this one was too good to pass up.  j-lo thinks her triathlon training is a more media-worthy event that watching that what’s-his-name swimmer win 8 olympic golds in beijing.

now, i could interject my personal slant that triathlons are becoming awfully faddish these days, but i really can’t argue with people’s initiatives to get in shape and train for these events.  personally, it’s not for me, because i want a life, and i enjoy what i already do (biking, skiing, etc.) and find endless ways to challenge myself in each.

but let’s blow this one completely out of the water.  this isn’t even a full tri she’s competing in.  at best, it’s an olympic distance (1.5K swim/40K bike/10K run), which is less than half an Ironman - which in my estimation, is the bare minimum credential you should have to start talking smack like that.  jenny from the block, you are denied - and blacklisted.

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Summer is going by too damn fast.  Partially my own fault.  Been a while since I’ve been on here, but here’s the quick synopsis of what’s been happening (that’s worth reading about).  A few weeks back I got to go to Vancouver on some bizniss, which let me stay in Seattle for the weekend to visit with some friends.  Man I love that city.  I so want to move there.  I’m sure much of it is the “grass is greener” paradox, but nonetheless I love it.  Must get back to visit soon.  A spot of travel to Japan, a memorable (and taxing) climb up Devil’s tower, and the last few weekends have been spent at the lake trying to take in what’s left of the quickly evaporating season.

Slumlording continues… all my tenants are locked into another year, so one more year of breathing room.  Still crap news coming out of Detroit on a daily basis (rants to follow), so that makes me feel even better about chances of selling my house there without losing my shirt in this lifetime (sarcasm).

Fat Tire festival up in the Harbor is in 2 weeks - I’m horribly behind on biking.  Drove 1.5 hours through slit-your-wrist traffic last night to get up to Elk River to race in the Thursday Night Throwdown races… only to find out… I forgot my shoes.  All that drive, and no biking for me.  Absolutely frustrating experience.  I punished myself with a 4 mile run when I got home for being so stupid.

Lake this weekend, bachelor party in the Chi next weekend (should be a stupid good time)… and poof!  Summer’s gone.  Sigh.  Well, there’s always next year.

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i really hate to admit this, as aj will probably be doing backflips of joy, after finally defeating me and my [largely antagonistic] support for the pc.

but i’ve had it.  there’s 2 real ways that apple won me over.

1.  pc’s just suck.  more so, windows sucks.  i guess it’s always sucked, but the disparity of performance, reliability, and just plain user friendliness between windows and mac has gone from noticeable to epically huge.  the fact that my 6-month old thinkpad is now as atrociously slow as my 3.5-year old dell is an abomination.  worse yet, i’m 99.9% sure it’s the OS’s fault because I recently wiped out and reinstalled winxp on the dell and now it cooks.  it seems windows has a chronic constipation problem.  i could go on ad nauseum extolling the countless levels of suck that have pushed me to my breaking point, but i’d be wasting precious (linux) server space (and probably eating up even more precious kilobytes of PC cache memory)

2.  apple just plain gets it.  and they’re cool.  they’re easy to use.  they don’t choke up like an acne-infested chess club president at the junior high dance.  and they’ve leapfrogged the usability and performance of xp AND vista without breaking a sweat.  additionally, they’re just hitting stride.  they’ve won me over with the iPod.  now that the prices of the iPhone are starting to descend from the stratosphere (and grew 3G in the process), it’s beginning to look attractive.  plus with the volumes and volumes of pics/vids/audio that i’m now compiling, mac just begins to make more sense.  not to mention, the industrial design of macs are just a marvel compared to the slap-happy garbage that the pc market is churning out.  and it encourages clever spin-off retailing opportunities like the steve sleeve.  i could go on and on.

needless to say, i’m starting to save for my first bite of an apple.  i’m pretty convinced the grass is greener.

who really need spreadsheets anyways?  oh wait… a mac can do that too.  game over.

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friday morning was an early call for me.  5:45a i was on the phone with japan, closing the first deal in our little inner-company startup.  only 6 months in the making, but a step in the right direction.  biked into work (dodged the rain… barely), had a celebratory coffee with boss and product manager, then settled into 4 hours of organized chaos.  got nothing done that i wanted to, but still insisted on leaving work at nooner.

met my old friend angie and her fiance for drinks and (huge) late lunch at brit’s… they’re in town for the brewers-twins game tonight (avid brew crew fans).  since i bussed it into town, i decided to be a little touristy in my own city, since i never hang out downtown.  it was fun - strolled through the skyways (the rain started to fall), and loped around town.  waited for some peeps to get off work to join me for happy hour, but by 5:00p, my legs called “no joy” and said they needed to go home for a nap.  100 miles of biking this week plus climbing and soccer - the body had been defeated.  my walk to the bus stop was more a stiff-legged stagger than casual stroll.  need… rest.

all for now, more interesting stuff later.  likely a good rant on how to “design for servicability” after wrenching on the ‘rent’s exploder tomorrow up in the TF. 

biking, cube dwelling, exploder, uncategorized - 1 Comment »

today felt like a day robbed straight from the script of Office Space.  fortunately, my colleagues all realized it as such, and it became the butt of our jokes at our cliched birthday celebratory lunch at Outback Steakhouse.  my boss is now searching for an late-80’s porsche 911, suspenders, and the Bill Lumburgh coffee mug.  anyone who thinks that movie is just a complete fictional parody, obviously has never done time between mouse-fur-lined half-walls.

i’ve bit my lip for a while on the steaming pile that’s brewing over in detroit.   but things are getting bad… real bad.  but you know what… i’m going to save that for another post.  but consider yourself warned - i’m about to let loose.

another epic morning for riding in.  calm winds, a bit humid though.  rain and breeze are headed this way though, so this afternoon’s commute home may be a bit tumultuous.  400 commuting miles logged to date… a whopping $70 saved.  need to keep at it to pay off those pannier bags i’ve been eyeballing.

more later from the cube farm…

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bear with me while i initiate version 2.0 of the slant… now hosted on it’s own server.  hack attempts at css to follow.

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My schedule tomorrow… utter chaos.

05:00 - wake up, roll out of bed, into car
05:30 - meet Dan and Paul, head to lake, launch boat
06:00 - water ski at Lotus Lake
07:00 - pull boat, head to office, shower
08:00 - begin hell day of meetings
11:00 - break away for dentist appointment, lunch on the run
12:30 - continue hell day of meetings
16:30 - hustle to Plymouth to meet Nick
17:00 - 20 miles of mountain biking at Hillside
21:00 - nourishment
22:00 - pour what’s left of my aching body into bed

Then with any luck, wake up and ride to work Thursday in hopes of making it a 3-day ride week.

I leave you with this… my life when I’m in Japan.

biking, cube dwelling, miscellaneous - no comments »

Beautiful morning for a ride - mid 60s, calm wind, zero clouds.  Made it in 43 minutes - one of my best times.

I’m saddened as I sit down to begin the day, learning of the death of George Carlin.  He was a cynic’s cynic; a realist.  His humor was drawn from an acute sense of the absurdity of the reality of our world.  He was truly unique, and brilliant in his delivery.  He will be missed.

This weekend was gorgeous weather - too bad I spent most of it slaving around the house.  Saturday morning out of sheer coincidence, AJ and Matt showed up at Victor’s while I was having breakfast.  Ironic that I had just blogged about Matt, and lo and behold I met him at random chance but a few days later.  A cool guy, just like any of my friends.  Sounds like he’s doing well… and his blogging is leading to some very, um, interesting stories.  It was a pleasant meal in the sun, and nice to have some company… seemed like everyone was busy this weekend.

I built a bike rack and a tire rack (for the snow tires) in the garage this weekend - my big accomplishment (aside from spark plugs on the OB… a chore I despise having to do again).  I’m pretty happy in how it turned out… but I had a comical yet scary thought.  I have about 30′ of security cable… way too much for just bikes, so I strung it through the tires/rims as well so some thug doesn’t make away with my stuff like last year.  However if that tire rack gives (I hope my keen engineering sense holds strong), it’s going to be a disaster that will take the bikes right with it.  Fingers crossed, pics to come.

Back to the grind.  1 for 1 riding this week.  Going for 3.

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I had been spoiled, used to living with a washer and dryer for several years now.  When I bought the duplex in Uptown, the upper unit (mine) didn’t have laundry.  The washer/dryer were in the basement - only accessible by the first-floor tenants.  No biggie I thought… to spin it to the bright side I thought “at least at the laundromat I get all my laundry done in one quick shot instead of dragging it out into an all-day adventure”.

A year and a half later, I’m sick of it.  The people watching isn’t as great as I thought it could be, it hits me for nearly $20 each time… enough by now I’m sure to buy a new washer and dryer.  The big sell… today… is it’s fricken gorgeous out… and I’m stuck in this lousy place washing my drawers so I don’t have to go Commando tomorrow (tough image to digest, I know).  Sigh.  Worse yet, to get a laundry center upstairs is going to require a major overhaul of the bath and pantry-cum-laundry room.

I must have bruised a rib the other day biking.  Everytime I sneeze it hurts like hell on the left side of my back.  I’ve felt this before.  But I can’t figure out how I did it.  I did shoulder a tree while hugging a corner too tight, but I didn’t think it was that hard.  Time will heal I guess.  Instead, you’ll see me cringing everytime I sneeze.

That’s all for now.  interesting stuff… hope your Friday night is more eventful than mine.  I gotta get out.

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Thank God for the excellent weather, because that’s about all that seemed to go right for me this morning.  Just one of those petty, infuriatingly annoying nuisances of a morning.  Ran out of OJ, spilled milk, broke an egg, tripped over the fan, blew a fuse, dropped the toast (butter side down)… I’m surprised I made it out the door without maiming myself with the ceiling fan.

I woke up (as Jimmy would say) absolutely pp-pp-p-pooped.  My legs screaming “no mas!” after 60 miles of trails and 60 miles of commuting this week.  My hopes for a 3-day bike-commute week were tossed the instant the alarm went off.  No worries though - the last 7 days have been the most miles I’ve logged all summer, so I deserve a rest.

I’m wearing Keens in the office today - it’s slow - Friday.  It feels refreshing.  I’m actually hoping for a bit of rain this weekend - to water my lawn, and to make me feel less guilty about having to be inside doing chores and laundry.   Back to the grind - hoping to crank out lots of little tasks today to clear my plate.

biking, cube dwelling, miscellaneous - no comments »