Saturday, September 30, 2000 Had a great ride today, even though it tired me out a bit. I'm finding that I feel as though I'm not riding that great, but when I look at my speed, I'm riding faster than usual. I'm not sure what the explanation is, but I'm not complaining. Anyway, I did the usual C470->Platte River-->Downtown Littleton loop. I had a 19.4mph average by the time I reached Littleton, and a 17.7 overall average, which ties my previous record. The split at Littleton, however was the fastest I've ever done that section. We watched Out of Sight on video tonight, though we'd seen it at the movies before. I love that movie, especially the character of Glen. Recommended. muttered around 8:54 PM

Friday, September 29, 2000 Rode home yesterday, and rocked! I did 19.3 avg on what I call the "time-trial" portion of the Platte River trail. This is my fastest time ever on that portion. OK, I have to admit that I had a decent tailwind, but I've ridden home on this trial with great tailwinds, and never turned in an average this fast. I went on to get a total average of 17.7 (my average always goes way down during the tail-end of this ride because I have to ride through downtown Littleton, which has stop lights, road construction, slow traffic, etc). That's also a personal best average for this particular ride. I've definitely gained a few pounds over the last month or so - I'd say about three. It's funny how bad habits silently return to your lifestyle: eating too many desserts, snacking, etc. This combined with not riding for a couple of weeks recently, due to sickness, and a business trip where I pigged out the whole time for a week, etc., tend to catch up with you. I'm going to go back onto the Atkins diet for the month of October. I hope to be able to lose about 10 pounds. I lost 10 pounds the first month with Atkins early this year. However, with Atkins, some of the weight loss is always just stored glycogen and water, so I'll really only lose about 5 pounds of "real" weight. That's OK. After October, I'll go off for a while (and try to just control my consumption), then in late winter/early spring re-enter. I'd like to get down to about 220 for the TOSRV in the spring. That'll be ten pounds less than this year. I also intend to ride through the winter this year, although that's very hard to do in Denver. It's not so much that the weather is bad, but that it's terribly unpredictable. You can check out the weather report and see that it's supposed to snow or rain, decide not to ride, then find later that the day was beautiful, and you therefore missed a chance to ride. The opposite also happens: you plan the ride, and the weather turns really foul. muttered around 7:39 AM

Wednesday, September 27, 2000 Watched Any Given Sunday last night, which was not so great. For an Oliver Stone flick it sure was "Hollywood". I mean, a fully resolved, pat ending? Come on... I'm reading Lance Armstrong's book, It's Not About the Bike. It's great! I originally had low expectations of it, and it sat around on the bookshelf for quite a while. But recently I met another cyclist at a party (we compared shaven legs) and he said he found that once he started it he couldn't put it down. I totally agree with that assessment. Lance is an amazing individual. I'm not sure we'd be buds if I knew him (he's probably a little too type-A), but I definitely respect his will and cycling ability. He's truly a modern great. Reading the book makes me want to go out and ride -- you can't ask for more than that. muttered around 8:41 PM

Finally, I cycled home yesterday. I guess it was about what I expected after two weeks off. The weather was nice - about 70 degrees with a weird, shifting wind. I kept feeling as though I was riding into the wind, yet my average was 18.3 at my "time-trial" cut-off point (about 10 miles into the ride), which is really pretty good for me. I definitely felt a lack of lung power, but not too badly. I basically just ran out of juice a little earlier than usual. Hill-climbing is where I think I suffered the most. I attacked my usual two hills, and I could really feel the difference. Regardless, it was great to get back on my bike! muttered around 7:16 AM

Sunday, September 24, 2000 Still haven't been on my bike since contracting a cold a couple of weeks ago. Sigh. On the other hand, I've made a lot of progress with my Sun network at home. See This old SPARC for more on that. It snowed last night, and it was great to wake up to a snow-covered fall scene out the windows. I took some pictures. Here is a panorama of the back yard: It should be warming back up this week, and I'm going to get back on my bike regardless of this cold. muttered around 3:44 PM

Wednesday, September 20, 2000 Still sick. Well, not sick, per-se, but definitely generating mucho-snotto. I don't feel physically bad, except for being a little tired. So, I still haven't ridden my bike since last Monday. This makes nine days without a ride. Sigh. On another note, I've got my new Sun Ultra box configured, and entered this blog from it. IE 5.0 seems to run pretty well on Solaris (contrasted with IE 4.0). More in This Old Sparc (the name has been changed from "Life with Sparky", since there are more Sparcs in the family now). muttered around 10:04 PM

Monday, September 18, 2000 Man, it's been five days since the last post, and I'm still getting over my cold, or whatever it is. The worst appears to be over. But over the past few days I've been amazed at just how much snot one head can produce. I'm very tired of blowing my nose. I missed a total of three days last week. Luckily only two really count as sick days because I worked from home the first day I took "off". I haven't been on my bike since last Monday because of this ridiculous cold/flu thing, which is a real bummer. I hope to get back in the saddle on Wednesday of this week. muttered around 8:42 PM

Wednesday, September 13, 2000 I'm sicker than a dog today. I had a semi-cold for a few days - my throat would get sore, and then a few hours later it would be gone. But now, I've got a full-fledged sinus-stuffing, throat-torturing cold. So, I'm at home today, but I'm still working because I want to save my vacation days. It's amazing how productive you can be with no interruptions. I'm working on a new feature for our application - allowing users to change their password. It involves a couple of JSPs, a "bean", and a change to an EJB so that it reports a useful exception if there are any errors in changing the password. I'd like to say here, that if we didn't use Unix (Solaris) as our development environment at work, then I'd not be able to work from home nearly as effectively. In order to work from home, all I need to do is dial in to work and telnet to the development box. Our entire development environment is then at my fingertips. If we used NT and the associated IDEs, source code control, etc., I'd be screwed because then I'd have to duplicate my work environment here at home, and would have to bother with transferring files back and forth, as well. Unix rocks!. I won a Sun Ultra 1 200E yesterday on eBay. $895 - guess that's a reasonable deal. More in Life with Sparky muttered around 12:53 PM

Tuesday, September 12, 2000 more (geek) refrigerator poetry: you never truly have fudge repulsive zombie fluid microsoft must logout muttered around 9:01 AM

I need to buy a truing stand from these guys: Ultimate Bicycle Support Product Index. However, they've discontinued their current model in favor of a new one under development. muttered around 7:44 AM

Saturday, September 09, 2000 The configuration of Ginny's computer went without a hitch. It did take about 2 hours, but overall no real problems. Here's hoping that I get the gumption to ride today. My intention was to get up early (which I did) and ride (which I didn't). I needed to finish installing software on Ginny's computer, and get the docs together, and get everything boxed up. I knew if I rode, I'd never have enough time to do that before her son's (my nephew) birthday party. So, I'm telling myself that I'll ride between in the time between Patrick's birthday party and when we leave for April's housewarming at 5:30. muttered around 9:33 AM

Friday, September 08, 2000 So here I sit while Windows 98 installs itself on the old Dell P166 desktop I'm giving to my sis-in-law Ginny and her son Patrick. I've been putting off configuring the machine, because I just knew it would be a pain. However, in the end, it really wasn't as painful as I thought to do the upgrade (well, so far): Figured out how to create a boot disk from Windows (it had been a long time). Booted from the floppy and realized that I couldn't see the hard drives anymore, nor would the CD-ROM work. Sat here thinking, so now what do I do? Brilliantly deducted that I needed a DOS-mode CD-ROM driver. Copied an autoexec.bat from the C: drive to the floppy because it referenced a CD-ROM access program. Copied the program to the boot floppy. Rebooted. No joy. During a reboot realized that I'd updated my PROM when I added a hard drive a couple of years ago. There's a very quick message that says hit 'ctrl' now if you want to boot from a floppy. So I tried that. Ahh - now the drives are set up correctly. If I just let the machine boot from floppy without hitting 'ctrl', then it skips the hard-drive setup step, so I now know to use the 'ctrl' key when booting from floppy. Found a Win98 startup disk! This is good -- it asks me if I want to install Windows 98 on the computer when I boot from it. This boot disk also gives me access to the CD-ROM drive. Sweet! I decide I should dump everything off the C Drive for the install. 'fdisk' to the rescue. I delete, and re-create the primary DOS partition on C:. I boot from the Win98 floppy, select "Install Win98" from the menu, let it format the drive, and am sitting here waiting for the install to complete. Hopefully it's smooth sailing from here on out. I'll add updates later. muttered around 11:17 PM

Ah, what the hell, the BBSpot site is so good (see previous blog, below (I love to say that)), I had to just give ya a link. muttered around 4:57 PM

Hehe: Linux Developer gets Laid. Thanks to Zeldman for pointing this one out. muttered around 4:51 PM

Wednesday, September 06, 2000 Last Sunday I did a 45-miler on my cross bike -- a big loop out C470, up the Platte Trail to the Cherry Creek Trail, off the Cherry Creek onto the Highline Canal Trail, and home through the neighborhoods north of my house. Average was 18.8 when I reached the Cherry Creek Trail. It tailed off to 17.6 (I think) by the time I got home. I didn't feel that great for much of the ride. Not sure what's up. Rode home yesterday on the Cherry Creek route, and again, didn't feel that great. This time there was an excuse, I think, since I had to fight a strong headwind much of the way. I only averaged 15.2 overall -- pretty sad. muttered around 11:21 AM

Saturday, September 02, 2000 OK, so it's been a while, but I've been out of town on a business trip to Dublin, OH. I was involved in a meeting to help define the current and future architecture of the Network Engineering group of Qwest. We were fairly productive, given that there were about ten folks from different areas of Network Engineering, many from differing parts of the contries, from different cultures, different development backgrounds, etc. Because of the meeting, I missed four opportunities to ride. I did ride home yesterday, but I was kind of jet-lagged, and didn't feel that strong, so I took the Platte route home, which is shorter than what I've been doing lately (by about 5 miles). I should ride today, but as of this writing, I'm not sure I will. If I don't go today, I'll definitely go tomorrow and Monday. Jake is getting along OK, but he's been licking his stitches a lot. It's tough to keep him from doing it without constant surveillance. We could put a "lampshade" device over his head, but I can just imagine how depressed he'd act if we did that. muttered around 12:39 PM