A Whole Lotta Nothing Matt Haughey’s Personal Blog

Flip video from yesterday’s cyclocross race

Heiser Farms Cross A class race from Matt Haughey on Vimeo.

iStockphoto ends up on a license plate!

My new license plate, originally uploaded by mathowie.

I love my new Share the Road license plate that is now offered here in Oregon. It’s only $10 as a one-time fee and half goes to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and half goes to Cycle Oregon, both bike-friendly organizations I support.

I noticed it looked familiar when it showed up. I’ve been a casual user of iStockphoto for some time and I recently designed a site for a race series a friend was throwing (first race is this Saturday and I’ll be there in the beginner class!) and I used iStockphoto to get that cool outline of Oregon and the cyclist profile (I used a slightly different illustration). When I opened the DMV envelope I instantly recognized the cyclist, because it’s this file, just reversed, and with the water bottle removed from the outline.

I’m not faulting the designer, iStockphoto is a great place to get super cheap illustrations and I use them all the time, rather, I’m more stoked that an illustration there ended up working all the way up to an optional state license plate.

Cycle Oregon 2008

I finally wrote up my experiences of riding in Cycle Oregon this year. There is a small sampling of the photos I took and the lessons I took away from the event. It really was one of the best vacations I’ve ever done and was easily the most fun I’ve had on a bike. I’ll be doing it many times in the future and I encourage any friends reading it to give it a try someday.

August cycling/diet update

In August I hit two major goals I set for myself on January 1st of this year, and they were two goals I didn’t think I’d achieve. I surpassed 2,000 miles ridden and I did it just before completing my first century (100 mile) ride. Up until this year, I’ve always ridden about 600-800 miles between May and October and this year I pushed myself to ride all the way through Winter. I’m guessing I’ll be hitting about 3,500-4,000 miles for the year by the end.

The century went really well and didn’t feel like a 7 hour day in the saddle even though it was. The first 80 miles were pretty easy and a blast, but riding into a headwind the last 20 was kind of exhausting and I was glad to be finished at the end of the day. I also did the century ride to prepare myself for Cycle Oregon, which kicks off in less than a week. I knew even the worst day at Cycle Oregon (a 77 mile day with about 7,000′ of climbing) would be a bit less distance then the century (and the Portland Century featured about 5400′ of climbing) so if I could do the century, I should be ok for Cycle Oregon week.

On the diet front, I’m still down around the same weight as last month. Kind of frustrating that I haven’t really budged in several months, but overall I’m about 12lbs lighter than I was at the beginning of the year and I haven’t yo-yo’d back up, keeping fairly steady for the past few months. I’m hoping a hard week of riding at Cycle Oregon will kick off another five pound loss, though it sounds like they will be feeding us like crazy at every meal.

TLFT*: Michael Phelps

Watching some recent olympic track and field events still sitting on TiVo, I’m finally starting to understand how amazing it was for Michael Phelps to swim 17 races and win 8 medals and break multiple records over the span of just a few short days. For some reason I wasn’t really that impressed by the announcers constantly repeating it. It’s just swimming in water right? You don’t even sweat while doing it!

Watching the track events and seeing the people that do multiple events have to go through heats (like Phelps did in the water), I’m completely and totally amazed by some track stars doing three different events over the span of a couple days. I guess it’s because I ran cross-country and longer track events at one time in my life, and that I can see they are totally exhausted at the end of each heat, but I am amazed at the insanity of running full bore several times a day over the course of a couple days.

Then I realize Phelps did about three times as many heats/races in a similar timespan, and that the few times I’ve been in an olympic-sized pool exhausted me almost instantly, and I have a new appreciation for the insane amount of sheer exertion that kid put himself through.

* too long for twitter

Becoming an old (blogging) man

Today I realized that I’m part of the “old guard” of blogging because I remember a time when blogging was so new that very few sites had comments (it seems like MetaFilter was one of the first few?) and after a few years when they started to become commonplace, people were generally decent to each other because it was very literally turning a blog into a face-to-face conversation.

But I think the root of the problem (described in various media outlets over the past year or so) of snarky, or mean-spirited, or generally unhelpful comments becoming the norm has to do with the distance we’ve achieved from those original link-and-essay heavy blogs.

I have a feeling that if you’ve only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+% of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It’s not an intimate conversation, it’s just another content management feature available to you on the web.

This has a de-humanizing effect that I’m seeing play out more and more often in the weirdest places. People will post about their idle curiosities on their personal blog (”Why does x happen when I do y?“) and instead of seeing friendly answers I would expect many years ago, I’ll often see someone early on read into the question and assume all sorts of accusations (”well, maybe it’s because you are a, b, and c, and everyone knows it!“) and watch most followup comments start from there and go into darker directions.

It’s tough because I love blogs and I love comments in blogs, but I’m starting to think there’s this “new generation” that has grown up online only knowing blogs as having snarky comment areas and never realizing it used to be a personal, intimate space where you’d never say anything in a comment that you wouldn’t say to a friend’s face. Also, know that I mean “new generation” in a way where age of person in it is irrelevant. You could be 50 years old and started reading blogs last summer and I’d put you in that group.

Of course, I could just be talking out of my ass, old people tend to do that…

New Prius or old Lexus?

The new Prius mules are looking a heck of a lot like the Lexus small-SUV hybrid rx330/350/400h series.

New iPhone car adapter worth having

I got a 3G iPhone as an impulse buy the other day (they’re plentiful in Oregon it seems, no lines, got one in ten minutes at 2pm on a Friday) but the big downside aside from the higher monthly cost was that my trusty old Belkin car adapter with pre-amp line out sound no longer charged the iPhone. The newest iPhone accepts power on the USB architecture instead of the old firewire one, so most every old car charger no longer charges your iPhone (and being the battery killer the 3G is, this is important to charge it as often as possible).

A bit of research the other day uncovered this list of compatible car chargers (with and without sound output) and I decided to bite the bullet and buy the Kensington LiquidAUX car kit.

After getting the package and setting it up, I have to say it does exactly what it should, charging the 3G iPhone and transmitting sound via the line out cord into my car’s aux-in jack. The extra cool bonus feature is that the wireless remote actually works on my iPhone, allowing me to now skip songs, pause playback, and toggle shuffle directly from my steering wheel without taking my eyes off the road. I really didn’t expect the wireless remote (with included steering mount) to function on an iPhone, but it does and it’s great.

So high marks all around for this. If you have a new iPhone, and you want to charge/listen to your iPhone in the car, this Kensington option is a good one (there’s a $5 more expensive version with a iPhone holder on a stalk that I didn’t need, but you might).

The first 24 hours of Fuelly

The first 24 hours of Fuelly, in statistics, originally uploaded by mathowie.

Holy cow. 24 hours ago, I took the stage at the START conference and explained some of the thinking and process behind me and pb’s new site Fuelly. I knew it was an influential crowd, and I knew if it was good it might take off, but I thought maybe we’d hit 1,000 users by the end of the weekend at most.

Thanks mostly to twitter and other blogs (like Lifehacker and Get Rich Slowly) it’s grown a bit faster than we expected. A cable network is doing a piece on it. Various awesome iPhone developers are wanting to plug into the API we still need to build. It’s really been a crazy 24 hours.

Our inboxes are bursting with feature requests and bugs, but I’m really happy with how far we got building a site in just a few weeks. I’ll be posting a full story of the development and creation of the site on fortuito.us in a week or two when all this dies down a little, hopefully inspiring other developers to try building their own similar projects.

Apple’s lame DRM

Not to turn this entire site into an “apple sucks for the following reasons…” blog, but I expect more from them and feel that pointing out their faults and design decisions that go against their typical fine work is worth mentioning.

Today, I’m pissed at their iTunes Store DRM. I have two computers I use daily, an iPhone, and an AppleTV. All four devices allow me to buy things directly from the iTunes Store, but wherever you purchase a file, it stays. Sometimes when I’m traveling and I’m on my laptop but I wish I had a show I left on my desktop at home, I’ll break down and go to the iTunes Store to get another copy. When you do something like that, you get this screen:

The thing that is broken for me is that you can playback iTunes purchased files on up to 5 computers, which I’m currently using less than the maximum of. Apple knows I’ve purchased the audio/video file before, and they know how many devices have ever played back that purchased file, but instead of allowing me to re-download the file to another computer capable of playing it, I’m forced to purchase a second copy.

I know I can just FTP the audio/video file from one machine to the next but sometimes you forget to do that before you leave the house. Or, you buy a TV show on your AppleTV, and that syncs to one computer, but not the other.

I really wish Apple would allow at least a few extra chances to download purchased media files. I’ve lost hard drives and had backup drives die as well, and it sure would be nice if they could let you see your entire purchase history and let you get things back you might have lost, or get second copies for your other devices.