June 2008 Archives

i always enjoy funny road signs, but it's especially hilarious when i'm huffing and puffing up a steep hill (for example, the arse end of bunker hill) and see a sign that says, "Road Work Ahead".

Ha! Road Work right here!

why am i relying on my weaknesses and using a patience based drilling solution, when i can rely on my strengths and use a gripping-power based snipping, bending, and snipping solution?

why indeedly?

the coffee roaster seems to be much closer to fixed than ever before. it survived a cold bean test, and now i (once again) have a copper cap for the drive shaft. tomorrow i guess i can try a real roast. there's a stopper nut in there and if the roast melts that, it's back to the drarwing board.

- i did it without deathgripping the handlebars. this helped a lot. a whole lot.
- i didn't have a whole lot of caffeine. i slept well last night.
- i was probably underhydrated. but it was nice not to have the camelbak.

i guess i'm taking sunscreen.

i had plenty on at the start but i still have a red face, and it's not just because i'm embarrassingly good looking.

i can still hear swamp shouting at me "stay on the boat! stay on the boat!!"

that was a funny moment. i had thought of it, i was simply doing a very poor job of actually doing it.

yesterday, i had no cheeses.

today, i have three cheeses.

three is the number of cheeses i have.

i got 12 hours of sleep last night.

sailing tired me the fack out.

i had a lot of time today to think up blog entry titles.

yesterday at the bike shop, i accidentally had the dude ring up a pair of medium bike shorts. i had tried them on and they seemed to fit. i thought i was trying on a large. "i must have lost some weight!" i quipped. they're the same brand as my "old" bike pants, so maybe i did lose a bit around the waist. anyhow, they're the medium-fancy model and my ass is much less sore than usual, so i guess i got what i paid for!

the ride today didn't start out well. i also bought a sleeveless jersey, the more to enjoy our fine weather with, only it was cloudy and smoky and gross so i didn't wear it. on the way out to the road, i fell upon some slippery linoleum. why the hell does our apt building have frictionless linoleum in a major walkway? because they suck, that's why.

my plan was to take ralston up to canada, then at woodside, coast down a bit to... oh crap! as I was reviewing my planned route during my warmup, i realized i didn't know the name of the crossroad. i wasn't too worried, i figured i'd recognize it, which i did. it's whiskey hill road: my kinda road! whiskey hill road to sand hill, down to alameda de las nuclear wessels, then back to ralston, where, at my discretion, i'd brave the intimidating alameda route back home, or wuss out and take ECR.

that was the plan. a couple days ago i drove the route from sand hill to ralston to verify that there was nothing... unpleasant... on that route. there wasn't.

i've gotten myself a book on cycling, and maybe i'll get another. this one stresses the importance of staying aerobic for a long ride. "don't go anaerobic" it says, in case you couldn't infer that from my previous sentence. even though i've never taken a stress test (the book contains two methods for self testing, neither is pleasant, but a stress test never is) and even though i failed to calculate 85 percent of 220 minus my age, i have a pretty good idea of where my lactic threshold is. so i vowed to really watch my heart rate and stay aerobic.

now, after about 2.5 miles of easy warmup, my route has a nice 20% incline. yup, 20%. no, it's not long, but it doesn't have to be, and it's not like it goes downhill, 20%, downhill, no, it's more like 15%, 20%, 10%. i don't think i'll ever be in the kind of shape where i can climb a 20% grade without twitching fast (get it!?) but who can say? i'm already in my easiest gear for the 15% part of the hill.

i made it up that hill, down it, and up ralston without pausing for a rest like i did last time. i watched my HRM closely and kept it as low as i could. by the time i got to wooside i was feeling good, aside from not knowing my turn, but i found it easily. some guys were huffing up what appeared to be not much of a climb, but you never know where someone's come from when you see them on the road.

whiskey hill is easy and incredibly scenic. i'm very glad i went there. sand hill had a bit of an easy climb -- ralston was steeper -- and then it was all downhill to... we'll get to that. i saw more huffing people opposing my direction on sand hill, but i thought to myself that it looked like a really easy climb. sure, longer than any climb i'm used to (really? crystal springs/polhemus might be longer) but gentle. in fact, i figured i'd have no trouble at all climbing it if i ever wanted to try such a route.

by the time i made it to stanford shopping mall, failing utterly to find my turn to alameda, i decided i wanted to try such a route. i was a couple blocks from ECR and I could have taken that home, but that's way more risk of death than i wanted for today. so back up sand hill i went. it sure was easy. and so was whiskey hill in the other direction, and it was a descent (not a climb, as i misrememberd) to get back to woodside. doing the calculation at the bottom of sand hill, i realized i'd get darn close to 50 miles on this ride, no matter how i chose to get home from woodside/canada.

i took the ralston trail rather than the arse-end of bunker hill, i wanted to be gentle to me. i had not taken my camelbak because i wasn't planning to do a long ride. but the weather was not too hot so i wasn't bad off. there had been some nice people with a "free rest stop" at edgewood on my way out, and i planned to stop there on my way back, but they were gone. the ranger's water cooler was way back in the dirt, and who know if it had water in it? so i skipped it. i had enough.

as i climbed up ralston trail with no sweat, as my mile counter passed 42, i thought: "i remember when this hill was so hard i had to stop!" nothing's nicer than improvement.

i zipped down ralston and took ECR home. I had to do some noodling around the 'hood to round it up to 50. i whistled for nearly the entire last 8 miles.

things of note: a boy on the back of a tandem said "hi!" to me as i came on to woodside. an indian dude passed me at about the same time, and i couldn't catch him, but saw him at edgewood, resting. he saw me jockin him, i guess, because he smiled and nodded as he passed me downhill on my ascent up sand hill. a dickhead honked at me as i passed someone on the unclosed part of canada. i did not retaliate. really wish i had a richer communication channel, one where i could say "look, einstein, the line i crossed is white, not double yellow. i'm doing you a courtesy by being in the bike lane at all, on my vehicle here."

much later, as a guy waved me through a turn, i realized that i'm fortunate to live in such a bike friendly area. for every retard or downright hostile person, there are 20 people who yield their right of way, move over, slow down, and otherwise make room for me. also, palo alto has nice bike lanes.

and now, the stats. my fargen cyclocomputer freaked out again today, and clocked me at 45mph with 144 RPMs. uh-huh. oddly, this did not seem to affect the mileage counter, though i can't be entirely sure. i guess since it only freaked out for a minute or two out of > 3 hours the numbers are not too far off, but those numbers are wonky enough to really throw things off. maybe the cyclocomputer is smart enough to throw out outliers like those, especially given how ridiculous they are.

the numbers:

time: 3:09
avg bpm: 142
max bpm: 173
distance: 50.3 mi
max speed: 49.7 (ha ha ha!)
avg speed: 16.4. corrected (50.3/3.15): 15.968. hey, that's not bad!
max cadence: 149 (ha!)
avg cadence: 82, but who really knows? know way to calculate the corrected version of this.
ride time: 3:03 (for a whopping 7 minutes of rest)
elevation gain: 2800 feet (total WAG)

and now, i owe myself an arrogant bastard jersey.

i got me a biking book and began reading up, and realized almost immediately that i'm doing it all wrong.

i don't need to push for 50 miles tomorrow, 40 last week was sufficiently hard, and my time on sundays would be better spent improving the quality of my miles over their quantity. for instance, riding up hills in a harder gear, and otherwise going faster.

not only that, i'm banging up my knee too much while running, i think, and my time during the week spent running could also be spent cycling. although i prefer running and it's much better for losing weight, i have a pretty large collection of hills to choose from around here, so i can make any ride as short and intense as i care.

i dunno why i can't find a pair of running shoes i like. i like running, i hate running shoes. sigh.

this time i had to pull ropes on the boat, and man, did i do a lousy job. the middle of a race is a fun time to learn how to do things, especially with a short-tempered shouty captain like ours. heh.

fortunately, i got some good pointers on how to properly pull the ropes under racing conditions. i tried to stay out of the middle of some arguments about how things should be done, and since i've already tried things one way, i can try them the other way next time and see how it goes.

the race was at south beach, again, and this time we took the boat back to TI before having dinner. as it was, we got back to the marina in time for the captain and i to split a hot dog bun. heh. that is fine, there were plenty of beans to go around.

we didn't place a whole lot better than our first SB beercan, but we also were shorthanded and ran into a lot of wind "holes". at this point, things like place and strategy do not concern me. i try to do the best i can, stay on the boat (wait, the other order, which is why i was so slow dousing the spinnaker) and improve a bit time over time.

15 minutes before heading out to the boat, i noticed that my "boating shoes" were in really bad shape: the rubber soles were about to separate from the shoe. i used to keep a pair of jungle boots in my trunk, which would have neatly saved the day, but for some reason they aren't in there any more. so i arranged to have some duck tape at the boat, and i taped my shoes together. this kept them from flying apart dangerously, but had the unfortunate side effect of making them dangerously slippery. i had some shoe-related slowness, but no shoe-related tragedies. but that's pretty much it for those shoes. i liked them while they were good :(

anyhow, it was fun, as always, and i look forward to going out again, even if it's only going to get harder.

i'm sailing this afternoon. i've known that for several days, however, it was only this morning when i did the math: there will be one fewer person on the boat than the other 2 times i've been out. i had a sneaking suspicion that this meant i'd be doing actual work on the boat.

my suspicion was confirmed as soon as i got to work: the captain pointed out that today i'd be doing actual work, since there would be only 4 of us.

great!

i mean... great.

there are apparently a ton of xkcds that i somehow missed. i will have to start at 0 and work my way through all of them.

but not in firefox with its stupid compressed mouseover text. argh!

hey, i'm overtraining! how do i know? i guess i've been at it long enough to tell easily. also, i've been sleeping poorly, eating poorly, and drinking too much. is that just because hops was home for a week? possibly. now it's time to pause for a moment, step back and reassess.

hey, not that far back! only the training stuff, please.

let's not upset ourselves.

nelson mandela isn't dead? when did that happen?

what with the funny names and all. that means you, broderick. and you, "dan mathews".

heh.

the dickhead that looked me right in the eye while cutting me off in the crosswalk at the ECR 92 entrance got a vehement, heartfelt double bird.

the guy with the severe spinal/hip/leg problems who shambled like a zombie but still wanted (i hope!) to be outdoors for a walk, even though the weather sucks and the air smells of flaming brisbane, that guy got a big grin and two thumbs up. good for you, man!

i've decided to learn to make cocktails, because:

2 parts it was an excuse to buy a bottle of bourbon
1 part i get to buy gear, and i like gear
3 parts i don't know how to make cocktails and i don't like not knowing things
a dash of this guy at work who i shamelessly copy mentioned that he made one last week
garnished with a twist of buying new glassware, which i also like

It's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x29. possibly my first monday haircut since The Big One, or The Smaller One Which Succeeded The Big One But Still Cost A Lot.

This one is the George Carlin Memorial Mohawk.

Q: how many miles must I ride to counteract the Awake-All-Night effects of the large amounts of caffeinated performance drinks and goos that I consume during a long bike ride?
A: 40

my package from sparkfun was a "personal package" but the one from digi-key was a "business package".

wha?

man, how did i miss that in the shower?

is that eventually, someone will start a thread titled, "what's your favorite beer/brewery?" and invariably it will be filled by people who come close to liking good beer but seem to only scratch the surface.

lots of "sierra nevada!" which is great, but there are better, or "ayinger" which is definitely more german than sierra nevada, but still probably not all that great by the time it makes the journey to the US (though since it's the interwebs, the posters could be german, but i doubt it).

i've witnessed this phenomenon on two forums that i visit (er, headphones and shaving, since you asked. yes, i'm weird.).

so... what's your favorite brewery?

i did just a tad over 40 miles today, being the first time i've done above 33, which was last week, being the first time i'd done over 30. we previewed the planned route yesterday and measured elevation gain with a gps, which is what i did last week only last week i did that on the bike.

the route was similar this week to last but instead of taking ralston to ralston trail to canada, we took edgewood and did only 3/4 of the canada roundtrip. as i was pedaling up the first part of edgewood (from alameda (not the one where they keep the nuclear wessels, the one with the fleas)) i was thinking what an easy ride edgewood was and how it was way easier than ralston, which itself wasn't really all that hard.

then i got to the actual incline, which, while still not being tremendously hard (though the speeding SUVs, absent on ralston but abundant on edgewood, did make it a bit more harrowing (i've never had a full appreciation for the enormity of lumbering monster SUVs, but today, in a flash of insight, i gained exactly such appreciation. crikey those things are huge. that's a whole lot of groceries you must be hauling there)) the climbing part seemed at least as long as ralston, if not longer, and at least as steep (though I think the GPS disagrees with me). anyhow, i realized that i was doing ralston with about 3 extra miles of "warmup", so while it may have been gentler it felt tougher.

i was noticeably fatigued on canada, not great. in fact my average speed for today was below 14mph, i think, well into the zone of "are you even pedaling that thing?"

one nice thing from today's ride: i no longer think the little climb up the arse end of bunker hill is hard. it sure ain't easy and i'm not going even 10mph, but i've learned how to make it "not hard". now all i have to do is learn how to make it "not slow".

i got honked at by a jackass in a bmw on canada. i was not in the "no cars" portion and i came about 1 foot outside the "bike lane" to pass someone. there was no oncoming traffic but the bmw felt the need to honk at me. also, much later, some truck honked at me while i was going up bunker hill. i think he was just your average truck asshat, since i can't think of anything even questionable that i did there.

anyhow, after zipping down BH, i rode up to ralston and then down ralston, and up ECR to home. at the merging stoplight in front of the mall, a teenage jerk on a cell phone in a coffee-can honda cut me off, but it only took one look at him while we were stopped to know he was going to do it, so i escaped without injury.

the planned route was to take ECR to crystal spring to polhemus to de anza to parrot, and then "down" parrot to home. but the route preview yesterday taught me something i didn't know: parrot, though far above home, is not a "down" route. it's a "why am i going up to get down?" route. going down parrot actually adds some 400 feet of climb to the route. what? when i'm already not just tired but pushing my distance limit?

i rode up to parrot and turned around, making up an extra .25mi on ECR to round my trip up to 40mi. hops was waiting for me when i got there, having done the same route sans the last 8 miles, for her own record breaking 32 miles.

as i was coming down the hill, trying to miss all the potholes (i managed to hit a really big one. my bike seems very well built but those giant, shade hidden potholes all over SM just really can't be good for the bike) i thought of amusing phrases to write on the blog to describe what would have happened had i taken parrot.

but first: a few words on route planning. one of the things i like about the way i plan routes (when i plan them) is that generally, the "questionable" bits are all preceded by an easy escape route, and usually, are also part of the escape route. last week, the questionable bit was climbing up to ralston from BH. but at any point during that climb, i could have turned around and coasted home. that's a great feature to have at the "pack on more miles at the end" part of the ride. parrot, OTOH, did not have this feature (it probably does but only if you know the area, which i do not). so i didn't take it.

had i taken it, i decided, i'd not only be in a world of hurt, i'd be buried alive 600 feet beneath the surface of a world of hurt, surrounded by burning lakes of hurt, about to be flooded and drowned by hurt, orbiting a sun of hurt right in the midst of the universe of hurt.

so there you have it, it's probably best that i didn't take that last leg of the ride.

my area is really a pretty good place for "training", if not for pleasure riding. with the requirement of "i do not want to drive to my ride", the safest places to ride are peppered with steep hills, leading to places with long gradual hills, and the only flat place to ride is ECR which will eventually get you killed, probably by a truck asshat, an SUV mom, or a snotty cellphone brat with a coffee-can muffler.

so the end result is i get lots of hill training, whether i like it or not, whether it helps me or not. psychologically, it does. example: the solvang half century (50 miles) contains a bit more than half the climbing i did today. easy. (although that "no hill more than 800 feet" bit scares me a little.)

anyhow, i'll keep on pushing and resting and so forth and maybe i'll get better.

drake's weekly friday beer party is even better.

there's no live band, but the whole affair is outdoors. there's about 1/4 the number of folks there, but the beer is way, way better (after all, it's drake's!). the crowd is very mixed, from beer geeks to gangsters with prison tattoos. actually, the prison tats outnumbered the beer geeks by about 3 to 1.

there were some homebrewers there and most importantly, drake's fires up a grill and the partygoers bring sausages, steaks, chicken, and any grillables that they can, to share for free with everyone. homemade salsa was there, too, and, at the end of it, 5 or six of san leandro's finest, looking for a handout or something.

our ride got draped with yellow police line tape. beat that, devil's canyon!

because it's laundry day.

because it's freaking hot out.

because it mostly fits again.

because jorge likes it.

i thought i'd pop on over to fark for a change, i haven't visited in many years. this was not only linked but got a followup post.

Brew Your Own Beer - Yeah it might not taste that great and you will be “that guy” that makes all your friends try their shitty brew but every true booze hound has to give it a shot at least once.

Scotch - learn to drink scotch either on the rocks or neat. Much like golf, it is a pain in the ass to learn, but it will pay off in the business world. While you are at it, learn the difference between bourbon and whiskey so that you don’t look like a total fucking hayseed. If you really want to get a gold star on your chart learn the difference between a blend and single malt as well.

right. classy.

while it's true that all of life's problems can be solved by bending, in the absence of a Bender unit, many of life's problems can be reduced to drilling problems.

And fortunately, I do have a drill. Hooray for power tools!

yesterday as i was leaving hork a coworker was leaving, with his kid, fresh from daycare, in the back seat. he pulled over to chat with me a bit, and said to his kid, "look son, it's saint toad!" the kid, maybe 4 years old, looked at me and exclaimed, "that's his face!"

"that's right," i said, "this is no mask, it's all me, 24/7."

that was my mantra while running.

i did notice something interesting, toward the end of the run a really fast paced song came up on the ipod and damned if my pace didn't synchronize to it. it was too fast a pace for that point in the run so i changed songs before i hurt myself.

heh.

on the advice of The Internets, I ordered a razor blade sampler pack from here. I also ordered a new brush and some shaving cream, and the guy was nice enough to throw in a free shave soap and a book on shaving which I read the other night while drinking rye, blogging, and listening to my headphone amp. it was like a hobby circus.

anyhow, the new brush is really nice (technically i got two new brushes but only one of them from that guy. from him i got an Omega (Italian, of course!) brush, which so far is by far my favorite of the three (technically 4) brushes that I now own) but it's with the blades that I am now getting all sciency. i'm taking notes each day with the goal being to find the perfect blade. according to the book which i read, the blade accounts for 70% of the goodness or badness of a shave, while the razor only counts for 30%. there's another 80% missing from that equation, imho, that deals with the cream/soap and the brush, but that's a different set of experiments.

so far, i've ruled out my longtime standby the Merkur Stainless. The first blade I tried blew it away: the Treet "no-name", which I think is what "they" call the Treet Blue Special, though I dunno why they call it that since it says no such thing either on the blade, the individual blade wrapper, or the box of blades. The blade is kind of bluish, though. This particular one is made of Carbon Steel and is thus sharper than a stainless blade, but, in the second conclusion I've drawn from my study, is only good for one shave. Maybe two but that's pushing it.

The price for 100 Blue Specials is under twelve bucks, so I could easily buy a year's supply of single-users without breaking the bank.

Fortunately for me, I have other hobbies, too.

i think i radiate a certain air of "you ought to learn python".

with a folded up damp towel, which, when folded just right, became a laser gun. two guys were chasing after me with operational laser gun towels, while mine was improperly folded and useless, and my best attempts to remember how to properly fold it were for naught, i could not return my folded damp towel laser to its normal, lethal, operational state.

i had called the two pursuers on some bit of bullshit they'd decided to pass off as fact, and they didn't much like that. they'd chased me down long escalators into the city underground, and through subway tunnels dark and long, bepuddled all the way, to a storefront, encased in glass, with a glass dutch door, the top of which was open. they'd cornered me at last.

i tried one more time to fold my towel just right, and failed. and then, as my enemies approached, smirks of victory upon their faces, their laser gun towels raised, armed and aimed at me, rememberd something, and told them:

"Hey, this is just a dream! Your weapons won't work here."

They activated their lasers, and indeed, I was correct on both counts. Their faces turned into mashed potato mounds, with carrots for noses and little beet eyes and smiley mouths made of red spaghetti. I punched them both in their faces, deforming them comically, until I woke up.

i thought to myself: it's bigger in here than it is out there.

and i wondered whether that was true, since such a thought demands some scrutiny, since such a boast is not to be made idly, without examination. and i thought of all the limitless universe, with galaxies unexplored and vast swaths of unknowable emptiness, and of astronomers and physicists and mathematicians who think about and probe all the endless reaches of space.

and i decided: it's bigger in here than it is out there.

there's just as much unexplored in here, but I can get to all of it if I try hard enough. It is vast but not unknowable.

the thing about enjoying the direction you're running in is that there's always a return trip that you'll have to make. boo for return trips.

i decided to run a little further this week than last wed. so i kept on after 23rd, where i turned last week. i thought i'd just keep going till hillsdale, which i did, but hillsdale managed to be a lot farther from 23rd than i had thought it should be. i ended up running 2 miles more than i did last week, adding 30 seconds per mile to my time.

i have a friend who is getting in to running. he's really into it, doing interval training on a track, planning his runs beforehand, and doing all sorts of running sciency things. i don't do that, i just run, and try to run a little farther than last week, and try never to run less than last week.

also, i am getting pretty good results in both my cycling and my running by doing each only once a week. i was running on fridays too, but only for 2 miles. i didn't run last friday and i suspect i won't run this friday. i don't think the friday run really helps.

i'm bascially doing HIT for my aerobic activities. that's not supposed to work, but until it does stop working for me, i dig it.

a couple weeks ago the right wingers trotted out the line that Obama saying he'd have a talk with Ah-meh-deen-a-jad was akin to Chamberlain... doing whatever it was that he did with hitler. The neo-cons didn't type up the whole memo.

example (safe for work, as if my 2 readers read this crap at work).

awesome.

he speaks with a vaguely british accent, and pronounces "patently untrue" as pay-tent-lee untrue.

pay-tent-lee earns him an extra 1000 points.

he doesn't adore the muslims, at least not openly and gushingly.

the same woman who compared The Global Muslim Threat to hitler and (implicitly) Bush to Churchill also said that she doesn't have anything against The Muslims, in fact, she "absolutely adores Muslims".

What?

Adores them?

The same way she adores her kitty, or the same way she adores Jeebus?

Who "adores" a billion heterogenous people? A braniac, that's who.

some chowederhead on npr, defending pres. bush: it's just like chamberlain and hitler, everyone wants to try diplomacy, and then comes the blitz.

that's right, muslim hordes strapped with backpack nukes are hiding just around the corner waiting to invade poland and spread at lightning speed throughout the continental US. only our invasion of Iraq and non-discovery of WMDs has kept them at bay.

good coffee.

that is all.

but i've moved forward a notch on my belt, which has notches all the way around, so that theoretically i could lose an almost infinite amount of weight, or use it to shoot up heroin. hey, i could use it to shoot up heroin, which would cause me to lose a near infinite amount of weight! now that's multi-purposing! I could get to the point where I wouldn't even need to adjust the belt anymore, I'd keep it on notch 3 or whatever and slide it from my shooting-up arm down to my waist.

some whiny bitch gas station owner was just on the radio whining about how he "loses money" when you fill up at his station and pay with your credit card.

cry me a river, dude. i lose 60 bucks, and you lose a dollar. go invent a car that runs on air if you want to make money.

president bush wants to prevent the iranians from gaining the know-hoo, uh, how to build a nukular weapon.

do we have that know-hoo, uh, how? isn't part of the know-hoo, uh, how of building a nukular weapon the know-hoo, uh, how of how to fucking pronounce the fucking word?

unintentionally mispronouncing words makes a person sound stupid, that's all there is to it. no exceptions for presidents or good old boys.

loneliness and i are old friends. it's not that we like each other, it's not that we enjoy each other. no, but we're comfortable with each other. we let our hair down in the presence of each other, we let it all hang out. we quickly groove into old routines, old habits, like a well used machine that's just returned from the shop and is eager to once again perform its old function, move along its old and well-established, well-known orbit.

no, i don't especially like being alone, but i've had so much practice at it that i've built up whole frameworks of Dealing With It, which I had thought I could discard like outgrown underpants, but, like outgrown underpants, I kept locked in drawer for no particularly good or recognized reason, until one day, unexpectedly, I had reason to put them on again and find out that they fit just fine, after all, and weren't as worn out and stained as I'd seemed to remember them.

In the movie "Heat," which I almost watched this evening, but didn't, because I found the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" first, the De Niro character says, "I am alone, I am not lonely." It's clear from his acting (man, that guy can act, can't he?) that he's lying. And yet, he's not. His personal code of conduct keeps him perpetually alone, and, like me, his aloneness permeates his life to the point where he's become as comfortable with it as he is with his own skin. Comfortable is not the same as beloved, of course, and this is brilliantly portrayed in his simple statement.

Thinking thoughts is what I do best, and writing about them brings out more thoughts, and clarifies the ones that I've already managed to have, such as they may be. But now is not the time for writing, though I think the topic is important. Now is the time for bed, and the thoughts will have to remain void and unformed, a universe of realization unrealized, an analyzed reality unrecorded, until I once again have the right balance of sorrow, time, and rye to scale my walls and record how i really feel, for all the giant load of usefulness that brings.

i've noticed on several runs of late, and most recently, today's ECR ride, that san mateo smells of chlorine in several places.

today's ride provided me with ample opportunity for free roaming thought, and i happened upon the hypothesis that this odor is associated with the Mosquito Abatement program. It seems to be concentrated beneath bridges (which had previously led me to believe that the odor was associated with the Hobo Stench Abatement program) and other shady areas where perhaps water would accumulate and provide hatching grounds for little bloodsucking bastards.

today i pioneered a new hairstyle, as i tend to do since last november: the fro-hawk. sure, i'm not the first to have one, but i'm the first to rock one at a fancy grocery store like the one where i overpay for bananas.

incidentally, i read that on The Internets that the reason the bananas at your grocery store are shrinking is because banana producers are desperately attempting to introduce new species of bananas to head off an incoming banana plague that threatens to decimate the current banana monoculture. the bananas we eat are sterile, all american-flavored banana plants are therefore clones. neat! or not!

anyhow, i'm rocking the fro-hawk. back in the day, i grew long hair or kept my hair super short specifically to avoid the fro that i get when my hair becomes somewhat longish, but today, i showered and forgot to comb/gel it, so my 4 inches of mohawk poofed up and out and all over the place and i ended up with a pillowy mound of poofed mohawk. now, if i had hair on the sides of my head, it'd look awful. as it was, it was a new kind of awesome, especially when combined with my no-nonsense attitude and sensible corduroy shorts.

yesterday, a kid working at the local hawaiian restaurant complimented me on my beard. actually, i get a lot of compliments on the beard. it's a crowd please, since most crowds around here don't see a lot of awesome beards: most crowds around here are genetically predisposed to not grow beards until they're really old, like the kid at the restaurant. he said he couldn't grow a beard if he tried, so i asked him how old he was. 17, he said, and i told him to wait until he was double that and he'd have no problems.

today, at my fancy grocery store, i saw a man with a braided single beard that was at least 5 inches long. very nice.

speaking of awesome beards, check this out. the best part, of course, is that my beard isn't on the chart, although the french fork, el insecto, and the sparrow are kinda close. close, but not nearly as great.

speaking of el insecto, when i'm cruising along on cañada road, i sometimes hear a buzzing sound that could be cicadas, but could also be the wind vibrating parts of my beard. the jury's still out on which it is.

this surely says something about me, or about life, or about drinking glasses. i'm not sure what. but i'm sure it's desperately important.

last month i visited the anchor brewery in sf, to hear a blowhard hawk his book (i kid! i kid because i love!). while there, we took a nice little self-guided tour of the brewery, witnessed yeast pitching, saw amazing open fermentation vats, sampled really tasty beer (prior to my visit i did not like anchor steam, but sampled at the brewery (much like budweiser, actually) it's quite fargen good). one thing they did not give samples of: their distilled products.

i've known for a while that anchor now makes rye whiskey and gin. now, apparently, they make several varieties of each. i have no interest in gin, however, rye was the first distilled spirit i ever had (in the form of jim beam, omfg). my favorite heretofore was a bottle of 18 year old sazerac, which i now pine for trying again, though it's unlikely i'll find a bottle.

a couple weeks ago i was driving down ECR and beltramo's jumped out and stole a hundred bucks from me. well, i guess stole is a pretty harsh term: they left a bottle of Old Potrero in my car, as well as several bottles of Rodenbach, a Duchesse, and some other good stuff. But my hundred bucks, they took that for sure.

I've sampled the OP three times, and it impresses me more each time. At 90 proof, it's more strong than I'd normally enjoy, but if the good lord wanted us to drink 90 proof whiskey, he wouldn't have invented distilled water.

Unlike other rye whiskeys, Old Potrero is a single malt: it's 100% rye. And because of this, there's no hiding from the flavor. It's full of flavors. Grainy, earthy flavors, sure, but also sweet, malty, oakey flavors, with an oily, slightly bitter rye finish. There are subtleties, but they're really subtle, because the main flavors are dominating and forceful. This is a huge whiskey.

It also has a pleasing color, which is actually not entirely common in whiskeys.

In all, it's a tremendous spirit, and while it's not cheap, it's certainly very competitive against some very nice scotches. It's also not outrageously priced for its quality. I'm motivated to try some of Anchor's other whiskey offerings, and I couldn't be more pleased that such a fine, traditional American whiskey comes from just up the street.

according to this guy's data (scroll down to bottom) the bit of my ride which i hate the most contains a 20% grade! "For a few brief moments, you summon your strength to persuade the wheels to revolve 16 times, and then the hill relents." he says, but those "few brief moments" seem to last a lot longer than few or brief.

no wonder i hate that hill so much!

he claims 300 feet of elevation gain, but since i don't start at hillsdale, i get to enjoy a 200 foot warmup before i get to the 10% grade. super duper!

today's ride could not have been more different than last week's. i got home after 33.9 miles feeling happy, refreshed, and energized. there were many differences which i think led to this difference, i shall detail them all because i have nothing else to do while i ice.

first off, i called in some cooler weather. as always when messing with the weather, you can only get boned, even if you get what you want. sure, it was cooler, but i also had headwinds on each of the "major" hills of my ride which should be impossible since they all face different directions. i hate headwinds more than i hate hills, which i hate more than produce from safeway, which is to say: a lot.

even with the wind, though, i think the cooler weather helped me a lot. even more than that, though, i drank a lot more water this time. i finished both bottles of magic pixie dust drink (increases VO2max! no, really! honest!) and most of my camelbak. i was well hydrated throughout.

the route was similar to last week's, and i bagged all of the "hills" i wanted to do last week, though i skipped de anza and substituted ralston. the major difference between the routes was the order of the hills. instead of doing alameda last, when i was tired, i did it first, so i could be tired for the entire rest of the ride. more importantly, i planned the route beforehand, even though i altered it near the end (and prayed i did not alter it further!). the route: my place to alameda, alameda to ralston, ralston to ralston trail, ralston trail to cañada, cañada to woodside, back to 92, 35 up to bunker hill, bunker hill to polhemus, down ralston (whee!), and then a leisurely and dangerous finisher down ECR to my home. i nearly got killified in front of a cop. how nice would that have been!

anyways, surprisingly, the leg from bunker hill to the top of ralston was relatively easy. that's usually right at the beginning of my ride and it's hard. the ride down BH is not exactly "restful" (it's short) and the ride up BH is killer for me, so i was tired when i got to polhemus. maybe i was "in the zone". i dunno. for that matter, BH wasn't as hard as it often is. i squirted some caffeinated clif goop into me, which i didn't do last week, which may also explain my uplifted spirit.

finishing on ECR instead of finishing by climbing de anza and alameda and their awful short, steep hills also probably helped the cause. in short: route planning, route planning, and route planning.

finally, the things that made the most difference: last night i had a hefty dinner, an awesome belgian beer called "nostradamus", and a good night's sleep. also, plenty of solder fumes.

so, enough with the reasons, here are the pitiful numbers:

distance: 33.9 miles
average speed: a shameful 13.9mph
average cadence: 81 rpm, nice!
ride time: 2:25
total time: 2:37
total climb: 2245 feet

that last bit is the real bad news. i took my spiffy gps-with-barometric-altitude-sensor on my ride to find out just how wimpy are the hills i climb. no true roadie would be caught dead with such a hefty handheld gps on his bike, but i recalled a bit of wisdom from either bible or some bike blog i read some years ago, which said: why do you look at the speck of extra weight on your frame and not see all the weight in your big fat lard ass sitting on it? also: something about a plank.

i was quite disappointed when i finished the first hill, flea street to ralston, and found out that it was only 540 feet of elevation gain. but i was pretty happy as i was climbing up ralston: i previewed it by car yesterday, and curiously, it felt much more torturous in the car than it did on the bike. it had me seriously intimidated last night, but today, i made it up without problems (which is not the same as "easily", sadly).

okay, hold on a minute. after some googling, it seems that 2245 feet of elevation gain is not too wimpy for a half century. sure, lance gains more elevation than that when he farts, but for a mortal, it's apparently pretty respectable for a 30 mile ride.

hey, just like bender, i may be even more awesome than i thought!

if i ever get my bike rack back, maybe i'll head up some roadie routes in palo alto.

I really hate these gul darned socks, but I can't get rid of them, my buddy Dukat made them for me by hand.

thank you, thank you! I'll be here all week, and next week you can catch me at Empak Nor!

some months ago, i got a waterproof pelican case (thanks!). at the time, i had no use for it. some fewer months ago, i got a dry sack, for which i also had no use.

but gear always has a use dropped in its lap if you hold onto it long enough. nothing beats my pelican case for keeping my wallet, keys, and phone dry while i'm on a boat, and in theory, if i had any bleeding clue where the dry sack was, it would keep my change of clothes as dry as my wallet.

sadly, i have no idea where it is. well, that's not strictly true: i have a pretty good guess which room it is in, if it's not in yosemite. i could tear apart the room or wait until wednesday.

i'm thinking wait: it looks in here like i've already torn the room apart. man, soldering makes a mess of the entire room.

i built an adjustable voltage desktop power supply. i felt like a jedi building a lightsaber.

it's a power supply unit... from a more civilized time.

another beer can race yesterday, this one was in berkeley. the weather was much less nice: no sun, cloudy, cold, and winds probably around 20-25 knots with huge gusts and 2-4 foot waves. we definitely got a lot wetter from weather this time (last time, we got wet from sailing :D).

despite starting 1 and a half minutes late (arguing over whether to sail under jib, since the wind was pretty gnarly (technical term)) we "decisively" won our class and came in 3rd overall. we were awarded a trophy for our victory.

after the race, cold, wet, and cold, we sailed back to treasure island where the boat lives, put it all away, and went home rather late.

it was a different experience from last week: the crew had 2 different people and everything seemed more relaxed. maybe it was because these were 2 very experienced crewmen, and last time, it was 1 very experienced and one newbie in their places. in any case, despite the scary weather, the giant, jacket penetrating waves, and my forgetting of my drysack, it was a very smooth and enjoyable race. i only hit my head once, which is half as many times as i hit it last time, so that's improvement on my part.

i think i was slower on average across the deck, but there was less changing course this time so also on average it probably didn't matter too much. still, i'll do better next time when my pads arrive.

the owner and captain hope to see me on the boat again soon, so i must be doing something !wrong.

the arduino is great but i wanted to dig a little deeper, and set some constraints. so i got ahold of an attiny13, an avr chip (like the atmega168 in the arduino) with only 1K of program flash. i acquired and soldered together the tools needed to program the chip and got under way.

one thing that became immediately clear: it's rather hard to debug. i've developed a flashing LED method of debugging, sending myself various pulse-based codes. not as efficient as a serial port.

another thing i ran into: the size of the .hex file is not hte same as the program size! I was trying to keep the .hex file under 1024 bytes, and it turns out, that's about 400 bytes in flash. score! i can relax a little about the size. a little.

luckily, avr's datasheets are quite nice, and i'm not having a lot of trouble interpreting which bits in which register do what. there's always fine print, of course. but that's not so bad.

my first project was a thermistor and a LED, hooked up so the LED would flash according to the temperature (now that I know I have more than 1K for the .hex file, I might look at a 7 segment).

the most irritating problem i encountered was this: i have a lookup table with 78 entries. when indexing to around 10, it would quite often inexplicably index 70 or so. i couldn't figure out why, but on a hunch, i split the tables into two tables of less than 65 bytes each. that seemed to fix the problem. no doubt if i read the datasheet a little more closely i'd discover why.

anyhow, it works now more or less. my next task is to get it running on 3V, then on a 3V battery, then into an enclosure to annoy my workmates.

the only place that IM's "Dancing with Khaddafi" sounds good at all is on my headphones + ipod while running.

It's not just that all IM sounds better when running, even though the cans are of lower quality. This particular track, which i had gotten used to hearing while running, sounds bad everywhere else: car, work, home rig. it has to have been mixed such that my normal gear brings the wrong sounds forward, which, i presume, implies that it was mixed for something else. no doubt the soundstage of an israeli dance club, which brings me to this point: an ipod plus senn px100s == israeli disco.

huh.

i'm getting back into the running thing, i guess. a fortunate combination of sunny weather and good tunes brought me past the 4 mile milestone, which i tell beginning runners (as i was told) is a big achievement, since "it's all easy after 4 miles". in my experience, the funny thing is that it's true. miles 5-10 are a lot easier than the first 4. it's my first 4 since getting back into running just a month or so ago, after deciding i wasn't going to wait to be light before running.

my shin is nearly pain-free. it may have been running too frequently, or running in the middle of the street (at a slant) that caused it. or maybe something entirely different. maybe it will hurt tomorrow. i don't know for sure yet. i'd really like to get it figured out.

one thing that was made abundantly clear today: mexican gardeners are nicer than white people out for a walk. i've noticed this on several runs. the gardeners always see me coming, and always turn off their blowers or their chainsaws or their weed whackers and get out of my way on the sidewalk. i always thank them. this is very kind of them, since they're working and i'm not, and i could run onto the street to get around them.

on the other hand, countless times i've had to either divert to the blacktop or say "excuse me" to oncoming white people out for a walk. it's one thing when you've got your back to me, but when you're looking me in the eye for a minute as i approach, and still standing shoulder to shoulder with your stroller buddy, taking up the entire sidewalk, there's no other word for what you are: an asshole. also a douchebag. that's two words, because you're raising your baby to be one, too.

i ran with brand new sunglasses today. brand new sunglasses sure are nice. it's like not wearing any sunglasses at all, until i look up in the sky and see the weird polarization effects. oooh, polarization effects! groovy.

lastly, my pace was 9:28. this is great, because it's basically my same old pace. the really weird thing is that it seems to be my pace no matter how far i run: it's my pace for 2 miles, it's my pace for 3 miles, it was just about my pace for 10 miles. but here's the weird thing: it was exactly my pace for the last 2-3 runs, all of which have been different distances and routes. maybe the gps watch is broken. i certainly wouldn't be surprised. it could also just be unsurprisingly buggy.

i heard this (unusual) word on the radio last night.

ah, memories.

i accidentally left the tube amp on when i went to bed.

the place didn't burn down. i lucked out.

reading a rather dry and boring but informative description of wet shaving, and it contained this gem:

The upper lip is a tricky bit, because of the unremovable nature of the nose.

nice.

i'm not pizza intolerant.

nor am i rye whiskey intolerant. in fact, i'm very tolerant; some might go so far as to say i'm downright friendly with the rye.

Q: did noah fish much on the ark?

A: no, he only had two worms.

for them's that care (me, in the future), my very-nearly-a-metric-half-century stats are:

time: 2:15 (including 4.5 minutes of stoppage)
distance: 30.3mi
avg speed: 14.0mph ( :( that's slow)
avg cadence: 82rpm (that's also slow :()

i did a lot better than that last weekend with only a few miles less:

time: 1:47 (incl. 3.5 minutes of stoppage)
distance: 26.2mi
ave speed: 15.2 (just barely not slow)
avg cadence: 83 rpm (huh, i thought i did better than that)

all righty then, perhaps i didn't do "a lot better" after all.

so good on the way in, also great on the way out.

what's not to like?

last night at heidi's pies i spied a young couple that appeared to be married. they were both fat nerds of the well groomed variety (that is, the male one actually keeps his beard neatly trimmed and brushes his shoulder-length hair occasionally). he was reading a terry pratchett novel and she was reading another novel. they were smiling and happy. their food came and they ate it while reading. they did not speak to each other, and that didn't put any frowns on their faces.

he had a tshirt on that read: you're reading my tshirt. that's enough social interaction for one day.

the shirt was only in jest, though, as they cheerily chatted with the waitress and decided that they were not too pudgy to order dessert.

it was great to see two people so well adjusted to each other and to their own particular...

idioms, sir!

yes, idioms. i and they are fortunate to live in a time and place where (finally) people like that can be prosperous and happy, and, maybe, just maybe, someday rule the world.

it is curious to note that had my own life not taken a different tack (gratuitous sailing term metaphor!) i myself may have ended up as a very well adjusted, happy pudgy nerd with a happy pudgy nerd wife, never speaking when there was sci-fi to be read, (and here i extrapolate and imagine) enjoying less-than-vigorous exercise like walks at the ren faire or photography trips, and having a sympathetic ear when complaining about all the idiots in the world who couldn't grep their way out of a wet paper bag, even if it wasn't a wet paper bag of plenty and they didn't have a Vorpal Scissors +2.

it's weird, i guess. i have a shaving fetish. sadly, it's not even the kind that involves women. fortunately, it's also not the kind that involves other men.

i look at a place like this and end up carried away.

now, in my defense, there's a whole movement of internet dweebs with wet-shaving on their minds, and i was there before it was cool, before there were shirtless internet dweebs on youtube with instructional shaving videos.

i've got a pile of straight razors that i no longer use because, though devotees will say otherwise, the safety razor was actually a progressive improvement on the old throat cutter. unless you're in a knife fight, of course.

as if my mondo order of pith-helmet smelling shaving creams of old london wasn't enough, i saw some mango shaving cream at the grocery (motto: too tired to go anywhere else? try the grocery!) and got that, too. mango! shaving cream! i am pretty sure it's for faces and not legs, but if i turn out to be wrong, hey, i'm a roadie after all.

i was waiting at a turn, windows and sunroof open, blasting what can best be described as Techno Banjo, when SMPD rolled on by, window also down.

I can only imagine what went through his mind as he saw me: "zorg-style haircut, techno banjo, smelly hippie beard, luxury car... in san mateo. fuck, no probable cause."

it's probably even more frustrating in SF.

still with me! all right!

and they won't even affect my eligibility for federal employment. bonus!

the glove did not fit, i think we must acquit.

twice last week i had a salad with feta on it (without realizing it, on account of how green i am at not eating dairy).

yesterday for lunch i had a healthy serving of butter (on purpose). for dinner i had an omelette with a-plenty o-cheese. friday's dinner included a slice of provolone. who knows how much incidental dairy I've eaten?

I've been more or less fine throughout. I can conclude tentatively that I am not sensitive to cheese or butter. the glove may actually fit my morning cereal milk, but as soymilk, expensive and icky to my mind as it may be, can handily substitute in that department (at least for oatmeal -- i have yet to brave a bowl of soymilk and cheerios) i may not be motivated to go back to the moojuice.

to get me to 30 miles today, i had to promise me pizza for dinner. we'll see how cheese tolerant i am. either that, or we'll see how committed i am to weight loss ;)

thanks readers (!) for all your helpful comments.

my limit is about 27 miles.

unfortunately, i did 30.3.

i wish i'd googled "50 km to miles" before my ride, then I'd have bagged me a metric half century since i was already mostly dead by mile 29.

this wasn't a wimpy-ass flat metric half century either. after descending bunker hill, i retraced a tiny bit of polhemus to take de anza up a silly hill, followed by some gentle hills, and terminated at hillsdale by a ridiculous hill followed by an outrageous hill where i had to dismount for a breather. a dude came out of his house and i quipped, hilariously, because that's the kind of guy i am, "did i wake you with my breathing?" ha! ha!

it wasn't a cakewalk after that, either. well, descending hillsdale was even zippier than descending bunker hill, but when i got to alameda the idjit in me turned the bike to the right and up i went on the awful hill of alameda de las pulgas. at this point, i didn't have it in me to do the whole hill so i turned right half way up and farted around that hood for a bit, then backtracked, and ascended to 36th.

at this point, my HRM said I was at 165bpm which isn't really that much for me. I used to do 185 on the exerbike and i've observed 180 in the wild. but for some reason, i felt like i was dying. perhaps i had a little heart attack or something. meh. i decided that i probably could get away with 30 miles today instead of the 35 i was shooting for, since 30 would still be a PR and since those weren't 30 wimpy-ass miles of foster city bike path but instead 30 manly miles of zippy downhills.

so i turned back and did some more gentle, rolling, granny-geared hills, wondering all the while how people can bike up something like mt. hamilton. most likely, it helps to not weigh over 200lbs, and it helps to be soopah.

anyhow, i had to throw on some extra loops at the end to make my 30. i got home, had some cold water, stripped down, and lay on the floor. that would have continued for about an hour but i had to go and rub my eyes, which brought salt into them, and marked the end of my floor time and the beginning of showertime.

so it goes.

admittedly, it was much hotter than last week, and i'm still recovering from both the injuries and the exertions of sailing on friday, not to mention various other stresses in my life, but i think what really bogged me down was my lack of bicycle training.

since last sunday, i've run, climbed, and lifted weights, each twice (and sailed). note the lack of bike specific training. since i'm not training for running, climbing, lifting, or sailing, it's hard to count my biking as "cross training". i guess technically i'm training to lose weight (which will make me worse at my job of rail meat but maybe by the time i've dropped any real weight, i'll actually be pulling ropes). undereating 4-5 days out of the week doesn't particularly help any of those sports.

Once upon a time, I took some sailing lessons and learned how to handle a sailboat. We started out on small boats under 30 feet and by the end of the 8 days I was chartering and skippering (as I recall) 35-40 foot boats. Nice ones with heads and radios and depth sensors and steering wheels and everything.

But after a while, I stopped doing it. I figured out why a couple days ago: I was always the one organizing things, and I always sailed out of Santa Cruz, which is a little far for me, and I had to skipper, and I never did manage to make a voyage without someone getting seasick. Mostly, I just got tired of organizing the trips (of course, organizing did not actually include "doing something" -- we mostly just sailed There And Back, which was fine with everyone on the boat). Skippering wasn't bad, and the drive to SC was actually usually fun. But finding people to sail and coordinating schedules is something I seem to find myself doing more often than I'd like, which is to say, more often than never.

Last wednesday, I went drinking with sailors, as it seems I now tend to do. After all, if I'm going to go drinking, why not go drinking with sailors? We swore and cussed and started some bar fights, and one of them asked me why I didn't sail anymore. At the time I had not had the chance to cogitate fully on the question, so my reply lacked the considered nuance of the above, and was: "I dunno."

So the sailor, who is co-owner of a boat, and whom we shall call M, invited me to sail with her in Friday's beer can race at the South Beach marina in SF. A beer can race is a semi-formal race where people with boats race, with big giant flaming scare quotes, "just for fun". At the time I accepted I couldn't see the scare quotes, but it wouldn't have mattered -- if they wanted to throw their race away on a newbie sailor, that was their choice. I wanted to sail. I accepted the next day after "thinking about it," which is to say, asking hops if I was busy on Friday.

My coworker and beer buddy D captains the boat, which is a J24 (note: I am not on the pictured boat). A J24 is 24 feet long and good for just about one thing: racing. Okay, maybe with some determination and creativity it could be used for other stuff, but as far as I know, M's boat is used pretty much only for racing. It has a sink but the head is 3 miles offshore.

The boat was on a trailer on Treasure Island and we lowered it into the water with a crane. I am glad I do not own a boat that has to be lowered by crane into the water, I think I'd have to change into my brown pants every time I did that. Maybe you get used to it. I dunno. I tried to be as helpful as I could, but I've been a newbie before at various things, and I happen to know that the #1 rule of newbism is "help, or get the hell out of the way", so I tried to not get in the way of the people who knew what the score was.

On land, that's easy. On a 24 foot boat under "normal conditions" there's not much running around even if you're not a newb with only one job.

The other crew members were A (also part owner) and Smart, which I thought was a pretty kickass nickname until I realized, once we'd finished the race, it was actually his surname, which is why my nickname is not "Smart". Smart had 3 trips on the boat under his belt, and suffered a promotion on my behalf. Since I was a rank newbie, I had only two jobs, one of which was to help launch and douse the spinnaker, and one of which was not. Now, if I'd done my job like the folks in those sculptures, I'd surely have been yelled at or worse. My job was to hang my legs out and my cheeks way over the side of the boat, not cozy my back up to the lifelines. There were five of us on the boat, and most of the time, 4 of us were lined up like ass cracks, "comfortably" reclining on the deck with as much of our mass off the boat as possible.

Now, I was told before I even set foot on the boat that Rule #1 was "stay on the boat". Later there was a discussion of the technical limits of this rule, and whether having an ankle touching the lifeline whilst dangling everything else into the bay to retrieve a GPS was still in compliance with Rule #1. I'd say the conclusion was: for A, yes. For me, no.

I did comply with Rule #1 for the entire trip. I'm a law and order type of guy.

My job of helping launch and douse the kite was pretty easy, as jobs go, although there is the usual sailboat confusion of which bleeding sheet am I supposed to be pulling, and oh shit i'm pulling the wrong end of it, and son of a motherless goat, i'm pulling the right end of it but now I'm pulling it the wrong fargen direction. But I think I'm over that now and next time I'll get it right the first time. Everything on the boat has to be done as fast as possible, which is really not fast enough. That doesn't make figuring out which end of which sheet to pull in which direction any easier. But I can't complain: Smart went from having one sheet to pull to having a bunch.

That reminds me: when I got invited I figured all my fancy sailing knowledge of which sheet to pull in which direction would be utilized. I was a little disappointed when I heard revision one of my responsibilities (which turned out not to be what I was doing, but did involve exactly as much sheet pulling as I eventually did). As it turns out I am lucky I had such a wise captain who didn't have me do much.

The difference between cruising and racing is: adrenaline. On a cruising boat, at certain moments, like during a tack or a jibe or setting a sail, things have to be done quickly, but otherwise, you find a nice deck chair and relax, enjoy the sun, have a sip of your beverage, talk with your crewmates, and so forth. If the boat starts to heel a little, you trim your sails or change your point of sail. You might have to shake the drops off your waterproof sailing jacket when you get back to shore.

On a race boat, you (well, "you" the newbie) hang on for dear life and try not to swallow too much of the bay, have no idea where the heck the boat is going or when it's about to tack (okay, towards the end I was beginning to figure it out), scramble in terror to the high side of the boat when it turns out the side you're on is going low (more on this in a moment!) hang on for dear life (did I mention that already? I have bruises in both armpits from clinging on to the lifelines. nice!), joke a little with the crew when your mouth isn't full of bay. If the boat starts to heel a little (ha! when the boat starts to heel a lot) you hang your ass way over the side and hope the captain knows what he's doing and won't dunk you. When you get back to shore, you'd better hope you brought a change of clothes.

When my main job was explained to me, I thought I was being told a joke. All sailboats have a rail and a lifeline. The rail is the little lip around the edge of the deck upon which, if you were running from one side of the boat to the other, you would stub your toe and be catapulted into the Pacific. This is where the lifeline comes in. The lifeline is a sturdy cable that runs above the rail at shin level around the boat, suspended by sturdy metal posts. On a cruising boat, its job is to keep you on the boat when you stub your toe on the rail. On the J24 its job is a bit different.

In my sailing class, they told us repeatedly: do not hang on to the lifeline, it will not keep you from going over the side. There are other things on the boat that you should hold on to, namely, the mast or the shrouds (cables that keep the mast in place). These are built to withstand tremendous forces, the sort of forces that you simply cannot generate yourself, so unless the mast is broken, in which case you're seriously boned anyways, you should be safe holding on to them. The lifelines, in contrast, are built to withstand much smaller forces (D said 500lbs, which, I pointed out, I could easily exceed by falling).

But on a race, the lifelines have to be used. Due to my previous programming, this was scary but necessary (getting to that). By the end of the race I was convinced that it was plenty safe, as safe as any part of racing, which is to say, terrifyingly unsafe (at one point in the race I thought to myself: wow, this is probably the most terrifyingly unsafe thing I've ever done in my life, which I guess means I've led a pretty boring life).

Okay, finally, on to my job description, which I thought was a joke. From my sailing class I remembered the basics of tacking (turning the boat into the wind): the skipper/captain says, "ready to come about", the one guy besides the skipper who has something to do readies himself and says "ready", everyone else gets out of the way and says "ready". The skipper says, "helms alee" and comes about, the one guy adjusts the headsail, and everyone gets back to relaxing. That's not how it's done on a J24 in a race. My job, when the skipper says "ready to come about", was to prepare myself by steadying my foot against the 3/4" rail, turning and facing the lee side of the boat, which was most likely slightly underwater, and when the captain came about, launching myself as fast as I could, on my belly, across the deck to the other side, which, if the skipper and Other Guy (trimmer) did their jobs correctly, would then be the high side of the boat, which meant I was sliding uphill (!) and grasping desperately for the lifeline above me, or which, if there was a screwup (there never was, this trip) meant I just launched myself downhill into the ocean. Once I'd slithered at As Fast As I Can speed across the deck, under the moving boom, I was to get up into a sitting position and hang my mass out of the boat to counter the heel. All this with no shoulder/arse clearance on either side, in the span of 2 seconds.

I wouldn't say I got good at it on this trip, but I did get a fair amount of practice, it being really my only job on the boat (aside from avoiding getting hit in the head by the boom, which I failed at twice). Several times I mislaunched due to foot-rail contact failure, and let me tell you, scrambling up a heavily heeled boat on my belly with no traction anywhere and the captain yelling "FASTER FASTER FASTER" sure is a lot of fun. No, really, it kind of is. Except for when I banged my knee. And my shin. And my hip. And my elbow. And cut my hand. And banged my knee again. And my other shin.

Everyone on board but me had sailing gloves (M still got a cut on her hand, it just happens). M and Smart had kneepads to help with the belly sliding. I now have sailing gloves but the folks at the PA West Marine must sail on something bigger than a J24 because they had no idea why I'd want knee pads.

I can't complain much about my job. For 3 trips that's all Smart had to do, but this trip, he had to do that, help me with doing that, and also help trim the sails, which, at one point, he was not doing quickly enough, and the captain, in a moment of motivational genius, shouted "I'm kissing your wife!!" after "faster! faster!" had failed to speed up Smart's actions, and "your pants are on fire!" had likewise failed.

After we had arrived early at the starting point, we did a couple of warmup maneuvers. On our very first warmup tack, someone flubbed up and I found myself hanging off the side of the boat (as I should have been) up to my armpits in the bay. Fun times! I seem to recall that I was not the one who flubbed up, though technically I suppose I did, since Rule #0 is "stay on the high side of the boat" and by definition, with my ass in the water, I was on the low side of the boat. It only got more adrenalinic from there.

This was the crew's first time sailing in this area and they were not familiar with the water, the markers, or the route. They weren't foolishly unprepared, either, and since we had 3 excellent sailors on board, we managed to come in 5th out of 10 in our class even though at multiple points the crew admitted we had no idea what route we were on, whether we were in the race, whether that thing up there was the marker we were supposed to head toward, whether we were following people who were in the race, or in our group, or what planet we were on, not to mention whether or not pants were or were not actually on fire.

In the end, it was simultaneously more fun and more injurious than any sailing I've done before. I got invited back (no, no date was set, so I dunno when it will be). I learned quite a lot (example: change of shoes goes in gear bag, not with wife). Most importantly, I followed Rule #1 (even when it wasn't easy) and Rule #2: have fun.

argh. roaster busted again. this time, the drive shaft melted and popped in half. this is basically what happened to the previous stir crazy part of my roaster, but that one took about 2 years to bust, this one took about a month.

wtf manufacturers?!

if i can manage to disassemble it without breaking the screws, as i did last time, it looks like i can replace the plastic driveshaft with a metal one that won't break. my concern is that the driveshaft is connected to the motor arm, which is plastic and can't be replaced. i'll still need some nice insulation to keep the metal drive shaft from heating up the motor arm or i'll be well and truly hosed.

i might just be too busy to fix it this weekend but fortunately i have a week's worth of beans on deck.

it's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x28!

Still got the mohawk. Almost a full Zorg.

i went sailing. on a race boat. in a race. it was awesome. more later.

my brother has a blog?? why wasn't i told?!?!

last night at the toronado, i despaired the lack of quality beer bars in my hood. it turns out, i may have actually been despairing my ignorance of quality beer bars in my hood.

apparently original nick's, right along my running route, is a quality beer bar with 20 good things on tap. tomorrow's a running day, maybe i'll pop in for a pint on my last leg.

another visit to the toronado last night, and this time it was good. that makes them 3 and 1, i think. the 1 bad experience was the result of bad moods, incorrect planning, bad luck, crowding, and, finally, disappointing beer.

last night though was well planned, high spirits, and russian river beer. i had supplication, temptation, damnation, and a drake's IPA just because. I'd previously had supp and tempt from bottles, they were (of course) way better on tap. the damnation was also mighty great.

we saw the guy from moonlight delivering his kegs. sadly, they were out of the redwood beer so i was forced to have the aforementioned drake's instead -- hand pumped! oh man was it thick and delicous.

anyhow, the funny thing is that this was a tapping party for russian river, but there sure were a lot of people there ordering boont ambers. i find this funny because i really don't care for the anderson valley beers, while at the same time, think that russian river is tops in the game. to pass up RR for mediocre AV is chuckleworthy in my book.

on the other hand, more for me.

really, i do.

mmm! fluxy.

i was having a nice jog through a cave/shanty dungeon of some sort, and i heard a kitty, so i stopped to scoop him up, and put him on my shoulder, and continued on my merry way. but then i heard the kitty again, behind me, over my shoulder, from where i'd just picked him up. I just picked you up, kitty! How'd you get back there? I looked and he wasn't there, but he was still mewling piteously, terrified that i'd leave him, my good friend pal kitty, back behind in the cave section of the cave/shanty dungeon, which wasn't all that nice of a place to be left behind in. He was nowhere to be found but the mewling continued!

then I woke up to find that the mewling was my own allergy nose-whistle, penetrating even my earplugs. har! I laughed and went back to sleep.

good times.

revision 1 of the Desktop Dingus is finished. it features:

- a green LED that turns red when you flip a switch
- a 4-digit 7-segment LED display that says things like "beer is good for you have some soon"
- 3 other switches that currently do nothing but are detected as on or off by the microcontroller
- a 2 port switchboard, ma bell style. yeah! also detected by the uC but doesn't do much else

as it happens, fabricating the dingus was kind of tough, with many trips to the hardware store for spacers, screws, nuts, etc. but hardest of all was getting the little stuff to work.

examples: discovering that I needed a pull-down resistor for my switches. it was not easy to get a single-color LED to light when the switch was thrown while not altering the detection by the uC of whether the switch was open. it was even less easy wiring up a 2-color LED that changes color at the flip of a switch -- while not altering the uC switch position detection. finally, it was really rather hard to do the above properly. i had to de-solder the LED subcircuit twice, destroying a transistor in the process (impatience).

rev 2 will probably feature a thermistor to tell the user ("the user", heh. me.) the ambient temp of the Desktop Dingus, but the main feature of rev 2 will be cooperative multitasking, to allow switch detection/actions to occur while the LED display is hard at work displaying stuff. this will be a software challenge, which i am better suited to tackle, but i expect electronics challenges to arise.

to assemble rev1, i had to use voltage dividers, a transistor, discover an inadvertent voltage divider in my circuit (whoops! i keep doing that...), pullup resistors, pulldown resistors, lots of crimp terminals, lots of soldering, and neither last nor least, an 8-bit shift register (i spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to control many switches from few uC pins and lit on the idea of the shift register, as suggested by an EE cohort. later, i found an arduino + shift register + many switches tutorial online. heh.).

anyhow, fun.

oh, right, that's what happens when i use sports drinks/energy gels with caffeine.

i may have learned, this time.

on my way out of the garage to go for my ride today, a young, slightly chubby girl on a scooter said to me, "beautiful day, isn't it?"

now, i didn't think kids these days spoke to strangers in spandex with funny beards, but i guess that just goes to show how out of touch with the younger generations i really am.

i remarked that it was, and that it was a great day to be outdoors. i rode off to have my ride, and she scooted on down to the park.

that was nice.

there was a spider in the shower this morning, a really big spider. so big that looking at him, I could tell my SOP for spiders in the shower would be inadequate: his body was so large that he would not fit through the pea-sized holes in my shower drain.

fortunately, there were chemical weapons at hand. i grabbed the lysol anti-mildew shower cleaner (on sale at target!) with the assumption that bleach can't be much better for spiders than it is for mildew, puppies, or humans, and applied the aerosolized poison about as liberally as i do to my other hated enemy, mildew.

Injured and weakened, the spider advanced toward the end of the tub, which is to say, he rushed me. I buffetted him with even more bleachy goodness, and when that didn't slow him down, i turned on the shower. Eventually he got stuck in the mess of hair that was stuck in the drain, and though I suppose the water rinsed off the bleach, spiders can do one thing that mold can't: drown.

Not only did I feel no remorse at this unprovoked massacre of a helpless spider, i felt as if I was doing my duty as a member of the human race. Right behind mold, I view spiders as the irreconcilable mortal enemy of all humanity. Sure, they gobble up some bugs that are even more unsavory, but every once in a while, those fuckers (speaking of fuckers, I keep on seeing the San Mateo County Mosquito Abatement Jeep driving around my hood when I run, and every time I see him, I want to shout out to him, pumping my fist in the air, "Yeah! Abate those motherfuckers!" but I never quite get close enough and I also don't want to shout "motherfuckers" in the middle of my hood at strangers while people are taking their kids to school) crawl into your ear while you're asleep or gnaw on your leg and leave a monthlong giant welt that maybe becomes so badly infected you have to go gross out your doctor and get on some really harsh medications. That's happened to me, my bro, and rather not too few other people I know.

No mercy.

I just road my toughest ride to date. 26.[something small] from my front door, up the little hill that is crystal springs, up the bigger hill that is polhemus, up the really awful hill that is that strech of polhemus that turns off to the ralston trail, a big whee down the trail, up that really awful and entirely not-fun bridge over the 280, another breif whee, and then smooth sailing to woodside (more on that in a second), back to the 92, then taking my life into my hands uphill on the 92, another big whee down to 35, really taking a big life risk on 35, an awful bridge again over the 280, a tremendously horrible little climb up (to?) bunker hill, a big, terrifying, 35mph whee all the way back down to crystal springs, a short gratuitous and lung-wrenching grind up ascension drive, a big whee down ascension drive, and a lazy cruise back home.

i got drafted twice on my ride, which i guess is a compliment. even more of a compliment is when i lose the drafters, not by spitting or blowing my nose on them, but by applying mass and acceleration to my pedals. that worked well for the two bike drafters, not so well with the 535i.

one gentleman played bicycle leapfrog with me all the way up crystal springs through to edgewood, and, as he caught up to me approaching edgewood, my planned turnaround point, he commented that i must be doing intervals, because i "ride like a bat out of hell" and then he catches up to me. now, i kinda just ride, keeping my cadence above 70, and preferably above 80, and lately, more like 90. my cadence hovers pretty reliably around 85 regardless of which side of the hill i'm on. buit cadence != speed and i guess i could be going fast/slow/fast/slow. maybe it was him -- i passed him uphill on crystal springs, but he passed me uphill on polhemus, and i was going "as fast as i could" in both cases.

i do (did) train intervals, both recently and Back In The Day. And since I've been weightlifting a lot longer than I've been biking, it's eminently believable that I'm biking like I deadlift: maximum effort, rest, max effort, rest, etc.

The numbers speak well of my riding style, whatever that may be: my ave. speed was 15.1mph, which is .1 over the threshold of "not slow". I sustained 26mph for good portions of the road between edgewood and woodside. My ave. cadence was 88, though my fargen cadence meter crapped out for some reason in the middle of my ride. It un-crapped out not long after that, for reasons just as unknown.

Because my leapfrog biking buddy said he was doing a "short ride" to "recover from his hip injury", as he passed me on his double, right at my turnaround point, i decideed to stop wimping out at edgewood and go all the way to woodside. plus, i didn't really want to sustain a conversation. so that's what i did, and now that i've done it, i have to do it every time, because I Don't Do Backsies.

In addition to the intervals comment, I paid a little bit of attention to my shifting. I applied what I learned from Cool Guy at the bike shop two weeks ago (this is my first ride since then) and marveled at what a well made bike I am privileged to ride. At one point, I stopped to rejigger my cadence meter, and when I started up again, it was a joy to feel how light and sprinty my bike is. It was tuned by a jerkoff, but a very capable jerkoff.

Anyhow, when I started riding, I just decided I'd learn to "shift naturally" and I think I do a fine job of it. I couldn't tell you much about gear ratios, or whether I'm shifting "up" or "down". i shift for "harder" or "easier", and my philosophy is "shift early, shift often" (i stole that from extreme/agile programming, the absurd lingo of which i am familiar with but do not practice) and whether that's how Lance does it, it seems to work well for me. But today I paid a little bit of attention to what I was doing, and I realzied that I try to keep my cadence steady (letting it fall where it may -- I no longer feel right with a cadence under 70, and tend to settle in naturally around 80-85), but i don't shift to keep my cadence up, i shift to keep my perceived exrertion steady. my perceived exertion, in turn, translates directly into chain tension -- that's apparently how i gauge my PE. so my cadence does what it does, and my shiftyfingers shift to keep my chain tension at a particular level that "feels right" (aka "easy").

i'm not sure how this info is particularly useful, except that it falls under the category of "knowledge", which I can tuck away like crimp-on connectors and hope for it to become useful at some later date. i suppose what it implies is that if i want to improve my cycling, i can work on riding at my natural cadence with a higher chain tension, in other words, pedaling harder.

i don't think i'll train for that, particularly. right now i'm having plenty of fun out there, and i'm not doing poorly, and my PE of "easy" is bitchin enough that guys with big calves and no granny gear want to draft me. if i can keep it fun and lose a pound or two, i reckon i'm happy.