8 Jun 2001 gleblanc   » (Journeyer)

Work Well, the manager/boss person leaves for vacation at 7am tomorrow, which will be both good and bad. Good because he -loves- to hear himself talk, and will make up BS about damn near anything he wants to (it's clearly BS to anybody with half a notion on the subject). Bad because now I have to do some of his job for a week. I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but the guy who used to do our tech support has moved to another department, so I have to do his job too. Hmm, I'm doing three jobs for a week. That sucks...

Looks like jfleck has been out playing in the yard again... Keep it up, gardens take time! We planted some blue-berries when we re-did the back yard last year, and they're looking really good this year. Maybe that was two years ago, I forget. We're going to get a crop this year, which should be really great in muffins and such. My dad loves to pick blueberries, so it will be really nice for him to be able to go someplace close and get them. I mostly like to eat them. :-)

Brits, and such

Hmm, I hope that's not a derogatory term, although it is a bit inacurate. I chat with <person>telsa a fair bit, when we meet up on IRC (gosh I wish I had a nice psgml like mode for this...), and she's been keeping really weird hours the past couple of days. Up at like 6am, and going to bed at 1 or 2 in the morning! Apparently she's "catching some kip" (did I get that right?) sometime in the afternoon. Still, weird hours.
The other "Brit" thing was pronunciation. One of the lists I'm on was chatting about "routers", as in the things that direct internet traffic, and got onto something, somehow, about how the "Aussies" and the "Brits" pronounce it. I've never heard the Austrialian pronounciation, but I'm certainly familiar with the Brittish one, as it sounds exactly like how we'd pronounce it in New England, especially an hour or two north of Boston.

Biking

I biked to work today. It was a great ride, I averaged 17.5 miles per hour. Amazingly fast. The ride home was 15.3, which is pretty good. My goal is to make every ride a better than 15 mile per hour average. If I can do that for a week or twos, it will be time for a new, faster, goal. Or maybe I should just tack and extra few miles onto the ride... I need to develop a decent training program (not software). A good set of workouts would be nice to have.
I've been noticing that I'm getting into much better shape now that I've been riding again. The first couple of trips to work were really rough, but now they're getting quite manageable. I can also see that my abs are getting a lot tighter than they were. My legs have some definition now, but nowhere near the bulk I had when I graduated High School. Hopefully that will be back before too long.
I don't mean that as vanity, although you could see it that way. I just hate being out of shape, but had trouble keeping myself there. I love biking, but I was really being a fair-weather biker for a bit. Now that I'm back, I'm thinking ahead, and trying to figure out good ways to get clean work-clothes to work, so that I can bike to work, rain or shine, and not have to lug a big bag on my back. My current thought is to rig a rack onto my bike. This is slightly complicated by the fact that I have a road-racing frame, and there aren't any mounting holes for the screws that would normally hold it up. I'll have to find a rig to mount it on the little triangular (should that have an ly?) shaped holes in the wheel drops. Oh yeah, one more way that I can tell I'm getting to be in better shape is that I can actually keep up for the first 2/3 of practice out on the track. I still get tired at the end, especially when they have me leading sprints, but it's a grand time, so who cares?!?
Wow, I just remembered something about the science stuff I was asking John (Fleck) earlier today! First, background... I make ice cream in the summer. Blackberry, strawberry, blueberry, mint, chocolate chip, whatever I can find that looks good. In order to do that, I have to make ice. Lots of it. At least 4 trays every day, often 6. Sometimes, when I take the ice out of the freezer, it will look like it's frozen in mid-splash. I'll get a picture to illustrate next time I remember. Anyway, I just checked the ice, and it freezes over the top first, and then on the sides and the bottom, trapping the liquid in the middle. As the liquid freezes, it expands. It's possible that at a certain point, this fractures the ice on top (since it can't go sideways or down). If the water was approaching the freezing point, as it escpaped the crack in the ice, it would be chilled even further, perhaps -actually- causing it to freeze mid splash. Any physics majors out there who can tell me why that doesn't work? I should ask muet...
One last question before I stop writing for the night... Anybody else know what kind of elevation gains they have on a typical ride? I've got about 350 feet down, followed by 100 feet up on the ride to work. All at just about sea level. On the way home, 100 down, followed by about 550 up, 250 down, and another 50 up. The ride home might even be hillier than that... (perhaps another trip down and up 50.

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