Archive: April 23, 2009

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Wildflower preparation

Thursday,  04/23/09  10:47 PM

Wildflower Century: wildflowers!I'm getting ready for riding in the Wildflower Century this Saturday, pretty excited about it, actually.  It isn't necessarily a hard century - no century is easy, but this one has "only" 6,000' of climbing, which is pretty reasonable - but this ride has the reputation of being amazingly beautiful; all on back roads with little traffic, rolling hills, great weather, and of course wildflowers!  (Yes I will be bringing my camera as usual so please stay tuned...)

One of the cool tools for getting ready for a long ride on a course you don't know is Google Earth.  You can see the lay of the land, where there are cities and towns, how far the checkpoints are from each other, the kinds of roads, and of course check out the climbs and descents.  Here's a view of this ride, from high above in the virtual air:

Creston is East of Paso Robles, pretty much in the middle of nowhere; this is a view looking South into the mountains.  There are hardly any towns anywhere in there; who knew there was so much open land between I5 and California 101?  It does look like there is plenty of up and down even if there aren't any fierce summits.

And yippee the weather looks like it is going to cooperate also.  So now I just have to eat a lot tomorrow - as much as possible, protein and carbs - and get enough sleep.  Oh yeah, sleep...  well first a little blogging, and then sleep :)

 

Thursday,  04/23/09  11:11 PM

Hi blog readers, what's up?  I hope you had a nice day...  I did, was able to finish some stuff, and that always feels good... and got in a nice hard ride, "Malibu CC" in 1:58, so that felt good (more Wildflower prep), and had a rather startling revelation about myself which was scary but now that I've had time to absorb, good.  More on that when I'm less scared :)

Okay, onward, make a filter pass we shall, eh?

So, about Tweetdeck.  First, it's a nice app.  Although the fact that it is written in Air makes it a resource pig, it performs just fine (of course, it isn't exactly compute bound).  I must tell you, using a desktop app for Twittering doesn't make the tweets any more interesting.  Maybe I'm just following the wrong group, but the signal to noise remains perilously close to zero.  However there was a weird and unexpected silver lining: Tweetdeck is a great Facebook client! 

Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror): "I hate meta-discussion so much. Podcasts about podcasts. Blogging about blogging. Stack Overflow posts about Stack Overflow. KILL ME NOW"

Me (@OleEichhorn): "Not to mention tweets about meta-discussions"

Today I had to send a fax - a 53 page fax - and it was weird... I have a phone line wired into my docking station (from 100 years ago) and so I selected Fax as my printer, and poof it "just worked", but the whole experience was like watching a black and white movie.  Listening to the phone ring, and the modems little beeping and whistling, man, it was like something from my childhood :)  And then of course it took over an hour to send.  But it did work, whew, so I guess I shouldn't complain... 

My daughter Meg is practicing a dance for school based on Michael Jackson's Thriller, which of course meant I listened to it again, and I must tell you it doesn't really hold up for me.  Not like CCR's Cosmo's Factory, which is older and cornier and yet somehow fresher still.  Or maybe less tied to a time; Thriller seems so "disco" and that seems so "80s".  I still like Billie Jean, always my favorite from that album, but I can't say overall it's one of my favorites... 

From Kottke: RIP, Geocities.  Man, I remember Geocities, in fact I had a Geocities page at one time.  Wow, what a blast from the past.  Interesting to be reminded that Yahoo paid $3.5B for Geocities in 1999; hard to say they got their money's worth, eh? 

I see where some are saying Facebook supplanted Geocities, but that's not right, and even MySpace was pretty different.  I think blogging supplanted personal websites, and so Blogger and Typepad and Wordpress and LiveJournal are the real successors...

Apropos: here we have the top 15 web properties of 1999.  AOL was #1, with Microsoft and Yahoo at #2 and #3, so that's not a surprise.  But some of the names are history, like Go, and Excite, and Lycos, and AltaVista, and Snap, and Xoom, and ... Geocities ...

According to Fred Wilson A second market is emerging.  This is a market for private equity, lying somewhere between an acquisition and an IPO as a potential exit for startup founders and early investors.  Huh, interesting.  I don't know enough to have an opinion about whether he's right, but it would be cool... 

Here we have a giant windmill.  I know, I know, you're thinking it's big, but check it out, it is BIG. 

Not a ZooBorn, but baby of the day: a [frozen] baby mammoth!  WOW.  And that is not photoshopped, that is a Nenets boy petting the little guy.  Presumably it was woollier when it was alive.  

I must say " baby Mammoth" reminds me of George Carlin and "jumbo shrimp" :)

 
 

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