Joel Hainley : San Francisco Bay Area Software Consultant

There are a bunch of people I owe emails to, if you are one of those people, i’m sorry for the tardy responses. I’ve been “hiding” ( as Tina puts it ). I’ll try to get caught up on email in the next week or so. Reasons for hiding, you ask? I’m just gonna keep that all to myself, but thanks for asking.

I’ve been riding the bicycle regularly since the end of June and have now logged over 1000 miles. I rode 88 miles this last Saturday, not very hilly though. I’m preparing for a ride around lake tahoe ( 72 miles ) in october, and then the next weekend a 100 mile ride in the davis area. The training has been pretty straighforward, i’m no longer taking bart to concord, but am riding down highway 4 and getting about 18 miles a day of riding in. There’s a few good hills and some good flat stuff, so i’m getting a great bit of training in every day. I tend to push myself during the week, and then just go with what’s comfortable on the weekends. That said, I did 77 miles in a little under 5 hours on saturday, then met up with Amy in Pleasant Hill and rode back to Baypoint with her.

The century ( 100 mile ride ) in october is my big ride for the year i guess. I don’t think i’ll be doing any more centuries during 2006 but that could change. I’m going to pull back on my weekend mileage a bit, and try to increase my speed and do some more interval training on the weekends, but I also need to spend some time riding with Amy and help her get some mileage under her belt. That’s hard to do when i’m going out and riding 75-90 miles on the one day when she can go riding with me.

Some people have made comments about how fast i’ve been able to get back into high mileage riding, however I have a few responses to that.

1. I’m commuting to work every day ( or at least 4 days a week ) on the bicycle, and though it’s only 13-18 miles per day depending on the route, riding every day has a dramatic effect on your strength/stamina.
2. I’m not just riding to work, but pushing myself towards my limits every day of my commute. I don’t get a lot of miles on my commute so i’m trying to make the most of them by really pushing myself.
3. 100 miles is not really high mileage. It’s a good goal but it’s not that far. Look at the double centuries, randonneurs, brevets, Firecreek 508 and other high mileage rides. 100 miles is a great goal, and a good amount of distance for your first year of riding, or even your first 4 months back on the bike in 22 years.
4. I’ve been here before, i was riding centuries when I was 9 years old on an all-steel “girls” bike. It’s amazing what the body remembers, and how easily it jumps back into old routines.

Let’s see what else has been going on. I’ve been working on a C# windows application using windows forms for a client. I have been trying to figure out the best approach to using MVC in C#, the approach that I ended up having to use in VB6 is not really applicable/possible in the windows forms world. I’ve almost got it figured out but it’s required me to dig back into my texts and relearn everything i thought i knew about MVC. I might put together some more notes here when I get things where i’m happy with them.

Someone gave me a 14-day free trial to eve online. The game is really cool, but it’s apparent that one could lose a lot of time playing it.

Let’s see what else….oh been doing some work with Smarty on php, i kinda like it. When it was first mentioned to me, i didn’t see that it was terribly useful, and to some extent it wasn’t with the framework that i’ve put together for php, but at the same time, extending the framework and little bit and dropping it in there, makes the separation between developer/html-monkey that much clearer.

I’ve also been doing some work with Mysql5. I’ve used mysql for a few years off and on, written a bunch of apps on it, but have always thought of it as a hobby database. Postgresql is the clear big dog of the open source db management systems. However, mysql, for whatever reason, has a lot more traction, i don’t quite get it, but whatever. So i’ve been spending some time getting up to speed on mysql5 because it’s now starting to have some interesting features, although they are still FAR behind postgres on the extensibility front. Not to mention the command syntax for the cli is easier in postgres ( fewer keystrokes ).