The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Sound Palette

Andrew called me in the middle of the week to make me aware that UNEAQ had been invited to play at Sno-Drift on Saturday with JT Donaldson, MJ Gamez, Sharon Buck, Roger Moorehouse, and Ladyhouse. There was no way I was going to miss this party.

After hearing from my friends that all of them had other plans, I hit the road and drove up to San Francisco in time to be the sixth person through the doors (although I got there after 11). I was on the guest list and wander in to await the return of the musicians from some taquería on the Mission.

MJ Gamez dropped a clean, funky set to an mostly empty house. Sharon Buck followed, playing a really enticing set of tribal and tech tracks that made it a tragedy that very few people were on the dancefloor. After her, JT Donaldson played a couple of tracks and gave over to some guy I didn’t recognize. About then, a couple of party buses showed up and the club was full — mostly with women. I hung out with my South Bay people and ripped up the dancefloor, at least until some of the members of the bachelorette party started to smother me a little bit.

UNEAQ came on right at two in the morning and played a magnificent set, including a couple of tracks I haven’t heard them play live before. Jessica and Andrew celebrated their birthdays in rare style, tearing up the speakers with their sophisticated deep house sound. The crowd waned a little bit as the gaggle of girls from the bus took off to some other venue, but the party kept on. Jessica’s vocals never fail to inspire, but with the sound system in Sno-Drift and the tight, intimate room, the sound was completely different than I’ve heard it before. What a great set!

Ladyhouse closed us out with a mix of house tracks that can only be described as “damn”. She kept the groove going until the club emptied out just before 4 in the morning. After watching the mad beatboxers and freestylers in the back room, I helped the band load up their equipment, said my goodbyes, and zipped back down the 101 for home.

Happy birthday, Andrew and Jessica. It was great to hang out with you all again. Let’s do it again really soon.

Installing Tiger

On Wednesday, after driving to work and hoping for a quick stomp on the bike afterwards, I cruised by the Apple store in Palo Alto and picked up Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). I knew I was going to need some time to install it, so I decided to install it today, since I cancelled my metric century this afternoon, due to bike part issues.

The longest part of the installation involved reformatting my 40 gig external Firewire drive and using Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup of my PowerBook’s hard drive. That took two episodes of Firefly to complete.

The installation took less than an hour and all of my applications appear to be working just fine—with the solitary notable exception of vim, which doesn’t seem to boot. X11 doesn’t bring the xterm to the front when switching to it from other applications, but Reason 2.5 launches fine.

The new features seem pretty nifty. I don’t dislike Mail’s new look as much as other people out there seem to. Dashboard is pretty nifty and I even downloaded a few extra widgets for it. Safari‘s new RSS functionality is really cool, especially since it creates a splash page for a feed, similar to how Sage for Firefox works, but I’ll probably just continue using Sage and Firefox primarily.

I’ve played with Spotlight a little bit, and love the way it opened iTunes when it found an MP3 that matched my search query, but I haven’t had a chance to explore it much yet. I haven’t played with Automator or any of the other new features yet. My computer seems a little faster, though.

All in all, the installation was a breeze and other than the extra time it took the new Mail to import from the old mail, it was all completely effortless.

Well, done, Apple!

Week 20

Where last week was a triumphant conquest of my seven continuous weeks of mileages shorter than chart goals, this week has been a week in which the weather was unpredictable and annoying, and my penchant for making excuses caused me to flip out on Thursday and remember that I’m supposed to be a tough cyclocommuter. I rode 10.5 miles to work in the rain and ended up requiring a new cyclometer at the end of that ride.

On Friday, I blew away my previous morning commute best by 14 seconds to slam the gauntlet down right and storm to work at 19.3 mph. After arriving at work, I checked my back rim, which is in the process of cracking lengthwise, and noticed more cracks near more spoke holes. I had the rim examined at Outfitter. My repair guy recommended avoiding riding it again until the new rim has arrived.

I had taken the bike in to have it checked after I bit it. I had the derailleur examined, because my gears were skipping, and we discovered the problem with the rim (“You’re not going to be able to keep it in true, man.”) and put in the warranty paperwork about ten days ago. I’m starting to get impatient to receive the rim, because I’m still going to have to take the bike in, leave it, and let them relace the spokes to my current hub/cassette. Hopefully, I get the rim soon, so I can get back out there and leave more asphalt behind me.

So this week–windy, rainy, and whiny–was kind of a bust. A little drizzle on Tuesday made me wimp out 6 miles short, it “seemed” like it was going to rain on me on Monday and Wednesday, and now my rim is kaput. I’m only 110 miles short of my goal this week. Let’s hope I get back on track soon, so you can all read fewer of my excuses and more of my triumphs.

17 May:  22.19 mi;  1:11:57 (18.5 mph avg; 27.0 mph max)
19 May:  28.94 mi;  1:33:07 (18.6 mph avg; 25.5 mph max)
20 May:  28.75 mi;  1:31:45 (18.8 mph avg; 26.0 mph max)
Total :  79.88 mi;  4:16:49 (18.6 mph avg; 27.0 mph max)

Month so far:  459.48 mi. 2005 so far : 2890.15 mi (57.80% of goal).
2005 goal   : 5000.00 mi.
Remaining   : 2109.85 mi (65.93 mi / wk avg)

Six Months on the Trek

Today marks the six month anniversary since I bought my Trek 520. Unfortunately, the Bontrager Maverick rim on the back is starting to split. Cracks along the rim have been forming on either side of the spoke holes. Yesterday, on the way home from work, the guys at Bicycle Outfitter recommended that I take the bike home and park it until a new rim comes in. Hopefully, it will get here soon.

In these six months, I have ridden 3,904.50 miles. I’m closing in on 3,000 since January 1, which I was hoping to finish by June 1. But, we’ll have to see how quickly Trek moves on my new rim. Since it’s breaking within a year of buying the bike, it’s under warranty. I just need continue nagging my friends at the shop to maybe get Trek to expedite my shipment a little bit.

So, it looks like my Saturday ride, which I had scheduled for 65 or 70 miles isn’t going to happen. I’ve been a little lax in the long ride department and I was looking forward to adding more time in saddle. I guess that’s going to have to wait for the new rim. I could attempt it, but when that rim fails the spokes will likely buckle and dump me on the ground. The way my luck goes, I’d be careening down Edgewood Road, trying for fifty miles an hour, when that happened.

Ah, well. Equipment failures are bound to happen. But, other than that, I’ve loved every moment on that beautiful Trek steed—except, to be honest, those moments when I was hammering against a 30 mph headwind. Let’s see what the next six months brings!

Blank to Work Day

Today was Bike to Work Day. After numerous days lately when I just didn’t feel like getting out there, because it looked like it might rain or it drizzled a little bit, I was determined to ride to work today. The forecast called for a slight chance of sprinkles. Yesterday, it was supposed to rain.

It was pouring. I decided to go ahead and ride the full distance to work in the rain, wearing my clear PVC cycling rain coat. Somewhere in Palo Alto, my cyclometer started acting weird, counting 0.3 miles over a half mile stretch of road. After getting my goody bag at the refreshment station (thanks, Bike Coalition people!), I got to work exactly 0.2 miles short. During the weird stretch of counting funny, I had stopped to tilt the cyclometer mount up (in case water was in the contacts), and despite a full kick at what could not have been less than 22 miles an hour, my little Cateye measured my speed between 2 miles an hour and 15. At work, I flipped through the modes, noting the numbers. I went into my building to change into my regular clothes and out of my extremely soggy cycling stuff. When I came back out of the locker room, my cyclometer was blank.

After one too many cracks and smacks, it probably got water in the electronics somehow. After some consultation online, I decided to purchase a Cateye Mity 8 cyclometer. Luckily, they have them in stock at Bicycle Outfitter, 5.75 miles from my office by my usual ride home route.

I picked the Mity 8 because of the ability to manually set the odometer, so a few years down the line, when the battery goes dead, I can replace said battery and put my odometer back. After some experimentation, though, I figured out that odometer miles over 10,000 do not include tenths. So, I added up all my mileage since I started cycling, subtracted 10,000, so I could get my decimal, and put that on the cyclometer. When I pulled into my driveway, the cyclometer reads 12,219.4. Now, the next time I take one of those marker photos, I should be right on the money.

After an hour installing the thing in the shop (and shooting the breeze), I hit the road. Mity’s speed indicator is big and easy to read. The only thing that befuddles me so far is that the distance is four clicks from odometer. That’s a little weird. On the newly-busted Tomo, odometer is right before distance. That makes it easier to calibrate the odometer to hundredths of a mile.

One thing I like is the pace arrow. When I’m slower than my average speed, a little arrow next to the speed indicator points down. When I’m faster, it points up. Apparently, I am also able to program the new cyclometer, but I don’t know all of its features yet (like setting the clock to 24 hour time). By the time I decide I really need one with cadence (I considered the Astrale 8, but you can’t set the odometer), there will be one with BlueTooth, a GPS unit, 100 gigs of disk space, a heart monitor, altimeter, and USB connectivity all built in. And I’m sure it’ll be about the size of a dollar in quarters.

Salted

Lakshmana came up this afternoon after my ride to tag along to Salted. Due to my own difficulty getting moving again after the pizza and 62¼ mile bike ride, we didn’t get up to the club until about 11:15.

The crowd seemed quite heavily female tonight, at least for the first couple of hours. Miguel Migs was playing a wonderful deep house set. Julius Papp took over and continued the vibe with some great tracks—with obvious jazz, soul, funk, and disco influence. The dancefloor stayed full the entire evening.

The crowd was really fun tonight. Little pockets of people would end up near me on several occasions and I danced hard with pretty strangers who just wanted to see if they could get me to collapse in exhaustion. One of the people near me, a choral teacher, and I had a good conversation. I thought she was really cool and hope she emails me.

Vikter Duplaix, the headliner, ripped it up, starting with a set of minimal techno tracks that segued into funky Latin-influenced floor stompers. I’m going to have to see about getting one of his records.

After a while, I scooped up Lakshmana and we decided to take off about 3. I was soaked in sweat all the way down to my knees. Whew. What a great party.

Week 19

For the first time since early March, I had an utterly complete week in which I exceeded 100% of my chart (I’ve been riding Week 12 on that chart since rolling back).

This week was nice, but breezy. Although I did drive to work on three of the days, I still got more than all of my miles, especially with yesterday’s metric century. After crushing my best average speed on Thursday, I had hoped for a 30 kph (18.6 mph) average yesterday, but headwinds reminded me that I’m really kind of a wuss.

It does feel really nice to have mornings on which I can ride to work without my shell and heavy fleece tights. It feels doubly nice to have days where I’m not slogging home against a fierce headwind with an outside temperature of 59°F (15°C). Hopefully, this weather trend continues—minus the strong afternoon winds, of course.

09 May:  28.86 mi;  1:30:32 (19.1 mph avg; 30.5 mph max)
10 May:  29.18 mi;  1:35:13 (18.4 mph avg; 26.0 mph max)
11 May:  28.56 mi;  1:29:02 (19.2 mph avg; 34.5 mph max)
12 May:  28.54 mi;  1:24:25 (20.3 mph avg; 35.5 mph max) *
13 May:  31.29 mi;  1:39:15 (18.9 mph avg; 26.5 mph max)
14 May:  62.23 mi;  3:23:19 (18.4 mph avg; 35.5 mph max)
Total : 208.66 mi; 11:01:46 (18.9 mph avg; 35.5 mph max)

Month so far:  379.60 mi. 2005 so far : 2810.27 mi (56.21% of goal).
2005 goal   : 5000.00 mi.
Remaining   : 2189.73 mi (66.36 mi / wk avg)

Getting My Metric On

My friend, Lakshmana, and I made plans to hit the clubs tonight, so I headed out on my ride very early (for me). In order to beat him to my house, I decided to leave at noon, but I didn’t really get out the door until 1. In order to add a longer ride to my chart, I decided to do a metric century.

It was about 72°F (22°C) outside when I headed out. It was quite breezy, but that seems to be the norm lately. I kicked away and told myself to take it a little easier than I usually do, fearful of burning out on one of the two climbing sections of the route. I headed past Google’s campus, steamed down into Sunnyvale, and continued on to Saratoga. It was out of Saratoga that I began to get wimpy. I chugged up over Mountain Winery, limp-wristedly switching to my 30/32 gear and limping up the hills at 4 mph. By the time my climbing had finished around the Stevens Canyon loop, my average speed was only about 17.2. I poured it on in the descents, inhaling some kind of flying insect at 32 mph in Cupertino, which stopped me in my tracks long enough to cough up a lung.

The winds increased significantly after I made a water stop at the Outfitters. I gained some of my average speed back by the time I passed my 12000 mile marker and I rolled up the easy climb to Portola Valley with some power. I also knew that I had less than 20 miles left of my ride and some speed to gain in that distance. The Portola loop’s headwinds continued to bear down on me at 20 mph, but I ducked out of it as best I could.

I had hoped to post a speed over 40 miles an hour on my descent of Woodside Road, but crosswinds were so bad that I topped out just under 36. I must not have been properly hydrated on the last three mile sprint home, because on Atherton Avenue, I got cramps in my right hamstring, lower back, right calf, left thigh, and shoulder simultaneously. Ouch.

Still, I had a good ride, despite the headwinds. It really feels like spring is coming, which makes me excited. Spring should have already been here a while ago, but with 78°F (25.6°C) on the mercury, I’m not complaining today.

Today:   62.23 mi;   3:23:19 (18.4 mph avg; 35.5 mph max) May  :  379.60 mi;  20:04:58 (18.9 mph avg; 46.0 mph max)
2005 : 2810.27 mi; 151:00:02 (18.6 mph avg; 46.0 mph max)
Goal : 5000.00 mi (2189.73 mi to go : 56.21% complete)

Twelve

May 14, 2005. 16:15 PDT.
Alpine Road @ Stowe Lane
Menlo Park, California
This marker: 12000 miles
Miles actual: 12150.04

 

Shredding the Expressway

Today was an early meeting day at work, which meant that I got to leave at 3:30. Waiting for me at the post office in Menlo Park was another package from my friends in Canada. I snagged it, headed home, and found my new shell, socks, jerseys, and shorts.

After eating at 4:30, I headed out on my ride about 6. Yesterday’s single-ride after-work stomp (because I had a sore throat in the morning, but I medicated myself enough to feel good enough to ride by afternoon) was good and the usually gale-force winds were a little more gentle. Today, I got a trudgy start around the Watkins-Middlefield-Glenwood spin, but started to feel the kick a little more as I scrambled up Valparaiso. I charged down Junipero Serra, meeting and passing a group of cyclists as I thumped toward the southeast.

At my turnaround point, Bicycle Outfitter, I ate a Clif Shot, refilled my water bottle, and hit the Expressway back. My average speed was about 19.9 then, so all I wanted to do was not squander what must have been a good tailwind thus far. Fifteen minutes later, I set the first personal best of the day—fastest twenty mile sprint ever (59:33), fastest hour (20.15), and fastest 25 miles (1:14:15). Despite a slight breeze in my face, I kept my head down, started my count, and chugged the miles away.

When I rounded the Atherton Avenue corner and began my last three miles, my cyclometer read 20.1 mph average. With a slight downhill left but the headwind-prone badly-worn Encinal to close out my day, I glugged more water and leaned further down into my drops, counting the alphabet and the beats.

“Alpha 2 3 4 Bravo 2 3 4 Charlie 2 3 4 Delta 2 3 4…”

Personal bests today: fastest 20 miles, best hour, fastest 25 miles, fastest single ride, fastest day (4:37 faster than the same distance yesterday). Maybe having those cheese enchiladas an hour before the ride did the trick.

Today:   28.54 mi;   1:24:25 (20.3 mph avg; 35.5 mph max) May  :  286.08 mi;  15:02:24 (19.0 mph avg; 46.0 mph max)
2005 : 2716.75 mi; 145:57:28 (18.6 mph avg; 46.0 mph max)
Goal : 5000.00 mi (2283.25 mi to go : 54.34% complete)