New Chair—01.23.12

For those of you not in the know, we got a new chair at the Moore household recently. It came for free from our generous neighbor, and finally fills out the seating arrangement in our living room. Finally after some 15 years of living here we can all sit down around the TV at once (not that we ever will of course).

We quickly discovered that as much as we like the chair (it really is comfortable) the cats, who probably have immeasurably more time with which to enjoy it, also like it quite a bit.

A forceful takeover...

It turns out that this chair is a POÄNG, a chair from Ikea. I found this out because I had these photos up on my screen during a Study Hall period at school, and one of my friends walked by and happened to glance at the pictures. Somehow in less than about 10 seconds she was able to figure out that this was in fact a POÄNG (although didn’t know the spelling so my first search was for a “Pawang”)

It turns out that this chair renders cats rather immobile, so you can hover over them all day with a camera and they will lazily submit. This seems like the complete opposite of the way cats usually react to cameras, which is to start moving around as much as possible so as to make your 1/30th of a second shutter speed completely useless.

Lazy cats...

I actually took pictures spanning over multiple days of cats on this chair, and they started to get progressively more “artsy”

The "Artsy" nature of this is lost when you find out this cat's name is 'Tails.'

2012 Racing Season—01.22.12

The 2012 Racing Season is upon me. I got out today for my first race of the year, race number one of the CBR (now renamed “SoCal Cup”) Criterium series. It was my first race as a Category 4 Road Racer, and even in this ‘tougher’ field I placed in exactly the same place as I did in Category 5, 13th place…

The actual race is not what I want to write about though. There are plenty of “race reports” and you can try to explain how a race feels, but anyone that doesn’t race just won’t get it. What I want to write about is race preparation.

The day before your race you take note of when you have to get up. Today I had to get up at 5am so I could get out of the house at 5:30 so my dad would have time to warm-up for his race at 7am. Knowing you don’t want to have to get all your stuff together in 30 minutes you get ready the night before. In the middle of January this means working at 9pm to get yourself ready. Even in California this means it’s cold. Really uncomfortably cold.

Cleaning bikes at 9pm is a joy.

I don’t claim to know how my dad was able to stand being out cleaning his bike in the cold with just a t-shirt on (I cleaned my bike too, you have to before a race! but I did it with 3 shirts and a sweater on.) For reference, this is what it looks like when its slightly more bearable to work on a bicycle.

I was working on my dad's shifting the same day I had my own derailleur problems I talked about yesterday... [taken by my dad on an iPhone]

Once I’ve got my bike ready, I have to get all the clothes I need for a race together. There are quite a lot:

What's most exciting about this is my new team Jersey!

Of course this all has to get packed up to, and that ends up looking like this:

And now I'm all ready.

I’m all good to go. All this stuff goes in the car and I all I have to do the morning of the race is wake up and eat… Except that in reality I forgot to bring my Garmin with me. All this effort and preparation and I forgot one of my most important training tools. Oh well. That’s what all this practice is for. Hopefully I don’t make the same mistakes for my weekend of fun next week, with Poor College Kids and two races at Mothballs…

Stop!—01.21.12

I have been really much too busy the last few weeks. My last post was on January 6th, which happens to be the day before Kickoff for the FIRST Robotics Competition. School then started on the 9th. With Robotics every single weekday after school from 3:50pm to 7:30pm I’m hard-pressed to find any time in my day to do much anything that isn’t coursework. My weekends are taken up with long training rides in preparation for this coming race season. Tomorrow I have my first race of the season, a little 40 minute criterium to make sure I still know how to use my legs. Getting out there means waking up at 5am to make sure I have time to warm up etc. etc. Lotsa fun.

My life right now can kind of be described like this:

This is the pile of cycling clothes that my cat, Skittles, enjoys.

I have no time to myself and so my clothes are just piling up on my dresser endlessly. One day this all catches up with me as my cat pushes all my clothes onto the floor. Like last Saturday. I live in Los Angeles, which as a cyclist means that in the winter I do the Simi Ride, no questions asked. Last Saturday I got up at 6:30 like usual to get ready to roll out at about 7:15. I even got going, until I tried to shift my bike from the little ring to the big ring and nothing happened. I had neglected cleaning my bike for so long that the front derailleur had gotten jammed with sweat and gatorade and dirt and the like.

And so this post gets its namesake, because I had to “Stop!” and take care of myself. I ignored some obvious signs (and now for the sake of getting in some more pictures, some ‘cliches’):

Nothing is going to get a race to stop...

I’m trying, and hopefully I’ll be able to spend a little bit more time writing for this because of it. I’ve not been writing for lack of interesting things to talk about, but for lack of energy to sit down and open a text editor and write about it. Almost everyday I get to see stuff like this:

"Erik" is very proud of his handiwork here.

Waffle Ride Sandwiches—01.06.12

It all starts with a dream (actually the product of being hungry).

Being an endurance road cyclist I spend a lot of time on my bike. To avoid the dreaded “bonk” I have to eat ridiculous amounts of food. Burning upwards of 3.5k calories on a typical long ride that energy can’t all come from energy drinks. Nor can it come from energy bars (Clif Bars or Powerbars and the like) because they just get too boring. By the 4th Clif Bar of the day you just want to stop eating.

So I got The Feed Zone Cookbook for Christmas, and I’ve tried a couple recipes from it. Like: Waffle Ride Sandwiches.

The most important ingredient, rice, lined up and ready to go.

After being cooked the rice is blended with the rest of the ingredients which makes this terrifying slurry.

After this point the process always turns into pure frustration as this incredibly weird rice-based waffle batter has to be cooked on our waffle iron. Which is lack-luster to say the least. I’ve found that the best method for getting these to come out well is to pour the batter out, making sure it covers the whole waffle maker, and then go do something else for about 25 minutes while it cooks…

All the effort pays off the next day though, when I pull waffles out of the freezer, pop them in the toaster, and slather them with all kinds of delicious goodies. Here peanut butter and honey.

After coating the waffles in goodness I slice them up so I can stuff them in a ziplock bag and eat them on the go.

It might look weird, but at mile 57 it’s good stuff.

Flymoore on Github—01.04.12

Just this evening I created a repository and used the requisite git voodoo magic to push the existing git repository this website is based on to GitHub. You can check it out here

This is neat for a number of reasons. Firstly now I have a backup of my website that is certainly more stable than either the MacBook my development version exists on or the VPS this website lives on. Secondly I know have a separate development repository. I can dork around and play with the GitHub repository as much as I like and it won’t ever break the live website. I can start editing the website from multiple computers through GitHub and not worry about the website repository getting all out-of-sync and broken, and limit the number of computers that have access to the flymoore.com repository. All in all it’s really quite cool that this is possible.

GitHub obviously provides the service that makes Git so easy to use nowadays, but the real hero of this story is Git itself. Git is so flexible. Many of my projects start out as a local repository on my computer used just so I can look back and figure out where a bug is coming from or just compare different versions of code. Git usually starts out as a failsafe against stupid mistakes, making it harder to break a project such that it can’t be repaired. If I want to though, I can go create a GitHub repository and share this project with the world, or share it with my colleagues on a number of private repositories. There are all sorts of different models that Git supports, different levels of distribution of developers and their repositories. (There are a whole bunch of interesting ones described here) Git will let you do all of this, and its all very easy.

Git is in a sense kind of like the Linux (guess who developed it…) of Source Control Management systems. It’s incredibly adaptable and really a pleasure to use, but many people are stuck using old more cumbersome systems or simply unaware.

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