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Wibblelog

It rained!!!

July 19th 2007 Posted in biking, weather

It rained!!!

Well, 0.05 inches, at least. Who knew it could rain in July in Silicon Valley? I guess five hundredths of an inch was enough to cause a huge power outage in the east bay. Amusing.

I know why it rained, though. It rained because I fixed my bike the night before and I was excited about riding it again. I learned the hard way all about Goatheads and why they are so damned evil last week, when I managed to ride over a patch of them and get several dozen stuck in my tires on my way home one day. I pulled out the ones I saw, put in a new rear tube, and biked to work again the next morning. The back tire was flat again by the time I got to work. WTF! It was then that I realised just how nasty those freaking thorns are - there were several of them lodged inside the tire that weren’t noticeable from the outside surface. Back to REI I went, resolved to defeat the goatheads once and for all - or at least the batch that had attacked my bike. I decided that this would be a good excuse to get new tires (the ones on my bike were purchased 11 years ago, and were very very knobby. Not ideal for city riding.), so after getting some superb advice from one of the bike guys at REI, I picked up a pair of shiny new "hybrid-ish" tires with much less road resistance - they’ve got a nice smooth surface for straight travel, and some small knobs along the edge so I can at least take some dirt trails if need be. I’ve ridden about 20 miles on them in the last 2 days since buying them, and I’m happy as can be. It takes so much less energy to travel on these than on my old fat knobby tires. I guess an extra 20psi and a smoother surface would do that :)

One last random note: I now have a computer named Goathead.

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One hour

April 06th 2007 Posted in biking, work

It takes exactly one hour for me to walk to work from home. Longer than I thought … oh well. I guess I’ll keep biking - that only takes 15 or 20 minutes.

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The nice part about moving.

August 09th 2006 Posted in biking

Now it’s much quicker for me to bike to work. It’s only about 4 miles now, and it could probably be a good bit shorter if I took the more direct (but less scenic and less safe) route. Being able to bike to work in ~18 minutes is pretty nice.

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Bikin’

June 08th 2006 Posted in biking

It occurred to me a day or so ago that I should keep track of how many miles I’ve biked since I started riding a non-trivial amount. It’s been about 20 miles a day (according to the gmap pedometer) on days I ride to work, which I know is not a whole lot, relatively speaking, but it’s a great start for me. Anyhow, I’m at >=146 miles as of today, not counting any riding I did before the first time I rode to work a couple weeks back.

Also curiously and somewhat cool, my pedometer records (to a limited degree of accuracy) time spent on the bike if I keep it in the leg pocket of my shorts. We’ve got this web gadget at work to record the data that the pedometers collect, and doing my daily stint on the bike puts me squarely in the top 15 or so users of the system. Previously (before I lost the pedometer the first time and then found it 2 months later) I was averaging about 6,000 steps a day, and now I’m at like 14 or 15,000 steps. For some reason I’m doing more walking even on days that I don’t bike - I haven’t had a day under 7,000 for a while now. Who knows, I might end up getting into shape yet instead of turning into a blob.

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