Car Wedgie

On the way to school this morning we came across a car that had given itself a wedgie.

We had a good laugh but I suspect the driver didn't think it was so funny.

I also uploaded most of the pictures from my Great Western in the Winter hike. The trail is one of my favorite mountain bike trails and was great even if I did do it without the mountain bike. Here are the pictures of the trail.

Great Western Trail in the Winter

I should have been doing the interval training, but on Monday I had an appointment with the outplacement agency that Novell hires for people they lay off. So after dropping the kids off at school I figured I would just hang around the area and take pictures until my appointment. So I headed up the Great Western trail. This is a trip we frequently do on mountain bikes.

It looked like I would be able to finish the whole trip in time for my appointment, but I had a hard time finding the trail in the snow at the one point, and ended up being about 40 minutes late for my meeting. Oh well I got some great pictures, and I'm not looking for a job anyway, because I am going to open my bike store as soon as they get the building built. I put the pictures together as a video an then thought I would try uploading to youtube and to blogger. My first attempt at uploading a video.

While walking the trail I realized why I no longer like winter. It is because I don't do enough winter activities. It was great to spend some time appreciating the simple things in life, the beauty of nature. It was also fun to run across a LARGE herd of elk. Anyway, if anyone ever reads this, I hope you enjoy the video.

Biking shoes

My kids were talking about how much people spend on shoes. Saying things like "I would never spend that much for a pair of shoes!" I didn't dare tell them how much my Specialized S-Works shoes cost. Anyway I have typically used my normal shoes when riding on the stationary bike. The problem is that the arch in my foot gets real sore after a workout. So I switched over to using my mountain bike shoes for my last training session. What a difference! The stiff soles fixed the problem. I guess I should dig out my old worn out mountain bike shoes for the indoor training. While they are beyond their useful life for real biking I think they will work well for the indoor stuff and maybe make my other biking shoes last longer.

Big Cushy vs Light Weight

I guess I have finally capitulated and started riding the indoor bike. It seems every month in the Bicycling Magazine there is an article by Chris Charmichael promoting some intervals based workout routine. This month it is steady state intervals and power intervals. I figured now that I am indoors I might actually try this interval thing and see how it goes.

I did a set of steady state intervals yesterday and then a long steady ride today, that is if you can call 1 hour long, it gets boring being indoors so about 1 hour is all I can do. The intervals, however, were not to bad but the seat is a different story. When people see my light weight seat they always question how comfortable it could be. However I can ride my bike with the nice light not much to it seat for 11 hours straight and not get as sore as the big padded cushy seat that came with the stationary bike I am using. I also find sitting for an hour on a padded bench at church much more difficult to endure than all day on the bike.

Google Ads

What is with these google ads? I thought they were suppose to have something relevant to my blog. I won't mention what they are advertising because I don't want encourage those ads, but I would think the frequent reference to MOUNTAIN BIKING, CYCLING, and OUTDOOR RECREATION would get ads that had something to do with mountain biking, cycling and outdoor recreation, not ads based on the fact that someone else has the same name I have. I guess I may need to add some filters so I can get more mountain biking cycling and outdoor type things.

Sore Back - Great Core Workout

After it snowed the other day my son wanted to build an igloo. I don't know how to make a good igloo but I do know how to make snow caves. This was probably the best snow cave I have ever made. I got out the snow shovel and piled up the snow until it was about six feet high. We then dug out the cave. Because the snow was so soft this was an easy cave to dig out. After a few days in the sun the cave was about half as high as it was originally but still an intact cave.

It has now been a week since we built the snow cave and my back is finally getting over the sore muscles from lifting all that snow. It was probably the best core muscle workout I have ever done.

I posted another picture from the snow cave on flickr.

No loose change

It has been a long time since I actually road a bike, and I am starting to question if I am still a cyclist. It is just hard to get out when it is so cold out there. With snow on the roads I don't dare ride my road bike and with muddy or snowy trails I don't feel like riding the mountain bike. I could ride the stationary bike, but instead find myself doing a bit of weight lifting. Winter sure is a hard time for a biker.

Today when doing my laundry, instead of finding loose change in the dryer I find nuts from presta valves. I guess I still am a biker. I just hope I can get back out on the bike before I run out of those little nuts.

Snowman

Snowy day today. I guess with all of the snow I just have to shovel my driveways to stay in shape.

I have been working on an Email Santa website. I will continue to improve it but I think it is ready for people to start using now. Try it out and let me know what you think. http://www.stnickemail.com

My own cannon

This is a story I heard when I was a kid, I don't know where it came from.

Once upon a time there was a small town that had one man who didn't have a job. He wasn't about to take charity so the town leaders met together to see how they could help him. They decided that they would give him a job polishing the cannon at the town park. The man accepted the job and for years every day he would go and polish the cannon. He faithfully performed the job of polishing the cannon for many years. Then one day he walks into the city office and gives notice that he is quitting. The town leaders were shocked. "How can you quit?" they asked. "Well," he says, "I have been doing this job and saving my money for 23 years now. I bought my own cannon and I'm going into business for myself."

Well after 23 years of working for Novell I finally found myself on the layoff list. The job market for software developers in the area seems to be strong, but I have decided to go into business for myself. So I am working on opening a bike store. Now I am waiting for my store to be built. It looks like it will be June or July before I will be able to have my grand opening. I have however started working on the web site for my store Epeak Biking.

Friday Pie-day

A couple of years ago my wife started a tradition of Friday Pie-day. We always have left over pie from Thanksgiving so we invite friends and family over to goof off all day and eat pie. Of course this was the plan for this past Friday Pie-day.

Then my Bishop calls and asks if I want to go for a two hour bike ride at 11. Sounds great! I can burn off some of the pies I have been eating and get back before things really get going. Of course we don't get started on time, oh well half an hour won't kill me. Then as we get started I am informed that this is a 2 1/2 hour ride, now I am pushing it for getting into trouble. It is cold and there is a nice wind out of the North. I guess this just means the trip back will be faster, right?

By the time we get to the turn around point it is obvious this is going to be a bit longer than the 2 1/2 hours the ride was suppose to take. Then as I am turning around I go off the paved trail by about 1 inch for about 1/4 of a turn of the wheels. Scared that there might be goat heads in the dirt I jump off as quick as possible and check my tires. Arrrrrggghhh, about 5 goat heads per inch! I pull them out and sure enough both tires are leaking. I brought one spare tube and one CO2 cartridge. My bishop also has a flat at this point from some glass he ran over earlier. luckily he brought two spare tubes. We replace the tubes and are about to continue on and BANG! his rear tire explodes. I guess he put too much air in it. Now he has to get out a patch and patch the tube with the least number of holes in it.

The trip back is faster while I am going down wind, but I don't think bladed spokes work well with cross winds. It just seems that the cross wind slows me down a lot more than it should. By the time I finally get home everyone has been there for hours and I am in trouble for taking 4 hours to do a 2 hour bike ride.

I guess it is like software development. Take the amount of time you think it should take to finish the ride and double it.

RAT A U LAD

Ride Around Timp And Utah Lake in A Day.
I rode the RANATAD a few days ago. Today when I did a ride around Timp and Utah Lake, and in the spirit of RANATAD I named it RAT A U LAD. My Garmin Edge had a dead battery this morning so I only captured the first hour of the ride. Using Google Maps I created a route showing where I actually went, but could not figure out how to save it in the My Maps feature. Anyway here is the route.

White Rim 2007

Well, we did it again. I think I have ridden the White Rim around Canyonlands every year since I started mountain biking. Sometimes we take multiple days and a few times we have ridden the whole thing in a day. This year we did it a bit different. The goal was to ride the whole 100 miles unsupported. Also usually we start at the turn of to Mineral Bottom road and ride clockwise. This year we started at the bottom of Shaffer's trail and did it counterclockwise.

Like I said, the plan was to start at the bottom of Shaffer's trail and go counterclockwise. This would give us a big climb at the start of the ride while the legs were fresh and then at the end with a downhill when the legs are tired. Also we could stash some extra water at the turnoff to Mineral Bottom. And the last great idea of this plan was that we would be riding downhill on the long Mineral Bottom Road. Going clockwise the road is long boring and tedious, so we sometimes skip that part of the loop.

So I started out with a gallon of Gatorade in my Camelbak, and two water bottles on my bike. Amazingly everything worked as planned and I ran out of water just a couple of miles before the finish. We only had a few problems. Before we had ridden half a mile from the truck I broke my chain. It was a brand new chain I had put on the day before because I broke the previous chain on the Tuesday before. So we fixed the chain but couldn't get the shifting to work quite right. As the ride continued on my shifting got worse and worse, until by the end I only had the lowest gear and a couple of the highest gears that I could use. It turns out the cassette was loose and getting worse as I rode. The only other problem we had was my biking buddy ate too much at "lunch" (at around 3 pm) and got stomach cramps. So we had to rest for awhile on a rock.

The place we stopped to rest had an amazing view. I sat there for awhile and wished I had my camera. I didn't bring my camera with me because on these one day trips we typically don't have much time to get good pictures, and my pack was already too heavy with all the Gatorade. Anyway the view was off into the Maze district of Canyonlands. It was a beautiful view of white cliffs hanging over the red rock below and the red rock formations found in the area. The canyon with the Green River below was a lot like looking at the Grand Canyon. It was a great view and made the recovery stop more than worth while.



Dawn at the tip of White Crack at Canyonlands National Park
© jaovandelagemaat All rights reserved.

Like I said I didn't take a camera with me, and after that beautiful view of the Maze district I wanted a nice picture to add to my blog. I searched the internet for a good picture of that area and couldn't find one from that spot. But I found this beautiful picture of the sunrise at White Crack which wasn't far from there. Thanks, Jao for letting me use your photo in my blog. (Click on the picture to go to its web page)


And finally here is the motionbased viewport to the ride data:

Spring weather

It has been a typical Utah Spring. Last week our lunch rides were getting to be too hot. Then the last few days turned cold and rainy. Yesterday and today it was back to about perfect and the rest of the week looks to be on the hot side.

Here is a picture from today's ride. I have taken pretty much the same picture in the past, but it is a beautiful spot so I guess I just keep getting pictures there.

Back to winter

Got one ride in this week before winter returned. There is a new blanket of snow on the ground, but it looks like it will warm back up soon. Hopefully before next week is over we will be back to riding up Slate Canyon. Here is Monday's ride.

It was the first time this year that I have ridden all the way up to the pipe hill. Unfortunately my rear tire slipped on a couple of hills so I didn't make the whole way non stop. Maybe next time.

Good-bye Apple

NOTE: I did finally get this taken care of. See comments.

I purchased a 20" iMac in the fall of 2005. The computer would turn off at random times without warning. At first it would only happen once a week or so, but it started happening more and more frequently until it finally got to where the computer would not stay on long enough to finish booting.

I took the computer into an Apple dealer and they determined that the power supply was bad and replaced it under warranty.

One year and 3 months later the computer has the same problem. Only this time it went from occasional power failures to continual power failures in a week. I looked on the web and found this:
http://www.apple.com/support/imac/powersupply/repairextension/

My computer has the EMC number 2056 as stated on their website. However when I called about the problem they said they would not replace the power supply because my serial number does not match their list of "affected" serial numbers.

It seems obvious to me, given that I have had two power supplies go bad in just over a years time period, and that my number matches the number that they state on their web site, and that my computer was for the correct time period that I am a recipient of their bad power supplies. But this didn't matter to their support or customer service people. I argued with them for a long time on the phone and while they admitted that they had problems with their power supplies, and that I had a bad power supply they insisted that mine could not possibly be due to the same problem because, according the their customer relations person, "if we found a problem we wouldn't send you a new power supply with the same problem". Obviously they did.

I have been an Apple customer since the early days. My first Apple was an Apple II+. I have purchased my share of Apple computers and iPods. I have had my company purchase many Apple computers for me and other employees. I have to say though that if this is how I am going to be treated when they have an obviously defective product that it is time for me to look elsewhere for my computers. So no more iTune purchases, no more iPod purchases, and no more Apple computer purchases.

No cleats, no GPS

Finally got out mountain biking again. The trail was completely dry. It was sunny and warm, almost too warm. The problem is that it has been so long since I have been mountain biking that I was missing some essentials, shoes, and GPS. Fortunately I had an extra pair of biking shoes in my office, unfortunately they didn't have cleats in them.

Biking with clipless pedals, and biking shoes without cleats is hard. My feet were slipping all over the place. Oh well, it was still a great ride, even if I couldn't do technical climbs and I didn't get a GPS record of the ride.

Morning Fog

Just as things were starting to dry out a bit, it rained last night. I guess it is better than snow because it drys up quicker. I keep hoping that the trail will have dried up enough to get some mountain biking in. Road biking is nice, and it helps keep you in shape, but it just not the same as mountain biking.

After the rain there was fog. This isn't the greatest picture but it is the best that I got this morning. There were some great scenes of fog over the valley, but all I had available for those was my little Olympus camera, which just didn't do a good job of capturing the image.

A trip up hobble creek

We rode up hobble creek canyon today.

It is fun drafting downhill, but I think when I was pulling downhill it was more work than pulling uphill was. If motionbased would fix their view port then I would add it here, but it is a bit too much work to add the picture and make it work right and I am feeling lazy tonight. So here is a link to the ride

Not much riding

I managed to get a few rides in this month but they have been on the road so there is not much to write about. However, there have been a few beautiful sunrises lately and I wanted to add this one to my blog. So here it is, sunrise on Feb 18 from my front door.