rhymes with milk

If you zoom in really close between miles 19 and 20, you’ll see a little jog in the line. Not coincidentally, it’s right next to a ditch. It was dry before I got to it.

I have a goal to bike 5000 miles in a single calendar year, and I’m tracking my progress in the RWM Sandbox. The number 5000 is pretty arbitrary, not some holy grail number for me or anything. One day I was talking to my boss Nico about what kind of millage he puts on his bikes every year. He said that he doesn’t keep track anymore, but suspects that it’s somewhere in the 10-12,000 mile range. That’s a goddamn shit ton of miles. So I thought to myself, “It would be thoroughly impressive if one day I rode even half as many miles as Nico, Biker Extraordinaire,” and committed to making an attempt.

So far, things are not looking good. Of the 31 days in January, I’ve either been sick or snow has covered the ground for about half of them*. And of the remaining days, the majority have been freezing cold, I’ve worked all day and have had to commit to riding at night, or I simply just didn’t have the time to ride. Things are looking bleak already.

Excuses aside, I actually think this challenge is going well and I’m having fun tracking my progress. I recently joined a gym that prides itself on catering to bicyclists, so I’m definitely getting some millage out of their stationaries. It might be cheating just a little to include stationary miles, but let’s be honest, I need as much help as I can get. 5000 is a big number. That’s 96 miles PER WEEK.

Anyway, there’s a screenshot of January. Let’s see where I get to by the end of this month. Hopefully I add more than 67 miles, but I won’t be disappointed if I don’t. I figure numbers will start to skyrocket come springtime.

* Even when the weather turns around and starts melting the snow, I still can’t ride much. I try to stay off of wet and icy roads with Sven as much as possible, and let’s be honest, there’s no way I’m riding 5000 miles on just Helga. She’s a little too big-boned for that.

Yesterday Dustin and I bought used tennis rackets and played until the sun set. We were in tshirts/shorts the whole game. Today, 24 hours later, it’s 1°F outside. Crazy Colorado and your wacky weather.

Because deforestation at the hands of a pirate makes so much sense.

prompt

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? #

response

I think the word “community” is thrown around way too much by the new media crowd. It seems like the new word used to gloat about how many followers you have. I don’t consider myself to be a part of a community, and I don’t necessarily plan to.

prompt

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? #

response

I help make the internet. The last bit of it that I made was I Am The, a ripoff of another site I saw and thought sucked. I went into it knowing that it involved a number of problems that I didn’t know how to solve, and I was able to figure them out. I was pretty proud of it.

My next project is about 20 times as large, 20 times as complicated, and I have even less idea about how to implement it. Last night I bought a new domain name* to test it out on, and new server space over at Linode. Setting up that server alone was an incredible accomplishment for me (I’ve always been with HostMonster and only used their cPanel interface to set everything up…I’m ashamed to say that I know very little about webhosting), but I can’t take full credit for it; Linode has so many tutorials and step-by-step guides that they essentially hold your hand through the setup process. I’ve never used the command line cumulatively as much as I did last night. It feels like such an amazing accomplishment when you set up your own server, install your own LAMP on it, and see Apache’s default “It’s working!” page live on the internet. It’s an even bigger sense of accomplishment when you point your domain’s nameservers to your new IP and see it rendering the content you just added via SSH.

Holy balls, I geeked out hard last night.

* All 4 letter (not character) dot coms were taken in 2007, and there’s a good chance that somewhere near 99% of all 4 character (includes hyphens and numbers) are taken. My new domain is a 4 character dot com, and it isn’t gibberish. It has a 3 letter word followed by a number. And I only payed $10 for it. I can’t even tell you how stoked I am for getting that. Somebody had previously owned it, and let it expire…yesterday. I found it on an expired domain names list, and immediately snatched it up. Hell yes.

prompt

What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? #

response

I let go of photography. I’ve been busy, and I’m forced to be indoors during the only 40 hours of sunlight during the weekdays. To commemorate the loss, here are some photos I took around the Bear Canyon hiking trail yesterday.

See if you can spot the deer in the second photo. The original sized image might help, but I doubt it.