was an exploration of my maternal roots, going from Ennis to Killmihel on the tiniest roads I've ever seen, then on to Milltown Malbay on even smaller roads. We had lunch in Milltown Malbay, then returned to Ennis via a road crossing called The Hand, actually the mailing address of distant relatives even now. (There is no one and nothing there except a road marker, and I wasn't looking people up anyway.)

That was about 54 miles, and our second day was much less ambitious: we rode out to an unusual, rocky terrain called The Burren, and did a loop through the national park there. We took our time, stopped at a few archeological features, and took lots of pictures.

Evenings, which started and sometimes ended in daylight since the sun doesn't set until after 10:00, were spent checking the local "trad" music scene. We would grab dinner in a pub, and some musicians would wander in and start playing, our we'd find some bunch of people playing in the back of some bar. The music was uniformly good, and a lot like the stuff we'd heard in Dingle, but there was a political edge to Ennis that we didn't find elsewhere. It seems kind of silly to hear an Irish version of "We Shall Overcome," until you see newsprints on the walls from the 1916 uprising, and the statues of O'Connor and De Valera in the town squares...