Joel Hainley

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 ).

Been dealing with a lot of personal crap recently, attempts to push through them didn’t go as well as one could hope for. This resulted in me going into what Tina has referred to as “hermit mode”, things are a little better now but i’m still mostly being hermit boy.

I made a choice last week to ride my bicycle around Lake Tahoe on my birthday this year. My birthday is in early October so this should give me enough time to train. I currently ride minimum of 12miles per day that I work, but I’ve been taking longer routes home and approaching 80 miles a week of riding going into the weekends.

Doing a good amount of mileage during the week it was time this weekend to get out and do some real mileage on Saturday morning to get my body used to long distance cycling again. I left at 7am on Saturday morning and 4 hours later was back home with 55 miles ridden for the day. I promptly went back to bed and slept for a few hours, and spent the rest of the day recovering.

Sunday morning, went to town and got a coffee, wandered around Fry’s ( haven’t been there in months ) then fired up the Harley and went for a ride out in the delta. Found some neat backroads, then headed for the Riverboat for a pint or two of Newcastle. Headed home the long way then took grandma out to dinner and spent some time playing some board games with her and just hanging out. Watched a couple of movies and went to bed by 11pm.

I bought a book of logic puzzles and have spent a little time working on those, some of them I do really well on others i can’t seem to get out of my own way, but they provide a bit of entertainment while eating breakfast in the morning. I’ve been trying to eat breakfast every morning ( i’m not a breakfast person ), and i’ve been reading magazines and doing puzzles instead of reading novels to try and give my brain a little more diversity and a little bit of exercise. The exercise is not helping, brain is still a lethargic mess but one can’t blame me for trying.

I was supposed to see an old friend a couple of weekends ago, but events conspired against me and the drunk idiots I was with wouldn’t leave the bar so I could get to my motorcycle and go see her. Totally sucks. I guess I shouldn’t expect much when hanging around with alcoholics though.

I had some contract work to get finished up this weekend but damned if I couldn’t get my brain to cooperate on saturday. I tried to work for a while, couldn’t get a rhythm going, so I jumped online for some poker, and that wasn’t really interesting either. I went back and tried to work again..getting nowhere. So I finally gave up and grabbed a novel and read till 3am.

Sunday morning, I got up and got to work first thing in the morning, no problems getting into the zone to do some work, took a break for lunch and worked till about 11pm, completing the project. This morning I got up, made a few client requested tweaks and sent in my invoice. Contract fulfilled…project done…wooohoo!!!!

So saturday was a complete bust, but sunday more than made up for it. Overall I guess I can’t complain.

Friday night I went out riding with a buddy, hitting some of my favorite bars out on the delta. That was a good time, we made it to the Riverboat for a couple of pints of Newcastle then out through stockton and over to Union Point for a couple of coors then headed home. The weather was perfect for riding, and we even got to see some fireworks going off in Brentwood on our way home.

Tonight I have to get back to some of my other work that I have sitting out there waiting for me and, and I also owe some people an email about some coding they need some help with as part of a sweat-equity deal. That could turn out to be a lot of fun. I understand from the guy that put us in touch with each other that they are looking to be using Ruby/Rails for this project.

Simply Alerts is slowly coming back to the front of my task list as well. I have the perl backend done, and am just trying to workout the details of the administrative/customer UI. Once this is all done i’m going to be setting up a server and launching this product for real. Andrew has expressed some interest in learning Ruby/Rails and has bought the book, installed linux, and started learning, so there’s a good chance he’ll be helping me with some development, as well as learning the ropes of how the whole system works so that someone can watch it for me when I go on vacation.

Well that’s about all i’ve got to say at the moment..time to get back to work…

On Saturday, Amy and I got up, ran some errands, then hopped on the harley and headed out towards Pine Grove to see a good friend of mine. His daughter was having her second birthday, and most of his family would be showing up. He has 5 brothers and sisters so when they have a gathering even if just the immediate family shows up with their spouses it’s a frenzy. ( to use a term made famous by a man who goes by the handle p-dawg ). I’ve hung out with almost every one of his siblings at some point or another, and have known the collective family since i was around 12 years old, so it’s always a lot of fun when we can all get together.

We headed out the back roads through pittsburg/antioch and as we were approaching Hwy 160 the traffic over the Antioch bridge was backed up quite a ways..looking more like a parking lot than a highway. We had no desire to sit in traffic, so we just went out Hwy 4, stopped at Union Point for a beer and to people watch for a bit, then back on the bike until we hit Pine Grove.

Every time I go to the foothills i’m immediately amazed at all of the gorgeous land for sale, and the prices of the land and homes up there. Then I realize that it’d be hard for someone like me to find work up there, so it squashes any aspirations I may have of moving to the hills. Although it is a fantasy i enjoy indulging, the foothills, the mountains, the high desert along 395 somewhere, all of those places call out to me when i’m there. The quiet, the solitude, the simplicity of life. Then i remember i have to make a living and the fantasy i’ve built up starts to form fissures and slowly slips back into the sea of reality. Oh well.

Someday, if I keep working my ass off maybe I will be able to build up enough clients, investments/products/etc to be able to escape the bay area rat race and get up into the Sierras. At the very least, that’s the thought that gets me up in the morning and keeps me going on some days.

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.