Entries in Life

Yesterday’s ride was just something to get a little work done while the kids played at the park. I started to leave by myself, but, suddenly, the whole family was going. So I escorted the kids down to the park. Alexis followed behind with Lily and when she got there, I took off. Last year when I was riding 20 miles a day (which I’m trying to get back to doing), I stuck with a consistent route. I probably need to do that again, but I’ve enjoyed seeing the different parts of the country side.

After getting very, very frustrated with MySQL replication (and seeing the hoops people have to hop through to get replication to scale), I’ve decided I’m not that interested in pursuing designs that put a database at the center of the universe. Reading through Tim O’Reilly’s database war stories helped cement this idea for me. Especially interesting was the bloglines and memorandum interview and the facinating topix.net architecture (found from a comment). Another datapoint is LiveJournal. LiveJournal uses MySQL for storing posts, but they’ve a lot of work to minimize the use of MySQL as they’ve grown. We hear a lot about Google’s BigTable and GoogleFS all the time. But we can’t use them because the source isn’t available. LiveJournal has written similar systems in MogileFS and memcached and, unlike Google’s work, these are available to everyone. I’m going to start looking at how I can build systems around these two utilities and to minimize or eliminate my dependence on a SQL server.

Today’s ride started on the rail trail when I deposited and the kids at the top of the hill and then drove to the bottom to leave the car for them there. I met them on the way up. From there, I rode 30 miles back home. I had to stretch it some by zig-zagging across the turnpike a few times. On the last couple of miles, a mennonite man overtook me on his bike. I kept up with him and when we hit a light, I said “Thanks! I need someone to keep pace!” “Men can’t let go of a challenge, eh?” “See, I have an excuse. I just rode 30 miles. That, and I’m old and fat.” “Keep up the riding and you’ll be thin!” Thanks, random mennonite man.

Last week, I mentioned I would post some pictures of my bike ride on Mt Gretna with the kids. In the end, I only found a few that I wanted to post.

After complaining about it a little calorie calculators, I have some empirical evidence to back me up. I loaded this spreadsheet up in Google Spreadsheets and put in some approximate numbers. It confirms what I’m thinking: all those calculators assume you’re covering flat land. But add in a 9% grade and the energy used changes dramatically. Now, I realized I’m not going to be hitting a 9% grade consistently. I’d die. But at least I can see that I am going to be burning a lot more calories than what the calculators are telling me.

Yesterday, I didn’t ride. My excuse was I had a flat and was so into work that I didn’t get to the shop to get a new tube (I had already patched the tube). Today, instead of going for distance, I decided to try some hills. I didn’t have a lot of time (only 45min) and I wore myself out pretty quickly. Nevertheless, I managed to do 3 reps on a 9% grade (120ft climb/0.25miles). Plus another ~9% grade to get home. I may start alternating climbing days with distance days. Till now, I’ve only really focused on distance, but perhaps that is a throwback from living in the relatively flat southern Louisiana. So, tomorrow would be a distance day.

dcm is using gnus again. Not becauses it is pretty or elegent. Just because it works. I’ve been meaning to write up my own gradually more esoteric mail-reading configuration. But the core components are Gnus, Offlineimap, and CRM114.

Today’s ride was much better than yesterday. I was a little faster and felt like I was burning more. Surprisingly, I hit a nice little hill with a hundred food climb on it that almost killed me just past the five mile mark. I’m going to have to start taking my hills seriously. Many of the farms in the area south east of town that I’ve been riding through seem more pristine than those to the north and west. Or perhaps I’m just seeing them for the first time. These well-kept farmhouses with their beautiful yards and nicely swept porches give me an inferiority complex. Thank God for the ratty-looking, stinky farms!

Today’s ride was fairly short. I needed to recover from the damage I did yesterdaqy. Yesterday, as I rode onto the rail trail off of Mt Gretna, I was paying more attention to the couple walking off the trail obviously avoiding me than the metal bars blocking street traffic from entering the rail trail. I saw the obstacle too late and tried to block with my hand. Since the guard was fairly immobile, this just had the effect of jarring my shoulder and throwing me to the ground. The couple rushed up and, after asking if I was ok, mentioned that they were moving to the side to ensure that I would have enough room to enter the trail. Ah well. When I got back, I made a run to WalMart (the closest open grocery store) to pick up some fruits. I took the opportunitity to try out their sphygmomoter again. My pulse was high (80s, to be expected after a long ride), but my blood pressure (on four different readings) was consistently below 120/65. Yay!

Today I decided to try my fantasy ride (so called because I’ve titled it “My Daily Ride”) but, because I didn’t study the turns well enough before hand, I ended up going on an almost completely differeent route of 43 miles total including a 635ft ascent up Mt. Gretna. One thing I learned from this is that there is no possible way calorie calculators are correct. Sure, I was going slower, but a lot of that was up hill. Eh, since it was all in a loop, perhaps it cancels out. I’m not sure how much I care about this. I want to burn energy, but the calculators will drive me insane. Anyway, I managed to take a few photos with the camera on my phone and I’ll be uploading those shortly. It isn’t the best camera in the world, but it sure is compact!