the golden mean

2:27pm: reminder: birthday bikeride
Please join me at my house this Saturday at 10am for a 42-mile bike ride to Concord and Carlisle to celebrate my birthday. We'll be taking it easy and expect to be back between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. I hope we'll get at least one person who hasn't ridden that far before, so if that's you, here's your chance to do something new!

(gmap-pedometer thinks it is 43.01 miles -- that's either one to grow on, or insurance in case your bike computer's calibration is off.)

9:19am: birthday bikeride
Once again I plan to celebrate my birthday by riding my age in miles. I'd love it if you came and joined me! Some details:

• We'll leave from my house around 10am, have lunch in probably Concord, and expect to be back in Somerville around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
  
• This is a social ride. No particular level of fitness is assumed. We will regroup at the tops of the two or three steepest hills, and ride together otherwise.
  
• Please come ready to ride, with tires inflated and nothing requiring immediate repair. If you haven't ridden your bike yet this season, take it out for a spin around the block beforehand to make sure it's in working order. There are several bike shops right on the route if anything breaks on the ride, and time to stop at them if need be, but I'm hoping we don't need to stop at the one that's in the first mile.
  

Hope to see you there!

ETA: Right, I knew I was forgetting something important. This is on my actual birthday: Saturday, May 12.

11:23am: why I'm supporting Spokane in 2015
As you may know there are two groups bidding for the right to host the World Science Fiction convention in 2015. It has been quite a while since there was a contested Worldcon site selection, and it's nice to see multiple bids. And in fact the Orlando folks have a really, really good idea.

( the problem )

( the solution )

( why this is no solution at all )

( a real solution )

So don't vote for Orlando just because there aren't any non-stop flights from where you live to Spokane and instead you have to take a one-stop (with no change of plane, if you live in Boston). Don't even vote for Orlando because you like the committee's crazy ideas -- I certainly do. Take a look at whether they can make their ideas work.

4:35pm: what's this?
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&t=k&ll=39.659921,124.705816&z=18

11:33pm: rushing
I'm hurrying to get a photo printed for the SOS volunteer show. But this time the rush isn't getting it in time for the hang. It's getting it before the photo place goes out of business.

:(

9:27pm: five minutes at anime boston
I went past the Hynes this afternoon as Anime Boston was winding down and stopped in to see if anyone needed any help, and see a few friends on staff there. I wasn't there long, but I noticed something interesting.

Anime Boston had a room with a "Convention Operations" sign on it. This was different from Arisia's convention operations room in a lot of interesting ways, and as Arisia tries to recruit more people, especially the vast number of people who've been to Anime Boston before but not to Arisia, we're going to need to keep these in mind.

Convention Operations seemed to be serving several functions that are split up at Arisia. I don't just mean that those functions are more than one department. Ops and Volunteers and Staff Den aren't even all in the same division at Arisia. And what's more, those three functions are some of the physically most separated functions in the convention. Someone coming in from Anime Boston looking to volunteer is going to go to Ops because that's where you'd volunteer at an anime con, and if we try to send them halfway across the universe instead of taking their name and giving them a timesheet and something to do we're never going to see them again.

Convention Operations at Arisia tries, as roozle put it this afternoon, to "keep the riff-raff out". There are tables in the back where people could hang out in exactly the way that people were hanging out in Anime Boston's ops, but we'd rather they didn't with a few exceptions, and even then we look at it as a distraction and not something we are trying to accomplish. What kind of experience is that for most volunteers?

But the real difference is that at Anime Boston, there appear to be more volunteers than jobs to do. This may not really be the case but the appearance is critical, and the difference need not be large -- a percent or two will do. Volunteers sitting in a space that welcomes them, waiting for something to do, shows that the convention isn't desperate, that volunteers will have some choice in what they're sent to do, and critically that there will be relief when the volunteer decides they're done. This makes more volunteers willing to also help out. Have two extra volunteers and soon enough you will have twenty. This is all about appearances and it may well be that the right strategy is *not* to respond to every volunteer request even if there are volunteers available. Not only does this let there be a social nexus at the point where volunteers are coordinated, but it'd also allow assigning new volunteers to tasks quickly if they seem likely to wander off if there's nothing for them to do.

Hmmm.

10:40am: boston phoenx best of nominations are open!
http://contests.thephoenix.com/thebest/boston/2012/noms

You know what to do...

2:13am: where i slept 2011
Melrose, MA
Somerville, MA
Boston, MA
Gaithersburg, MD
Altadena, CA
Princeton, NJ
Crestline, CA
Ludlow, CA
Needles, CA
Bullhead City, AZ
Chloride, AZ
Seligman, AZ
Flagstaff, AZ
Kayenta, AZ
Mexican Hat, UT
Cortez, CO
Telluride, CO
Cimarron, CO
Salida, CO
Colorado Springs, CO
Boulder, CO
Brush, CO
Imperial, NE
McCook, NE
Kearney, NE
York, NE
Bellevue, NE
Atlantic, IA
Colfax, IA
Grinnell, IA
Dyersville, IA
Blue Mounds, WI
Muskegon, MI
Ionia, MI
Ann Arbor, MI
Norwalk, OH
North Lima, OH
Pittsburgh, PA
Bedford, PA
Delta, PA
Hillsborough, NJ
Huntington, NY
Uncasville, CT
Falmouth, MA
Bangor, ME
Shediac, NB
Castine, ME
Collingswood, NJ

... and I thought last year's list was long.

11:42am: how is this even possible?
If you're a space nut, you already know that Elon Musk (who seems to be in a one-man space race against China) is going to build a rocket whose first couple of stages fly back to their launch sites and land propulsively after they're done with the boost phase. This takes a lot less than half of their fuel since they're (a) not carrying upper stages any more, (b) mostly empty at that point, and (c) able to take advantage of aerobraking. But still... chemical rockets are a pretty marginal business. What's the secret?

I think I know, and it relates to another feature of the rocket. The Falcon 9 can make its intended orbit with an engine out -- perhaps even multiple engines out, depending on the failure timing. This is an important safety feature and one that's required to carry people, just as airliners all have enough engines to be able to complete a takeoff if one fails. But engine out capability means you have to carry some extra fuel, to make up for the less optimal flight profile. If boost goes nominally, the boosters can use this extra fuel for the return phase. If it doesn't, and if the payload is more valuable than the booster, then an engine out now costs you a rocket. Which is still better than the current regime in which most rockets are entirely expendable and the best case is that the booster has to be mostly remanufactured after a salt water splashdown.

10:31am: electoral calculus
Elections in Somerville today!

Once again I have two endorsements and an anti-endorsement for Alderman-at-large. Bill White continues to be awesome, and Dennis Sullivan also gets my endorsement. In an effort to oust Bruce Desmond I recommend voting for Todd Easton and Michael Nionakis, who I think have the best chance of coming in fourth -- both of them had sign-holders out, and they have been campaigning more heavily than Sean Fitzgerald, besides which I don't think I like Fitzgerald very much.

10:44pm: the beast awakens
After a longer than usual summer doldrums, suddenly there is a ton of Arisia activity in my email inbox. I don't have a particularly significant role this year and that's fine; I'm using the time to clean some things up that have been languishing for a while, and I'm seeing some other things get cleaned up too which is nice. I love the feeling of having really mucked out some neglected corner, be it virtual or physical.

One of the things other folks are getting cleaned up is we're finally taking a good inventory of the films in our film archive. Expect to see some of these at this coming con. Maybe if I make my saving throw against a big at-con job I can even get to the film program -- I'm always sad to have to miss most of it.

6:55am: Airside at DCA on Talk Like A Pirate Day. Not so many pirates in evidence here. I suppose that's not very surprising.

11:22am: I need to find a longer route to work.

10:21am: new job!
This Monday, I started work at Akamai. New jobs are always awesome and so is this one, but I really like my group and my boss, and the work seems interesting. It's a very thinky kind of place; the algorithms are mostly done but there are always more optimizations to do and there's more creativity and less plumbing here than at some other places. The people here are thinky too, which makes them fun to interact with.

I like to see how quickly I can check in code, as a measure of how agile the company is. This time the answer was Wednesday morning, mostly because access to Perforce is through SSH keys and Akamai is super careful about establishing trust for those. Two days or so isn't bad for a company of this size and I see the need for caution since we're a great big target. My boss was super sweet in saving aside a project for me with a gentle learning curve and not very much schedule pressure. We'll see how the learning curve ramps up in a couple of weeks when I'm done with that and move on to something more complicated.

I asked my boss if I should attend a particular design review next week and she asked if I was going to cause trouble. I responded "I don't know, it depends on whether there's any trouble that needs to be caused. But you guys seem to be pretty good at that". This put a big smile on her face and she said I had chosen the right group.

I keep running into people I know there. It's a pretty big company and even a percent of the employees is a pretty big number. But based on what I have seen so far I think I'm going to have to revise my estimate to two or three percent.

6:50pm: macys
When miss_chance and I were in Flagstaff on our honeymoon not quite fifteen years ago, we thought it had a certain something... you know what I mean. Like Austin, or Boulder, it's a cultural oasis. I don't even remember what we found -- a used bookstore, perhaps, or a neat breakfast spot -- that made us like it so much, but this is one of those places in which a place like Macy's simply has to exist. It didn't take very long to find it, and once I did I got a lovely grilled cheese (Havarti on homemade whole wheat, made on a panini press), and a hearty vegetable stew (it's all vegetarian here, natch, but the food doesn't suffer). The chai is fantastic. There's an enormous coffee roaster in the middle of the seating area, and a sign saying "coffee roasted daily", and a delicious smell pervading the whole place. The only flaw is there don't seem to be any outlets near the bar seating along the windows, so anyone with a computer has to take a table. But at least the tables near the outlets are 2-tops instead of 4.

Macy's
14 South Beaver Street (about a block from the Amtrak station)
Flagstaff, AZ
(928) 774-2243
macyscoffee.net
Open daily 0600-2000 (this is not written down *anywhere*, not even in the cafe itself, but the barista answered with confidence so I think it's trustworthy)

1:54am: harbor kitchen
Looking for an interesting carbo-load meal before tomorrow's long and rather hilly ride, and remembering that I am not only in LA but not all that far from the neighborhood with all of the best Chinese restaurants, I decided to ask Chowhound who had the best Singapore Noodles in town. The verdict was Harbor Kitchen, and I have to agree: they were quite tasty, well spiced but not overdone, with a good amount of high quality protein and veggies. The rest of the extensive menu looked great too; I particularly liked the fish balls. Definitely worth the trip from Pasadena.

Harbor Kitchen
1411 S Garfield Ave (just south of Valley)
Alhambra, CA 91801
(626) 289-2328
open 7 days, 0700-0100

11:19pm: the smells of los angeles
Now that it's not so smoggy any more, I'm struck by the way smells linger in the desert without rain to knock them down. Passing through an intersection I smelled the sawdust smell of woodworking, but from recent rather than active construction. Parks smelled of flowering trees no longer in bloom. Steve Lubanski's bike shop had that oily bike shop smell outside it as well as in. There's not much of the fragrant native desert flora around in the built-up areas to compete, either, so it's easy to pick things out. Fascinating.

12:14pm: postcards!
I'm usually bad at postcards when I travel. But I'm not usually traveling this slowly. So! If you want a postcard, drop me your address -- this username at gmail is best.

11:29am: blogging plans
I expect I'll be blogging during the bike trip. Blog posts that have nothing to do with the trip, or which fit with things I post here (like What's This posts), will still be here. Quick photo posts will be on Facebook, because it's so easy. Daily trip reports (and I expect to backfill the days I miss) will be at crazyguyonabike.com/doc/phi2011 and syndicated back here as phi2011 where you can comment if you don't like the crazyguyonabike.com comment mechanism. I may also occasionally post to the Craigslist bike forums (where I am red_ciocc) but that's unlikely to be substantive.

Apparently Facebook Notify doesn't notify when I post photos, and I don't know why, but I'm going to keep using it because it means I actually post photos whereas taking them any other way results in me maybe posting it as part of a mosaic fifteen years later if it's really good.

10:54am: packing list, a work in progress
5 pair bike shorts
5 bike jerseys
arm warmers
leg warmers
5 pairs cycling socks
shoes
lightweight booties
crochet-back gloves
spare pare of gloves
glove liners
Showers Pass Double Century windbreaker
5 bandanas
2 sweatbands
cycling cap

3 pair non-cycling socks
4 pair underwear
1 pair shorts
1 pair pants
hawaiian shirt
versatile crepe shirt
microfiber t-shirt
cotton t-shirt
microfiber button-down shirt
polypro long sleeve undershirt
Tevas

toiletries kit
cissus
ibuprofen
ear plugs

ultralight laptop
laptop charger
cell phone
cell phone charger
bluetooth headset
headset charger
solar emergency cell phone battery charger
short cable for cell phone charger
charger for headlight
spare taillight
spare batteries for primary taillight
shoulder strap for handlebar bag
a few checks
sunglasses
u-lock

mega multi tool
spare tire
two spare tubes
patch kit
tire boot
derailleur cable
brake cable
set of brake pads
4 citrawipes
4 large binder clips (for front panniers)
1 small binder clip

6 packages Crawford's Garibaldi biscuits
half an 8-pack of powdered yellow Gatorade
case of mandarin orange (caffeinated) Gu
bottle of cissus
spork

To get in LA:
sunscreen
oil

I will be editing this list, unannounced, until and perhaps even after I actually leave on the trip.

11:51pm: squee
A panel idea I suggested for Arisia, and which ran there, just ran at Wiscon. Same description and everything. I feel so validated!

5:45pm: leaving DC
on my way to the train from DC to Princeton, I took the Red Line subway, including passing through the very oldest stations in the system. That reminded me that I hadn't blogged this interesting graphical history of the Metro system.

12:05am: cross country: what bike to ride?
I have two bikes right now.

One is the Ciocc, which is a 1991 restoration of a 1986 bike. Its lowest gear is a 42x21. Riding it on hilly training rides in New England is a stretch. It's not up to mountains, even without panniers. It's not able to take panniers, even if you somehow got a rack on it. And it needs some work on its frame much sooner than 3000 miles from now. Riding this across the country would be like driving a Model A across the country. People do it, but not without spending a whole lot of money along the way.

The other is the Cannondale, which I rode to Montreal and back last year. At that time I put it together according to an ease-of-maintenance philosophy which I no longer subscribe to. And even at the time it was clear that this was the last gasp for this bike. The front end is in bad shape and I did the last rebuild I was going to be able to do. The wheels are both in really bad condition. The drivetrain is nearly as old as the antique drivetrain on the Ciocc. About the only bright spots are the seat (which is the only seat I trust for multiday tours) and the lovely front brake.

So, I've been test riding bikes. I'm a little hard to fit, since my arms are so short. This makes a Surly not work for me -- nor a stock Gunnar or Waterford or really a whole lot of otherwise very, very nice touring bikes. I don't have time to have one custom built. There are some cyclocross bikes with short top tubes and long chainstays -- like the latest edition of the Bianchi Volpe -- and some of those have eyelets for front racks, too. There are some touring bikes that might more or less work, and I have plans to test ride some of those. And then...

And then there's the Trek 520. This was the first model Trek came out with, 30 years ago. They've updated it, but not in radical ways. On paper, the fit is perfect. I wasn't expecting to like the components, but then I test rode one. I love this bike's drivetrain. I love the handlebars. The bike as a whole is incredibly well behaved -- just the thing for a long tour. The brakes are grabby -- but I can put on the front brake from the Cannondale, and the matching rear brake that wouldn't fit on the Cannondale but will work here. It will need new fenders, and racks (I don't trust the rear rack it comes with), and I'll move the seat over too.

I haven't actually bought this bike, because I want to give the Volpe a chance. But every time I ride it I'm more convinced it is the bike for me.

5:08pm: cross country
I'm really going to do it.

I've got a chance to ride my bike across the US, and I'm going to do it. I'm in shape, I have the time, and I have the money. These things might not all be true at once again. I'm leaving LA around June 12 and hope to arrive back in Boston five or six weeks later. I'm not going to camp, so it'll be a mix of cheap motels and couch surfing.

To that point, if you know anyone with a couch along the route (below) who can put me up, please do put us in touch.

I'll have at least rudimentary internet with me, and expect that Facebook will be my primary update mechanism. I'm looking at internet-connected GPS logging toys that let people watch my progress in real time, but I don't know if that's really going to work in the field (I'll post here with a link if it does).

I'm buying a new bike, since my current touring bike would probably not make it (and needs a ton of work, and doesn't fit me well anyway). I'll transfer a few of the nicer parts from that bike and then retire the frame (and all of the low-end parts, which is most of them). More about that in a separate post.

I'm mostly not riding an established "trail", because I want to spend time with friends, and none of my friends live along or really anywhere near any of the trails. I'm not currently planning to ride with anyone, so apart from Colorado (where I will most likely follow a trail) I expect it'll be a lot of time just me and the bike. I've been riding centuries to train and really enjoying them, so I'm really looking forward to this.

The route (all dates extremely tentative):
June 11: Pasadena-Santa Monica-Pasadena. 70 miles to get in the ceremonial wheel dip in the Pacific ocean. Live in Southern California and want to go on a nice long bike ride with me? This is a pretty good bet.
June 12-16: Pasadena-Flagstaff. Could cross the Colorado anywhere from Blythe to Boulder City. Possible overnights anywhere between Palm Springs and Las Vegas, or really anywhere in a pretty wide area.
June 17-19: Flagstaff-Durango. The obvious way is through Tuba City and Four Corners.
June 20-24: Durango-Denver. This bit has more cyclotouring resources available, but I'd still love to stay with folks in the mountains of Colorado if you or anyone you know lives there.
June 25-July 1: Denver-Iowa City. I might just have Nebraska covered, but I don't have anything lined up in Iowa so far.
July 2-6: Iowa City-Ann Arbor. I'm staying with family in Ann Arbor but could stop in Madison or Chicago (probably not both) and would love to visit folks in Wisconsin and Michigan.
July 7-9: Ann Arbor-Pittsburgh. Google suggests a brief dip into Canada followed by a ferry ride to Sandusky, and then two nights somewhere in Ohio.
July 10-11: Pittsburgh-Gaithersburg. Stopping in Bedford PA or Cumberland MD, perhaps?
July 12-16: Gaithersburg-Boston. Via family in Huntington, NY, and the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson ferry (yeah, I like ferries). Anyone know someplace I could stay in the Brandywine River valley in DE or southeastern PA, or anywhere in Connecticut?

Please feel free to forward pointers to this post. Woo-hoo!

11:58pm: tips for saturday's ride
Thinking of coming on my birthday ride this Saturday? Haven't ridden that far recently? Some tips:

• Take the bike out for a mile or two (or five, if it has been a while since you rode it at all) beforehand to make sure it doesn't have a slow tire leak or some other mechanical problem.
  
• Gloves are every bit as important safety gear as a helmet.
  
• The current weather forecast is for the rain to hold off until the evening, but New England weather is changeable. Don't overdress. Do wear synthetics, and the most useful piece of extra clothing you can bring is probably a lightweight polypropylene undershirt.
  
• This ride is long enough that you'll need to drink water on it. And most likely, you'll need to replenish electrolytes too -- not doing so can lead to cramps which can be quite uncomfortable. Gatorade helps some but not as much as you think. Bananas, V8 juice, and raisins are all excellent.