Joel Hainley

I ordered a Motobecane Messenger last week from bikesdirect.com, it was half-priced through the end of January, couldn’t pass it up. The reason for the bike being that I wanted something I could leave in the bike rack at the school when I went to class. I wasn’t comfortable leaving my Cannondale locked up sitting out side with the Brooks on it, for hours on end. This seemed like a good compromise and it allowed me to buy a fixed gear, something i’ve had a fascination with over the years.

The first ride was rather shaky, but i quickly got myself able to start, stop on the bike ( no track stands just yet ). Then I stood up on the pedals and rode up to the top of the street, tried to coast and it INSTANTLY reminded me that coasting is for wimps. Then headed back down the hill and got used to the idea of using my legs to slow the bike. The bike came with brakes which, while not being “pure”, is a necessity for me.

Once I had acclimated to the bike, I made sure that things were screwed down and tire pressure was good and headed to work. Got to my first sizable hill and really had to dig in to get up the hill. Once at the top of the hill there was a nice stretch of road and I was able to start hammering and the bike responded instantly and took off faster than Barbaro ( RIP ) on EPO.

I made it to work, then to class, then home without much incident, a few spooky moments as I am not used to riding a bike you’re not allowed to coast on, but overall it wasn’t bad, in fact, it was kinda fun. I can see why people get addicted to them, they have a different feel than a regular bike, a really connected feeling.

I am trying to get myself in shape for a century in March. This can sometimes be difficult with all the rains/cold weather during this time of year. I have to remind myself that a lot of people ride their bikes to work in the snow, then remind myself that I live in california so I don’t have to suffer like that.

I haven’t been eating as many carbs for the last few weeks and it’s had a huge impact on my riding. ( no i’m not on a low/no carb diet, i’ve just been eating less overall, but i think it’s the lack of carbs that’s killing me ) Basically i’ve felt like a slug out on the bike the last few weekends. I only rode 45 miles last weekend, over Kirker Pass Rd, through to Walnut Creek, then up to the junction on Mt. Diablo and back down. I rode SO SLOW.

This weekend wasn’t much better, I started off at a better pace, but by the time I got to Morgan Territory I was beat, and only made it 3 miles up the south side before I realized that I had better reevaluate my plan because I was heading for a 100 mile day if I stayed true to the plan I made when i left. Now this didn’t scare me that much, but it would mean that there’d be a lot of riding done in the dark because I didn’t get started till late and I wasn’t riding too well. So i abandoned the plan. Ended up with an 82 mile day. The strange thing was that at about mile 63 out of NOWHERE came “the freight train”.

The “freight train” is a term I used as a kid when i’d be on these LONG rides and I’d be pushing a headwind, uphill, and have to get into the drops and pedal my ass off for a few hours. It’s just making the pure effort, no thought about when it’s over, you’re just a machine beating the hell out of the pavement, and the wind.

Anyways, most times that i have these days where I feel like a slug I can actually get myself into a state, fire up the “freight train” and start eating miles. The last two weekends it’s been rough.

I’m tired, and blithering so i’ll shut up now.

2006 ended about 15 days ago and 2007 has begun.

I’m finding myself rather busy this year, with a few different things going on.

1. I’m doing my first century of the year on March 03, 2007 in Death Valley. : i’m feeling like i’m in decent shape for this but i’ve got to keep working. Amy got me a stationary trainer for my bicycle for the days that it’s raining/etc and I need to get some training in. I have ridden the bike to work in the rain, but it seems to be really hard on all the components so I’m not sure whether i should/will continue this. The trainer allows me to get a fair workout in when the weather doesn’t cooperate.

I did my first 50+ mile ride last saturday, it felt good to get out there and push a bit. I can definitely feel a difference from my first 50+ mile ride in the summer. I’m stronger and my body is quite used to the riding now. I picked up a brooks saddle after the Davis Century and i REALLY like it. Its hard as a coffin nail, but i don’t have the chaffing problems i had before during a week of commuting.

2. I’m taking a class at DVC this spring: I was talking to an old friend and she asked me “what are you gonna do when you retire”. I thought about it for a moment, i’d never considered the question before, and replied “I think i’d like to go get a college degree in something”. This stuck with me for a while, and one day i kinda realized, well i don’t have to wait till i retire to go to college, i could just take a class or two a semester and enjoy the process i don’t have to get into “school mode”, and quit working etc. So starting this spring i’m going to start working through my general education requirements. I declared my major as Mathematics when I applied, as I’d like to throw myself at something that isn’t directly computer related but is applicable if necessary. Plus i’ve always wanted to be able to understand the math in Knuth’s books.

3. Looks like i’m going to be making a go at climbing Mt. Shasta this summer. I’ve talked to a couple of people who are also interested and it looks like it’s a go. So after the Chico Wildflower Century on April 22, i’m going to switch over to hiking mode and get ready for that. Probably do some hiking up in Yosemite, Sonora Pass, Mt Diablo to get prepared for that effort. Should be a good time and definitely a clear goal. Either one makes it to the top, or one does not.

4. Contracting stuff continues to grow, lots of work to get done in the first month of the new year, going to be a bit of a challenge to balance everything out but I’m hopeful that I can keep everything moving forward. I would like to be at a point where I can do contracting part-time when/if i get accepted to a 4-year institution.

5. SimplyAlerts.com is slowly being finished, going to get this completed in the first quarter and hopefully I can get some interest in it. If not, well, i’ve learned a ton about php, smarty, perl, postfix, postgres, etc. It’s comparable to the functionality provided by redalert.com, or will be, and i have some cool ideas to implement once the base is in place that would make it MUCH cooler than redalert, and i think i can offer it cheaper.

I was doing some work for a client this weekend and needed to resize a photo. I dusted off the picprep source, built the app, and did what I needed to do, but i noticed an odd problem in the way it worked. So i earmarked that for further investigation when my work was done. Sure enough, when I got some time to look at it in detail there was a bug in picprep, and it was a kinda major bug.

I know how it made it this long without being discovered, the bug only shows up when you are working against single files, and not doing appending of characters to the output filenames, but i should have caught this a lot sooner. I fixed the bug, and then started looking through the rest of the source and found some interesting things in my notes about this project. I had mentioned that I would port this to linux at some point. However when i looked at the source, it had been ported to linux ( i think i did this one morning when shad needed it, and forgot to package it up for general release ) So the application now runs natively on windows/osx/linux, pretty cool on that deal.

I thought of a couple of features that I could use in this product so perhaps when time allows i’ll add them they include :

• rotate process : the ability to rotate images would be nice
• collage process : the ability to point picprep at a bunch of image files and have it turn them into a single large file would be nice. this would include the ability to generate an image map coordinates file back to the original pictures such that you could drop the resulting image and coords onto a webpage and have a interface into the pictures
• command files : it would be convenient to be able to save a set of operations into a text file such that if you were always wanting to process files in a particular manner you could just drop them into some directory and then say “run these commands on this directory”. The thing about picprep is that its processes are discrete operations such that if you want to rotate, add border and then create a collage that is three seperate commands that must be issued to picprep in series, having the ability to create command files for multi-step operations would obviate the need of ways to chain the operations together internally.
• border process : i haven’t looked into this but i’ve seen a bunch of images on the web where people add a little white border around their photos, I guess to give it the polaroid instamatic touch. It might be kinda nice to be able to say “add border to these photos”

I’ll probably spend some time on this when I need a little bit of sanity in my life. The myndkryme website has been down for a while not sure why, haven’t talked to the ISP about it yet. So if you want new builds of picprep ask me directly here, and i’ll get them posted somewhere where you can download them.

Went to Stanford in December to watch a Knuth lecture. It was interesting, he kept the heavy math bits out of the lecture so i could understand it. ( well not so I myself could understand it, but as a consequence of him keeping the math bits out, i was able to understand it. )

I’ve been slowly reading through his MMIX paper, it has been interesting, although i have had to take detours to understand some things that he takes for granted.

Shad sent me this today :