Category: упражнение

Night ride

Took a night ride last night, first night ride of the year. A little more than 20ish miles, there-and-back-again on mostly bike trails from home to the Walmart on the highway then back home again. The dynamo-hub-powered Busch & Müller Lumotec IQ Cyo Premium (bit of a mouthful, that) headlight worked admirably as always. This light and the Shimano DH-3N72 dynamo hub that powers it are perhaps the best bike-related things I’ve ever bought, the pair being second only to the bike itself.

The legs felt strong and good the whole ride. Finally to the point in the year where a 20-miler is pretty easy, though the speed was slow.

At one point I saw a leaf on the ground that looked like giant pickle. It reminded me that I haven’t had a pickle for a long time which led to me having an intense craving for pickle juice. I think there should be pickle-flavored Gatorade, how refreshing would that be?! ?PICKLE POWER!! ?

Saw what I suspect was Jupiter, very bright in the sky. Haven’t kept up with astronomy lately so forgot to check the visible planet schedule. The planet was so remarkably bright at first I thought it was an aircraft, then perhaps a satellite flare but it remained in position throughout the ride.

Saw the first fireflies of the year on the west side of Holmes lake dam. Nice spread of them, twinkling like a galaxy of little stars in the grass. Later, on the ride back, I got hit by some kind of giant flying beetle on the west side of Holmes lake dam, which scared me straight out of any poetic notions of galaxies or stars or grass.

I really like night riding in general, it’s cooler than the day, there’s generally less traffic and it’s quiet and peaceful. Having a good set of dynamo-powered lights means not having to worry about battery charge levels and such, I can just get my bike, top off the tires with some air, ABC-Quick-Check then go. Maybe later this week I’ll do a night-time gravel ride to Conestoga lake, that’s always a nice ride. Especially when that one train always haunts me on the ride back.

Monday Workout

Monday workout: 2 sets each chinups, dips, foot-elevated bodyweight rows, pushups, sliding hamstring curls and ab-wheel rollouts. On the second sets I managed to get an additional clean rep of chinups and dips, two additional pushups and three more ab-wheel rollouts. Not too shabby if I say so myself. It’s still my intention to gradually increase the volume and variety of exercises each week or so, this week I’m adding the hamstring curls to my workouts whether I ride the bike that day or not.

Babylon 5 season 3 DVD set sitting on a laptop computer
DVD Decrypter ripping Babylon 5 season 3 disc 6 on the same laptop running the boioioing.org VPS.

Went to the library and got the Babylon 5 season 3 DVD set. My method of watching DVDs is a bit convoluted: my main PC doesn’t have a DVD drive and my laptop’s screen is too small to see from my bed so I have to rip the DVDs onto the laptop HDD, then transfer the ripped files to the main PC over the gigabit ethernet dingle-dangle-dongle you see coming out of the right side of the laptop, then I can use VLC or whatnot to view the decrypted and ripped DVDs on the PC with its larger screen and better audio output.

Probably be easier to just spend $25 or so and get a DVD drive for the PC.

Anyway, I’ve been watching the series before bed again recently, sorta skipping some episodes, not necessarily paying close attention to others, and falling asleep through yet other episodes. I’ve already seen the series straight through on maybe four or five occasions by now so I pretty much know what’s gonna happen and when. At this point, the show is just very comfortable, something I can turn on and it requires just enough of my attention to distract my brain from itself but not so much attention so as to require a mental investment which would cause restlessness.

Jamaica Ride

bike next to sign that reads "Jamaica North Trail"
Start of the limestone portion of the Jamaica trail proper

Made the Jamaica ride today. The trail surface was nice and dry for the most part, firm without much washout, save for a couple of small and easily-avoidable muddy areas. A few years ago parts of the trail were utterly destroyed due to harsh rains and flooding but the repairs have been holding up very well, particularly in light of the harsh rains and flooding we’ve had here in the past couple of weeks.

Did a there-and-back-again from home, to the Saltillo trailhead and back home. Round trip of 16.28 miles for a weekly total of 50.83. Still not great for this time of year but not bad for only the second week of bicycling for the year. According to Fitbit this ride burned 1005 calories. Seems a bit high to me. And by “a bit” I mean like 300 bits.

One of the things I like best about this trail is that it has these woodsy sections:

limestone trail through a wooded area
Nary a peacock in sight

Even though there is a train track about 40 yards to the right and a neighborhood about another 120 yards beyond that there is a feeling of isolation in this part of the trail. The trees and thick ground foliage (nettles in particular) really dampen the sound of city-life and civilization in general so it’s easy to forget about those things and just enjoy the scenery.

Didn’t see any turkeys or deer this trip. Or any of those groundhog things. Maybe next time.

Later did some laundry and the drawstring was pulled out of my Nashbar bike shorts. Real pain to get it back in. Used a bike-wheel spoke to thread the drawstring bike into the shorts so it was all nice, bike-related, bikey bikelstuff to get it put bike together again.

Bike ride number four for the year

Today was my third bike ride of the week and the fourth of 2019. Felt pretty good!

  1. Forgot to start Fitbit’s connected-GPS at the beginning of the ride, started it about a half-mile into it, but it doesn’t seem to matter because the Fitbit didn’t even start tracking GPS for the first portion of the ride anyway. More on that later.
  2. Sit bones are adjusting to the saddle again. Felt nice and cozy, like a hen settling onto her clutch of eggs.
  3. Saw a motorcycle cop on the bike path, not evidently in hot pursuit of some perp either. Just cruising along. Another cyclist stopped and gave the “what the hell, man?!” palms-up gesture as we were both bemused by Mr. Johnny Law(less)’s antics.
  4. My rear fender seatstay bridge bracket broke. Hit a bump when crossing a street and heard the sound of plastic tinkling on the ground. Stopped to make sure it wasn’t my bike falling apart which, much to my everlasting horror, it was. Thankfully, I had some zip-ties which appear to have nominally fixed it. Gotta remember to get a new bracket and more zip ties.
    zip ties on the bike's fender
  5. The big tree that was blocking the path the other day was cleared so the path was opened again. Since I haven’t mentioned this before it’s probably even less interesting to note than it sounded.
  6. At my turnaround point I noticed the connected-GPS wasn’t either connected or GPS-ing so had to start it again. So there’s 7.9 or so miles that aren’t GPS’ed. Sorta too bad since I’ve never GPS’ed that section yet so I’ll try to get it later.
  7. Saw something like a Heron on the ride back, near the curve where the trail becomes the segment where ducks and geese like to hang out on the stream.
  8. When I got home I did one set of “sliding” hamstring curls with my feet supported on an old skateboard. Gonna start doing more sets of these as I get more miles to help counteract the general “pushing” nature of bicycling and have better-balanced leg development so hopefully I don’t develop knee-tendon related injuries, ostensibly from overdeveloped quads (relative to the rest of the leg) like I’ve had happen before.

So 30 some-odd miles for the week so far. Not much but not bad, though not good for this late in the year. Might ride again tomorrow. Might not. I do want to take a Jamaica ride soon but since it’s a limestone trail that’s gotten soft from all the rain recently I might give it another day to dry out.

Also, trying to get back into a calisthenics routine, adding a new exercise or two to my workouts every week or so. Today, did two sets of chinups, two sets of dips, two sets of bodyweight rows (foot elevated), two sets of pushups and two sets of ab-wheel rollouts. (Actually, used the aforementioned skateboard for the “ab-wheel”.) Not too shabby. Definitely feeling it a bit but in a good way, probably gonna feel the abs later, maybe in a not-so-good way but hopefully not.

Again with the bike

I recently made a post about a discrepancy between the mileage recorded on my CatEye Mity 8 and GPS recording on my Fitbit and phone.

Although this is my same bike it’s from an earlier ride somewhere near dangerous animal holes

The weather was nice yesterday so I reset the wheel size in the CatEye and redid the same there-and-back-again ride as last time. At the halfway/turn-around point I noted that the CatEye was reporting 5.45 miles, so, in theory that would make a round-trip 10.9 miles. That agrees with manually inputting the turns into google maps with the distance measuring tool. However, the Fitbit app says 10.47 whereas Strava says 10.53…

[interjection — the Fitbit is telling me I’ve been sitting for too long. Gonna go for a short walk and stretch my eyes. … And back]

GPS trackpoints cause kids to run their bikes into *fire hydrants.

…so roughly 0.4 miles unaccounted for if google maps and the halfway-measurement-from-the-CatEye-times-two are to be believed. ~3.67% distance loss seems too much for GPS errors even accounting for the GPS points cutting corners during turns. GPS track points are gathered at a certain interval and connected algorithmically sometimes resulting in “cutting corners” like this image. According to the .tcx data file the Fitbit appears to poll the GPS on the phone at one trackpoint per second:

<Trackpoint>
  <Time>2018-11-20T12:46:35.000-06:00</Time>
  <Position>
    <LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
    <LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
  </Position>
  <AltitudeMeters>344.5</AltitudeMeters>
  <DistanceMeters>11115.37</DistanceMeters>
  <HeartRateBpm>
    <Value>127</Value>
  </HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>
<Trackpoint>
  <Time>2018-11-20T12:46:36.000-06:00</Time>
  <Position>
    <LatitudeDegrees>40.743xxxxxx</LatitudeDegrees>
    <LongitudeDegrees>-96.670xxxxxx</LongitudeDegrees>
  </Position>
  <AltitudeMeters>344.3</AltitudeMeters>
  <DistanceMeters>11118.250000000002</DistanceMeters>
  <HeartRateBpm> 
    <Value>127</Value>
  </HeartRateBpm>
</Trackpoint>

Dadgummit! can’t get the whitespace set right with wordpress, I’ll try to fix it later… EDIT: I guess manually encasing the block with  <pre>…</pre> tags does it.

One problem about this whole thing though, the CatEye stopped recording at around 7 miles. Forgot the actual number since I reset the CatEye shortly after. So it seems I’ll have get to do this little experiment again! Maybe next time I’ll see if I can find another one of those graffiti cats.

Not sure what this creature was, bigfoot perhaps if judging by the photo quality. EDIT – was probably a groundhog.

As for the ride itself, I saw this weird beaver-like creature. It was an unusual possible rodent for this area, it had a body similar to a beaver but a much smaller tail. I thought it was someone’s giant pet rabbit at first but it definitely was not that. Moved rather slowly. It took me a while to get my camera out of my pack and ready to photograph hence the terrible picture. This fella might not have been particularly fast but he was good at concealment in the brush. [EDIT – I think it may have been a groundhog.]

Also saw a daytime fox near this creature. I generally consider it somewhat auspicious to see a fox at all, let alone during the day, let alone in the day in a park where people are milling about.

Also saw this giant great dane standing in someone’s yard. Passed it on the “there” portion of the ride and again on the “back again” portion, standing in the exact same location staring in the exact same direction with the exact same regal pose. I stopped the bike about 100 yards/meters down the path and did a U-turn wondering if it was a live dog or a realistic statue, was gonna take a picture but the dog slowly turned its head and stared me down so I was like “Ok buddy, you’re real then.” Turned around and proceeded forthwith.

Finally, saw a dog that looked like a lion being walked by a lady who also looked like a lion.

When I got home I remembered to reset the Mity8 overall odometer to account for the wheel-size adjustment discrepancy. The original discrepancy was 38.25 miles but I adjusted for the ~3.87 that was missing from this ride for a total of a ~34.4 mile rollback, as indicated by this image.

*I suppose now would be a good time to mention that the red thing in the mspaint image is supposed to be a fire hydrant.

Велосипед два

Velociped dva

Bicycle 2

Looks like the weather might be nice today so I’m gonna try the same bike ride I took last time again and see if resetting the wheel size on my CatEye bike computer will make it agree with the GPS distance from my phone. Pretty excited about this because, well, because I get to ride my bike!

Betcha thought it was gonna be the Queen tune. Er, unless.. unless you saw the title in which case, probably not.

но я не гопник

No ya ne Gopnik

But I’m not a Gopnik

I sort of want an Adidas tracksuit. Probably mostly because of my Slavic ancestry and it’s apparently in our DNA. I do like the old-school style and  would probably be comfortable wearing it around. And I am pretty good at proper flat-heeled squatting. Wait…

Может быть я гопник?

Mozhet byt ya gopnik?

 

All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi…


I just wanted to accomplish one basic task today. But in order to complete that task I had to do some other task, which revealed yet another necessary task, and so forth and so on. That is how today has been.

Got the nginx and wordpress ssl stuff working reasonably well. There are still a few tweaks I would like to make but things are seemingly stable at the moment. I’ll probably explain the reasoning in a  future post.

Still need to get the database issues with wordpress and my virtual hosts figured out but that should be relatively easy. Mostly just migrating this boioioing.org database to something more site-specific, and then I’ll be as right as dodgers for this after.

And right as I was editing this post I used Mouse Without Borders to connect to my other Windows machine (actually the one hosting this site’s VM at the moment) to start a new DVD in DVD Decrypter, somehow managed to accidentally do something with the CAPS LOCK key when manually naming a VIDEO_TS directory and now the indicator LED on the keyboard won’t show when I’m typing IN CAPS on that machine. I know it’s not a hardware problem with this Corsair K70 LUX because it works fine on this PC.

Once the laptop finishes decrypting this DVD I’ll restart it and see if that fixes it. EDIT: noticed something strange happened with the Synaptics Touchpad driver. Hmm. Yes. I suppose a reboot is in order.

Constantly one more task…

EDIT 2: I’m stupid. Of course when using Mouse Without Borders the CAPS LOCK indicator LED would correspond with the PC that is being used and not necessarily the physical keyboard on which one is typing. I would not have expected that behavior and it even might have been different with a previous version of this utility but this is indeed how it is now. In my case it was the remote PC’s CAPS LOCK indicator LED that was toggling with the CAPS LOCK state, and not the LED on the local K70 when typing into the remote PC. To be fair to myself I have been keeping the laptop lid closed recently so didn’t notice this until opening the lid to check out the touchpad. At least I’m glad I figured it out.

So, what was I doing before this again? Eh, time for a walk.

Велосипед

Velociped

Bicycle

The weather is nice.

So decided to get out of the house and leave the vim and python and database stuff for later, when the weather is not so nice.

Today was the first bike ride I’ve taken since September and the first one with this Fitbit Charge 3 I bought last month earlier this month.

I’ve seen a couple of these cats around town…

…location of said cat

According to my trusty CatEye Mity 8 bike computer  (which I’ve had for about 10 and a half years) I travelled 11.23 miles. The Fitbit connected-GPS says 10.6 and Strava, which gets its data from my Fitbit profile says 10.64. Quite the discrepancy betwixt between the GPS data and the CatEye. I’m gonna have to *recalibrate the CatEye and try this  ride again later this week. Uhhhhhh-suming the weather holds out, that is.

Regardless of which method I used to calculate the distance, the actual time elapsed door-to-door was the same, and the MPH (or km/h if you prefer) average was rather slow, although I will note that the Fitbit seems to not pause when I do so perhaps that was a reason why it reported the lowest average speed. Strava seems to be more forgiving when it comes to adjusting for stops and reported a higher average. I’m gonna check if adjusting the distance in the CatEye yields a similar average.

[EDIT: just checked, the CatEye still reports faster average but within the right ballpark, about 0.2 MPH faster than Strava. I did not adjust the moving time though, Strava reports about 53 seconds more than the CatEye so that would probably account for a part of the discrepancy. I don’t actually care enough to look any more into this right now. EDIT 2:  yep, that was it. Cейчас всё хорошо]

[EDIT 3: Just realized I forgot to reset the wheel size last time I changed the battery in the CatEye. Silly me. I wonder by how much that will make the odometer distance wrong. Assuming I changed the battery at the beginning of 2016 the discrepancy would be about…

{checking… checking… checking…}

{…checked}

…38.25 miles. Significant but not that bad. I can adjust this in the CatEye’s running odometer later.]

I’m always a bit amazed at how quickly I lose my bike legs, even after a week of not riding, let alone two months. I was feeling pretty good the whole ride but definitely noticed a lack of pizzazz in the quads, particularly up the little inclined planes we call “hills” around these parts. I do note that there is a bit of tenderness in my ischial tuberosities, or the postérieur derrière as one might say in France, ou peut-être comme on pourrait dire en France, plutôt . Or “sit-bones”, I guess, is generally what people call them. Tenderness in the sit-bones, then.

At any rate, retesting the distance with the soon-to-be-*recalibrated CatEye and the GPS-connected Fitbit offers yet another little experiment. Perhaps the CatEye is not so trusty after all? We’ll see about that.

*Note: “recalibrate” was not included in the Chrome spellcheck database. What’s up with that? Now I’m second-guessing myself on whether or not it’s actually a word. But you know what really is a word? The word “word”.