WombatNation

My favorite real conversation from tonight:

• Child: Do you kave Kit-Kats?
• Me: No
• Child: Then I’ll take a handful of whatever.

She’s lucky the broccoli was in the kitchen and not close at hand. Instead, I gave her more candy than anyone else.

There was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake just north of San Jose a few minutes ago. We didn’t feel much at our house in Oakland, though the water in a water cooler sloshed softly back and forth for nearly twenty seconds. My wife’s sister in Modesto said it shook their whole house and that it was the strongest earthquake she has ever felt. She hasn’t yet gotten hold of her daughter in Santa Cruz. The epicenter would be roughly in the center of a triangle formed by Oakland, Modesto, and Santa Cruz.

An article on the comeback of vinyl records at Wired linked to from Slashdot suggests that KALX was wise to release a double 7″ compilation as one of the fundraiser gifts for donors (just a $25 add-on to one of the other packages). The 7″ was pressed by Pirates Press in San Francisco. The actual manufacturing is done in the Czech Republic, but Pirates Press provides lots of great services for bands or organizations that want high quality labels, jackets, etc. for their records.

We still own a thousand or so LPs and KALX owns tens of thousands. Many tens of thousands. Although I do love wandering the aisles of a high quality book store while browsing for interesting titles, browsing through the LPs in a collection like KALX’s ranks pretty high,too. Browsing packaged CDs just isn’t the same.

KALX started their 45th anniversary fundraiser last Friday, so call early and often to donate money to the best radio station in the world.

This year KALX has an even more awesome gift than usual. The temporary tattoos are very cool, but I’m talking about the double 45 RPM 7″ (for most of those of you under 40, this is a good time to become acquainted with historical music technologies) with live recordings in the KALX studios or in Sproul Plaza by the Talking Heads, Mark Gardener (from Ride), Dengue Fever, and Supersystem. This is your only way to get a copy of this classic 1978 recording of the Talking Heads playing Stay Hungry.

Full Disclosure: I’m married to the general manager of KALX. But I’m still an impartial observer.

When I first read about TripIt, I was interested. Now that I’ve tried it, I’m totally sold on the idea.

TripIt automatically builds up trip plans for you from the confirmation emails you receive when you book flights, hotel rooms, car rentals, etc. All you have to do is forward the emails to a tripit.com email address. You can also manually enter information or edit things that their software parsed incorrectly. I just set up two trips using confirmation emails from United and Southwest. TripIt imported the information flawlessly.

Currently, weather forecasts for near term trips and historical weather data for longer term trips is added to your trip pages. Links to maps, seatguru pages for the exact airplanes you will be flying on, flight check in and flight status web pages, etc. are also added.

You can easily give your friends access to summary information about your trips. This is great, because I often forward the confirmation emails for my business trips to my wife and she has to keep track of them herself if she wants to know exactly when I am going to be out of town. Now all she has to do is log in and she can see my up to date travel plans. You can even take this a step further and add other people as viewers or collaborators for a trip. That gives them access to even more details, and in the case of collaborators, allows them to edit the trip plans.

TripIt also supports iCal, so if use a calendar app like Google Calendar that also supports iCal, you can subscribe to the calendar feed for your TripIt plans. Unfortunately, the Sunbird Lightning calendar extension for Thunderbird doesn’t yet support iCal.

They also have a Listserv style API. You email it commands and it emails you back short summaries for things like your trips for today or some future day. You can also request just the flight, hotel or car rental plans. And in true Listserv style, if you send it an email with the command “help” in the body of the email, it will send back a helpful list of the supported commands. That could be very helpful if you have a cell phone with email service, but no mobile browser or a tiny screen. I tried accessing the site on my ancient Treo 600, but the page was way too big and took far too long to load. It would be really cool if they added an optimized site for mobiles.

Yet another cool feature is the TripClipper bookmarklet. After selecting some text on some other website, like info on a restaurant you want to go to on a trip, you select the TripIt bookmarklet (I keep a folder of useful bookmarklets in my Firefox personal toolbar) and then assign the clipping a date. Here’s one thing I thing could be improved, though. Even though I picked a date that fell within one of my trips, my clipping was added as a note under Unfiled Items. While it was easy enough to click on the move link to move it into the right trip, the date I assigned the clipping should have been enough information to automatically assign it.

In another hilarious episode of Steve Don’t Eat It, Steve cuts an orange, remotely brain shaped, sulphur shelf mushroom off a tree in his yard, chops it up, sautés it in olive oil, and chows down on its lemony chicken tasting goodness. The chopped up chunks even look a bit like chicken. Well, from a chicken that dined primarily on circus peanuts.

Five freaking seconds.

Well, technically it was 5.2 seconds, but that’s all that separated me from finishing the Mount Diablo Challenge in under one hour and ten minutes. That was my most ambitious goal I thought remotely realistic, so I’m not disappointed at all with my results. I dropped about two minutes and forty seconds off my finishing time from last week, so I’ve got to be pretty pleased with that. Also, it gives me a perfect goal for starting my training for next year.

The overall results are now up at doitsports.com. I had the 433rd fastest time of the 976 official finish times (which feels better than it sounds), was mysteriously classified as being from Fresno instead of Oakland, was 191st in my age group (the largest age group by far is men 40-49), and finished in 1:10:05.2 with an average speed of 9.25 mph.

I was pretty sure I was going to be a little over 1:10 when I looked down at my bike computer while climbing the final steep pitch with about 50 meters to go. While the ride today finished up on the less steep road to the summit (the normally one-way downhill route), it’s still well over a 10% gradient. Even though I had to ride around several people who were going so slow on the final climb I thought they might fall over, while also riding by a guy near the finish line who appeared to have stopped to throw up, I couldn’t have made up the five seconds even if I were the only rider on that slope. I gave it all I had at the end.

Once again, the exertion required to climb the last bit to the summit left me thinking of other things (such as trying not to cough up my pancreas) besides looking down to see the time when I crossed the finish and stopping the timer on my bike computer. So, the riding time that got recorded was again a little longer than my actual race time. My cadence and average heart rate were pretty consistent with last week’s training ride, but this time I rode bigger gears at the same cadence during the less steep parts of the ride.

• 1:10:40 riding time
• avg heart rate 167 bpm
• max heart rate 181 bpm
• 1100 kcal
• 10.9 miles
• avg speed 9.3 mph
• max speed 23.3 mph
• avg cadence 74
• max cadence 111

Three people actually rode unicycles to the top. While the wheels on their unicycles were pretty big, that’s still totally amazing. I couldn’t ride a unicycle up my driveway.