MeBikeCommuter

A good year's end

2011-12-30T11:25:00.000-05:00

4,150 miles on bike = PR
3,150 on car

Cutting Edge Exercise

2011-02-26T10:44:00.001-05:00

Yeah, I know it's been a long winter, but still... I'm not sure it was bad enough to justify this... extreme synchronized indoor spinning.

Bill's Magical Mystery Tour...: Cutting Edge Exercise

On the positive side, it's in Italian.

What Would You Say If You Had Only 5 Minutes Left To Live? | Alastair Humphreys

2011-02-14T07:23:00.000-05:00

What Would You Say If You Had Only 5 Minutes Left To Live? | Alastair Humphreys

Evening commute picture

2011-02-10T17:56:00.000-05:00

5:00 pm, 4 minutes before the theoretical sunset, at the Presumpscot River Bridge on Middle Road.

Year's mileage

2010-12-31T12:22:00.000-05:00

3,600.
Since I started tracking it in 2002, about 24,500.
Miles on car: 3,035.

The digital digit

2010-12-29T21:40:00.002-05:00

I read an Instructable article over a year ago that showed how to sew a bit of conductive thread into one's glove finger to allow touch-screen operation while engloved. I finally got around to trying it, seein' as how it's turned glovey here in Maine.

It's not rocket surgery. I operated on a pair of polyester liner gloves that I found on sale at EMS last spring. Well, the right one anyway. I thought the outside thread should be a fairly small, localized contact area, but I'm not sure that's so important... when you use your bare finger on a touch-screen the contact area is pretty broad.

The inside of the finger can/should be a messy thread nest, for plenty of contact area with your finger.

I got a chance to try it on this morning's commute. 21 degrees, with the road shoulders still crunchy after Monday's blizzard, but with not much wind and a nice bright sun. I stopped on the side of the boulevard to try to capture the sun-backed skyline of Portland across the cove.

Well, it's not very realistic looking but it's cool in a hipstamatic kinda way. Emboldened, I tried a new camera app on my iPhone called Pano, for shooting panoramic pictures. It has a learning curve that I haven't ascended yet. The double sun is the first clue.

Anyway, the conductive thread worked and the liner glove definitely helped keep my right hand from freezing for a few minutes.

Morning commute picture

2010-12-03T18:07:00.002-05:00

Takes the prize of becoming the blog header picture. Taken with cheapo HDR Pro app on my iPhone.

Car's cockpit ~ TV room

2010-11-20T12:00:00.001-05:00

I liked the first 45 seconds of this video. The analogy between viewing the world through a windshield and watching TV was a new way of looking at it, and it felt like a good description to me.

Au Soleil (To The Sun) - Wereldfietser (World cyclist) on Vimeo

After that the video switches to computer animation techniques, which felt new and clever at first but it got old after a few minutes and I stopped watching.

Cycling the world on $1 for peace

2010-11-20T09:16:00.009-05:00

This video interview rocks.

The Wind In His Face - Wereldfietser (World cyclist) on Vimeo

I forwarded it to my friend Ron who leads a team of employees from India.

The next time one of your employees whines about a challenge, you can say
"In this world there is no problem."
(Sounds better than "Wimp! Show me your passport.")

Evening commute

2010-11-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

Kent's Bike Blog: Barb Chamberlain: Bikes Will Save the World

2010-11-14T20:34:00.000-05:00

I love this presentation. Okay, it's a little bit self-righteous but the presenter knows it and has a sense of humor about it.
Kent's Bike Blog: Barb Chamberlain: Bikes Will Save the World

Hmm... her blogger profile says she likes work, biking, yoga, good coffee, dark chocolate, great books, civil society, and living in the U.S. I think I'm in love again. (Okay, she also likes politics but nobody's perfect.)

Talking myself out of talking myself out

2010-11-08T20:12:00.005-05:00

We had a storm last night. Tree branches down, high wind, power outage, steady rain, slippery leaves all over the road shoulders. Bummer. After having a cold all last week and working at home, I was seriously needing my commute. The forecast for the next few days didn't look much better. Crap. (Note to self: Set up the indoor bike in the basement.)

When I awoke this morning the wind was easily audible while I was lying there in my Benadryl grogginess. The little weather app on my iPhone said 40 degrees and 18-mph winds from the northeast, which is the direction of my morning commute. "Wind Advisory Alert." Crap. Out came the rationalizations... Oh well, I need to carry some clothes into the office, buy some food, I could drive.

But wait! Would the Minnesota Bicycle Commuter drive on a day like this? No! He doesn't have a car!
Would my friend Robot drive on a day like this? No! He doesn't have a car either.

To top things off, last night I was reading another armchair adventure book, "Bicycling around the World" by Frosty Wooldridge. Okay, it's not Pulitzer Prize material (as if any of these "I-biked-so-much-I-was-tired-and-hungry-every-day" books are), but it has its high points. At the end of one chapter he presents his "ABC philosophy for happy living", where "C" is:

Celebrate -- Jump up and shout about being alive. Jump into a cold stream when you want a bath. Laugh at the hill you are about to climb.

Okay, obviously I biked to work. Ya know what, it wasn't bad at all. I think I hit it when the winds were at a lull. The rain was light. As Robot said, the hard part is throwing your leg over the bike just outside your garage. True, it was my second-slowest commute ever, with the headwind, two panniers and my winter biking boots. Average 11 mph. But hoo boy, think of the magnificent tailwind I was gonna have all the way home!

In the afternoon the sun came out and the wind died down. Crap.

Rights of Way: Life in a Red State (It's Not All That Bad)

2010-11-03T20:28:00.000-04:00

Rights of Way: Life in a Red State (It's Not All That Bad)

Portland's Streetcar Network, 1916

2010-10-31T16:59:00.002-04:00

Cool bit of history and graphics.

Rights of Way: Strasenbahn in Portland, 1916

So is that what that old piece of railway bed came from, east of the Martins Point Bridge?

But it's better than TV

2010-10-31T16:50:00.004-04:00

A post from earlier this year that expressed my preconceived notions: Seth's Blog: But it's better than TV

It's not that I think TV is evil incarnate... (I watched a few hours this year, and an occasional movie on the big screen is nice, not inherently different)... It's more like, who has time for it?

Of course his list is easy to extend. Who has time to watch TV when one could:

Take the long way home from work.
Put an hour or two into the project from work that's got you hooked.
Cook!
Do some yoga to unwind and stretch
Watch a TED video
(Getting down to the not-so-often and like-to-try now...)
Make wine (okay, that hobby didn't work out so well)
Play bridge ( haven't done that in over a year)
Buy a Mac, learn to develop games or just personal gadgets for the iPhone
Go bowling.
Learn to play the harmonica again.

blog fodder

2010-10-31T00:13:00.002-04:00

I let my blog lie fallow for a long time, like for the six months of this past fantastic season. I can't quite get into blogging about my mileage and training and such, seems pretty self-absorbed. (Or PSA as my daughter-in-law used to say.) Maybe I should say I can't write about it with the same humor and distance as the good bloggers.

I'm still impressed by Minnesota Bike Commuter as you can tell from the title I've adopted and the occasional "pictures from my commute" posts. He merely writes about his commute (about the same distance as mine), simple journaling, nothing exciting, except that he's been car-free in Duluth, Minnesota for over eight years. My current role model. When my 17-year-old Toyota finally rusts out, I plan to go car-free. So far this year I've logged more miles on my bike than my car, so I think I can claim to be "car light". It wouldn't be that hard... I can work at home when I need to. Which I haven't done this year more than a couple of times... I'd miss my commute.

I follow a few dozen blogs regularly, so I got that going for me... which is nice. Occasionally some article strikes me as worth emailing to my friend(s). There's no shame in padding my blog with references to more entertaining sources. That was the original meaning of a web-log after all.

Pictures from my commute

2010-10-30T13:40:00.002-04:00

Winter's rolling around and my commutes are more likely to see the cool light of Maine.

Back Cove about 8 am yesterday.
This was shot with my little iPhone and the HDR Pro app. High dynamic range.

Martins Point Bridge going north a few minutes later. Not HDR. Looks a little darker than I remember it being. I've made this my new header image.

Video Compilation of Bicycle Fails - BikeHacks

2010-10-29T07:38:00.002-04:00

Ouch. Most of these failed bike stunts are kinda painful to watch. I hate it when my bike splits in half on landing. The ones involving racers at the end are pretty funny.

"It's funny until someone gets hurt... then it's hilarious." ?

Video Compilation of Bicycle Fails

Dave Moulton's Blog - Airbags for cyclists

2010-10-25T16:25:00.002-04:00

Agreed. I've been ranting to a few folks that cars have become too danged easy to drive. Bring back the stick shift and the clutch and the choke... drivers might not get so bored sitting there.

Dave Moulton's Blog - Dave Moulton's Bike Blog - Airbags for�cyclists

Cycling In Madagascar | TravellingTwo: Bicycle Touring Around The World

2010-10-23T08:21:00.000-04:00

Love this little video.

Cycling In Madagascar | TravellingTwo: Bicycle Touring Around The World

Road-use tax B.S.

2010-05-08T17:08:00.002-04:00

I was sitting around reading the latest issue of Adventure Cycling magazine and came across a letter to the editor that got me riled up.

"Cyclists pay no road tax." There is a common misconception that the streets, roads and highways are paid for by fuel taxes and motor vehicle fees, and, therefore, that cyclists do not contribute. In actuality, local streets and roads are by-and-large paid for by local taxes (property taxes, sales taxes, etc.). State roads, which include interstates and U.S. highways, are predominately paid for by state and federal moneys which are raised through a variety of taxes. A study by the Texas Highway Department concluded that there was not a single section of its state roadways that paid for its own construction and maintenance through fuel taxes and user fees and, in fact, it was typical for roads to be very heavily subsidized by general revenues. (See www.keeptexasmomving.com).

This reminds me of something Earl Eccleston (my daughter-in-law's father) once told me. He had worked for the Maine Turnpike Authority for years. At some point the authority realized that the total toll income had paid for the cost of construction, and suggested that the toll booths might be removed. The state's response was, no way... those tolls go into the general funds, not into a turnpike-specific pool.

Perhaps the roads-are-funded-by-usage-fees misconception started with those yellow stickers on the backs of trucks, "This truck pays $38,015 in road use taxes." (At least the sticker gets the "taxes" term right.) By the way, the trucks don't actually pay those taxes... the consumers of the trucked goods do.

Here's another way to look at it. Let's say that the roads are supported entirely by usage-specific taxes. In that case, motorcycles (fuel-efficient and lightly taxed) should be restricted, right? Good luck with that one. And what about those those socialist pedestrians and baby strollers demanding their free sidewalks?

The last time I heard someone mention this silliness, it was to support the idea of requiring bicycles to be licensed. I'm actually in favor of licensing cyclists. Not because the miniscule tax income would give the cyclists more of a "right" to the road, but because I want all cyclists to be required to learn the rules. It seems like every month I see someone riding on the wrong side of the road, or at night without a light. I've almost hit a couple of them myself over the years.

Argh. As long as I'm getting all free-thinky here, I also favor charging a fee for every email. I'm happy to pay a nickel for every email I send (call it $50 a year for me), because it would completely wipe out spammers' profits. (I found one University of California study that sent out 350 million fake "herbal libido" messages and got 28 buyers. That's a "super-crappy" response rate but it would've grossed about $2,700. Even a penny-per-thousand fee would've wiped out the profits.) I got the nickel number from a short-lived government proposal ten or twenty years ago, one that I favored until I heard that the money would be given to the poor suffering US Postal Service. The danger is that it would become another starts-small general-slush-fund tax, another one that jobs would depend on forever after. (Remember that the USPS is the agency that gives favorable rates for junk mail.) I'm not sure what should be done with this hypothetical email tax. Aha, how about rural connectification? So I'd have connectivity when I'm up there poaching the roads of northern Maine on my bike.

Beware The Reader

2010-03-28T10:11:00.008-04:00

I had been following a couple dozen blogs by subscribing to each one individually and organizing the links manually. So 2005. Maintenance was starting to feel like maintenance, so I disobeyed my traditional we-doneeno-steenkin-GUI rule (which was a bit hard to defend in the context of a web browser anyway) and switched to Google Reader (henceforth to be known as The Reader) without seeing the sinkhole I was about to be sucked into. It offers "Recommended sources".

Some of its recommendations are downright spooky. It offered Applied Physics Letters and Physical Review Letters, journals I haven't perused since college. Whoa. I'll resist the paranoid hypothesis that The Reader found my 1969 library records. I'll even doubt that it found an old copy of my résumé on the web somewhere. Let's just assume that any college-educated software/biking geek is a likely target market for those journals. (No, they didn't make it into my subscription list. I had no trouble declining them after one click showed me scintillating titles like "Surface Induced Asymmetry of Acceptor Wave Functions". Ah, the good old days.)

The good news, I guess, is that The Reader isn't that knowledgeable about what I like. The bad news is that it compensates for its ignorance with volume. It's been tempting me with hundreds of blogs about biking, touring, skiing, yoga, cooking, software, bridge, technology hacking, outdoor adventure and Portland. I'm afraid to accept any more of its recommendations lest I give it more ideas!

I can't find any way to turn off the feature. Sure, I could just ignore it, but...

I'm up to 61 blogs.

P.S. Extreme danger warning. If you do start using The Reader, do not click on this link:

if you value your time.

A few links for Ron

2010-03-28T09:11:00.004-04:00

I've been saving a few links that I thought would interest my skiing/biking/college friend Ron. Rather than email them to a single person, I'll get a blogpost out of 'em.

This "ski mountaineering" is an alpine/cross-country/hiking hybrid I've been wanting to try. (Endolphins over adrenaline, ya know.) I bought the skis for it a few years ago but so far I've used them only for cruisin' the groomers.
Ski Mountaineering Championships

A video for Ron's downhill-biking friend: Extreme downhill biking

Wow, a post involving Bill Walton. The fourth picture was the first to catch my eye. "That bike looks way too small for him." Then I realized it was a joke. He had swapped bikes with the little girl... compare to the third picture. I found this post about what a real Bill Walton bike looks like.

Speaking of biking Bostonian bruisers... with Slovakia as a bonus.

Spring is in the air; so is radio

2010-03-17T20:42:00.003-04:00

Today's homeward commute was the first one in months when I didn't have to wear long pants over my biking shorts. Ahhh... the temperature reached the high 50's. (I will have mercy on you by not posting a picture of my pasty white calves.) It was a great mood-lifter. I saw dozens of other cyclists on my way home, quite a change from the average of one I've seen for the past four months.

Actually yesterday would've worked too. Out of habit, I re-donned my winter tights for the commute home and realized halfway that the legs were getting a mite sweaty. Tomorrow I might even dust off my summer shoes!

Speaking of yesterday, I discovered that I can get my favorite local radio station (WMPG) on my iPhone. In the past I had tried small FM radios while running or biking but I couldn't get dependable reception. WMPG's signal isn't the strongest all the way to Cumberland Foreside, and those little radios don't have much of an antenna. Now there's a Public Radio Player app that delivers streaming audio from several hundred stations. I got consistent reception over my whole commute.

This is cool. Ten or so years ago there was a lot of futuristic-media talk about the "Negroponte switch." Long-time wired services (telephones) were going wireless and long-time wireless services (television) were going wired. Now we're taking a formerly wireless signal (radio), converting it to a digital stream intended for the mostly-wired internet, but switching again and delivering it over the wireless cellular phone network. All for my little commute.

iPhone thumb drive

2010-02-24T20:56:00.000-05:00

I came across this useful tip. The software worked for me in my first try. Lets me use my iPhone as a thumb drive... seems like the kind of thing that should be possible out of the box.

iPhone Explorer - Lifehacker

Nobody cares that you ski at Alta

2010-02-24T20:47:00.005-05:00

I got back from our annual ski-trip-out-west a couple of weeks ago. It was great skiing for us Eastern groomer boomers as usual, even though the locals thought it sucked as usual. I took an introductory all-mountain lesson and got my first small taste of powder and mogul skiing. (Side note to Mike Salisbury: This year I tried The Legends again and loved them again. This time they were the Dynastar Legends Sultan 85, the fattest skis I'd ever tried but they worked great on the groomers.)

I saw a bumper sticker on the door of the rentals shop that I liked. "Nobody cares that you ski at Alta"
It shows that Alta skiers can poke fun at themselves. I gotta turn that into a bumper sticker for my car. (I like bumper stickers that are such an obscure reference that only a few people will get it.)

Another sticker I plan to make:

I'll not spoil the obscure reference by telling you where the quote came from, but I'll tell you why it came to mind. I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Up in Alaska. It said, "My turn-ons are exploration, distance, and mule-like physical labor. In other words, I'm an endorphin junkie; I have little use for adrenaline." It made great sense to me. (In case any adrenaline junkies are reading this.)

Speaking of Altans poking fun at themselves, or needing to... Not a Traitor to Alta

That article's reference to Solitude also caught my eye. We heard Solitude recommended several times while we were out there at Alta. It sounds like the new in-place-for-non-in-place-people.

One more reference to Alta and the Peruvian Lodge where we stayed. The current issue of Skiing mag has this clipping. We haven't had the pleasure of staying in the dorm yet, but it sounds like a good deal.

Free books on iPhone

2010-02-24T20:21:00.000-05:00

I forget how I came across this. It's a pointer to a web site that offers free e-books that can be downloaded to one's iPhone.

Best place to find free books for Stanza? - Mac Forums

I found several titles that were actually on my books-wanted list beforehand. I'd been having trouble finding them in the local library or, in a couple of cases, finding them anywhere. Books that someone or some place had recommended.

Fight Club
The Forever War
The Last Lecture
On Writing
The Tipping Point (this one I'd bought and paid for last year but couldn't get into it and gave it away)

Spinning Edamames

2010-01-25T19:32:00.002-05:00

I watched a couple of Good Eats episodes during a home spinning workout last week. (Yes, that probably says something about my combined biker-geek-ness.) It was an entire show about the edamame. The Edamame Dip recipe was appealing, so I tried it last night. Especially since I had some cilantro and miso in the fridge. (Yes, that probably says something...)

It wasn't good. Harsh and woody and over-spiced. I threw it out. The next morning I woke up thinking, "How can I doubt Alton? I must've butchered it." Perhaps I didn't cook the edamames long enough... they looked more chopped than mashed in the food processor. And at the end of the prep I had discovered I didn't have any chili paste as I thought I did. Ah yes, vague memories of throwing the bottle away a couple of months ago. So I'd substituted half a chipotle. Bad idea.

I rechecked the web site's user reviews and they were all 5's! The very rare straight-A average. So I tried it again tonight. This time I cooked the edamames longer (6-7 minutes in boiling water, not 4 minutes in the microwave), omitted the chili paste, and food-processed it longer. Much better! My wife said repeatedly, "Oh man", while scooping it out with celery sticks. Recommended.

Mine still doesn't have the creamy consistency shown in the recipe photo. I think we need a smaller food processor. Or a pestle.

Make an Adjustable Car Dock for $2 - Cars - Lifehacker

2010-01-25T07:29:00.000-05:00

Hmmm... the geek part of me thinks this is kinda cool, but the biker part shudders.

Make an Adjustable Car Dock for $2 - Cars - Lifehacker

Gadget Review - Bar Mitts

2010-01-08T20:03:00.006-05:00

Bar Mitts are another item I justified for enhancing my winter commute. I learned about them from MnBicycleCommuter, a guy who commutes in a colder climate and with more consistency. He commutes every day, whereas I did only three days this week.

My excuses: Monday was the day after a significant winter storm and the road shoulders were choppy. I don't have a Pugsley the way he does. (I was tempted... I chatted about Puhsleys with the bike shop. If only there was a non-road trail that would take me close to work.) Tuesday was still a bit icy so I commuted on my studded tires. Wednesday and Thursday were clear enough to go back to my faster (relatively) 28mm Ruffy Tuffies. Fridays I don't bike-commute anyway because I have a kick-butt morning yoga/pilates class. I suspect that would be an unacceptable excuse in Minnesota.

I digress. The Bar Mitts actually work. They shield my hands from the wind well enough that I can get away with thin fleece gloves (my fall gloves) even when the temps are around 20. (I imagine I'd like them even better in a cold rain.) At the beginning of my ride my hands feel a bit chilled but by the end (30-40 minutes later) they're starting to get sweaty. Hmm, I just realized that might be because the metal handlebars have been chilling in a 40-degree garage all night. Maybe I should move my bike inside.

I definitely appreciate the lighter gloves for dexterity. A couple of years ago I was trying snowboard mitts (heavily padded and fingerless) and had trouble reaching the brakes in one scary little emergency.

Negative points:

When I tried wearing somewhat thicker gloves on a colder day I lost more dexterity than I liked. There isn't much interior space at the front end of the Bar Mitt and I had to push to get my fingers to the brake lever. I wrote to the Bar Mitts guy, hoping to exchange the Medium mitts for Large, but he said the large size wouldn't give more room in the hand area, only in the cuff/wrist area. "Keep using them and you'll find that they will belly out in the hand area. In the future I plan on giving more space around the hand." Oh well, I'm not sure I really needed the thicker gloves anyway. Especially not if my bars had been warm to start with?
They look funny. Cheryl at the bike shop called them "embarrassing". She must've meant for herself... it takes more than that to embarrass me. (If you see a guy wearing Frankenstein boots, an iPod remote on his right forearm, a helmet mirror, and a voice recorder dangling from his backpack... that'd be me. Hey, at least I didn't wrap my helmet in packing tape this year. If it's night-time and the bike has a mother-ship-blue DownLowGlow light, that's definitely me.)

Overall I give 'em a 7. Maybe an 8 if I had a much longer commute, or lived in Minnesota.

P.S. Speaking of the DownLowGlow... I find I seldom use it. For one reason, my work schedule is flexible enough that I don't have to commute in the dark. And it is kinda bulky. I recently read about this product that gives about the same visibility in a much lighter and cheaper unit.

Gadget Review - The Scosche iPod Remote

2009-12-29T22:44:00.008-05:00

A hard-core Maine-winter-bike-commuter (and gadget-lover, if that's not an oxymoron in the same sentence with hard-core) sometimes encounters problems with gadgets that were designed for the softer masses. Like the iPhone's touch screen. I postponed buying an iPhone or iTouch for years because the touch-screen didn't let me switch songs at high speed (cough) without looking at the device the way my old click-wheel iPod did. Finally I caved in to the iPhone's combination of music player and GPS. (Oh, yeah, and a phone. I forget 'cause it never rings.)

At first I adapted the iPhone into my incredibly high-speed lifestyle by adding wires. A cheap volume-control-thumbwheel extender cable from Radio Shack daisy-chained to a Griffin SmartTalk earphone adapter, cleverly snaked along my backpack's right strap. That was okay until full-glove season came along a couple of months ago, making those little wheels and buttons impractical.

The start of my dissatisfaction was an Instructable about how to sew your own iPod remote from conductive fabric. With big easy-to-mash buttons. I bought the kit. How hard could sewing be? After several frustrating, hunched-shoulder hours I gave up. Those tiny wires inside the thread are too fragile for these hands. (Conductive thread, my ass... fluffy wool yarn around skinny-thread wires.) I figured even if I got it working (which I did for a brief moment of coolness), it wouldn't be long before the wires would break. (From wind shear, for example.) But it was educational and got me looking for other solutions.

Enter The Scosche wireless remote. (The name appealed to me; my father-in-law used to call a small refill of his drink "just a scosh".)
It has the five basic controls I need: pause, volume up/down, and next/previous track. (Actually it has another couple of buttons for "Playlist" and "Shuffle" that I haven't figured out how to use, so I ignore them.) And the buttons are big enough that I can hit them with winter gloves.

The remote velcro-straps around your wrist. (Or handlebar I suppose. There's also a steering-wheel strap for the occasional cager day, but then the commute's too short to be worth the trouble.)

After a few weeks' use I'm happy with the product. It seems unaffected by the cold, unlike a competing Belkin product I've read about. I've biked with it in the twenties, and skied with it in the teens. It's not guaranteed to be waterproof but I had no trouble in a light rain coming home yesterday. (Come to think of it, I could probably wear it under my sleeve and still operate the three major buttons.) I have only two tiny quibbles:

* It's not designed to work with an iPhone; it has no mike. If you need that capability (people actually call you, and you can converse over the wind roar), stick with the original Apple earbuds or the SmartTalk adapter. (Good luck with the gloves.) When you plug in the wireless-receiver dongle you'll see a "not made to work with iPhone" warning. You can tell the iPhone to go into Airplane Mode (works for me), or dismiss the warning, or just be oblivious to it and it'll dismiss itself after 20 seconds.

* It took a while to get used to the buttons. I can't feel the tactile feedback (a little bottom-out click) with winter gloves on, and the command doesn't take effect until click-and-release. I've formed the habit of mashing on them for half a second.

Yeah, that's a really picky quibble, and there's a reason for the activate-on-release buttons. If you hold the buttons down for a second they do something different. Holding the next-track button does fast-forward. Pause does turn-off-the-screen, not so very useful. (Unless your biking buddies are making fun of your rear end lighting up?)

P.S. I confess that I feel somewhat guilty (un-hard-core? un-Mainer?) to spend that much on a remote control. In my defense, I have a long-standing albeit convenient rationalization that anything remotely (sorry) related to fitness is a good investment. And another one that the average vehicle costs $8,003 per year to own and operate, so I'm still way ahead of the game. (Granted, that would be more convincing if I was car-free. I flatter myself that I'm "car-light" since my 16-year-old Toyota logs fewer annual miles than my bikes.) Finally, this remote was cheaper than the sewable DIY kit if my time is worth a little over minimum wage.

P.P.S. I have some conductive thread left over, in case anyone wants to make touch-screen-compatible gloves.

Cartoon

2009-12-24T12:34:00.002-05:00

This "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip cracks me up. My favorite was a few weeks ago: Dunk Rye For Me.

And today's loser phone.

Year-Rounder Challenge

2009-12-19T20:08:00.007-05:00

Wring out the old! This year of riding is almost over, with maybe a couple more rides left in it. Amazingly, I've squeaked out my annual mileage goal once again. I went over the top (3,508 miles) on my studded-tire icy-roads commute last Monday. (The trick to squeaking out your annual goal every year is to set it on October.)

I'm looking for some new goal to play with next year. This week's Road Bike Rider newsletter talked about a "Year-Rounder" challenge organized by the UltraMarathon Cycling Association. Basically you commit to doing a century every month of the year.

Details: Every ride doesn't have to be exactly a century, can be only 90 miles if you can face yourself the next morning. It can be slow, 11 hours including stops. If you live in the far north (like MeBikeCommuter) you can postpone the rides for a couple of the months (say, January and February) to some much more tropical month (like March). Or if you're truly insane you can substitute an "indoor century" by pedaling six hours on your basement trainer. They don't all have to be organized rides; you can certify personal rides with store receipts and GPS trackings.

If you do all that you get the coveted "Larry Schwartz" award (a medal) for only $10. Can't beat that! Who's with me?

Name change

2009-12-19T16:20:00.000-05:00

I was getting tired of the old blog title. "Rare Weird and Benign" was an inside joke for the software developers I work with, but I never got around to discussing software arcanities here. If you think reading about biking is boring...

So, being influenced by this other blog MnBicycleCommuter I found by a year-round bike commuter in Duluth, Minnesota, I now call this MeBikeCommuter. Boy I'm clever.

Pictures from my commute

2009-12-13T21:25:00.010-05:00

Long time no blog. I have trouble seeing the point to it, since I have approximately one reader and he wouldn't check if I didn't email him a notice, so why not just use email? But yesterday as I was participating in the CCCP Second Annual Reindeer Ride, Tracey told me she checks my blog occasionally. Wow, two readers! So I'll try harder.

I've been following a lot of bike-ish blogs. Like this obscure one, Minnesota Bicycle Commuter. (Notice that this person Doug has the same taste in winter bike equipment that I have. Warmth over style any day.) He's made a few posts lately with titles like "Pictures from my commute". It struck me as an excellent topic. Posting pictures is easy to do, and it forces me to take more notice of my surroundings... which have been lovely this month with a sunset on almost every homeward commute. The snapshot to the right is from the north end of the Martins Point Bridge.

This one was a few minutes later on Baxter Boulevard.

I mentioned the idea to someone at work and he said something like, "Of course. Maine is known to have great light. That's why we have so many artists. Kind of like Paris."

Or maybe Minnesota.

Two pics of the Penobscot

2009-09-15T23:33:00.003-04:00

Two shots from the cool Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Bucksport.

Still more tips

2009-09-15T22:27:00.007-04:00

I was carrying paper cue-sheets that I'd printed from the MapMyRide site. They turned out to be unreliable in telling left from right. If there was an interesection where we needed to turn right, the cue sheet would say left about 20% of the time. Judging from the forums on the web site, this is a known problem.

On the other hand, MapMyRide had a fairly good route editor and it allowed exporting the routes to a GPX file. I could import them into the Trails app on my iPhone and that was what we relied on. The GPS tracking was always accurate, letting us compare our location to the imported route when we were in doubt. (I turned on the GPS tracker only occasionally because it eats battery life. The Mophie Juice pack worked well as a battery extender.)

This is where the moose had been a few seconds before. On Benner Road near Bristol.

We liked Rockland. The Captain Lindsey House was a very nice B&B. I also recommend the Bikesenjava bike shop. The shop had a dog named Moby that was a "foot sitter". Ron stood in one place with his feet slightly turned out, and the dog planted himself.

One last tip, probably the biggest thing we learned. Staying at B&B's was nice... scenic, quaint, nice people and all that. But their cancellation policies and scheduled breakfasts limited our flexibility. We couldn't decide at the last minute to stay in one place for a day (like Rockland), say because our legs were tired or in case of rain. If we ate the big sit-down breakfast that we'd paid for, we didn't hit the road until 9:30 or later. Next time we'll try plain old motels.

The end of the trip, on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor.

More tips from the tour

2009-09-15T22:02:00.004-04:00

I recommend Isabella's Sticky Buns in Freeport (photo at right) for a food stop. The owner is very biker-friendly (all his employees bike-commute to work) and the coffee is roasted in house. Best sticky bun I've ever had.

If you should have an Ortlieb handlebar bag... my baling-wire lash-up worked great. No breakage or slippage over 250 miles of sometimes bumpy roads.

In the last few days before the tour I changed my mind about using a rear rack and pannier, after I realized that the rack+pannier weighed almost as much as what I'd be carrying. (We had only two days where we had to carry our belongings from one B&B to another, so I was carrying only about six pounds.) I switched to a Vaude backpack (on the recommendation of a salesperson at the local EMS store, which I trusted because he didn't sell them), and it worked great. It has a ventilation gap between my back and the load to avoid sweaty-back syndrome, and lots of ajustability for a good fit. I've retired my trusty twenty-year-old LL Bean backpack, may it rest in peace.

AT&T's cell-phone service is crappy in large parts of Maine. I bought an iPhone a couple of months ago and I like it. Its other functions (GPS and music) worked great, but its primary function (being a phone) was useless because AT&T has almost no service from Damariscotta northward. Not even roaming agreements with other carriers... nothing.

I recommend the Mill Pond Inn in Nobleboro (more like Damariscotta Mills) for a B&B. It had the fewest conveniences -- no Wi-Fi, no espresso or morning paper (the owner Bobby Whear said "Hey, you're roughing it") -- but I liked it. Look at that mill pond.

Here's Ron relaxing at the mill pond after breakfast.

Lessons from the Coastal Tour

2009-09-15T20:56:00.007-04:00

Okay, I've been back from my epic (for me) tour of the Maine coast for more than three days and I haven't blogged about it yet. Why is that? I dunno... this whole blogging thing feels pretty self-absorbed. (Or as my daughter-in-law puts it, "PSA".) If I could've done nightly updates it would've been easier, but my iPhone got no cell service at all in the northern half of the tour. So here I am trying to write a story about it after the novelty has faded.

To avoid being totally PSA, I figure a blog should offer something useful. What did I learn that might be of use to someone else, even if only to the tiny niche of long-distance-cycling aficionados? Let's see...

Good weather is the most important ingredient of a good trip, although that's not much of a useful tip. We had a string of crisp sunny days in the 60's. On the last day it was a trifle cooler and we had to wear arm warmers.

The routes were very good. Their best feature was that they avoided Route 1 almost entirely, except for a 20-mile stretch between Bucksport and Ellsworth where Route 1 wasn't bad at all. They came originally from the Maine DOT site and I adjusted them to suit our distances. When we rode them we found a few more adjustments, and here they are in their perfected glory.

Day 1, Portland to Wiscasset, 52 miles. Only minor tweaks to this one. One was stopping at Marnee's Cookie Bistro in Bath. The other was ending at the Snow Squall B&B on Bradford Road in Wiscasset. The route from Brunswick to Bath was quite nice and I plan to do it again. The second nicest day.

One tricky point was at the end of the Bath Bridge. There's a dark little tunnel under the bridge that gets you to the north side without having to risk a left turn across Route 1. The DOT cue sheet describes it but it's still easy to miss. Look for the sign for the pedestrian underpass at the bottom of the hill after the bridge, just before Hall Street.

Day 2, Wiscasset to Nobleboro via Pemaquid Point, 51 miles. I don't recommend this route. For about ten years I've been saving a newspaper clipping that claimed the Pemaquid Point loop was the most beautiful ride in Maine. (Some people get so excited about a lighthouse.) The scenery wasn't worth the getting there. Every time we went down a coastal peninsula in Maine, the roads got narrow, shoulderless, crackly and trafficky, and Pemaquid was the worst of them. (Yes, Scott, you told me so.) On the bright side, we saw a moose.

Day 3, Nobleboro to Rockland, 49 miles. This was the nicest day. No problems (that I remember) with the route or roads. We noticed that people seem to be friendlier in northern Maine. Rockland was very nice and we would've liked to stay there another day.

Day 4, Rockland to Belfast, 37 miles. Lots of rural roads with not many people, one convenience store in twenty miles, and no cell service. No complaints about the road conditions or traffic.

Day 5, Belfast to Bar Harbor, 58 miles. A major adjustment here. (This route wasn't on the Maine DOT site and now I see why.) I tried to minimize the time on Routes 1 and 3 by coming down Route 230 and cutting across the island on Crooked Road. Nevertheless we ended up on Route 3 for the last three miles into town. Worst road ever. Cracks and potholes, zero shoulder and heavy traffic. I almost got hit by a car coming across an intersection in the last quarter mile. (In his defense, he had the setting sun in his eyes.) I got spooked an hour later just thinking about it. I asked the local bike shop the next day if there was some better way; he said there wasn't and that we were lucky it wasn't mid-summer. Exploring by car on the way home, I found a better way that avoids the last piece of Route 3 and that's what you see in the perfected route. Just in case I ever decide to bike into Bar Harbor again.

Duct tape and baling wire

2009-08-31T20:19:00.020-04:00

A few months ago I got an Ortlieb handlebar bag, in prep for the upcoming Coastal Tour (coming up next week!). I selected it because several touring-type bloggers recommended it, and yes, it is quite waterproof. The first day I tried it was the first day of the Trek across Maine... an acid test with 3 inches of rain. The stuff inside the bag did indeed stay completely dry. However...

The mounting system is brain-damaged. It's a screw-tightened plastic-coated cable that gets frayed as soon as you use it, making it nearly impossible to re-thread through the screw-holes if you ever remove it. You can see some of the fraying in the photo. Now, maybe once-forever setup is fine for some people, but what if you want to try a different stem, or merely rotate the handlebars, or just want to do a fast ride without the bag? I've already bought two replacement cables (paying as much in shipping as for the cable) and enough is enough. It's the kind of over-engineering that gives engineering a bad name.

Now I've lashed the bag to the bar with some baling wire I happened to have lying around. It's working fine so far, after several days of commuting over the increasingly bumpy roads. I tightened the set-screws onto the baling wire to keep the bag rigidly level, as solid as the original cable if not better. I do worry a little about the set-screws eventually biting through the thin wire, so I've added a safety net of two zip-ties (click on the photo for a close-up) to keep the bag from flopping onto the road in the path of my front tire if the wire breaks. Yeah, duct tape would've made a better story.

A lesser annoyance with this bag is the rattle. There are two snaps in the top cover for attaching a waterproof map case. (Yes, I bought one of those too.) Unfortunately if you don't have anything plugged into the snaps, they rattle. Over the increasingly bumpy roads and all. So... I picked up a pack of snap-fasteners from my neighborhood hardware store and made this lash-up. A couple of velcro straps I had lying around, snaps on one end to attach to the bag cover, rubber bands on the other end to tie to the cover's handle loops. (Actually not rubber bands but strips from an old inner tube I had lying around. Yankee frugality and all that... my opposite-reaction to the money I spent on this bag, I guess.)

Voila, a cockpit iPhone mount. The iPhone is removably attached with Velcro, in case anyone ever calls me while I'm riding. (Hey, it could happen.) The iPhone hasn't shown any signs of shaking loose after several days of bumpy commuting. I used a lot of velcro, about 6 square inches gooped to the back of the cheap case. I love Goop.

My touring partner Ron will be thrilled to see that I have another excuse to ignore the scenery while I'm biking. And not to stop pedaling to consult the map, or answer a call, or switch playlists. Now if I could only figure out how to attach a Bladder Buddy...

Lobster Ride

2009-07-26T22:11:00.008-04:00

I'm not ranting about biking and eating for a change. On Saturday I did the Lobster Ride century up in Rockland. (Well, okay, there was a lobster roll at the finish, best I ever had.) It was a very scenic route, much of it through tree-lined country roads with occasional ocean views. However, I'd still have to give the prize for most beautiful route to the Cadillac Challenge in Bar Harbor last fall.

The route was broken into two halves, coming back to the starting point after 50 miles. The first half headed north through Camden, the second half south through Tenants Harbor.

I enjoyed the northern route more. It had more of the tree-lined country roads and less traffic. This lovely pond came at mile 32 in the vicinity of Lincolnville. The sign says "Look Out for Loons."

The southern route had the theoretically more scenic ocean views, but somewhat more traffic and long stretches of no shoulder. Not too surprising for a narrow peninsula, I guess. It was cool (literally) that there was a fog rolling in, as can be seen in the photo at left and in the lighthouse photo at the top. The Marshall Point lighthouse had its light and foghorn going full tilt.

I was contented with my performance, averaging 14.6 mph with no problems or pains. But only contented... that's the same average I did on my first century six years ago. Hrumph. My excuse this time was that the route was somewhat hilly; bikely.com says the total ascent was about 5,000 feet. No mountains (nothing taller than 500 feet) but lots of rolling hills.

"Stop and Eat" cartoon

2009-07-18T13:13:00.009-04:00

No Tour de Menu ride this rainy Saturday morning. I'm planning to do a long solo ride tomorrow. I spent the morning piddling... backing up the computers, programming the new remote, making English muffins, catching up on old blogs. I came across this Yehuda Moon cartoon which reminded me of our strawberry-shortcake picnic. It's a great illustration of the Tour de Menu attitude. (That'd be us in the khaki shorts and the tiny cap. Does this mean we've gotta give up spandex?)

More tour than menu; Trails / Bikely

2009-07-12T09:07:00.005-04:00

Dave Clements and I did another Brunswick loop yesterday, another 57-miler. (We seem to be stuck at that length, three times in a row.) This time we tried a different back-road route that avoided Routes 1 and 9 completely. We started from near Dave's place at the top of Blackstrap, went up to Pineland Farms and then east to Brunswick by Quaker Meetinghouse Road. I really enjoyed the back roads, if only for the variety and minimal traffic. The beautiful day didn't hurt either. Coming back we took the traditional Flying Point Road leg which does use Route 1 for a bit.

We didn't do much eating this time. Only a coffee and un biscotto al cioccolato at the Little Dog in Brunswick. Dave even passed up the red-hot-dog stands; he's gone on a diet. This unexpected reduction in intake took its toll on me; at the 3/4 point I had to wolf down the emergency Payday bar I was packing. It was a great workout, toughened by the headwind on the way back. (If I was better at this planning stuff, I would've done the coastal leg in the morning; the afternoon forecast called for strong winds.)

I was playing with my iPhone's GPS to follow the somewhat unfamiliar route. I tried the built-in Google Maps app and an add-on app call MotionX-GPS. Neither would import the route that I'd pre-created on the web. You can create a route in MotionX, but setting a bunch of waypoints on the iPhone with finger-taps is way too tedious. Today I found an app called Trails that works much better. It will import pre-created routes from bikely.com (also highly recommended), giving you a useful view like the one at the right. You can even pop up an elevation profile for the route, as seen in the black window in the screenshot. Trails will also auto-record a route as you bike it, for later blog fodder. (While your music plays in the background. The only down-side is battery suckage with the continuous GPS.) .... So now I'm all set.

Another nice app is TrackMyTour. It avoids the battery suckage by not continuously auto-recording your route. You stop at each significant turn or point of interest and tap the 'Add Waypoint' button. The waypoints can be saved offline (with optional photos) until you get back home to annotate them and upload to the web.

Trails Bikely... wasn't that the rock duo that did "Crazy" a few years ago?

Urban tour de menu

2009-07-04T16:42:00.006-04:00

Our second Tour de Menu was a bit tamer. Only two of us, Gary and me, 56 miles. We thought about returning to the Brunswick Farmers Market, armed with spoons this time, but for variety decided to bike up to Yarmouth and join the Casco Bay Biking Club's regular Saturday ride. That ride headed back into Portland, so we ended up doing Portland-Yarmouth out-and-back twice. Next week I'll be wanting more variety. But, as the cowboy said after he ate the moose-turd pie, "Good, though!"

We turned it into an urban tour de menu. We stopped at Standard Baking Company in Portland where I had the best almond croissant I've ever had. (Gary thinks the fact that everything I eat on these tours is the best I've ever had, might be a sign of early Alzheimer's.) Gary says he had a terrific pizzette.

When we got back up to Yarmouth (for the second time) we stopped at the ice cream stand on the corner of Main and Elm, next to Andy's Handy. Chocolate milkshakes. Best I've ever had.

The other guy in the picture is Bill Jose, the ride leader.

Tour de Menu

2009-06-27T20:48:00.021-04:00

(It's been a long time since I've posted so I'll need a couple of paragraphs to set the stage.) At the end of last year I was growing tired of the racing-club attitude: riding as fast as possible from point A to point A with minimal stops. Over the long cold winter and some of the wet spring, I entertained myself by reading blogs from cyclists (usually on the sunny west coast) who had more of a riding-for-fun mentality. They were taking their road bikes exploring onto dirt roads or taking overnight camping trips. Sometimes with lots of time for eating, self-prepared or otherwise. One blogger even stops to look at flora and fauna.

I heard similar feelings from my friends Ron ("these clubs don't even stop to drink water!") and Gary and Dave, who were always partial to stop-and-eat anyway. We wanted to try long moderate-paced rides with multiple stops, usually for eating. We came up with the goofy name "Tour de Menu".

Today was the inaugural ride. Ron couldn't make it this time, but he challenged me, "You have to keep to the spirit of the thing. Not just two 30 mile sprints with a stop to wolf down some food." Dave, Gary and I were up to the challenge. We rode from Portland to Brunswick and back, 57 miles at a civilized average pace of 15 mph.

Our first stop was the Brunswick Open-Air Farmer's Market. Someone mentioned strawberry shortcake so we got that into our heads, only to find that nobody was actually selling any. We had to make our own. Finding strawberries was no problem... there were loads of ripe picked-this-morning berries for sale. We found a vendor selling shortcake biscuits. There was no whipped cream anywhere but we found an organic-dairy vendor selling creme fraiche so we went with that.

The hardest part was finding plastic spoons. None of the couple dozen vendors had any. One mentioned that they weren't allowed to hand out eating utensils, which is kind of weird. Finally one of the vendors, Debbie Cupo, came to our rescue. (She had struck up a conversation with us because she saw Gary's MS150 jersey; her husband is Joe Cupo, the Channel 6 weatherman and MS150 spokesperson.) Upon hearing our desperate plans to eat our shortcake with the broad ends of Dave's metal tire levers, she found some plastic spoons in her car. And a tablecloth and a vase of flowers. Instant picnic.

That was the best strawberry shortcake I've had in a long time. Certainly the freshest. Okay, it could've used some sugar; the creme fraiche was more like butter than whipped cream.

As we continued up to the center of Brunswick, Dave spied hot dog stands in the park. He had two while teaching me about the superiority of red hot dogs over those other pale tasteless plastic-covered tubes. Gary and I also had one, purely to keep Dave from eating alone.

Finally (only a few more blocks actually) we stopped at the Little Dog Coffee Shop for an iced latte and two smoothies.

We sat there for some time. (I confess that I succumbed to the temptation to connect my new iPhone to the free wi-fi.) Our real average speed if you include all the stops was about 9 mph.

Things I learned from this inaugural ride:

Carry plastic spoons.
Carry sunscreen. (Glory be, the sun came out!)
Carrying a little sugar wouldn't hurt.
It might be better not to put all the food stops within a few miles of each other.

Skiing at Snowmass

2009-02-16T20:53:00.010-05:00

Last week was the 11th annual ski trip with my old college friends, this time to Snowmass, Colorado. The conditions were great for us Eastern skiers. There hadn't been a powder dump for a couple of weeks so the place was fairly empty; the locals don't bother coming out for groomers. Notice the scarcity of people in the obligatory scenic shot at the right.

On the second day, 4" of snow fell during the day so I got to improve my skills on powder, shallow though it was. I'm getting better at the closer-feet, more-vertical-body stance that I'll need if I ever see real powder. It definitely helped in the mashed-potato-ey stuff. The fatter skis helped too... I was demoing Dynastar Legends because a friend at work raved about them. Or as he calls them, The Legends. They were great on the crud, they carved well and they were stable at high speed.

One humorous sight was at the top of one of the lifts. The liftie was sitting outside the control room pedaling away for hours. I think it was partially a way to keep himself warm, but also a visual gag as if he was powering the lift. Maybe he was trying to dupe us gullible people from away.

On the last day I got all full of myself (a.k.a. had a brain fart), took off from my group and went speeding down an ungroomed trail called Sheer Bliss. I turned left into an even less-groomed "trail" called West Face, kidding myself that I was starting to get the hang of this all-mountain back-country-ish skiing. Then I saw why it was called the West Face... the trail ended at what looked like an abrupt cliff. Properly humbled, I walked the short distance back up to Sheer Bliss. Well, it seemed short on the way down, but at 11,000 feet it must've taken me 15 minutes to get out. (Walk four steps, breathe for 30 seconds, repeat.) Here's a picture from when I got back to the top; notice the post-holes my boots poked into the snow. (Sorry, Western skier dudes.) Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the cliff very well. The cool thing was, I felt really alive afterward.

Yearly mileage

2008-12-25T10:01:00.003-05:00

This has been a great cycling year. I reached my ambitious goal of 4000 miles on Thanksgiving morning.

Actually I thought I'd blow past the goal with a whole month left to go, but this December has been very bad with ice and two snow storms. I've done only a couple of commutes to work for the whole month. My year's total is 4043 miles. (Not allowing myself to count the half-dozen indoor spinning workouts this month.)

Correction 12/31: 4075 miles.

A frustrating December. In the last 10 weeks I've gained back 5 of the 7 pounds I lost over the whole year. That's it... the holidays are over now, no more Mr. Sociable.

Couch bike and winter riding

2008-10-13T13:39:00.004-04:00

I've been talking up the idea of doing some light touring, a.k.a. credit-card touring. I've gotten a positive response from one person (Ron) to do a five-day trip from Bar Harbor to Portland next year. Maybe I could get other people to come along if I had a couch bike. (In Maine would that be a couch potato bike?)

Which reminds me, for some reason... I've been talking up winter biking too, even more seriously because I did it the last two winters (one mild, one cold) and had a lot of fun with it. Nobody is interested. What's up with that? We're living in Maine!

If anyone cares to try it, I recommend the weekend rides with Casco Bay Bicycle Club: Saturday from Yarmouth and Sunday from Gorham, both at 9 am. (See there, both daylight rides -- I'm not trying to sneak in night biking.) The rides aren't races (not as fast as the CCCP Monday nighters) but they're not slow either... they're similar to the CCCP Wednesday night rides. I'd say Sunday is a bit more challenging.

I also recommend the Col d'Lizard Powerstretch tights. This review on IceBike.com (scroll down one page-full) found them to be comfortable down to 10 degrees and I can confirm that to be true. Yet they're not stiff or restrictive-feeling, unlike other pants I've tried.

That review page also recommends Sealskinz socks, but I wasn't as happy with those. They're totally waterproof which is the good and bad news; my feet tended to get sweaty. Instead I recommend Lake winter biking boots. I love 'em. They're pricey but they should last for years.

Cadillac Challenge

2008-10-07T21:02:00.011-04:00

I did the Cadillac Challenge Century on Sunday. Well, the lesser 73-mile version of it anyway. (The organizers called it a metric century but that's a pretty hand-wavy metric conversion. I was calling it a furlong century.) It was a very hilly course -- 5,500 feet of climbing total, including the 1000 feet up Cadillac Mountain at the end of the route, of all places.

It was great. Best ride I've ever had. (That I can remember anyway, which narrows down the competition considerably.) I was accompanied by a group of five other similar-speed cyclists. The weather was crisp, getting up above 50 degrees in mid-day. The scenery was awesome, with frequent views looking down on brilliant ocean views. I didn't stop for photos, but here's one that a club member took at the top of Cadillac.

The 6-7% grade up the mountain wasn't all that bad. For most of the 3 miles I shifted down to my 30x25 granny gear and just ground it out, achieving an average pace of over 6 mph. I didn't bonk, as I did a year ago going up the Kancamagus, perhaps because I was careful to keep eating and drinking this time. (I gained a pound.) Measured in Bryan Bonk Units, the Kanc is more than twice Cadillac.

Fryeburg Frolic century

2008-09-21T19:38:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I had a satisfying ride in the Fryeburg Frolic century. It was only the second century I've done, the first one being the same ride five years ago. The first time ended with a bunch of aches and pains -- butt, soles of feet, shoulders, neck, and especially lower back. This time was much better in that regard... nothing hurt. So I've finally got a bike that fits me and is adjusted properly. I just thought I'd point that out to all the people who are amazed at all the tweaking I do.

The part I didn't like was Route 5/113 in the middle part of the route around Hiram, Maine. Too much traffic and too little shoulder. A tank truck went by me with inches to spare, and all I had to maneuver in was the width of a white line. I've been told there are frequent tank trucks on that stretch because of a Poland Springs warehouse nearby.

Well, okay, I learned something. (Aside from boycotting Poland Spring.) That route was part of the ride I had planned to take some day from Portland to Loon Mountain. The Fryeburg Frolic showed me a more back-road route that avoids almost all the highways. I mapped it out at MapMyRide. (I stopped mapping at the entrance to the Kancamagus... not much choice after you get on the Kanc.) The back-road route is a bit longer, of course... it stretches the distance to a nice round century. Maybe next year I can talk someone into doing it with me. A century with a ten-mile downhill at the very end... sounds like fun, right?

I haven't checked out the part just before the Kanc. Maybe I can avoid the last little bit of highway (302 in Fryeburg) by taking an alternative route on Brownfield Rd and 153.

Epicurean Cyclist

2008-09-07T21:44:00.002-04:00

I came across a new blog, new to me anyway, about medium-distance bike touring. I say medium distance because he's not trying to go across America, only as far as he can go in a day or weekend at a civilized pace. Love it.

Check out this great video of touring the English countryside fifty years ago.
http://epicureancyclist.blogspot.com/2008/08/another-train-video.html

Ron the cyclist

2008-08-10T07:31:00.005-04:00

(To my skiing buddies.) Hey, guys, be forewarned that Ron is already getting in shape for ski season. He bought a fancy new bike and came up to Portland for a ride yesterday. (Well, to be clear, he drove up to Portland and we biked after he got here.) We did the "four-lighthouse tour" of Cape Elizabeth and South Portland. Here he is at Higgins Beach. The total was 44 miles, impressive for a newbie.

I should've stood closer with my cellphone camera so you could see his "Polish Post" jersey with the screaming eagle. And his grin. (What did we use to call that kind of grin? I forget.)

Today we did another 21 miles for the biking club's Sunday morning coffee ride. Ron was keeping up with the pack pretty well, and was ahead of me for a few miles. Oh the ignominy. Jan says I've created a monster.

We have a long-range plan of touring the coast of Maine next year, one of those ideas that made a lot of sense after a couple of beers.

Trek across Maine 2008

2008-06-17T20:56:00.005-04:00

As I was hoping, I had a much better time on this year's Trek across Maine than the last time I did it in 2002. Knowing lots more people in the cycling community was the biggest improvement. Walking around Sunday River on Thursday night before the start, I ran into a about twenty people I knew from Seafax (sorry I didn't have time to take George up on his offer of a beer), from my CCCP cycling club, the bike shop, the Bicycle Coalition of Maine, and of course the good folks of my current Quantrix team. (See first photo.)

Another improvement was my fitness level. For the 120 miles of the first two days, I averaged 16 mph over the decidedly hilly terrain, 12% faster than last time. The second day, Saturday, was a blast... almost a "peak experience". I started out with the Quantrix team and then saw the CCCP team whiz by and hooked on with them. They were taking a leisurely day (for them) and I motored right along. Now, understand that the Trek prohibits racing tactics, like drafting in pace lines, and we did our best to obey the rule. About ten of us rode single-file but we stayed at least three feet apart to avoid the risks of drafting. Nevertheless one rider scolded us for drafting as we passed him. It wasn't intentional... it's impossible to hold a three-foot gap at variable speeds on a road's shoulder being used by about 2000 riders, and I suspect we appeared to be drafting at times. (I wish the Trek would worry more about enforcing the single-file rule, so we wouldn't have to go into the traffic lane so often to pass.)

The first two days gave us outstanding weather. Crisp, sunny and 60 to 80 degrees. The third day, however, wasn't fun, with a steady rain in the 50's. The best tactic was to keep pedaling and not stay very long at any rest stop. I was riding with Chris and Els of the Quantrix team who had three flats in the first five miles (as often happens in wet conditions). I'm not confessing my average speed for the last day.

By coincidence, this year's Trek followed the same Bethel-to-Belfast course as it did in 2002. The long hill near the end of the last day -- the one I labeled "Heartbreak Hill" when I wrote about it back then -- was far less memorable this time. I didn't even realize it was the same hill until afterward.

Finally, a big thank-you to all my contributors. The warm response was another big ingredient in the experience.

My ever-supportive wife took this picture as I came to the finish line in Belfast. She said the blurriness came from the rain on the lens, but no doubt my blazing speed must have been a factor too.

The Memorial Day notches ride

2008-05-26T20:19:00.010-04:00

Today was my first participation in the annual Memorial Day Ride put on by my cycling club, CCCP. I'll get the fussy little negatives out of the way first. I was the lanterne rouge of the group. I'm slow going up hills... slower than last year I think, gotta work on that. (Maybe I can use early-in-the-season as an excuse, although it was the same time of the season for everyone. I refuse to use the age excuse... such an easy cop-out slippery slope to the naugahyde recliner. Not to mention that there were one or two other guys my age. My extra 3 or 4 dozen pounds compared to some of those skinny-ass guys is probably the primary reason, but then again, there was at least one guy heavier than me. I could blame it on age plus weight... I know I had the record there. But most likely I just gotta work on it.)

But ya know what, I'm pretty happy with it. Definitely satisfied. It was a serious ride and a serious group of 32 riders. (I think I saw Rob Smith, Maine's ironman-triathlon king. And Dan Emery who did well in the Crank the Kanc time trial last week. And another guy Mike who somehow had done the Foix-Loudenvielle stage of the Tour de France.)

I averaged 14.4 mph over the 82.7 hilly miles, up Pinkham Notch and Evans Notch. Here's the map.

We had a nice view of snowy-peaked Mt. Washington on the way to Pinkham Notch.

This was a lovely old girder bridge over the Androscoggin River. It was at the end of North Road, a nice tree-canopied, low-traffic, undulating camp road from mile 43 to 51 on the map.

I'd like to thank the people who persuaded me to participate. Kris, Jim, Dana, Tracey, James and the club in general. Other than having achy legs (going to go do some yoga now to get the blood moving in them) and a sore gluteus (maybe need a new saddle?), it was a great experience.

Zen view

2008-05-24T14:29:00.005-04:00

Yeah, I know, it's been a long time since I've updated the blog. I'm having trouble seeing what the big deal is, unless I have something incredibly informative or entertaining to share with the world. If I was as funny as The Bike Snob, then I'd post regularly.

This morning's group ride (with the CCCP club, following the standard Prouts Neck loop) was quite nice. It appears that early summer has finally arrived in Maine... the temperature got up into the low 60's and a few of us actually removed our shells and gloves late in the ride. (Another way to tell that summer is upon us is that the "hi, do you have a minute for the environment?" kids with clipboards have reappeared on Exchange Street.) The sun poked through the clouds and Jim "joie de vivre" Heffren commented on the beauty of the scenery we were in. By the time I allowed myself to appreciate it the sky in front of us was overcast again, but I looked in my bar-end rear-view mirror and got this cool Zen-view effect of the still-sunny blue sky behind us. I whipped out my cellphone camera and took this shot.

(You can tell that I have a very high-tech cellphone by the way it makes my blurry-fast spokes look like they're hardly moving.)

So that was cool.

The annual boys' ski trip

2008-02-20T12:28:00.007-05:00

Every year for about the last decade, several old college classmates and I have been taking a ski trip. This year we're at Snowmass, Colorado, which has been voted our new favorite destination. Great snow, almost nonexistent crowds, large resort. Our previous favorite, Alta, has arguably better snow (especially if you're a powder hound but that's a taste we've not yet acquired) and low crowds, but it's not all that big and we were looking for some variety. If we really wanted some variety, the same Snowmass lift tickets would get us into three other resorts nearby, including Aspen.

The downside to Aspen/Snowmass is that it's a little harder to reach... it's a four-hour drive from Denver so we flew into some small regional airports (Aspen or Vail), making my trip from Portland a three-hopper. I'll omit the details of my 21-hour travel day after the first flight out of Portland was canceled.

Here are four of us: me, AJ, Mike and Ron. The fifth guy (Hoodie) is behind the camera. Damn, we're suave-looking dudes. In our defense, it's a bit chilly here in the morning, single digits. At mid-day it's up to the 30's and we'd be sweating if it wasn't for layering and pit zips.

Ron, me and AJ.

The first photo above is a shot of a 14000-foot mountain named Maroon Bells, taken from the top of the Elk Camp lift.

bike snob

2008-01-21T20:15:00.002-05:00

As long as I'm in url-review mode... anyone who cares probably already knows about this one, but anyway...

http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/

biking cold and long

2008-01-21T19:28:00.001-05:00

I still haven't gotten into the swing of this blogging thing, apparently. Is one supposed to post even when not much is happening, like a diary? Or, I read recently that the creator of blogging intended it to be only a recommendation of other web sites that one found interesting, like a URL review.

Hmm, well... on the diary front, I bike-commuted to work for the last two work days when it was about 8 degrees. A "P.R." of sorts, the lowest temperature I've biked in, albeit only for 2 miles each way. I learned that one can get a mild brain-freeze headache if one's forehead is exposed, so the second day I wore my ski goggles and balaclava. (One of the benefits of being a weird old geek, as Coach once called me, is that one doesn't care much how one looks.)

I did a group ride with the Casco Bay Bike Club on Saturday morning, in the 20's. (If two of us is a group.) The first few miles are all about temperature regulation... getting the gloves adjusted and letting the toe warmers heat up and the body's furnace stoked. After that it feels like you can go all day. We did only 22 miles (estimated, not odometered) but it was awesome. It felt like I'd stopped winter.

On the URL-review front... I stopped in at the bike shop on my way home tonight, partially to warm up and partially to show the shop owner my Down Low Glow light, also known as a "ground effect light". To get the idea, see http://www.rockthebike.com/lights/downlowglow.
But I digress... there was an interesting young guy, Ray, in the shop. He was talking about his upcoming cross-country tour this summer with his girlfriend. (I wish I'd had enough maturity to bike cross-country with my girlfriend at his age. Did anyone do that back then?) Here's his blog address, although he warned that it'll probably change to something better: www.rayandannabike.blogspot.com

2007-12-14T20:08:00.000-05:00

Mission accomplished. On my little two-mile commute home tonight I passed my 3000-mile goal. I've removed the odometers from my bikes. The goal was getting too obsessive-feeling even for me. (Now let's see how long it takes me to stop mentally calculating my mileage.)

Yesterday I biked to work at 5:40 am on my fixie when it was 15 degrees. My cheeks got a little nipped (my front cheeks) but I was having fun riding down the middle of the city streets with no traffic. This morning I biked in the aftermath of last night's snowstorm, with studded tires. It wasn't very much fun, to be honest. A biker makes the cars nervous (and vice versa) when the lanes are already narrowed by the snow. Avoiding rush hour was a better idea.

Lightening up on the exercise goals

2007-12-01T18:37:00.000-05:00

For each of the last six years I've biked more miles than the previous year.

2002: 1,170
2003: 1,712
2004: 2,232
2005: 2,246
2006: 3,080
2007: 2,940 so far -- planning to make 3,100

That's cool, but not exactly a "sustainable strategy", as the IBM executives used to say. I need a goal that scales better with age. I remember reading in a skiing magazine a few years ago about Klaus Obermeyer (a legend in the downhill skiing world) and his goal. He resolved to ski each year at a speed at least equal to his age. He admitted that he had a bit of trouble hitting 83 mph in his 83rd year. How cool is that?

So I'm thinking of a goal like "at least one ride longer than my age." It'll be a piece of cake next year (one 59-mile ride some time during the year) but it would be more sustainable. Like the book-promotion web site I found recently, saying "Ride a century when you turn a century." This shifts the emphasis more toward enjoying it and sticking with it. No more logging/slogging miles.

Soon after I had this epiphany (last night, to be exact) I was reading the latest issue of Bicycling magazine and its recommendations for firing oneself up for next year:

"If last year you were all about training, target heart rates, regulated cadence
and watts, this year strip your body and bike of all power-measuring devices."

That's it! I'm going to remove the odometers from my bikes.

Baby steps toward the new job

2007-10-29T19:14:00.001-04:00

I'll be starting with Quantrix in a couple of weeks, so of course I'm already afraid I'm falling behind schedule. In my spare time I'm trying to look at some of the important areas:

The Quantrix modeler itself. It might be nice to understand the product.
Swing, Java's desktop GUI library.
The OSGI plugin architecture.
GWT, the Google Web Toolkit.

Okay, to the modeler. The Quantrix site has a couple of nice multimedia "tours" that I've watched. I'm not the kind of person to watch 30 minutes of someone else working (this would normally be something I'd save to watch on a plane flight) but still, nice job.

On to the Quick Guide, a hands-on tutorial, more my style. By the end of it I've exported a model to an HTML archive. Even though it's only an export, it's a live view. The browser user can move the categories around and select from the filtering lists. Very cool. Maybe I'm easily impressed because I've never been an Excel maven, but still, it's very cool in terms of my usual software expectations.

That was a Microsoft-specific archive (MHT file). Alternatively, I can export to the more generic "Web page complete" -- an HTML file plus a folder holding the other pieces like images, stylesheets and javascript. Then I can do the same live-view manipulation in Firefox. Here's the result so you can see for yourself:
The exported result from the Quantrix Quick Guide

Try, for example, dragging the "Year" tile in the upper right up above the "Quarter" tile.

P.S. If you prefer the single-file MHT archive, you can still view it in Firefox. Get the "IE Tab" add-on.

Kank'n'Back

2007-08-26T15:36:00.000-04:00

One of my two biking goals for this year was to ride the Kancamagus Highway. Last weekend (August 25th) there was a club ride called Kank'n'Back. Start on the Conway side (or close to it, from the Covered Bridge Campground) and bike to Lincoln, NH. Eat something and bike back. Nothing to it, only 56 miles total. There is the small problem of a hill in the middle (2855' at the peak, which means about 2000' of vertical climb). One more small problem was a forecast of record-breaking heat. What the heck, we'd be starting fairly early in the morning (8 am) and it's cooler in the mountains, right?

Well, I did it. It wasn't the most fun thing I've ever done.

After the westbound leg to the peak I was pretty whipped. 15 miles of fairly steady uphill. Doesn't sound so bad now... that averages out to only a 2.5% grade, eh? I was sensible enough to take a few short rests on the side of the road.

At the peak I was considering turning back and going back downhill to the parking lot, along with a couple of other riders. (There were only six of us to start with.) But the day was fairly cool with complete cloud cover, almost looked like rain. One of the guys said he thought the leg we'd just done was the hard part... "it's the long steady uphill that gets you, and the leg from Lincoln is shorter." Besides, we'd stop and eat in Lincoln and rest up. I decided to go for it.

Going down to Lincoln was a blast. We three remaining guys were in a pack going like a bat out of hell for about 10 miles. My speed hovered around 40 mph but I could've easily gone faster. I was pumping my brakes because it felt a lot faster than that... there was a serious headwind blowing up the hill (is that normal?) and the wind noise kinda spooked me.

We ate lunch and headed back up. This is where I made my mistake... I didn't refill my water bottles at the deli. Heck, I had one and a half bottles left and it wasn't that hot... what could go wrong? Well, about one-third the way up the hill, the sun came out and I found I couldn't drink what was in the last full bottle. I had filled it with this fancy new soy-protein-energy drink that someone had recommended for long rides. It had gotten warm and tasted like warm chalky tofu drainings. So basically I was out of water. Did I mention the sun had come out? How about the fact that it was "only" about 10 miles of steady uphill in this direction, which made the average grade 3.8%. I don't think averages really capture the feeling here. I saw a sign warning trucks about a stretch of 7% grade.

I bonked. That's a highly technical term. (See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bonk but ignore the first definition.) I couldn't pedal another stroke. Oh the shame... I had to walk the bike almost the entire last mile to the peak.

[October 2007: I edited out the rest of the post. It doesn't seem nearly so interesting now. Besides, I've been told that what happened to me probably wasn't a "bonk" but a "blow up", when the muscles are just plain overworked. I'm not gonna refer to the UrbanDictionary for that term... I'd have to ignore almost all the definitions.]

Ron Kole wrote:

So how was it? Boston tied a record at 96.