rhymes with milk

I have a goal to ride 10 centuries in my life. Originally I was planning on doing them in 10 consecutive years, but that’s not looking good since my first and last century was in 2009. Despite having not done another century, I still did a ride this past weekend that I hold on the same level. Here are the numbers:

3 days
~140 miles
~10,000 feet ascended
minimum altitude > 9,000 feet 

It was certainly one of the coolest things I’ve done, and I’m really glad I got to be a part of it. I just wish I hadn’t fallen in a 5 mph meeting with a curb in front of 2 national champions. Lame.

Sat July 21, 2012 – Turquoise Lake

Sun July 22, 2012 – near Giberson Bay, Dillon Reservoire

Mon July 23, 2012 – just outside Copper Mountain

Bike maintenance. Apparently when you clean bearings that were coated in gummy-bear consistency grease, they stop squeaking. Good to know.

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I downloaded Lightroom today. I had it a few years ago and didn’t like it then. But today I saw a how-to video on timelapses, and they used Lightroom to do batch edits. It was pretty slick so I figured I’d give it another try.

The interface border-lines on cluttered, but only because it packs a million and half features all onto one screen. There are so many on/off switches, hover states/actions, buttons, icons, pulldowns, sliders, and menus. It’s almost overwhelming.

Its features are mostly split into two main categories: photo organization & storage, and photo editing. Most of the extraneous organization features are lost on me, probably because I’m such a casual photographer and I don’t have massive archives of images that need organizing. I don’t ever need to change metadata, add keywords, color-code, or otherwise categorize my images. In the past, the only similar Bridge feature that I’ve used is the color coding to mark to-do’s and potential come-back-to’s. Though I have no use for the rest, I can definitely see their possible usefulness. Just not for me.

As for the editing, the power is incredible. I’m still learning how to coax the look I’m going for out of the program, but a learning-curve is to be expected. Again, the editing tools border-line on cluttered, and I think that’s due to them all being available at one time in a single really tall sidebar. Each section of editing tools does expand/collapse, but that only makes finding the right tool harder. At this point, I feel like Photoshop Camera Raw’s tabbed interface is much more user-friendly. But maybe I’m missing something in Lightroom. Perhaps in time I’ll find the advantage of its UI.

I only ever hear great things about it, so I’ll keep giving it a chance. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Two awesome things blew my mind today.

1. Cyclemeter, the iphone app, is awesome. Tangent: I’ve been opposed to buying apps since I got my phone. I think I realized why recently. The money isn’t paying for anything tangible. I’m not even getting a disk with the software installation on it. I rarely pay for anything I download, so the concept is foreign to me. But I’ve recently realized the irrationality in that. If I get use out of the app, it’s worth paying for. I buy myself lunch at least once per week, and after tip I rarely pay less than $10. This Cyclemeter GPS tracking app is incredible, robust, simple, and useful, and it only cost half as much as my weekly lunch. The question of whether or not it’s a worthy puchase is a no-brainer, and I now see that.
2. The Google Earth browser plugin is awesome. I’ve never seen much point in having a separate application on my computer for what I can basically already do online, but now I can actually do it online. The fact that I can now see the Taco Bell at Baseline and Broadway in 3D — all in browser — is priceless.

It’s pretty cool seeing the correlation between elevation gains and speed changes. Sometimes the speed seems to inexplicably swing without reason, but over a longish ride like this, a lot of data has to be crunched into a very small space. Naturally, some of the info gets lost in translation.

Ally and I rode our bikes through campus, and stopped on Farrand and threw around a frisbee like hippies. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.

Outside of Anabelle’s apartment after a Glee night. I rode my bike here (somewhere nearish Foothills and Arapahoe) from the disc golf course in south Boulder in 12 minutes, averaging 18 mph*, which I thought was quick.

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Murder might take place here.

* Shouldn’t that actually be m/h, or even mi/h, but definitely not mph? We don’t say that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8 mps², right?

I took my bike’s brakes apart to clean them, crossing my fingers that I could put them back together. They save my life more than any other part of the bike, so it was pretty necessary that I restore proper function to them.

I think they still work…

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I took the dogs for a long walk, and Ally stayed home since she’s super sick with the streptococcus. I took pictures along the way and SMSed them back to her so that she follow us on our walk. It was the most excessive use of modern technology I’ve probably ever been a part of, but it was fun nonetheless. Also, any time I put AT&T’s resources to work makes me feel like I’m actually getting something for the ridiculous amount of money I pay them.

Here’s a thumbnail view of my walk.

I lock my bike next to this one when it’s rainy out.

A drunken homeless man fell asleep in the women’s bathroom at my office today.  A little girl in the middle of her piano lesson down the hall found him.  Turns out he wasn’t in too deep of a sleep though, because as soon as the sweet-old-lady-teacher went to investigate, he popped up from his place of slumber and bolted.  Those homeless guys can be fast when they want to be.  They’re kinda like crocodiles in that way, I guess.

I have no idea if what I just said comparing hobos to crocs is true.  Or offensive.  I didn’t intend on either.

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Sooooo today was Boulder’s official 2010 Winter Bike to Work Day.  Seeing as how I bike to work most days, today was just like any other except that I got a free bagel at Moe’s.  Thanks, Moe.

Btw, check out Moe’s favicon.  That’s how you know the site was built using Joomla, just like freedtvroom.com (guess who has two thumbs and did all of the content entry aaaannnnnddddd “designed” the facebook link on that bad boy. This guy!).

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A very awkward girl talked to me this evening on my ride home from work.  Because of the way the streetlights are timed, I always end up getting stuck at the NE corner of Arapaho and 28th.  Normally I wait on the small pedestrian island there alone, but tonight there was a girl standing there about 8 feet to my right.  I was not within her direct line of sight, nor she in mine, but for some reason I could feel her eyes burning a hole in the side of my head.  I refused to look back, but it was becoming unbearably awkward.  After the longest ten seconds of my life, I hear an oddly matter-of-fact “Hi,” almost like she had been expecting me to say it first or something.  I could practically hear how red and frizzy her bangs were just by the way she said “hi.”

“Hello,” I said back.  “How’re you?”

“I’m okay.” Super awkward pause where she just looks at me with half of a smirk playing across her mouth.  She then turned around, awkwardly looked at the moon, then mumbled something about it being a nice night.

“Yeah, it’s not too chilly for a bike ride, so that’s a good thing,” I said, trying to stave away the awkwardness.

“Haha!  Chilly is nothing for winter.  Chilly is nothing compared to frost!”

“Um…”

“I’m from Crested Butte.”

And thank god the light changed just then.  I quickly said “Have a great night!” and rode off, never to see her again, yet still surrounded by a cloud of awkward.

Want to know what I did today?  I took pictures of a $900 bicycle stem.  You see this guy?  Imagine an $885 better version.

I don’t know how many people know this, but I work for an online retailer of high performance specialty bicycle components.  One of the owners of the company I actually work for started it as a side project about a year ago, and though it’s not a huge operation, it’s a decent second source of income for him and it can sometimes take up a significant amount of our work time.  Though I do little more than product input into our e-commerce website and ship orders, I’ve learned a hell of a lot about bikes.  In fact, I’ve somehow become something of a snob about it.  I guess that comes with the territory of selling $150 skewers (the long pegs you put through your wheels to clamp them onto the bike).  If I see a bike and it doesn’t have a carbon fiber stem top cap that weighs 5g or less, I scoff.

Then I get onto my road bike, with stock components all around, and can’t believe how good it feels to ride it.  It glides like it’s on butter.  When I’m riding it, instead of wishing I had 18-spoke carbon tubular rims on it, I scoff at the people that would spend the two grand on a set of those.  My cheep-by-comparison aluminum clincher rims with their unaerodynamically shallow depth ride better than I could ever ask for.

Granted, if I ever actually rode one of those baller $10,000 all-carbon bikes, I’m sure I’d be singing a different song.  Maybe I’ll just avoid riding one of those for my entire life so that I’ll always appreciate what I have.

Anyway, despite my ravings about it’s awesomeness, my road bike sucks in weather.  I’d never take it out in any kind of precipitation, and it’s tires are slippery (as if they were riding on butter?) so any moisture/ice on the ground is liable to kill me while I’m cornering.  Anytime it snows, I have to stay off of it for a minimum of a week until some of the ice has melted, and the paths and sidewalks aren’t so wet.  Typically during that time I ride my 10-year-old mountain bike which is durable enough to take all the beating and weather I can put it through, and crappy enough that I don’t care if it literally explodes while I’m riding it (idk why it’d do that…).

Unfortunately, though, it’s been going through a tough time these last few months.  The shifters were starting to crack, which is unsurprising since they’re entirely plastic and they often take heavy abuse.  The cable tension started making them slip out of place, allowing the derailer to shift the chain from cog-to-cog, making smooth riding very difficult.  I’d have sore hands after any length ride because I’d have to hold the shifters so tightly to keep them from slipping out of position.

So the natural solution: tear the shifters off the bike.  This caused a chain reaction that resulted in me deciding that the bike should be a single speed.  Without shifters, the derailer isn’t going anywhere, so the chain is always going to stay on the same ring (hence single speed).  This makes the entire cassette (except for the single ring the chain ends up on) just dead-weight (and since I’ve become a weight weenie by association, I won’t allow a single unnecessary gram to be on my bike).  Might as well lop the derailer off while we’re at it.  Then in the front, the middle chain ring has a bent tooth that causes the chain to slip off, so we’ll get rid of that one.  The small chain ring on a mountain bike is so damn small it’s useless unless you’re climbing 45° inclines, so that’s gone.  Front derailer: gone.  All associated cables: gone.

Unfortunately, half way through working towards this, I realized that bikes were made with very specialized tools, and therefore need very specialized tools to take them back apart.  All the tools that I need would end up costing me more than all of the materials I had to buy to make the conversion.  Eff that noise, bra.  So now my bike is laying in pieces (but not the pieces I want it to be in) and all of the parts I took off of it are too destroyed to put back on.  So now it’s single speed or bust.

Since I work with some actual bike enthusiasts (not just posers like me), naturally they have all of the necessary tools and should bring them in for me in the next few days.

Um… that’s all.

There’s no moral to this story.  Any of it.

Welcome to the new year, the new decade, and the new Rhymes With Milk.

This last week has been full of reminiscing over the past ten years: the tragedies (9/11), the mistakes (Bush), the triumphs (Jon & Kate are off the air). Everybody has been very negative about it because they’re so fixated on all of the things that have gone wrong, so I’m done listening. I’m going to start looking forward, because this is bound to be a big next decade for me. I’m going to be my mid-thirties by the end of it. I’m probably going to be married, and have children and a mortgage. Who knows if this blog will still exist, but I sure hope it does.

In that vein, I’d like to layout some goals here. Not for the decade per se, a little more short-term than that, but still for the sake of posterity. Maybe on Jan 1, 2020 I’ll look back at this post and make myself feel sad about loosing my youth or something. Whatever.

Beyond posterity, I’m doing this for a few other reasons. I’ve set a lot of personal goals for myself over the last few years, and many have fallen horribly by the wayside for one reason or another. I’m hoping that publicly declaring them makes me more likely to pursue them. It might work, or it might not, but it’s worth a shot. Also, having a job has understandably distracted me from my personal life. I have fallen into a routine that essentially erases my weekdays, and makes me too tired on the weekends to do anything. For example, I have been “working” on this revised version of Rhymes With Milk since around August, and most of it got finished before I got my job and during my 4 day Thanksgiving weekend. It shouldn’t take me that long to do a relatively simple* website design, especially when it has been the top priority of my to-do list for that whole time. If I plan to get anything done ever again, I need to force myself to find the time to do it.

Anyway, here go the big ones:

1. I want to ride my bike. A lot. I am declaring it now, I am definitely going to ride all 120 miles of the Triple Bypass on July 10th. I’d also like to do the 100 mile Centurian the following week, but their website has too little info so far for me to be sure of that just yet.
2. I want to blog. When I stopped back in April 2009, I hated blogging. I stopped the Daily Picture Project, then I haphazardly put together an ugly and difficult to manage photoblog here on rwm which just drove me away from it altogether. These last few months, though, I’ve had a lot to say and nowhere to say it. Not that I have grand ideas that I think the world needs to hear. I just didn’t have a medium for exploring and processing subjects that I was interested in, or a place to record memories. This comes back to that posterity thing I was talking about earlier. I’d like to remember this decade, so starting today, January 1, 2010, I would like to start blogging, regardless of the fact that this site isn’t complete yet (just do me a favor and don’t go to the About or Contact pages. Or the permalink to this post. Or the archives. Well, actually go to the archives because they’re pretty cool looking, but ignore the fact that they don’t flow well with the rest of the site. And ignore the link colors in the archive, which I messed up somehow. I’ll have to fix that. If only I had the time…)

   UPDATE: I just made a small adjustment to the archives and now they’re all outta whack. Don’t bother going there for a while…

*I’m just going to say right now that this website was actually a bitch to make, I learned a lot, and it really stretched my abilities, particularly in the realm of WordPress PHP programming. I didn’t add anything too particularly complicated compared to “real” WordPress themes, but I went into it knowing hardly anything about the WordPress back end and coded everything from scratch.  There was a lot head scratching and “What the hell is this stupid loop everybody is obsessed with?” talk for the first month or two. Oh how naïve I was.