On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

After a heavy but hardly extraordinary snowstorm the day after a Christmas spent in northern New Jersey with family, it was time to return home to San Francisco. It had been over a day since the snow had subsided, plenty of time for things to get back up to speed, and although with air travel on the rise this year passengers whose flights had been canceled were desperate to find a way back home, since I had a reserved spot I wasn't too worried. Nevertheless, I left my parents' house with substantial margin to get to the airport in plenty of time. My plan was to leave the station in suburban New Jersey on the 11:06 southbound to Secaucus, connect on one of a series of LIRR trains to Jamaica, then get to the airport 2 hours ahead of my departure. No problem. But things didn't quite go according to plan. First, my sister and I were waiting at the platform, at which we'd arrived with 5 minutes to spare, first 5 minutes, then 10, then 15 minutes after the 11:06 sch...

I hope anyone reading this is having a fruitful Christmas. I'm personally in New Jersey, where it's cold by San Francisco standards, but excellent weather for running, which I'm finding I can still do despite months of neglect. I know: patience! It's hard, but last year I learned the hard way that going too hard too quickly is a loan which needs to be paid back at a very high rate of interest... It is a good day for me -- what a great Christmas present this find was, from Japan: a GARMIN FIT decoder library for Perl . In addition to the library, some sample applications are provided: fitdump and fitsed . So why am I so pleased with these? Well, many reasons, but one is that when uploading files to Strava , I tend to have two problems: either I forget to reset the unit from one day to the next and I end up with "rides" (or "runs") which span multiple days, or I neglect to shut it off when I get on the train or in a car, and end up with motor...

As I noted last time, the maze algorithm doesn't know are care about topography or dimensionality. All it cares about is a list of nodes with each node's initially unconnected neighbors. How the nodes are laid out is post-processing. One-dimensional mazes aren't so challenging: each node has 2 neighbors. Two directions, for example east and west. With a 2-dimensional maze with square nodes, each node has 4 neighbors (no cutting corners). Obviously 2-dimensional is more challenging than one-dimensional: there's no the opportunity for dead-ends and multiple path options. Sample directions are north, east, south, and west: two more than the 1-dimensional case. To three dimensions, each node (assuming cubic nodes) has 6 neighbors. In addition to north, east, south, and west, you can add up and down to the list of directions. So there's a pattern here. Each time you add a dimension you add two more neighbors and two more directions, the two directions bei...

Okay, so this is mostly a bike blog, but since I got a new job in October, my time for riding has dropped off substantially. I'm trying to ride into work more often: once to twice per week would be good. But it's 42 miles one-way, so I've got to "make time" for that to happen. Anyway, in my job, one of the products I use is a structure generator for semiconductor device modeling. So, for example, I can build models for field-effect transistors, bipolar junction transistors, p-i-n diodes, photo-detectors, light-emitting diodes, even static random access memory cells and other small circuits. Fun stuff, really. The models do a remarkably good job of matching reality, even though the reality of semiconductors can be fairly complex. Knights of the Lambda Calculus But when I found myself home sick with a bad cold, between naps I needed an activity to keep myself occupied. It was a good exercise to reacquaint myself with Scheme, the scripting language used b...

Thanks to all for the great time at the Low-Key Hillclimbs party last night! And thanks to Sports Basement for giving us space to hold it. It's a lot of work doing the slides for the awards, but I think it's really important to try and recognize all of the great contributions that both riders and volunteers make to the success of the series. Once again, despite not really trying, we raised money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the Open Space Trust . Each of these charities does great work, similar really. I view the Open Space Trust as fighting cancer of the land, while LAF fights cancer of the body. The two are really intertwined. And a huge thanks to Strava for providing some wonderful prizes. We awarded this with a card game. I was a bit inspired by Charles Ardai's excellent book " Fifty-to-One ", in which a very simple card game was played with very high stakes. We played a series of games which were closer to "one-to-one", unt...

Back in April I lamented the closing of the Marin Headlands for construction. Well, the construction was finally completed last month, and Sunday for the first time since then I rode the loop . I've been sick for two weeks now: sniffling, hacking, and coughing has been epidemic at work, and after Thanksgiving it was my turn in line. So I've been feeling sort of crappy, riding as I'm able. Yet yesterday I motivated myself to try a loop of the challenging and beautiful Headlands. The last time I'd ridden to the Hawk Hill summit was September, when it had been unpaved, serene, and illegal. The chance to have ridden it without car traffic had been too much to resist. Now the pavement is done and yesterday, fearful of what I would observe, I set off. Hawk Hill in September, during repaving. The result: the pavement is pristine, as expected, which is nice, of course. And my fears of "improvement" were unfounded: there's been little "improvemen...

Another day on the Caltrain bike car ( StreetsBlog ) Back in February I proposed a weekend train schedule for Caltrain, one which would make the train an attractive option for those traveling along the Peninsula on weekends. That schedule wasn't based on any estimation of actual resource constraints. Rather it was what I expected it would take to start to make a dent in the car traffic on 101 every Saturday and Sunday. That proposal was for express trains traveling north and south each hour, with two limited trains taking care of the secondary stations, also each hour north and south. Without service at least comparable to this, service which is typical of rail systems around the world excluding ours where we've sold our souls to the auto industry, those willing and able to drive will find themselves hard pressed to claim the train is the preferred alternative for travel subject to external time constraints. I'm sitting next to Ammon Skidmore at a JPB meeting in ...

I live with three cats. Of the three, the older of the two males has food issues. He was found, nearly starved, as a kitten, and apparently learned from that harsh lesson to never take the future availability of food for granted. He has a special weakness for crunchies, which he loves. These have the further disadvantage of being calorie dense: he can consume a lot more of them before reaching stomach capacity. So to keep him at a healthy weight it's important to control how much he gets. With this in mind, before leaving for a three-day mini-vacation back in October (which included some fantastic riding; okay, mandatory cycling content), it was time to break out the automated feeder. The feeder has a reservoir of food connected to the outside world with a tube containing a rotating screw. The screw turns on when programmed to do so, channeling food down the tube, where it pushes open a one-way door and then falls into a feeding tray, where it is quickly consumed by enth...