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I saw my first McCain bumper sticker yesterday and two things struck me. One, I’m surprised it took this long to find a single supporter in the republican-heavy area I live in, and two, the logo looked familiar. Thanks to 30 seconds of google image search, I think I figured it out:
As a bit of public shaming, I’m going to do a monthly update on my progress of riding my bikes more and losing some weight. February is all good news because I’ve put in a lot of miles and I’ve lost 5 pounds.
I rode about 280 miles in just under 20 hours of riding for the month (thanks to it being the cold winter, I also won my first monthly challenge over at the We Endure MetaFilter group). I didn’t watch what I ate too much, but I did pay attention to how much and when I ate. I am no longer eating anything after 6-7pm or so (I used to occasionally have a bowl of cereal, cheese and crackers, or dessert late at night) and I’m no longer eating heaping helpings of seconds and thirds at dinner until my stomach hurts (I used to do this several times a week).
So far, it feels like a pretty easy transition as it is minimal dieting but the biggest surprise is that the tons of riding I’m doing (on pace to do over 3,000 miles of riding this year if I keep it up) boils down to just five hours of riding a week. Last summer, I probably rode my bike an average of once or twice a week for an hour or so each time, and I didn’t ride much more because it always seemed too difficult to schedule into my day. In the last few months I realized I made excuses or put off riding until it was too late in the day to go out, so instead I came up with a new system: schedule your exercise.
My day starts around 8-9am and I process through my email to figure out what my day is looking like. I’ll check my calendar as well to see what’s on tap for that day and after 30 minutes or so of work I can figure out if I should take a bike ride before lunch or a couple hours after lunch. Anything that comes up after I make the plans is fit around that (”I can’t call you back as I’ll be out before lunch, I’ll call you later in the afternoon“). I try to ride every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and if I can squeak out a long ride on a weekend I’ll do that as well.
That’s my biggest surprise in taking on this new lifestyle endeavor — doing regular exercise is not nearly as invasive to my schedule as I previously thought. It’s just setting aside an hour or two 3 or 4 days a week and I’m seeing weight loss and increased endurance immediately. I also realized five hours a week isn’t that much to give as even though I consider myself a casual gamer, my playstation still probably sees more than 5 hours a week of use.
So far, so good, and I think I’ll be able to keep this up for a very long time.
In my post about bike riding, I mentioned that this was the first winter I was spending on my bike. For the past few winters, I’ve hung up my road bike every October and left it untouched until March or April when things warmed up again. I also gained about 10lbs each winter from months of indoor inactivity and noticed I was suffering from bouts of winter blues. When I started doing cyclocross last fall I realized it wasn’t that hard to power through the winters and continue riding.
I noticed the thing holding me back and hanging up my bike each fall was simply being too cold when riding. While I could handle cold temps on my legs, it was mostly my ears and hands freezing from lack of coverage. Also, I avoided riding in the rain, which in Oregon can be the majority of winter days. This winter I decided to spend a few weeks and a few hundred dollars testing out everything I could find to try and get some comfort when temps got cold and the weather turned wet.
Keep in mind that winters in the Pacific Northwest are mild by global standards and probably even by American standards, but they’re much colder than what I was used to after spending the first 30 years of my life in California. Average daily high temps in the Oregon winter are roughly in the 30F-50F range with lots of rain (and snow a handful of days). The stuff I list here has worked well for me when doing 15-20 mile rides (about 60-90 minutes of riding) in temps that are just above freezing and raining.
I’ve broken the following tips for gear down by area of the body. I sometimes tried 2 or 3 different products before finding one that worked and I’ll say upfront a lot of this stuff is expensive but I contend the comfort is definitely worth it. Also keep in mind all this gear does add to your exercise time — it literally takes me about 15 minutes to fully suit up for a cold ride and almost that long to take it all and hang it for drying. I bought almost all of this gear at REI but their online store changes often and I’ve linked to other places I could find the same item or something similar. Click any thumbnail to get to a store selling it.
Keeping your head warm
There are a few important things to consider here: you want to keep your ears warm and your head dry even in rain. Towards those goals I found the following products to work best.
A Skullcap is a liner you put on your head, under your helmet and they extend over your ears (this is key to keeping warm). I tried out a cheap one made by Trek and another cheap one made by REI but they didn’t cover my ears completely or block much wind. I found a model made by Gore (the gore-tex people) that has a windstopper layer inside of it to be quite warm and big enough to completely cover my ears.
Helmet covers are also important for sheding rain off your helmet and keeping wind from getting to your head through all the vents. Gore makes one that works fantastically. Water flows right off it and never soaks in.
Helmet type is important to keep water off your eyes and face. I’ve always ridden with a helmet like this one, which offers tons of vents to keep your head cool in summer. I quickly found that even with a helmet cover, lots of rain would pour onto my glasses so I ended up getting a mountain bike helmet with a bit of a visor like this one. That extra inch or so hanging over my temple is enough to keep rain completely off the top of my face while riding.
Don’t forget your eyes. I wear prescription sunglasses by Oakley, with their lightest lens available (it lets in 61% of the light while normal sunglasses only let in 10-20%). They still block sun but I can wear them and see fine on cloudy days, they block cold winds from making my eyes tear up, and my helmet’s visor (even with the helmet cover stretched over it) keeps water off them nicely.
Keeping your torso warm
There are loads of options for what to wear on top and most people go for layering. I tried jerseys with fleece over with a shell on top of everything and found it to be too bulky. I eventually found a really nice high-end jacket by Gore that I can wear with a simple first layer like a t-shirt. Even after months of rainy and muddy rides, it never lets water in and keeps me really warm even below freezing. It does get a bit warm when temps rise to up to 50F but it has underarm vents (with a mesh screen under to keep your shirt inside — a nice touch I’ve never seen in a jacket before). It also has a napoleon pocket for my iPhone and standard cycling jersey style pockets in the back (also has a tiny zippered back pocket I keep my house keys in). I love this jacket to death and it’s gotta be the most technologically advanced fabric I’ve owned. I have zero complaints with it.
Keeping your legs warm
If temps are in the 40F-50F range, I find that a simple pair of cycling tights works fine. It’s basically just a pair of normal cycling shorts but they go down to your ankles. And yes, you do kind of have to get over the weird feeling of wearing tights in public but embarrassment goes away after a ride or two. I love these Pearl Izumi tights because they have a great chamois pad:
When temps are in the 30F-40F range and it is raining, I use another set of tights, this time by Gore. They have windstopper fabric and they are unpadded, so you have to wear them over summer cycling shorts. I can’t find them at REI anymore but I think these are the same pair.
Keeping your hands warm
I normally wear a pretty light glove and I really like having the dexterity to work a cycling computer and adjust zippers while riding so it took me a long time to find a winter glove that didn’t feel like an oven mitt. When temps are in the 40F-50F range I wear a light leather glove by Pearl Izumi that is basically a summer cycling glove with full fingers. When the wind kicks up, it rains, or temps go into the 30F range, I switch to a slightly heavier glove, a thermalfleece padded version of the same glove. Lots of companies make lots of heavier gloves but I found them to be cumbersome to use and after 15min or so on my bike, my hands would start to sweat even if it was barely above freezing outside.
Keeping your feet warm
Lastly, if you’re using road shoes they’re probably thin leather that is tight fitting and require a short thin sock. That spells disaster for comfort in the winter rain and I decided to try out some heavy shoe covers/booties. They work amazingly well and it’s one of those things where you didn’t know you needed them until you had them. I was surprised the first time I wore them on a cold ride because I was just used to having ice cold extremities but these really help you stay warm, especially in rain. Without these booties, my feet used to cramp up on cold rides, but it hasn’t happened since I started using them.
Conclusions
This winter, I’ve ridden several hundred miles in weather a lot of people don’t like to drive a car in. I’m fitter, healthier, and happier and when I have a couple hours set aside for a ride, with all this gear the weather really doesn’t matter anymore. It is expensive stuff and I’d guess it’ll cost you $500 and up to get fully outfitted but the difference is dramatic and these gear choices are the only thing making comfort possible in the freezing rain.
In the past few months, I’ve become the proud owner of two jackets with a new-to-me feature called the Napoleon pocket. Obviously, it’s named after the dude and his famous pose of having one hand halfway obscured into his clothing and it’s becoming more common on hiking and cycling jackets.
In traveling around I’ve quickly come to love my Napoleon pocket jackets to death mostly because it’s the perfect place to stash an iPhone/iPod for the following reasons:
I’ve also found the pocket handy when getting to an airport or grabbing a rental car because it’s a great temporary pocket you won’t forget about and that you can quickly find again without having to dig through other stuff. I don’t know what I’m going to do this summer when it’s too warm to wear a jacket as I’m getting daily use out of this feature.
For the past few years I’ve been getting back into cycling in a big way. Though I’ve spent all my life riding bikes, after college I rarely had time or a place to ride. Now that’s all changed as I live in a relatively flat small town with plenty of roads and a healthy cycling scene.
A couple summers ago I got my first road bike and went on a few 15 mile rides with the local bike shop group. Last year I raced in a couple cyclocross races and got my ass thoroughly kicked, but had a blast. Thanks to the MetaFilter cycling challenges over at We Endure, this year I decided to stop hanging my bike up every winter and just power through it.
This year, I’m aiming to do quite a bit more. This fall I’ll do the whole cyclocross series. I’m also doing the 500 miles in one week of Cycle Oregon. I’ll do a century or two (or 3) during the summer as well as the Portland Short Track series on my new mountain bike. Today I had fun doing the Worst Day Ride as well as hitting the North American Handmade Bike Show. Though I’ve only ridden 600-800 miles a year for the past three years, I’m hoping to put down about 2,000 in 2008. My three favorite blogs right now are Bike Portland, Bike Design, and Bike Hacks.
I mention all this because you might see a few more bike-related posts here and I’m actively trying to lose another 25lbs this year by watching what I eat and exercising more. It also adds some motivation to meet my goals, so if you see me in six months on the street or at a conference, go ahead and ask me how many miles I’ve ridden and how much weight I’ve lost.
In the beginning, I listed my home phone number and apartment address on all my domains. By the late nineties, the marketers/spammers showed up and after the tenth early morning phone pitch and junkmail blast, I gave up and fabricated a generic-sounding address and slapped a movie-style 555 phone number on all my domains.
Last Fall I finally buckled down and got a PO Box and I decided to try putting a real business address and phone number (at least my SkypeIn number) back on my domains. Today I did my monthly PO Box check and it was full. For the first three months of my mailbox, I got almost no mail but today it was stuffed with special offers for the owner of metafilter.com. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since there’s almost no cost to blasting out ads to every domain owner but it was still unexpected.
My biggest worry when looking at this stack of mail? I hope the person living at 123 Fake St. in San Francisco knows how truly sorry I am for the past eight years of junk mail.
A lot of people ask me how I do the MetaFilter Podcast (warning: the podcast makes no sense to anyone outside of MetaFilter uberfans). I know they don’t mean “how do you do it man, you’re making magic over there every week!” but rather “what software and hardware does it take to make a decent sounding podcast?” After almost a year of regular podcasts and trying out different software and equipment, I’ve gotten the workflow down cold and I wanted to share the my way of making a good sounding podcast on the cheap. This works perfectly well for me being in Oregon and talking to my friend Jessamyn in Vermont over Skype, recording at both ends, then tossing it all into Garageband to complete the podcast.
I read a lot of podcast how-tos when I set out to do my own, and almost all of them are mired in technical details about microphone quality and USB vs. mixer board audio wankery. Most every tutorial about doing a podcast interview focuses way too much on studio-like sound quality achieved through your equipment instead of through software and a bit of clever thinking. So without further ado:
How to record a good podcast between two mac users on the cheap
Software required:
Hardware required:
Though you might have heard bad phone interview podcasts with Skype before, having Call Recorder running on both sides of your interview will mean your interview partner will have a crystal clear recording just like yours. The cheap headset microphones are brain-dead simple to use on a Mac (plug-in, change audio prefs to use the headset for input and output, adjust the recording level) and produce perfectly good vocal recordings. I’ve used $250 higher-end microphones and had little audio quality improvement.
This process assumes two people, each running Skype, Call Recorder, and having a USB headset microphone.
The Interview Recording:
Assembling the podcast in Garageband:
How does it sound?
To give you an idea of how it sounds, consider the following three sample recordings.
The first is the worst possible: recorded Skype conversation where I dialed out to a phone and recorded the entire thing on my end (mp3 sample 1 96kbps)
Second, here is what a standard recorded Skype call sounds like, where I recorded both sides of the conversation on my end, so my partner was recorded through Skype and even on my high bandwidth fiber connection, it does have artifacts (mp3 sample 2 96kbps)
Third, here is the same interview segment as the second part, but with my partner’s local recording track thrown in and my recording of her track thrown out. Much better and to me, sounds like we could be in the same room, even though we are 3,000 miles apart. (mp3 sample 3 128kbps)
Conclusion
The basic premise of this approach is you can record a Skype interview without actually needing/using Skype. You are actually recording audio on each end independent of Skype, so you won’t suffer any sound quality problems due to Skype transport. So that’s it, for about $100 or so, you can have a pretty damn good podcast that sounds like two people sat in a room together talking and recording, even if they’re on opposite sides of a country.
I didn’t know half the delegates are voted on in less than a week. I mean, I knew a lot of races were happening at once, but half the delegates? That’s a quasi-election day right there. This video should help you decide:
I spent most of the weekend elbow-deep in weblog archives and templates, trying to update my site to MT 4.01 and WP 2.3.2 (the former required the latter to export/import). After several hours, I started looking at Expression Engine and Tumblr and even considered Blogger to run this site. After getting fed up with shortcomings, I thought I’d describe my dream weblog engine instead.
For anyone that designs and builds a blog app or CMS, consider the following as typical use cases and design technology around these experiences. As a user, it feels like blog app design is instead about picking technology first and asking users to design their usage around that.
Admin Backend
When you’re working on a blog post or setting up a blog, the backend of the application should be as close to the database as possible. A blog backend is almost by definition very low-traffic (especially with a single author) and there should be no impediments between having a thought and pushing a publish button. Most every app I’ve used is too slow in this regard, so even if you have to use another technology or application design from your blog publishing core functions, keep the backend as fast as possible.
Here’s a design goal: writing a sentence, pressing publish, and seeing it live on the site should take a handful of seconds. Writers should never have to stare at a spinning graphic for a minute as they wait for the publishing engine.
Templates
Here’s how most designers interact with templates: They work on a layout for a day or two (in photoshop and/or plain HTML/CSS), implement in whatever blog code the system requires, then they tweak it 100s of times over a few hours until it is done. Then it stays the same for anywhere from three to twelve months until a new theme/design inspiration comes along.
I personally like tweaking templates in a text editor, directly interacting with files on the server (as opposed to within a web app window, having to regenerate to see changes). I also prefer not to see the guts and/or technology of the blog CMS. Abstract it with output tags that don’t require knowledge of programming languages. Keep application logic out of the layout whenever possible, and allow minor tweaks in simplified tools (clicking options in a widget editor) instead of requiring template changes.
Simplicity is golden. The fewer templates, the better. Blogger wins in this regard by allowing an entire site to be laid out with a single template file and some CSS. MT4 is kind of a nightmare in this regard with seemingly dozens of templates, sub-templates, and sub-sub-templates that can be tweaked.
My ideal template engine would be as simple as possible and allow me one general template to control layout, maybe a few specific templates for specialized output (an entry with comments is different than a list of archived posts), and allow for fast tweaks until the design is done. When a template is “done” convert it into some stable package the CMS can use and that I can share with others easily as an archive.
Import/Export
There really should be a standard of some sort that blog CMS companies can agree on for export and import. Users of blog engines shouldn’t be hostages to their applications. Data exit and entry is problematic in everything I’ve used and it’s a shame. Blogging is supposed to be fun and I prefer to be agnostic about what tools I’m using, so it’d be nice if I could change blog engines every three months without too much friction. I won’t even go into how every engine has its own URL scheme — it’d be nice if I could keep my permalinks forever, even as I change blogging apps.
Documentation
Every blog engine seems to suffer not only from poor documentation, but also extensions, template designs, and tutorials are almost always spread out across multiple sites (often out-of-date). If I download a blog CMS from Site A, plugins for it are on Site B, but they link to Site C where you can download things (but documentation for the plugin is back on Site B). Every blog engine seems to also have internal battles between “here are the free tools for your blog” and “here are our professional services for your blog” that leaves me wondering where to find more info or extensions after I download. Then there are random people that just setup galleries of plugins and templates that often rival or surpass the blog engine company’s version of the same. It’d be nice if there was a way to find those as well.
My ideal blog engine company would hire some seasoned blogger and technical writer to be a documentation czar, keeping docs up to date when new versions are launched, produce screencasts for introductory users, and provide complete documentation at a stable URL that applies to every version of the product. If an outside site does a better job of collecting and offering templates, a documentation leader should recognize that and link to them in highly visible places. There doesn’t seem to be anyone internal at these companies fighting for the users to make sure they can keep being informed about how to best use the product.
Server Load
I’ll admit I like simple, live code editing of my template files (as described above) when I’m tweaking a design, and I love fast admin screens that let me post instantly, but once a post is up, it’s just text on a web server and should exist as a flat file. I’ve clicked through way too many digg links and del.icio.us popular links only to end up at database connection errors or too many user errors on servers that can’t handle the load. I know building a perfect cache is hard to do, but failure of your site at the most visible and important time for you should never happen.
Anyone got any other ideas of how to build the perfect blog application?
A few months ago I was thinking about Apple’s rise in value after the iPhone and how Steve Jobs does a great keynote every year, and naturally I thought “I wonder if there’s a way to make money off quick investments around the keynotes?” Then I thought “What if you did this every year, for just a day or two of investment?”
I ran the numbers and here they are, on this new 1-page website: Keynote Index Fund
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