On Bikes and Domino

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2009-12-15T13:44:00.001-05:00

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Big Kahuna

2009-10-13T20:10:00.004-04:00

Ya ya.. been a while...

I was finally able to ride the Big Kahuna this year after 4 years of tries. For those who don't know, the Kahuna is a group mountain bike ride put on by a local bike shop owner. This year there was about 130 riders who participated which is a huge number for something with only word of mouth advertising. The ride itself starts at the Montserrat T station in Beverly and ends up at Lobsta Land in Gloucester Ma. There are no marked routes, you basically get there however you want, but the with only a few road crossings, you are in the woods the whole time. Mike and I managed to do 21 miles, but could have easily added 5 more miles on.... not that we could have made it to the end, but the options were there...

As for the ride itself, I didn't really plan well at all when it came to food. Didn't eat enough for breakfast, and I didn't bring any food with me, so I really ran out of gas 3/4 of the way through. Despite that we met a bunch of really cool people and had a great time! Next time I'll bring more food....

Ride report - Lynn Woods

2009-06-06T06:58:00.004-04:00

Met with the real estate agent in the afternoon, and still managed to get out for a ride in Lynn with Mike. I took the Nomad out this time and boy is that soft! I'm still amazed at the difference between the two bikes in terms of how the suspension affects the ride. On the Nomad, I really don't even notice the rocks on the trail, and Lynn is pretty much all rock and not all of it is the good kind - long stretches of smooth granite (there is a lot of that here too though). Right now I'm talking about the football sized rocks that just litter the trails out there.

trail leading up to the stone tower from the golf course side

I would be bouncing all over the place on the above tail, but on the Nomad, it's just buttery smooth! On the down side -literally- I am absolutely flying down the hills. You just need to point the bike down hill and without even worrying about a smooth line, you'll be at the bottom in seconds. However, compared to the hard tail, it's a lot more work to get up a hill faster, though, that being said, it is easier to keep the rear tire planted over the rock gardens with full suspension. The hard tail is much more skiddish and you know about and feel every rock you pass over.

So I feel pretty good about this past week. Managed to do 25.75 miles total, with 18 (give or take) of those miles done on the single speed. Didn't break any records... maybe next week....

1x1 around Dykes Pond (updated)

2009-06-02T15:32:00.003-04:00

Took the single speed out to the Dykes Pond loop today. Not too shabby if I do say so myself. Total time on the single speed was actually really close to the last time through with the full suspension bike @ 1 hour 34 minutes. Considering I spent probably 15 minutes talking with some lady who was playing with her dog at the levee and considering the mechanical problems.....

Last time it was a flat tire that took longer to change than it should have, and this time it was, or could have been, worse. I took a little header at one point and, as headers go, it really wasn't all that spectacular. I wasn't going very fast, and the whole crash went pretty much by the book. I quickly got up, brushed myself off and went to ride off when I noticed my handle bars had gotten a bit twisted. No problem I thought, I'll just walk the rest of the way up the hill and... whoops.... back wheel won't spin. Normally this would mean a bent rotor, but this time the rear wheel was wedged up against the frame in an awkward way. Ok, shouldn't be too bad. The sliding drop outs that allow you to set the chain tension probably just slid a bit. They have been doing that lately. I was able to quickly adjust everything to get the wheel spinning again and after fixing the handle bars and the seat I was off and rolling.

Later, I had stopped for a quick breather and I looked down and noticed the rear wheel was really close to one of the seat stays, and much farther away from the other. Hmmm... that's no good. Did I bend the frame? Is the wheel messed up? At this point I just can't tell, and have not spent a lot of time inspecting it. I'm hoping it's just the wheel and not the frame.. that would suck.

If I can find where I put the camera, I'll take some pictures.

UPDATE: Helps to have a second opinion. After showing Mike the problem after work, it turns out there wasn't actually anything wrong. The wheel just wasn't seated completely in the drop outs. D'OH....

Diving home...

2009-05-31T07:56:00.003-04:00

On my drive home is a swing bridge that gets pretty busy in the summer. Last week I snapped some pictures while I was waiting for the road to open again:

The alternate route is there in the distance...

Single speed - Pics

2009-05-31T07:36:00.003-04:00

I have had these sitting on my camera since I built the bike, so I figured I should show you what I'm talking about for this single speed thing:
Total cost was about $400.

Currently running a 32t chain ring in the front and an 18t cog in the back. The rear drops outs slide to adjust the chain tension. Nice thing is that the disc break mount slides with the drop outs.

The Nixon fork has a remote travel adjust switch that is mounted to the handle bars for easy over the bars crashes. When I took it out of the box, I thought it was a remote lock out. I'm not really sure why you would need to change the travel like this.... I wish it had been a remote lock out.

Rainy ride on the 1x1

2009-05-29T07:17:00.003-04:00

It's been a while since my last post, and sadly, not much has changed....

I was back out at Greenwood Road yesterday... in the rain... by myself... with an idea that I was going to see if I could beat my previous time in here. Those plans were changed halfway though the first hill when I realized that I wasn't so much 'riding' but skating on the super slick roots and rocks and not even doing that particularly well. So rather than push it, I just tried to keep a consistent speed up and make the best of it. Turns out I actually did pretty well. Total time was 38-ish minutes (vs. the current record of 34 and change). I took a breather at the halfway point for a few minutes and decided to skip a more technical ( in these conditions, on this bike I guess treacherous would be the better word) section, using the fire road to get to the final section. I think I rested for about the same time it would take to complete the section I skipped, so it ends up eing pretty close to a wash in terms of time.

I think I should be able to easily beat the current record.....

Single speed

2009-05-16T17:28:00.002-04:00

This morning, I got the single speed finished up! This is going to be an interesting bike to ride.... I can't wait to try it out on some of the trails I know really well like Lynn Woods. The fact that it only has one gear is sorta not even the point. The real difference is that this is a hard tail, and I've been riding full suspension bikes for a long time. The single speed idea only came out of the fact that I never really change gears anyway on my normal ride, so why add all that extra complexity.... or so the theory goes.

So, right now, the first two things that I'm not sure about with the way it is set up is the gearing which is 36x18... much taller than I have been using lately with a 34x21, so that will probably have to change. Either use a 32 ( I have some old chainrings laying around ) which might work well with the 18t cog in the back. Other wise I need to pick up some larger cogs (I'll probably do that anyway since it gives me more options). The other thing I'm not quite happy with is the fork - a Manitou Nixon Platinum . It was pretty cheap so I won't complain too much. First thing about the fork is that it has a remote travel adjust feature. There is a little lever that you mount on the the handle bar that, when pressed, lets you change the travel of the fork. Normally you would have a little dial on the top of one of the fork legs that does this. Almost every fork I have owned has some sort of travel adjust, and I usually don't play with it. I just keep it at what ever the longest setting is, so I think a remote lockout would have been better. The other thing I'm not so happy with is the just that it always feels 'sticky'. I have had this problem with other Manitou forks also (one of them being a Nixon), so I'm not sure if it is a characteristic of all Manitou forks or just the Nixon and lesser models. The nice thing about the fork is that it is dual air so I can make it as stiff or soft as I like.

The one issue I had so far was that I tried a 24t cog from a 9 speed cassette with didn't work at all. I did this because I only had a 9 speed chain available at the time, so the single speed specific cogs I had wouldn't work. On my initil test run, the chain kept falling off at the worst times. Because the cogs are made to make changing gears easy they are not really a good choice if you don't want to change gears. After a quick trip to the bike store for a 7 speed chain, the other cogs worked and on my second run, everything worked perfect.

Can't wait for the first ride... too bad it's raining tomorrow.

Greenwood - best time ever!

2009-05-11T18:56:00.002-04:00

Last time out at Greenwood Rd I felt pretty good and predicted that I would be able to do the whole loop in under 45 minutes. I figured this was a pretty fair estimate since that was pretty close to my best time last year (40-45 minutes). So today I went out by myself with the sole intent of getting as close to that as possible. I'm glad to say that I managed to blow that estimate away with a time of 34:31!! I'm sure it's pretty laughable for the really fast guys... but not too shabby for me!

Not sure how much more time I could eek out at this point, but maybe by the end of summer I could get under 30 minutes..... we'll see.... next time though, I'm gonna see what sort of times I can get doing two complete loops... stay tuned!

Venting - Notes Color Columns

2009-05-02T11:45:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I was working with on a UI redesign of Teamstudio Security Manager when I hit a very useful sounding, but half assed "feature" in Notes views - the color column. So long as you don't want to do anything customizable with it, it works well enough. All you do is use an RGB value in the column formula and all the text to the right of that column changes to that color. Useful to help draw the users attention to certain documents. The most familiar use for this is in the Notes mail template where you can highlight emails from people with different colors. I don't like to hard code colors like that since there can be a variety of reasons the user may want to change the color - being color blind for example. I know that what ever color I choose, someone won't be able to see it well, so why not give the user the choice what color to use!

The ability to change the color should have been pretty easy to do, and my first try was to to just use @Getprofilefield() in the color column where I had previously just had a hard coded color. Whoops... can't use that formula in a column... ok... quick scan though the help (should have read it closer in hind sight) got me going and I filled in the right properties in the column settings. So here is where it would have paid to read the doc more closely. These settings are global to the application, and not per user. The doc clearly states that this feature is only useful for applications that have only one user! What sort of application is that?? Ahhh... mail... right... The most frustrating thing is that they came so close to having a feature everyone could make use of - not just the mail template developers. All they needed was to use the user name, or use the column formula to get the user name - the doc even tells you to put @Username in in the column formula for cryin' out loud! Or just make @Getprofilefield work in the column, they obviously got pretty close to this since the column properties require you to enter the name of a profile document to load the color formula from!

ARRRGGGG! Yet another overly complicated feature that lets IBM do interesting things, but doesn't help anyone else.

Belated ride report - First road ride

2009-05-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

It's taken a while to write this up, but Tuesday's ride was the first road ride for me this year. It was going to be in the high 80's and I just could not resist. Things was that it actually got up to 94 here, and I was a little under prepared. Turned out to be a bit longer of a ride than I set out to do, but every ride is like that for me. I just can't help but take the long way for some reason... This time, I wanted to hit this really steep, but short road out in Topsfield, MA that goes under Rt 1. I only found it recently and hadn't had a chance to ride it. Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be once I actually got out and did it. Turns out it's around an 11% grade, but only a quarter mile in length. After that, I didn't have enough of hills, so it was over to Hill St in Topsfield for the ride home. Those who live around here know that the street is aptly named! All in all it wasn't a very hilly ride, and felt good to be out on the road especially since, heat like this can get really oppresive on a slower mountain bike ride.

Ride Report - Gordon College

2009-04-30T07:24:00.003-04:00

Just a quick update for now... yesterday's ride was out at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. I've been pretty good at keeping my rides so far in the 8 mile range (when I'm by myself that is....). Hopefully I'll be ready for the few races I've been looking at this year.

Ride Report - Greenwood Ave

2009-04-27T19:49:00.001-04:00

Went out to Greenwood Ave in Beverly, MA with Mike and Bosco today. The loop here is pretty small, area wise, but is pretty intense. I don't think there is a flat spot in the whole place, it's all up and down. Perfect interval type workout. While today's ride wasn't going to break any speed records, I did manage my personal best time on the first two sections (from the splits page they are lap #2 and #4). Previously my best times were 11 minutes and 7'30" respectively. This time around I managed 9 minutes and 6'30"! Both sections are about 1 mile long, but the first section has 2 considerable hills right at the start, which I'm sure contributed to the slower time.
Anyway, next time I'm out here by myself I'm sure I could put in a sub 45 minute time for the entire 4 mile loop.

Ride report - Lynn Woods

2009-04-25T09:19:00.004-04:00

Yesterday's ride was in Lynn Woods - one of my all time favorite places.
Lynn is great because of the variety of trails both cross country and freeride. Lynn is basically divided in half by a reservoir called Walden pond. On the south side of Walden pond are all the cross country trails. You ride for a pretty long time and get a great workout. Nothing on the south side is very difficult, technically. North of Walden pond is where all the really technical stuff is. the entire thing is basically a huge rock garden. The north side is where you will find all the guys sporting full face helmets and 8+ inch travel bikes.

The north side is my favorite, just because of the rock. I love slogging through a long up hill rock garden and then have to jump up on a bolder at the top only to have to quickly accelerate to take a 3 foot drop on the other side. The amount of effort you ave to exert in such a short time really gets the blood flowing! The two sides are connected at one end via a long levee covered in trap stone - which really sucks to ride across. Yesterday though, for the first time in years, I decided to slog it out to make a complete loop and I'm really glad I did. The levee itself was just a long spin in a high gear, but the trails on the other side have had a lot of work done to them lately and really makes it a cool option.

The maps, BTW, are courtesy of Diesel bikes who have done a really greate job working with the ranger to maintain and improve the trails in the area.

Here are some photos from last year ( I really have to start brining the camera again...)

Finally Here is a crummy video from last year:

From Halloween Ride in Lynn

Bike setup

2009-04-23T21:21:00.004-04:00

I love riding, but I also really enjoy working on bikes. I usually end up breaking quite a few bits (mostly derailleurs and pedals), so it helps a lot to know how things go together and work if you have to do some emergency trail side repair. It also saves you from having to drop your bike off at the local bike shop for repairs. This is nothing against the bike shops - the guys up at Seaside Cycle are awesome, but they probably won't be able to do major repairs while you wait, since there are probably 10 other broken bikes in front of you. (Side note: It also helps to have a pair of vice grips or two... just ask Scott!) So this is the basic run down of the more interesting parts that make up my Nomad.

Up front, is a Fox 36 Talas RC2:

I really like this fork. The 36mm stanchions combined with the thru axel front wheel, make it super stiff, which addresses one of the biggest complaints I had using a standard 32mm fork. The only issue at the moment is that I think I have it a bit too squishy for my style of riding. This is easily fixed by just adding a bit more air pressure - huge benifit to having an air sprung fork versus a coil.

For brakes I'm running Avid Elixer CR's with 185mm rotors:

I debated getting another set of Avid Code brakes like I had on my Heckler, but went with these because the Codes would make a huge amount of noise and it drove me nuts. I figured I would try these and have been pretty happy so far. They only get noisy when they get wet, but I don't notice it too much because they also don't stop so well when they get wet... maybe a different set of pads will help.

Cranks/Chainguide are Truvativ Stylo's with an e.Thirteen chainguide:

The e.Thirteen was not the easiest thing to install. It took a bit of fiddling and cutting, and actually had to leave off a few bits of plastic to get the thing to fix. I also had to grind off the bolt tabs on the crank set that hold the small chain ring on because they were dragging against the inside of the chain guide. Didn't really matter since I usually on only run a single 34t chain ring up front anyway.

Over the years, I've come to realize that, up to a certain point, you really do get what you pay for. Low end parts are cheap, but they don't perform well and they really don't stand up to the abuse of riding every day (especially in New England). So if you want to really get into biking don't skimp on the components!

GSpot

2009-04-23T14:57:00.004-04:00

Today's ride was up at GSpot in Essex.

GSpot is a pretty typical New England style ride with lots of exposed granite, constant rock gardens and the whole ride is basically up and down. Not much in there is flat.

Here are a few pics from earlier rides that may give you an idea what I'm talking about:

Here is a crappy video of a particularly big roller up there that I took earlier in the year

From SPRING at G Spot

The Collective - Seasons

2009-04-22T21:03:00.003-04:00

One of the greatest mountain biking movies ever is Seasons by The Collective.
Great sound track, great interviews, great movie.

Just figured I'd share.... :)

Working with Domino Global Workbench - Part 1

2009-04-22T17:33:00.006-04:00

So, after installing DGW, the first thing it needs to do is set up a Projects database:The projects database is where DGW keeps track of all the tagging and language options for the databases you are localizing. The problem is that DGW insists on defaulting to a local copy of the projects db, which is no help for teams. Making it worse is that the steps for changing to a different project database is a huge pane. So the quick solution was to just make a replica of it on our development server, and replicate it all the time. This lead to the need to actually setup standard area where DGW would be keeping all its stuff, namely the glossary dbs and the tagged dbs. I wanted a standard place so that when other people tried to set this up for their apps there would be no doubt where to go. I settled on the following structure:

We keep all development templates under the development folder. Blow that I created a folder called 'dgw'. Here is where all the glossary dbs are stored along with the project database. Within that folder I have a one called 'tagged' which is where all the tagged versions of the templates go. Normally this would be a problem because Domino doesn't allow 2 templates on the server with the same Master Template Name. For us, though, this is fine since I'm going to building every thing with Build Manager, so I don't put any template names on the templates as this is done at build time.
Inside the 'tagged' folder all the templates keep the same name as the original template:

[ Luckily (due to a bug) Domino kindly removes the template name on any new copies, as well as the database title, categories, and inherit from settings... gee thanks.. not! ]

I also have a folder called 'dgw_custom' which is where I keep a customized version of the glossary template under CIAO! control. I'll explain why I need a custom version of that template in a future post.

So that is basically it. I always know where my tagged templates are and I always know where my glossary dbs are. More importantly, it's easy for other people to keep track of this also and doesn't require anyone to constantly ask me where the glossary is for any particular database!

New Toy

2009-04-22T10:46:00.006-04:00

Today's ride was in Gloucester, MA out around Dykes Pond. This will be the first ride this week since my car was in the shop on Monday and it rained all day Tuesday. Needless to say, I'm feeling a bit antsy not getting a ride in since Friday last week (First ride in Lynn woods this year). I've also been itching to try out my new toy - A Garmin Edge 705:

It's pretty small so hopefully it won't get in the way or lost...

The ride itself went pretty well with the exception of a flat 15 minutes in. This was only the second time I've ridden this loop, the first time was with fellow Teamstudio guy Mike Wetherbee. That ride took about 3 hours, mostly because we were exploring and did a lot of standing around talking. So I was quite happy to be able to do the entire 8+ mile loop a lot faster at only 1.5 hours.

The Edge also performed much better than I expected, though it reports that I gained 1100 feet and lost 1400 feet in elevation... I started and stopped at the same spot and I didn't notice being 400 feet below my car when I got back... though maybe something else moved....

Garmin also has a pretty slick website for reviewing all the data, though over the past few days it has been a bit flakey and timed out a lot. They have a desktop application also, but it doesn't integrate with google maps, so the neat factor isn't has high. Here is the report from today's ride.

Can't wait to get out to some of the other palces I know and map those out as well!

My day job

2009-04-21T16:03:00.004-04:00

So, when I'm not biking or drinking, I work for Teamstudio. For those who don't know, we create tools for IBM Lotus Notes/Domino admins and developers. The tools aimed at admins are a mix of native Domino server add-ins and hooks that do all or most of the work, and standard Notes databases where all the configuration happens. Lately I have been working to get the localized Japanese releases of two of these admin tools - Seacurity Manager and Agent Registry completed, and for that we recently switched to using Domino Global Workbench which is where everything got horribly unproductive....

You see, DGW is pretty bad. I think it's biggest problem is that it has been ignored by IBM for a very long time and as a result, it is incredibly awkward and clunky to use. It's main interface is based on Notes 5:
which is pretty hard to use and not very well done and makes it even harder to use. The other half of the application are two Notes databases - DGW Projects, and the glossary. The projects database is fine for what it does, but I wish the client would remember that I want the database on a server - which it doesn't...! The glossary database works, but looks like a novice Notes developer was working on it. There are many places where it doesn't perform well, and most are the result of badly written code.

At the end of the day, DGW works for what I need it to do, but it is very painful to use. However, so far, I have been able to work around most of the trouble spots, and have even been able to integrate these changes into our build process using Build Manager so I can automate all these tasks. I'll describe all of that in later posts....

Post ride...

2009-04-21T15:50:00.003-04:00

What is the the best thing after a long ride?

What do I ride?

2009-04-21T14:51:00.005-04:00

Right now I have 4 bikes. In most ridden order they are:
Santa Cruz Nomad:

This is my main ride all year long. I try to do at least 3 or 4 rides a week in the woods. Prior to this bike I had an '03 Santa Cruz Heckler that some dirtbag stole from off my car at work... RRRR

Specialized Allez:

I only really ride this (outside) in the summer. Winter time usually finds this bike hanging in the garage or strapped to the trainer.

K2 Big Easy:

This is mostly for toolin' around with my wife and kids. It's huge padded and suspended/sprung seat is really easy on the back side! It is also used to pull a Burley trailer or a third wheel type bike.

My fourth bike is an '03 Specialized StumpJumper FSR that is really only used for a back up on the rare occasion I can't fix something that broke on the Nomad.

Try again...

2009-04-21T11:40:00.011-04:00

So lets try this again.... this will be a more personal blog than my other attempt but it will still cover some of the things I run into at work. Mostly though, this will be for talking about bikes and rides.