Running With the Foghorn Leghorn
- Thread starter Norm
- Start date
Sometimes when I stop and take pictures on a ride and enjoy the views and nature sounds I think, maybe I should slow down more often. But then a mile later I am back in kill kill kill mode. Retirement is for going slow.
The Heckler
You bring new meaning to the term SUCK
I can definitely relate to this. I've actually only recently began to enjoy hiking but need to be in a place with insane views and interesting features. I especially enjoy jumping on large rocks and some scrambling.
My favorite hikes are up hill and on terrain that is mostly unrideable. It's the only way I don't think "this would be so much more fun on the bike." Mt. Tammany at the water gap fits the bill.
QUOTE="stb222, post: 594384, member: 152"]Sometimes when I stop and take pictures on a ride and enjoy the views and nature sounds I think, maybe I should slow down more often. But then a mile later I am back in kill kill kill mode. Retirement is for going slow.[/QUOTE]
I'll probably never retire. And lately i've been in a constant state of my mind being blown by every thing around me.
Went for a hike at the Water Co a week ago and found myself standing there staring at a field full of rocks for like 10 minutes. That field of rocks was goddamn amazing at the time.
Slightly related - I'm always hearing folks at places like the Sourlands telling their children "You see all these rocks? Glaciers put them there" Which is actually incorrect. Evidence suggests Glaciers never game through the region. Those boulders are the result of volcanic & tectonic forces and erosion.
I always enjoy your early morning photos.
I'll probably never retire. And lately i've been in a constant state of my mind being blown by every thing around me.
Went for a hike at the Water Co a week ago and found myself standing there staring at a field full of rocks for like 10 minutes. That field of rocks was goddamn amazing at the time.
Slightly related - I'm always hearing folks at places like the Sourlands telling their children "You see all these rocks? Glaciers put them there" Which is actually incorrect. Evidence suggests Glaciers never game through the region. Those boulders are the result of volcanic & tectonic forces and erosion.
I always enjoy your early morning photos.
I'll probably never retire. And lately i've been in a constant state of my mind being blown by every thing around me.
Went for a hike at the Water Co a week ago and found myself standing there staring at a field full of rocks for like 10 minutes. That field of rocks was goddamn amazing at the time.
Slightly related - I'm always hearing folks at places like the Sourlands telling their children "You see all these rocks? Glaciers put them there" Which is actually incorrect. Evidence suggests Glaciers never game through the region. Those boulders are the result of volcanic & tectonic forces and erosion.
I always enjoy your early morning photos.[/QUOTE]
Everyone knows that the devil put those stones there:
"Charlie Sutphen, whose father was the Sourland Mountain fiddler, is the source of many a weird legend concerning the wild life that abounded in the hills north of Hopewell. Take it from him, Sourland Mountain was the devil’s stamping ground. He is responsible for the yarn that the devil started to build a great stone wall, separating the East from the West and while carrying a huge number of boulders he received a call for dinner. He dropped the stones, which today are known as Roaring Rocks, located near Belle Mead.
Juggernaut
Master of the Metaphor
I am very much enjoying "introspective Friday" .
i'm a pretty big fan of hiking, always have been, but it's been much more so since i was appointed to the town's trails committee. they've essentially given me free reign to build trails here in Roxbury and over the past year i've put in well over 100 hours hiking, scouting and digging. it's been fantastically rewarding to lay out trails and actually find people on them that are enjoying them.
rick81721
Lothar
Yeah I always hear that too.
http://www.centraljersey.com/opinio...cle_49d9e450-0a39-11e5-836b-3bd578d60aa4.html
gtluke
The Moped
I hope today's recap goes like this:
"thursday night luke tries to convince me to go to sourlands in the morning, but I'm scared shitless of that place. Instead I agree to meet him for food around 10 or 11, at 10:30 on the dot he texts me and I reply with "I just ate, you want some peanut butter?""
"thursday night luke tries to convince me to go to sourlands in the morning, but I'm scared shitless of that place. Instead I agree to meet him for food around 10 or 11, at 10:30 on the dot he texts me and I reply with "I just ate, you want some peanut butter?""
Red Mosquito
Formerly RLB the Scrapple Boy
Sounds like mushrooms!
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
The awesome thing about this job, this project - most jobs & most projects actually - is that people are pretty clueless. We have this system where a bunch of data is automated into a queue and the queue picks the agents to assign the "case" to. I'm simplifying for the sake of this conversation. So the Case gets an agent based on the classification. Say the Case is labelled "food" it gets randomly assigned to someone with the "food" skill. This is a general snippet of how half of my email exchanges go:
Client: Case 2054438 was assigned to Reggie, who does not have the Food skill
Me: Actually it was assigned to Steve, who does. Steve just assigned it to Reggie because I guess he's too fucking lazy to do any work?
Client: I'm gonna need to talk to Steve...
So Wednesday was a dual-purpose ride. First, the aim was to go and ride hard, as hard as I could for about 40 minutes. Then I was going to stroll down to the start of the Pharma ride and join @Dominique for the usual Wednesday ride. So I warmed up for 20 minutes then went as hard as I could for 40. The numbers on the lap:
40 minutes
24 mph
322 watts
174 HR
A lot of people say that training is difficult because they cannot go hard enough by themselves. While these numbers are not the same as a race, they are damn close. The 174 HR is very close to a cross HR which is typically around 180 for the race. This loop obviously did not have the acceleration/deceleration of a cross race but it was a solid effort and served its purpose. After that we did another 34 miles and I ended up with 58 for the day and 3:15 rolling. The second purpose of the ride was to get in miles. The biggest challenge during cross season is keeping any sort of base fitness as you often see no point in riding more than an hour or maybe 2.
The Pharma loop had 2 main climbs - Bissel and Sawmill. The group is usually a mix of guys & girls and D managed to get to the top of both of these first today. It was a good ride for her and I see her coming along in terms of effort/suffering on these rides. I think the races help in that regard, she's getting used to suffering more and it shows as she is pushing through some stuff that I know hurts. She managed 10th on Bissel and less than 15 seconds off the top 5. Solid for an almost 6 minute climb.
Then I guess we came home and ate something then watched more TV. I think the meteor showers were supposed to be overnight but I wasn't going to set my alarm for 3am and go sit in the field across the street to watch lightning bugs in the sky. I mean it would be cool to see. But I was too tired to devote that much effort into it.
The awesome thing about this job, this project - most jobs & most projects actually - is that people are pretty clueless. We have this system where a bunch of data is automated into a queue and the queue picks the agents to assign the "case" to. I'm simplifying for the sake of this conversation. So the Case gets an agent based on the classification. Say the Case is labelled "food" it gets randomly assigned to someone with the "food" skill. This is a general snippet of how half of my email exchanges go:
Client: Case 2054438 was assigned to Reggie, who does not have the Food skill
Me: Actually it was assigned to Steve, who does. Steve just assigned it to Reggie because I guess he's too fucking lazy to do any work?
Client: I'm gonna need to talk to Steve...
So Wednesday was a dual-purpose ride. First, the aim was to go and ride hard, as hard as I could for about 40 minutes. Then I was going to stroll down to the start of the Pharma ride and join @Dominique for the usual Wednesday ride. So I warmed up for 20 minutes then went as hard as I could for 40. The numbers on the lap:
40 minutes
24 mph
322 watts
174 HR
A lot of people say that training is difficult because they cannot go hard enough by themselves. While these numbers are not the same as a race, they are damn close. The 174 HR is very close to a cross HR which is typically around 180 for the race. This loop obviously did not have the acceleration/deceleration of a cross race but it was a solid effort and served its purpose. After that we did another 34 miles and I ended up with 58 for the day and 3:15 rolling. The second purpose of the ride was to get in miles. The biggest challenge during cross season is keeping any sort of base fitness as you often see no point in riding more than an hour or maybe 2.
The Pharma loop had 2 main climbs - Bissel and Sawmill. The group is usually a mix of guys & girls and D managed to get to the top of both of these first today. It was a good ride for her and I see her coming along in terms of effort/suffering on these rides. I think the races help in that regard, she's getting used to suffering more and it shows as she is pushing through some stuff that I know hurts. She managed 10th on Bissel and less than 15 seconds off the top 5. Solid for an almost 6 minute climb.
Then I guess we came home and ate something then watched more TV. I think the meteor showers were supposed to be overnight but I wasn't going to set my alarm for 3am and go sit in the field across the street to watch lightning bugs in the sky. I mean it would be cool to see. But I was too tired to devote that much effort into it.
Mountain Bike Mike
Well-Known Member
I'll probably never retire. And lately i've been in a constant state of my mind being blown by every thing around me.
Went for a hike at the Water Co a week ago and found myself standing there staring at a field full of rocks for like 10 minutes. That field of rocks was goddamn amazing at the time.
Slightly related - I'm always hearing folks at places like the Sourlands telling their children "You see all these rocks? Glaciers put them there" Which is actually incorrect. Evidence suggests Glaciers never game through the region. Those boulders are the result of volcanic & tectonic forces and erosion.
I always enjoy your early morning photos.[/QUOTE]
I now like @capedoc sooo much more. I would like to hike with capers to watch him watch things and get his mnd blown.... I would find great entertainment in that.
Red Mosquito
Formerly RLB the Scrapple Boy
I was hoping for a better end to this story. Pretty much all of my clients are clueless, which is good for business but bad for sanity. We wind up maintaining a lot of data for clients. Yesterday I made the discovery that one of said datsets is completely fubared, like only 1/2 of our updates over the last 6 months got applied. The client needs to roll up the data through some SQL voodoo, basically just click the right buttons in the right order. It's not hard, but boy do people go out of their way to screw things up! The worst part: nothing I do is difficult, it just requires attention to detail and the ability to reason my way through a problem. Sometimes I wonder how anything of any consequence has ever been built in this world!
I once had a colleague/client come for help with her data.
Industrious as she was, she had created an MS Access form to enter a bunch of hard copy data into.
Somehow she had managed to create a form that was not linked to a database.
Not entirely certain how this was possible, but she did it,
and I took some degree of pleasure in letting her know her data were somewhere in the ether, and that my work was done here.
She wasn't exactly my favorite colleague.
Red Mosquito
Formerly RLB the Scrapple Boy
On the bright side, those lessons learned the hard way usually stick fairly well.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
There really is no better end to the work story. I mean, the real keeper is that 1 of 2 things routinely happens with this. Either the scenario above, or the data comes in looking like garbage. So you have the scenario where garbage gets assigned to a Generic Queue because it does not have the data you expect. Like you are looking for "food" or "mechanic" or "janitor" and the report comes in and is listed as "giraffe". So then you have to figure out all of the errant skills and configure new ones, because asking the data feed to change is like asking the constellation Orion to add a new star to its belt.
Oh, a third one is that "the jobs failed today," which means you look on the server and see the file has a date of 2 days ago because they did not deliver anything.
We have a weekly call to see how things look for the weekend move to prod. Every week I convert some number of reports to prod, I add some enhancements to the existing code, and I fix the shit that the previous guy left in a half-assed state. So on the call the main client's boss joined and basically told the guy running the project that I was way beyond better than the last guy and that everything is going incredibly well. The guy running the project is PF Chang's Dale, for those of you who recall my trip. Dale is happy which means that my 15 minutes of contact with him this week was more than enough for him, and that I would talk to him again in 6 days, 23 hours, and 45 minutes.
On the bike I intended to go easy and take The God Bike out and run it in a field with the tubulars. Yes THOSE tubulars, the PDXs which have been the absolute worst for me in the past. Not because of the tread or anything mundane like that. But because of the goddamn flats. Remembering 3 years ago, I got 3 flats in something like 2 rides. That's over $200 for a total of about 4 miles. Why am I bringing this up? I don't know. I sent the tires in and the asshole at Clement told me they never got them.
So anyway I go to a field and ride around but then soon get bored and figure that if I'm going to see if they're going to stay on, I should rail some corners with them. I slowly build up to them and before long I'm doing 5 second sprints trying to get my power as high as I can. In the end I managed to set all my 1-7s power highs for the last 3 years, which I guess means something. My max power was 1334, and my 5s power was 1146w. What the hell does any of this mean? Not much, other than my tires did not roll off.
I'm going to ask @Dominique if she wants to help me remove the rest of the glue from the sidewalls. I shouldn't care but it does look god-awful. And yes @Delish did tell me to tape the brake track but I was too impatient. I mean, I did the first set with no tape and no glue holocaust. Second set did not fare so well. But really this glue is all over the tire, not the brake track. Yes it was a mess.
During the ride Lou texted me and asked me a question. I pondered this and said this was something to think on.
Later I got Julia at camp and we went to the 4H fair in North Branch. It was of moderate interest to her but it was something to do. D was out riding with another crew and we ended up staying there for almost 2 hours. They had some cool stuff like the monster model train setup, plus the RC car races and a little track where they were racing go-carts. She likes the animals for the most part and especially liked to pet the bunny. She opted to not pet the porcupine, however.
That night we watched more TV again for like the 3rd night in a row.
There really is no better end to the work story. I mean, the real keeper is that 1 of 2 things routinely happens with this. Either the scenario above, or the data comes in looking like garbage. So you have the scenario where garbage gets assigned to a Generic Queue because it does not have the data you expect. Like you are looking for "food" or "mechanic" or "janitor" and the report comes in and is listed as "giraffe". So then you have to figure out all of the errant skills and configure new ones, because asking the data feed to change is like asking the constellation Orion to add a new star to its belt.
Oh, a third one is that "the jobs failed today," which means you look on the server and see the file has a date of 2 days ago because they did not deliver anything.
We have a weekly call to see how things look for the weekend move to prod. Every week I convert some number of reports to prod, I add some enhancements to the existing code, and I fix the shit that the previous guy left in a half-assed state. So on the call the main client's boss joined and basically told the guy running the project that I was way beyond better than the last guy and that everything is going incredibly well. The guy running the project is PF Chang's Dale, for those of you who recall my trip. Dale is happy which means that my 15 minutes of contact with him this week was more than enough for him, and that I would talk to him again in 6 days, 23 hours, and 45 minutes.
On the bike I intended to go easy and take The God Bike out and run it in a field with the tubulars. Yes THOSE tubulars, the PDXs which have been the absolute worst for me in the past. Not because of the tread or anything mundane like that. But because of the goddamn flats. Remembering 3 years ago, I got 3 flats in something like 2 rides. That's over $200 for a total of about 4 miles. Why am I bringing this up? I don't know. I sent the tires in and the asshole at Clement told me they never got them.
So anyway I go to a field and ride around but then soon get bored and figure that if I'm going to see if they're going to stay on, I should rail some corners with them. I slowly build up to them and before long I'm doing 5 second sprints trying to get my power as high as I can. In the end I managed to set all my 1-7s power highs for the last 3 years, which I guess means something. My max power was 1334, and my 5s power was 1146w. What the hell does any of this mean? Not much, other than my tires did not roll off.
I'm going to ask @Dominique if she wants to help me remove the rest of the glue from the sidewalls. I shouldn't care but it does look god-awful. And yes @Delish did tell me to tape the brake track but I was too impatient. I mean, I did the first set with no tape and no glue holocaust. Second set did not fare so well. But really this glue is all over the tire, not the brake track. Yes it was a mess.
During the ride Lou texted me and asked me a question. I pondered this and said this was something to think on.
Later I got Julia at camp and we went to the 4H fair in North Branch. It was of moderate interest to her but it was something to do. D was out riding with another crew and we ended up staying there for almost 2 hours. They had some cool stuff like the monster model train setup, plus the RC car races and a little track where they were racing go-carts. She likes the animals for the most part and especially liked to pet the bunny. She opted to not pet the porcupine, however.
That night we watched more TV again for like the 3rd night in a row.
Friday , August 14, 2015
So it's Saturday night and we just opened a bottle of wine. I've pretty much been laying low on the beer & wine tip and in the end I'm sure I'll only have like 2 glasses because after that my head generally starts to hurt. But before I get into that and we watch more TV, I'll try to remember what yesterday was like. Since it's Saturday night I imagine most people won't read this so I won't bother to explain the @Dominos answer about eating & bloating and such. Maybe Monday.
Ended up going to Chimney Rock by myself yesterday and had a pretty good ride. Tried to keep the foot on the gas the whole time as opposed to picking and choosing when to hit it hard then going easy in between. In the end I got a personal top 3 on 12 different segments which must mean something, since I've ridden every trail in both directions at least 10 times each since this Strava thing has come into existence. If I started picking & choosing I might actually set some solid PRs. But I'm not training for Strava segments, despite what the product & marketing teams at Garmin may think.
So my hard rides for the week were Mon/Wed/Fri with an easy ride Tue and a mostly easy ride Thu with the exception of those sprints to cure the boredom. After the ride today I was pretty tired.
@Dominique was heading out to a girl's night out in town so again it was Julia and I for dinner. We went to the diner because I promised her meatballs & gravy before I dropped her off, then totally forgot to go to the store. So we went there then went to the park where she played a bit then we went for a walk. Back at the house and she went for the iPad and I wrote a little bit and then texted with Fred, who was drinking on his couch. We were both wearing pink shirts.
The end.
So it's Saturday night and we just opened a bottle of wine. I've pretty much been laying low on the beer & wine tip and in the end I'm sure I'll only have like 2 glasses because after that my head generally starts to hurt. But before I get into that and we watch more TV, I'll try to remember what yesterday was like. Since it's Saturday night I imagine most people won't read this so I won't bother to explain the @Dominos answer about eating & bloating and such. Maybe Monday.
Ended up going to Chimney Rock by myself yesterday and had a pretty good ride. Tried to keep the foot on the gas the whole time as opposed to picking and choosing when to hit it hard then going easy in between. In the end I got a personal top 3 on 12 different segments which must mean something, since I've ridden every trail in both directions at least 10 times each since this Strava thing has come into existence. If I started picking & choosing I might actually set some solid PRs. But I'm not training for Strava segments, despite what the product & marketing teams at Garmin may think.
So my hard rides for the week were Mon/Wed/Fri with an easy ride Tue and a mostly easy ride Thu with the exception of those sprints to cure the boredom. After the ride today I was pretty tired.
@Dominique was heading out to a girl's night out in town so again it was Julia and I for dinner. We went to the diner because I promised her meatballs & gravy before I dropped her off, then totally forgot to go to the store. So we went there then went to the park where she played a bit then we went for a walk. Back at the house and she went for the iPad and I wrote a little bit and then texted with Fred, who was drinking on his couch. We were both wearing pink shirts.
The end.