SPIM the Pipelined Reindeer

I've gotten less than one ACBL masterpoint per hundred miles I've biked this year.

On Saturday I did finally accomplish the "four centuries in one year" plot, riding the whole of the Granite State Wheelmen's Seacoast Century. For being a much much flatter ride it also wound up taking me longer (8:45) than some of the earlier ones I've done this year; obvious factors I can add into that are an extra water stop, having to walk across five bridge crossings (including the pretty long one north from Portsmouth), and fighting the interminable headwind southbound. Also, we wound up waiting for the bulk cargo ship Gypsum Integrity to pass (especially frustrating because the lift bridge had just closed when it showed up). There was also some company; fredrickegerman rode the metric century plus the first 17 miles of the full century, nuclearpolymer and proven rode the tandem for the half century. (Route map)

I feel like I did a bad job of pacing myself on this one. Also that I wasn't eating enough, which was a little odd, since I also felt like a pigged out a little bit the first time at the Maine rest stop (but was hungry 10 miles later). And unlike last week, where killer hills need buff thighs, I was feeling this week's ride in my calves.

The clientele of the two centuries was also visibly different. On the CRW century if I could keep a 16 mph pace and finish in under 8 hours, I'd be towards the back of the pack. This week there were many more riders without clipless pedals, several more racks, more than a couple tandems; I almost always felt like I was "in the group" even when I was pretty visibly lagging coming back. I passed the hand-powered recumbent about three times. It also apparently was a big Team in Training event, with jerseys from pretty far away (Hudson Valley, Long Island, Pennsylvania) and per-group helmet thingies (one group had giant silver stuffed Hershey's Kisses). They also seemed to have their own water stop at Cape Neddick, which I didn't quite get.

Missed attraction: the Fun-O-Rama at York Beach.

There was this theory that I might attempt all three CRW centuries this year, and today was the third of three. It was in fact quite scenic and quite rural, to the extent that the pre-ride spiel included a mention that there was nothing at all between a store at mile 34 and the rest stop at mile 52. I'm not convinced it's actually easier than Climb to the Clouds, in that CttC had the one GIANT CLIMB, a couple of moderate climbs, and the rest rolling hills, whereas the CRW Fall Century had several hard climbs — no single climb was as big as Mille Hill Road, but there were at least a couple of places where I was running a full mile or more in my bottom gear.

I was again a little worried about prep for this ride but it came out okay. Significantly, I did not fall over around mile 60, and while I was definitely slowing down around mile 90 I'm willing to accept that. The whole thing, climbs and all, came in at 102.88 miles, in about 7 hours 45 minutes. (Route map; incomprehensible graphs)

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With the CRW fall century coming up this Sunday, this past weekend was the time to take a nice, relaxing 50ish mile ride. Instead, I did the Quad ride, good for 55 miles, but comparatively intense. The variant du jour was the dinosaur ride down Route 4, which as a bike ride is more notable for the two moderate climbs than anything else. As a positive sign, I did okay on both climbs, and was still alive climbing up inside 128 in Lexington. I was starting to lag just a tiny little bit on the last mile before Arlington, with the one unfortunate side effect that the new woman who was following us didn't know to stop at Starbucks. (Route map)

Major plan for during the week is to bike to Littleton tomorrow (much like this) for a work thing, for, say, 23.78 miles each way. It'd be clever, but at this point unlikely, to hit the gym tonight; Thursday or Friday night would be clever too. Weather is tentatively looking good for Sunday (clear, high around 71). Still planning on the Seacoast Century the weekend after next too...

I feel like I should get into having more of a schedule/plan for things, and try to a little more actively do things I want to do. Historically I've had this vague fear of scheduling myself to the point where I can't do spontaneous things, but "spontaneous things" these days seems to be "lounge around playing SimSig Cambridge", which does eventually run out of useful entertainment value. Things that come to mind:

• I'd like to get more board gaming in. Right now a lot of my game cycles are taken up by bridge, which is okay as far as it goes, but I haven't even played anything as pedestrian as crayon rails in ages (modulo a recent evening of Dominion). But, this requires other people, and I feel like everyone else is already overscheduled.
• For that matter, I'd like to be a little better at bridge. Playing regularly helps a little bit, but sometimes I feel like I'm missing some little detail in play that everybody else knows (more experienced people in our group talk about "leaving tricks on the table" and this usually isn't at all obvious to me).
• I'd also kind of like to resurrect the model railroad project in some form. Maybe I don't need to finish the project in the basement per se but instead learn how to do things "correctly". Maybe what I'm after is a club, which would get me a larger layout, more expertise, and possibly people more motivated to build trees than I am. Maybe that's TMRC, except that student groups are for students (AFAICT TMRC is still run by the people who founded the AI Lab, though) and the TMRC evening seems to be Wednesdays (the night narya is home).
• I should keep up the gym plot. It's good for me, even if the sequence of get home, sit around for a bit, work out, come home, shower, eat dinner tends to take up the entire evening.

With the CRW fall century coming up in two weeks and the Seacoast Century the weekend after that, it seemed like a good long weekend to get two days of biking in. The weather was quite accommodating, and I successfully went 54.5 miles on Saturday (map) and 49 on Sunday (map). I guess "successfully" for Sunday was pushing it a little; I was visibly sagging going up Strawberry Hill Road in Concord, fell out of the group heading for the airport route, and limped back home along the bike path. It was still 100 miles in two days, though, which is good to be able to do, and suggests if I do in fact sufficiently rigorously hit the gym the two centuries should be fine.

Yesterday I again did the Quad Cycles ride. I seem to have this bad pattern going where I'll do a big ride or hit some other distraction, take a week or two off, and wind up almost starting from scratch, so yesterday's ride was "only" 63 miles and I was pretty wiped when we made it to Starbucks. (I think I'm still on track to hit the September centuries.) After speculatively eyeing the weather for most of the week, it did wind up being a beautfiul day, especially when you were moving, though I also discovered the joys of iced Gatorade when I got home. (Route map)

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100 (or less) pretty flat miles along the New Hampshire coast. The half, metric, and full century rides go up a little bit into Maine; the full century also dips down into Massachusetts. Last weekend of September (could be either Saturday or Sunday or both), $35, registration closes 31 August.

I have my eyes set on the CRW fall century the weekend before, but I could use another T-shirt, and this is almost certainly an easier ride; if there was interest in riding this one socially I'd be up for it. More details online.

I figured a reasonable goal for yesterday would be to try to hit South Street in Needham, and while I accomplished this it just wound up being too hot to really go fast or far. Maybe actually getting out in the morning instead of starting after noon would have helped; so would have going with the usual group. Still, 42.52 miles. (Route map)

Also, the vaguely productive thing I did today was generating KML files from the data I have lying around so it can be plugged into various Google tooling. (Route map) If you want to look at everything all together this file can be plugged into Google Earth; Google Maps doesn't seem to want to try to display more than 8 routes at a time and doesn't even try on the rest.

I don't necessarily dream that regularly, but when I do my dreams seem to show up in a very well-defined world, and I'll occasionally even have multiple dreams in the some world. Hours or weeks later I won't necessarily remember the content of the dream but I'll remember the world. So a couple of months ago, where there was the futuristic deserted subway line built by a long-lost civilization cross-platform from the "normal" subway...I could draw you a map of where the abandoned-yet-running Orange Line went (and it was definitely the orange Line) and what surrounded the southern end of the line (it definitely went south from the station where I found it) but I couldn't tell you anything about how I got there to start with.

A week or two ago there was a commuter-rail oriented dream. (Funny how trains keep showing up in these.) From The City the main rail line left to the northwest; after some complicated underground winding around out of the central station (the downtown was kind of twisted, too) it became a three-track main running along an eight-lane freeway. Once you got substantially out of the city this became a freight line running off to Somewhere Else, but the last passenger station was maybe ten miles further out than I was. But there was a north-south main road, that led to a university sort of area; and if you knew what you were looking for there, you could find an abandoned interurban line that eventually would connect back to The City's streetcar system.

Last night I wound up driving outwards along the freeway. Actually, I was steering, and someone else had the brakes and accelerator. And this was kind of a problem, because there kept being police cars stopped in the middle of the highway, and my copilot wouldn't slow down, so I kept dodging, even the big pile-up in the left lane. Somehow we did wind up stopped, and trying to get away in an abandoned taxi...but part of this involved digging around in the arm rest to find bits of jewelry that I had lost, and somehow turning up the ex-cabbie's wedding band, which somehow made me flip out a lot. (And that's when I woke up, and decided trying to fall asleep again during a thunderstorm was a bad idea.)

I've sort of lost my view of what downtown The City is like, other than that it's sort of like Boston except more vertical, including some weird streets with bridges over other streets.

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I was a little worried about attempting the CRW Climb to the Clouds century today, but it turned out fine. A key detail this time around is that it wasn't raining, so I got to see some of the scenery places like Justice Hill Road instead of it being this interminable damp uphill slog. Mile Hill Road was too much Hill for me to do in one pass, but with three or four stops it wasn't a big deal. End result was 101.54 miles in about 7:45. (Route map)

Even if I wasn't riding with "the pack" this time (I thought the ride started at 7:30, the first departure from Concord was actually at 7:00) I did a much better job of keeping up, and that was a huge psychological help. I did start to run out of steam around mile 60, but when I decided I just couldn't handle the next hill and stopped about 20 people came up from behind me and passed me. The water stops were similarly busy, and the parking lot at the start area quite well populated by the time I finished.

The big disappointment was that the road up to the summit of Wachusett was closed. They made up the four miles by tacking them on to the end in boring parts of Concord, which was a little sad as well. But, I didn't die coming down route 62 in Princeton at 42 miles per hour...

Saturday's traditional games-on-campus mob included both a run of Notre Dame and a game of Stone Age. I enjoyed Stone Age (even if I failed to pick a winning strategy, and for that matter failed to divine what a winning strategy would be), but I definitely picked up that it had the same "bootstrap first, then get victory points" nature that Notre Dame does.

I find playing Notre Dame very straightforward, largely because it has three mega-rounds that correspond loosely to the three phases of the game. In the first round you need to either get all the blocks or all the gold, and ideally you can use the "move three blocks" specialist action to then transfer that to either the park or the hospital. Then in the second round you need to not die of the rat apocalypse, level up the park, and start getting VPs, and in the third round do whatever you need to do short-term to get the most VPs. In the first round you can get away with not sending someone to Notre Dame, but in the third you absolutely must to get your park bonus points if nothing else. There is a very clear distinction to me in between when you need to be in start-up mode and when you need to be in final-sprint mode.

Stone Age at least had the same nature. When do you transition between getting more workers and farms, and trying to mine your way to expensive buildings? Part of my problem, I think, was that my maniacal focus on picking up the green cards meant that I'd skip infrastructure in favor of VPs in the early part of the game. (And another was that the same maniacal focus meant that I'd spend an entire round to get three wood to get a green card, but that wasn't worth as many points as trying to spend the same resources to build a building.) Settlers doesn't really have that nature, because the things that get you VPs are the same things that get you more ability to do stuff. Puerto Rico to some extent does (do I grow new plantations, get people, or ship/sell stuff more VPs/money?) but you can also build up infrastructure on other peoples' turns, and with buildings providing both special powers and VPs there's some overlap in the "builder" action.

From the National Weather Service climate report: June, 2009 was 4.7 degrees below normal, and had 16 days with at least 0.01" of rain (normal is 10 days). But, the 3.22" of total rain is exactly normal.

In the names our ride gives bits of the route, today was River/Monument, Strawberry Hill, Dinosaur, 62 to Concord, reverse River/Monument, reverse Dinosaur, Airport; or if you prefer a list of towns, we went through Arlington, Lexington, Bedford, Carlisle, Concord, Acton, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Billerica, Bedford, Concord, Carlisle, Bedford, Billerica, Chelmsford, Carlisle, Concord, Lincoln, Lexington, and Arlington. At any rate, all of this going around in circles was at least on an absolutely gorgeous day ("it's stopped being March in June") and came in for me at 82.13 miles. This was a little longer than I was planning, and I was seriously thinking of bailing the second time we got to Carlisle Center (ca. mile 60), but I got talked into the longer route and it was good for me, and I even did a good job with the big hill just inside 128. Yay me. (Route map)

My current personal laptop is four years old in August, and it might be getting towards time to replace it. (Heavier than I like, extended battery makes it a weird shape, not great screen resolution, occasional hardware problems with the wireless dropping out, but otherwise works fine.) The current candidate, for a couple of reasons, is a Lenovo T400. Around hardware and Windows issues I tend to live in a cave until I really care, though, so can the greater interwebs help answer a couple of questions?

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I figured it might be clever to put a new head on our mop, since the current one is getting kind of ratty. So off I went in search of an 8.5" Roll-O-Matic sponge/scrubber mop head. Sounds straightforward, no? It turns out that places that sell mops -- Home Depot, Target, Star, Stop and Shop, those kinds of places -- only sell one or two brands, but each brand has a slightly different way of connecting the mop head to the rest of it, and only sell heads for their brand of mop.

Hello, Amazon.

Out of all of the inventions to come out of the United States Treasury, I hadn't realized the value of the soda token until recently. In New York buying an LIRR ticket with a $10 bill, the machine gave me back these yellowish coins a little larger than a quarter. "Great," I said, "what do I do with these, trade them one-for-two for $2 bills?"

But then I discovered their true purpose. Rather than futzing with the bill reader on the soda machine at work (only slightly less irritating than the T's Charlie Ticket fare gates), I can put one of these magic soda tokens into the machine, and get a cold can of Coke and a quarter out! Much easier than trying to pick out four dimes, two nickels, and a quarter from the loose change in my pocket, particularly since the soda token is the largest coin I have.

Weather aside, this was an absolutely gorgeous ride. It was practically all rural roads, taking the long route through Harold Parker State Forest in North Andover, quietly ducking into New Hampshire, and returning via the nice part of the Merrimack River in Amesbury and Merrimac. I even caught the train stations in Wakefield and Topsfield for paying attention. In all this came to 101.80 miles for me (route map, since to my surprise my treacherous GPS batteries didn't die).

Biking in the rain wasn't actually so bad. I maybe went a little fast at the start, hitting the first rest area at mile 47 right around 3 hours, and so after the second stop at mile 76 I was pretty much crawling home in that "mild rises make me shift into my bottom gear and curse the world" sort of way. I wonder if focusing on longer rides would help; if I'm going to do CTTC I definitely need to practice climbing.

Was I the very last person back? It wasn't obvious; the home base was starting to be cleaned up when I got back around 4:20, and I didn't see anyone come in after me, but I also wasn't obviously being followed the way narya and I were when we did CTTC. Overall the support was present but minimal, and if you're actually traveling light you could definitely get by on the water and food at the stops. In a couple of places I would have liked to see a couple more arrows, and I would have liked the cue sheet be a little closer to reality (especially where it could have said "no really ignore the 'road closed' signs").

I finally got passed around mile 88 by the guy riding the century on an ancient fixed-gear bike. The fully enclosed recumbent was cool, particularly given the weather.

New York City of course has two major train stations these days. Pennsylvania Station handles all Amtrak service in and out of New York, plus New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad; Grand Central Terminal, historically the stomping grounds of the New York Central and New York, New Haven, and Hartford railroads, is the Manhattan end of Metro-North trains. Of these the Metro-North commuters by far get the better deal.

Grand Central has an outpost of the New York transit museum (more a gift shop with a small exhibit space) and I took some time there to look around. My first thought was that it could reasonably compete in the "Classy European Railway Stations" competition: several concourses filled with little shops, a small grocery, lots of granite and marble, pleasantly art-deco ticket windows, and so on. There's a downstairs level with lots of fast food options, and a restaurant on the main concourse. I did eventually find the transit museum outpost, which was worth the visit if not huge.

I then bopped over on the Ⓢ train to Times Square (very strong signs that there used to be a 4-track connection between the Times Square shuttle and the 7th Avenue IRT line) and took a ① to Penn Station. You might notice peering at my Flickr that there are no pictures of Penn Station. From the concourse this is basically three stations. The NJ Transit area is somewhat nice but has few amenities. The Amtrak station seemed to redecorate aiming for "sterile" and got "vaguely oppressive". The Long Island Railroad section is dark, and crowded, and generally not a place you really feel like hanging out. (And it's a good demonstration that just because you put shops and restaurants in a place it doesn't mean it's attractive.)

Because I could, I took LIRR out to Queens. The trains were quite comfortable, and felt oddly larger than typical MBTA stock. Seeing real position-light signals in action was a little strange, but (after some deciphering) there they were and they seemed to be showing reasonable things. It was a pretty fast, pretty smooth ride out, not a bad way to go if that's what your commute winds up being...just with that horrible station at the inbound end.