I biked from home to the Herndon Monroe park and ride, then took the bus from Herndon to West Falls Church, then biked to Rosylnn where I stopped at the Bike to Work Pit stop. From there I biked to work.
The flat section in the middle is the bus ride, where I turned off the GPS
(if you are on an rss reader, click the story to see the map)
I picked out a new bike on sunday to replace my stolen 97 hard rock specialized. I picked up my trek 4300 yesterday but the weather was so crappy that I didn’t ride it more than 100 feet to car for the journey back home. So this morning I strapped on the odometer and took off for my daily commute to the park and ride. Not exactly spectacular for a first trip but enougth to get the heart following and get to know the new ride. So I now have two bikes one for serious long distance rides and one for commuting and rough paths like the c&o canal. this bike rides differently from old hard rock and is a very different ride compared to my portland. hopefully I will get as many miles out of my new mountain bike as I did my old one
I am very tempted to by the electric bike at $400 x3 for the solar panels it almost sounds reasonable when you compare it to petrol.
I am planning on heading to the Cycle Fest 2008 at wakefield park this weekend.
I am changing jobs and was trying work out how to bike there, I tried google maps but it doesn’t include the WO&D trail as an option so I had to do a best guess to work out the mileage.
This would be a valuable tool for helping bikes find safe routes. Please help out by signing the below petition.
After a couple months of trying to swim twice a week, cycling to work (well on days when it isn’t snowing or raining) and 3 days of skiing I have managed to loose 10 pounds, not the money kind but the weight kind.
Since I had some time off over Christmas and we didn’t have any major plans so I decided to tackle some outstanding IT project in the house.
The first thing was to clean out all the computer that used to live close to the litter box in HY’s old appartment. That was the most icky of the projects, vacuuming out the layer of the cat litter dust, stripping out all the drives, and wiping down everything. I also needed to wipe down all the stuff I dumped in the basement after moving for similar reasons.
I ran nine cat 5 cables, 2 to the TV in basement, 2 to the TV in living room and 4 to basement room with all the computers and one to the phone demark. I still need to find out if I can easily pull some cables up into the attic and over to HY’s office.
I rebuilt the asterisk server with PBX in a flash and hooked the Sipura 2002 into the house telephone lines so we can use normal cordless phones for making calls. I also signed up for axvoice to get 200 minutes of US/Canada minutes. The international rates also appear to be good.
I also needed to centralize all my mp3/acc files on one computer, over the years the files have spead out over a number of computers. I also borked my raid array on the file server a couple years back and had a lot of MP3’s that didn’t play all the way through. So I wrote a script that copies all the mp3 from my laptop to the file sever. If it was already on the fileserver then it would over write the file, if it didn’t then it added the song to a ‘new’ folder. After after a month or so and a couple iterations fixing dumb things like ; and ‘ in the song names I had all the files in one location which are being sharing out via iTunes on the mac mini.
I also backed up all my files on my laptop and installed Leopard (macos 10.5). Apple makes it really hard to accidentally wipe your computer so took me few goes to work out how to do a full wipe. The first time I missed the small “options button” in the install that gives you the non idiot upgrader. The second time i selected to do a fresh install, but preserve user applications and files in a separate folder option. I didn’t realize it was going to copy in all saved files and applications back into the normal folders after installing. So the third time I did the nuke and destroy option to wipe the computer then install. After all that I now have a fresh install with just the applications I want. It runs nice and fast now.
I am really like 10.5, the time machine option is nice and easy for backing up the computer. The Screen Sharing App is the best way to remotely control another Mac, very very fast compared to Chicken of VNC or Vine. I had some issues with X11 doing control click for pasting till I found the developers site where I could install an unofficial update. I am not impressed with the new version of Front Row. Apple synced Front Row to match the version that comes with the AppleTV’s. It seems slower especially when viewing media on another mac. They also removed the extra level between selecting a TV Season and the episodes so you it now goes straight from TV Show to all the episodes. This sucks if you have 4 or 5 seasons of a show and only want to watch season 3.
The final thing on my geek list was to upgrade the file server to something less ancient than Suse 9.3. Ubuntu has been my Linux distro of choice for over a year now, but it doesn’t have a nice gui for setting up LVM and RAID partitions so I wanted to see what open suse 10.3 was like. I tried out the live cd on another computer and wasn’t hugely impressed with the newer version of KDE. I didn’t like the equivalent of the start menu, the final decision was made when I couldn’t get the live cd to boot on file server, so ubuntu it was. After installing I had some issues with the raid drives. I wasted most of Sunday trying different things, but both raid arrays are now online and keep working even after rebooting. I had a number of issues, first the partitions on two of the disks wouldn’t show up in /dev till I removed the entry in /etc/blckid.tab. I then had to build the raid mirror with just one drive, then wipe the super block on the other drive, reboot, then add the second drive back in. The only thing I can think of is that the drive had the superblock in both the /dev/sdd and /dev/sdd1 which was confusing it.
I still have to install vmware server, setup samba and some other junk on the file server but nfs is up and running and the macmini can see all the media.
Oh and I got a Garmin GPS Bike computer from Hongying that allows my to track my heart rate and the path I took.
So thats my Christmas geek fest.
What did everyone else do?
ODO 512
AVG 14.1
max 25.2
time 23:51
trp 5.6
I have Trek Incite 8i wireless odometer that bought at the same time I bought my bike. I have been getting strange Max speed readings on and off for since i got it. I finally tracked down the porblem. If I put it to close to my mac book laptop the speed indicator goes crazy. I tried switching off the blue tooth and wifi transmitters on the laptop and I had the same problem. So that unit is going to be retired in favor of my new christmas present, a Garmin Edge 305 GPS/heart rate/cadence/Speed/altitude/kitchen sink monitor. The only problem is I forgot to turn it off last night so it died 2 mins into this mornings commute, OOOPS.
I can tell you this much for today
Total time: 2:08
26 cal burned
distance .44 miles
heart rate 131 bpm
max 15.2
Yesterday (on old bike, with hy)
Time 0:46:13
559 cal
6.69 miles
avg 8.7
max 20.2
I have been keeping my eyes open about this issue. I even went to the VDOT six year plan hearings at the Fairfax County Building to hear what was being said. I would have stood up and presented my support for improving both bike lanes and side walks over i495 except I was recovering from a cold and I had more or less lost my voice. I did meet Bruce from FAAB who posted an excellent summary of the event. If you have only ever driven along route 7 as it passes over i495 you might not appreciate just what a daunting task it is to either walk or bike across that bridge. For the walkers there is no side walk. if you are lucky the ground is dry and you are not walking in mud but you have to cross two lanes of fast moving cars. For the bikers you have to be 2 lanes out in fast moving traffic to avoid being sucked onto i495. While living in the area I would take the bus the 3 miles to work rather than biking on route 7 over i495. Currently VDOT is looking at creating additional HOT lanes on the beltway, in order to do this need they to rework every bridge and every interchange the HOT lanes pass. So this is a unique opportunity to improve the biking and pedestrian access across those bridges. I just read that McLean Citizens Association has put their support behind the issue and would like to add my support. Tyson Corner is trying to convert itself into a pedestrian friendly zone, but unless they can do something to bridge the major roads in the area Tysons will only ever be a car destination and a metro stop at the mall.
I help out at a community bike shop in Arlington. Colin sent out the following
I mentioned this in the last Phoenix Bikes newsletter, but just wanted to
give a few people a reminder that tonight we are starting a new project at
the shop – Shop Night for volunteers.
Jonathan Ferree is helping head up this weekly bike build for volunteers.
From 7 – 9 pm every Tuesday we’ll be working on bikes, shop improvements,
and just hanging out.
Should be fun – and you don’t need bike knowledge to join. Just a
willingness to learn and a set of clothes that you don’t mind getting a
little greasy.
The more the merrier, so pass on the word, and I hope to see you sometime
soon.
Phoenix Bikes
Barcroft Park
4100 S. Four Mile Run Drive
Arlington, VA
www.phoenixbikes.org
(703) 575-7762
c: (202) 494-9553
