Joel Hainley

At the beginning of May, after thinking about it for over a month, I went down and bought myself a bicycle. A Cannondale Touring Model road bike, unfortunately I had to order it because they didn’t have any in stock. Cannondale had some sort of problems getting the order out the door on time, due to a tardy shipment from a supplier so I didn’t receive the bike until last tuesday.

Once I had settled up with the bicycle shop, and gotten some adjustments made, i rode it back to the office, then rode it home. I’ve ridden to work every day since then, so i’m coming up on a week that i’ve been riding. It has been awesome thus far, I haven’t ridden in years, and to be able to ride a bike of this quality is a complete pleasure.

I ride to the BART station in Baypoint, and get off at North Concord ( the next stop ), the only reason I take bart at all is because there isn’t really a safe way to get to concord from baypoint on a bicycle. Something I hope they fix soon. This gives me about a 4 mile ride, for approximately 8 miles each day. A good amount I would guess.

It has been really nice, a great way to start and end the workday. I’m getting stronger already, my time to get to work and back is getting shorter and shorter, and i’m able to make it the whole way without requiring a stop. Something I couldn’t manage the first few days.

When I decided to buy the bike, the idea was to incorporate some exercise into my daily routine, so on that point I’m definitely making out. However, now I’m starting to wonder what it would take to get into shape for a century, maybe do a metric century or something. I need to get into a bit better shape before I could do something like that, but who knows. maybe i’ll give it a go at some point. Riding around lake tahoe would be fun, perhaps I can do that again ( the last time I rode around lake tahoe was on my 10th birthday )

Another oddity about this is that my chevron bill is going to be really skinny this month, I don’t think i’ve been to the gas station in over 10 days now, and I’m pretty sure that the last time i bought a tank of gas it was about $11 for the motorcycle. Gotta love it.

The short amount of time I’m on Bart doesn’t really afford me much time to read but that’s ok, i spend a good portion of the time on the train trying to catch my breath from the riding I just did to get there.

One rather odd point, my bicycle cost me more than my truck did. Go Figure.

I’ve been damned busy recently I picked up a new hobby, but this one doesn’t cost me any money.

“How’s that?” you ask.

I’ve taken to doing contract/consulting work in my spare time, it’s been a good bit of fun thus far, I gave my new business a loan and built a new desktop so that I could get started. I had it paid off within the first month and i’ve been getting busier and busier. I am still working fulltime for a company and doing this on the side, hence, a hobby.

I have no intentions of going fulltime with this endeavor at the moment, I enjoy where I work, and like the people, there’s little if any politics, and the commute is good. So I’m just doing this to keep myself out of trouble, not even for the money, i’m making plenty where I work now, socking an embarassing amount of my salary into savings.

I was motivated to start doing this in the beginning because I got to work with a good friend again on some contract work he needed some help with, and also to put a little extra money in my pocket. However, I have quickly realized, that while doing work on the side does bring in a good amount of cash, it give you less of an opportunity to spend it. In fact, i’m saving even more out of my salary than I was before because I have less time to spend it.

I have noticed a shift in the last few weeks though, my focus has shifted from the money i’m making to ensuring that I hit my deadlines, my budgets, and make my customers extremely happy. This has proved far more rewarding than the extra cash, although i’m not complaining about that either, but then again, i’m just putting that in savings too. ( I can’t help it, it’s compulsive )

I have bought some books I never would have bought otherwise, i bought Knuth’s TAOCP boxset and a few other books. It’s amazingly difficult to find expenses when you do computer consulting/contracting, aside from a sirius subscription, a computer, a network connection, and a phone, you just don’t need much to make a go of it.

Since a lot of my contract work thus far has been .NET development, I might get an intel laptop ( all i have is my trusty 12″ powerbook g4 ) at some point just to give myself some options when i get into crunch mode on a project, the local Panera bakery provides freewifi so I can get out and do some work outside of my bedroom on occassion. We’ll see about that though. Ok enough for tonight, I’m gonna go read before I hit the hay.

I’ve maintained daily mumblings for years and years now, before blog was a word, in fact, before Google, iPods, linux 2.4 existed. However, i don’t do that much anymore. Mumblings was maintained with xml, xslt, and java, and quite frankly that was getting annoying. I am often in front of a computer, but never have an easy way to get to mumblings to update it.

So I noticed a old coworker was using wordpress, and thought this might be a much better way to go about things.

Why not just call it daily mumblings : redux? Well I don’t really mumble anymore, i tend to just utter nonesense at random intervals. So I felt a name change was in order.

So there you go. We’ll see how this goes.