Rules of riding in the South

1. No shoulders…EVER
2. Group rides shall never ride slower than 25mph
3. On back country roads, the only time a car will pass you from behind is when a car approaches from the front. Due to high order complex mathematical rhomboid chaos theoretic theories, all three paths converge at the same point to make for a risky intersection (see point #1)
4. Total elevation gain for a 3H group ride shall never exceed 100ft
5. 50 degrees is COLD
6. Headwind…always and without exception
7. Unrideable (noun): when water is on the ground, the conditions are not suited for riding ones bicycle

Mathematical!! Rhombus!

Do you want your booties?

Man, how could you not love this cartoon…it’s quite possibly the best 7 minutes I’ve spent on YouTube in a long time! From the booties, to the penguins, to the oxymoron.

74%?

If it’s only “74% smooth creme filling”, what’s the other 26%?

No matter, it’s 100% hazelnut goodness…

Downed Tree?

Back when we had that huge wind storm that knocked out pretty much every power line from Duvall (which just happens to be the name of what used to be my favorite band, but fortunately they re-formed into my old/new favorite band the Smoking Popes, but I digress…) to Seattle, I set out to survey the damage.

I think these shots pretty much sum up the chaos that happened around these parts:

I’ve been “Snap”ped

WordPress rolled out a new “feature” that will allow you to look at the page behind a link without actually going to it. If you check my page via a web browser (versus the RSS feed) hover your mouse over a link. Neat-o

Map crazy

So, when Gmaps-Pedometer came onto the scene, I thought “That was it, what could EVER top the coolness of this”. But over the past couple months I’ve seen more and more bike/mapping mashups and I have had a hard time deciding which one to use and which one is the best…hopefully this breakdown will help folks out when choosing how to document their route for their friends:

Gmaps-Pedometer: Originally started out as a running-route mashup, but it’s popularity quickly spread into the biking community. It is, I believe, the first and probably the oldest route-creation mashup out there. However, it’s been showing its age by not having any major updates to keep up with the state of the art. The biggest drawback is that routes are stored via a RouteID which doesn’t really allow you to search for routes in a particular area or to quickly go back to a route you previously created. However, the one saving grace is that it’s quick and easy (no login credentials required to create a route) to create/save a route but you had better remember the URL because once you leave the page, it’s lost forever. It does have elevation and calories burned but I’m not really impressed by those features.

Bikely: This was the second route mash-up that I found and is currently my favorite. Bikely has gone through some minor changes over the months to help ease the pain in creating/storing new routes and bookmarking favorite routes. I like the search feature where you can simply type in a zip code or city/state and it brings up a list of routes. Once one a particular route you it suggests other routes nearby…and will overlay those two routes. Very slick, very hip.

RouteSlip: I think RouteSlip wins in terms of asthetics/presentation, but is slower and harder to use than Bikely. In order to “Discover Routes” you have to dig down into the country->state->city with no real way to search for a given area. When you get to the city page, it basically lists all the cities that have a route pass through it. Needless to say, there could be so many cities listed it’s hard to pick out Snohomish from Sammamish or Redmond from Renton. If you’re new to an area or don’t really have an idea of what cities are nearby it can be a BIG pain to “discover” new routes. I’ve also noticed that its load time is SUPER slow when you actually find a route of interest. However I do like the elevation profile and I think it’s more accurate than Bikely.

VeloRoutes: The new kid on the block so I really haven’t had that much of a chance to play with it. But it’s less of a route planner and more of a route information gatherer. For Seattle, it can overlay the King County or Snohomish County bike map on top of the Google maps. It also has some pictures/webcams/hill gradient information. I think this is site is definitely novel in its concepts, but not all that practical when you get down to it.

BicycleClimbs: This was started by a guy here at Microsoft which I think is funny since he’s using Google’s mapping API instead of MSFT’s Local API. Regardless of that fact, it’s a neat little tool to help you find some hills in your area. It’s not really all that flexible since it’s listed by “Region” and you have to ask to have your “Region” added, but for those of us in Seattle it is a nice reference tool. I think people have gotten a little carried away in adding hills to the Seattle region and accurately assessing how “hard” (A/B/C scale) the climb is, but it is a niche website so what can ya do?

MapCruncher: Only works with Internet Explorer (boooo) but all it really does is overlap the King/Snohomish/Kitsap/Pierce County bike maps over the MSFT Local APIs. VeloRoutes does pretty much the same thing and it’s cross-browser…so use VeloRoutes instead.

Wayfaring: Not really bike specific so it doesn’t really have any of the features you’d come to expect from a route planner. It doesn’t do elevation and I feel it’s more for the non-bike crowd. Imagine a glorified Gmaps-Pedometer mashup geared more towards people making random maps about random things. In all honesty, the only reason to Gmaps-Pedometer over Wayfaring is the route storage…but other than that it doesn’t have all that much going for it.

NYC Bike Maps: There was a time when I thought I was moving to NYC. However, The F™ changed her mind and now I’ll be moving to SC at some point in the near future (she hopes). When I was assessing the bike-ness of NYC, I happened across this little ditty. NYC specific and, for the most part, the routes are already documented on the NYC Bike Map you can get from the city.

I’d be interested to hear of others, so if you know of any, please pass them along!

My new favorite weather site

So, now that I have been called out for not paying closer attention to the weather before venturing out on a cold Saturday morning, I hereby declare WeatherBonk my new favorite website.

It geocodes where you are based upon your IP address and then will display your local weather from a variety of sources as well as find local webcams to display plus giving an idea of the yearly climate…so cool it’s not even funny.

Falling apart

I’ve been sore…sore all over the place…I feel like I’m falling apart (instead of my usual “falling over” routine).

As folks have said before me, using a power meter is the suck. You see, I have two years of data and every year I get more and more depressed because I know what numbers I was able to do in the past, and when you first restart your training and you’re nowhere near those numbers…it’s depressing. It just goes along with that whole falling apart thing.

Black ice

THREE! The number of times I fell during my 1H ride this morning. I attempted to make it from my apartment over to our typical Saturday morning deli team ride meeting spot but after the second time kissing the pavement I called it a day. Now I’m sitting here nursing a sore knee popping meds…