For anyone who’s interested in cycling stuff — I’m thinking of riding Waves to Wine in September, the Northern California MS 150 ride. It’s two days, 75 miles each day (in challenging hilly terrain). I have the book Long Distance Cycling which has several training programs in it for a century, two basic ones and […]
Category Archives: Personal
Working on a weekend: with wine
I think wine should always accompany weekend work. Loosens up the synapses, and makes one care less that one is not relaxing, because one is relaxed, anyway. I enjoyed this interesting linguistic slipup: “Pullum, however, doesn’t really take Gelernter’s argument seriously, presumably because it’s absurd and ignorant and doesn’t deserve to be.” Parts of this […]
Why I bother
Michael Pollan has an article in the New York Times magazine this week called “Why bother?” It’s essentially a long apology (in the old rhetorical sense) for personal action, personal virtue, in the cause of reducing our carbon emissions. One of the last entries I wrote in my old journal before I switched over was […]
Ride report: Edgewood/Cañada
I met some friends in San Carlos for a ride today, and we went up Edgewood Road past 280 to Cañada, and then rode up to 92, and came back the same way. Total distance: 18.2 miles. Edgewood Road kicked my ass, hard. I really wasn’t properly prepared for any ride harder than Sand Hill/Whiskey […]
The USPS really fails
I just navigated a long and stupid phone menu (which had no proper way of failing if you can’t give a phone number that matches your address except to wait for a long time and finally transfer you to customer service) and several customer service representatives who transferred me to yet another representative, with the […]
101: revised
I did end up revising my 101 goals, and I’m feeling much better about them. Many of the biggest changes I made were to change “Do all of this” to “Do N of this”, and that had a bigger psychological effect than I realized it might. Knowing that instead of cooking all the rest of […]
Comcast partially fails
My previous experiences with Comcast customer service haven’t been too bad, but I had an annoying one this weekend. First, I got an online chat representative who wouldn’t really tell me anything useful about my bill changing, and referred me to my local service center. He admitted the bill did not make sense to him […]
15 minutes of fame, but not for me —
My dad is quoted and pictured in The New York Times today! He registers a complaint that his first quotation was incorrectly reproduced by the reporter, because he never would have said that someone “inferred that she believed”; rather he said that he “inferred from her comments that she believed”.
101 in 1001: feeling stalled
I’ve been keeping a list of my 101 with all the completed goals removed on my wall over my desk to remind me of what to try next. Today I put up a picture using the same thumbtack that I wanted to look at for a while, of Candace Wiggins (Stanford star basketball player). It […]
Mine now
The day I would have had to contact Terry to return Meg passed quietly on Saturday without me doing anything of the sort, so I’m now the happy owner of three bikes. And I need to start outfitting Meg appropriately, because today when the trains were late I opted for Maia instead because she has […]