Mike, Alison, and Haley joined me and Val for our first real trip in the Minnie. We went to the San Luis Reservoir for the weekend. The reservoir is a collection of a couple of bodies of water, set near Hollister. The place looks like it’s probably fairly fun if you’ve got a boat, jet ski, or other watergoing device.

Unfortunately, while we did have Mike’s kayaks, the wind was pretty severe (apparently more than 30 mph), so they said we couldn’t go out on the water. We did spend a couple of hours swimming in a lagoon area, but never did get the boats in the water.

As for the Minnie, it worked out pretty well. They had hookups for water and electricity, but not sewage. Our tanks almost filled over the weekend, but never quite topped out. Since it was so windy outside, we spent more time in the Minnie than we would normally. 5 people spending a lot of time in the RV is pretty tight, but it wasn’t too bad.

This was the first time we’ve had guests stay with us, and we had all the beds occupied (this was the first time we ever even made the dinette into a bed). Val and I stayed in our bed, but reports were that the other two beds were servicable, even if not of Stearns & Foster quality. ;) I laid on the dinette bed, and it was not as tight for tall people as I thought it would be. I think 1 adult up to 6 feet tall would be fine there, but definitely not 2 of that size. The bed above the cab was a hit with the kid, as you’d expect.

We ate several meals in the RV, and it performed well in this regard, too. We didn’t cook anything fancy (hot dogs were the “big” dinner on Sat. night), but I don’t see any reason you couldn’t be a little more creative with some planning.

All in all, it was a good trip. Luckily the company was good since we were forced into close proximity for most of the time.

Val and I have been reading a lot about RVs, and one of the recommendations people have for newbies (and even anyone experienced who gets a new RV) is to take the RV to a site with hookups close to home and spend a night in it. That way, you get to learn how to hook everything up and exercise all the equipment, so you’ll find out what stuff you might need before you get out in the boonies. Seemed like a good idea, so we stayed at Travel Villa, a place in Redwood City, right off of 101.

Hooking up to shore power (RV-speak sounds a lot like boat-speak) was simple, as was incoming fresh water. We’d previously had a hard time getting the coach AC working, but had no problems this time. Good news, since the AC made me nervous. I think the coach batteries were too dead to start it, but after charging with the shore power, they had no trouble starting it up.

Staying in the RV is fun. We ran to Target and bought more stuff for it, including a frozen pizza to make in it for dinner. That was a good test, since it verified that the freezer and stove not only work, but are big enough for a full-size frozen pizza.

We watched a couple episodes of Entourage, courtesy of Erik’s boxed set (mini-review: first 2 episodes OK, outlook positive), and the RV makes for a nice cozy evening. The TV is small, but that’s not too bad in a relatively small space like the RV. The speakers are weak, which is bad when the AC and/or oven are on. Luckily, I’ve ordered a 15-inch LCD TV from Overstock.com to replace the 13" CRT TV it came with. 15" is the biggest LCD we could find that runs off of 12 VDC power (helpful due to how the power is wired to the TV cabinet), and I think will be plenty big for the RV.

To address the sound problem, I’ll probably replace the really crappy radio in the cab. I found a head unit at Best Buy that plays DVDs (I’ll run the video from the cab to the TV cabinet), which will then run the sound through speakers that are placed throughout the RV. That’ll increase not only the quality of the sound, but the volume.

Todd donated an old DirecTV receiver to the cause, so all I need now is a dish, and I’ll have a full-on multimedia setup in the Minnie. Not a top priority, mind you, but it’ll help kill time when camping in remote locales that don’t have much going on at night (common on bike trips). There are quite a few solutions to getting a dish on the RV, so I’m not worried about that. A lot of people at the RV park simply attached a regular dish to a PVC pipe, and hung it on the ladder when parked.

The last piece of the puzzle was a bike rack. I had a $100 gift certificate to Trail Head, which helped toward that goal. Bikes now have accommodations almost as nice as people do. I still need to work out a lock to secure them (and the rack) to the hitch.

Anyway, mission successful. All the major systems worked, and the minor problems we found were things like cabinet doors that are misaligned. We still have to take the RV back to the dealer for detailing, so we’ll have our list handy for that trip.

Almost ready for a big trip! :D

Here's a good chance for those of you who haven't made it out to do some trail work to do so:

Who's up for helping to trim the shaggy Dog? Water Dog Lake trails need to have the vegetation trimmed, duh. Like everywhere else in NorCal. We need a few good trail citizen to help us rake & toss brush this Saturday June 18. We're renting a gas powered brush cutter & the City of Belmont is loaning us a gas powered hedge trimmer, so we just need help getting rid of the trimmings. Should be easy work, as much a hike as anything else. Please reply if you can help, if even for a couple of hours. We'll work fro 9 AM 'till 3 PM, if you've got that much time.

Val and I bought an RV on the way home from our wedding in Nebraska. Here’s how it happened…

Before the wedding, Val and I not-so-seriously discussed getting a road trip vehicle that was more capable of self-sustained trips than the Element. We had looked at camper van conversions and pop-up trailers on the Internet, but never anything more serious. While on the road trip for our wedding, we saw an RV place in Iowa with trailers like the ones we’d seen online, so we pulled off to see them in person.

As we thought, pop-up trailers wouldn’t really be a good solution for us. They’re inexpensive, but the Element is really underpowered to be towing anything, and they don’t have a bathroom. We then looked at the Airstream Interstate, a van conversion that is very cool and self-contained. Our interest piqued, we left and continued talking about how serious we were about having a road trip vehicle that would be such a large commitment. We both agreed that we enjoy road trips and wanted to do more of them.

We had originally wanted to drive from Nebraska to Idaho on the way back home from the wedding, but we were delayed in leaving Omaha, so we decided instead to periodically stop along a more direct route home and look at more RVs—we needed to get more information on what was out there and how one would fit into our lives.

Our first stop was in Salt Lake City, Utah. There are plenty of dealers there, and we spent a solid day-and-a-half looking at all the brands and available features. We narrowed our search pretty specifically: we wanted a full-time bed in the back, a dinette (which can be a bed) and a bed over the cab (a lot of models have entertainment centers there). I do a lot of mountain bike trips, and we both want to be able to include our friends on trips in general, so sleeping 4 adults comfortably was a requirement. Our trips usually involve a lot of “stuff,” so storage was also high on the list.

We spent some time looking hard at our finances and doing research on some of the details that concerned us: where we would park it, how much it would cost to insure and making sure we qualified for the kind of model that would make us 100% happy. We ended up comfortable that we could do it, and so kept shopping. Interestingly enough, we found that an RV would qualify as a home for us, since we don’t own one, so the interest is tax-deductible.

As we shopped, we settled on a couple of front-runners, and none were absolutely perfect. Some had better headroom while others had better TV position, etc. We decided that the Winnebago Minnie 26 A had everything we wanted and was our favorite (the tipping point was that the Minnie has a “garage” storage area in the back). Unfortunately, the Winnebago dealer only had one 26 A, and it had an entertainment center over the cab. I like the TV (a 24" model and a surround sound system), but we really wanted the bed. The dinette converts into a bed that wouldn’t really be comfortable for 2 adults, so the longer bed up top was important.

We drove on, and shopped in the Carson City/Reno area next. Luckily for us, there was an RV show that started that morning, and they had one Minnie that was exactly what we wanted. We ended up negotiating a better price than we’d been able to in Salt Lake, and 5 hours later (!), she was ours.

It’s been a pretty surreal experience, but we’re both excited, and are now sitting down to plan trips—now that we’ve got the thing, we need to make good on our commitment to ourselves to use it. We’re thinking that a weekend at Yosemite is a good shake-down trip…. :)

The new trail that we’ve worked on this season at Waterdog is now officially open. We finished the connector at the top of the French Trail, and the bottom was done last week. It’s officially part of the “Chapparal Trail,” which is what we called “New” and “New-New.” So this trail goes all the way from CCC to the top of French on one long singletrack. :)

Alex and I rode the new trail that connects up to the rest of the network this weekend. It’s the second time we’ve been on it, but it’s much closer to completion now. The bottom of the trail, which mostly parallels the French Trail, now connects to the bottom at Three Planks. The new connector weaves back and forth over the culvert with 3 or 4 wood bridges, and is really nice.

We did a 2-hour ride this morning. The idea was to start at 6 with a slower paced ride to accommodate Alex’s friend Javier, who’s been off the bike with a back injury for over a year. Javier flaked, but Val came along. We rode the old route up the fire road and up CCC, which we don’t do often anymore. The trail just after the bench has fallen again, although not as badly as last time. The first climb on CCC has a new bypass, but it’s not really better.

The 7 o’clock group never showed, so it was just me and Alex. We climbed Switchbacks and descended to French to get the top of the new trail described above. The really steep descent to the French Trail has a new network of singletrack that cuts the hillside, giving a narrow, swoopy route to get down that slope instead of bombing down the fall line like we usually do. The new trails drop you right onto Sparky’s Spine. Nice to have the option, but I like the old way pretty well.

Waterdog is really becoming a park with terrific trails.

There’s a trial maintenance day this Saturday, May 14th to complete the new trail section that runs above the French trail. We’ll be connecting the trail at the top to the French trail. We’ll meet at 9, and ride the newly completed trail after finishing the connector.

I’ve now fixed all but one of the outstanding issues for 2.01. I think you’ll find that this site is now much faster and more stable than previous releases, which was the point of recent work I’ve done on it. My apologies for several bouts of downtime the site took over the last couple of days while I updated the code.

Most of the changes were on an infrastructure level. The Rails framework on which the site is built was upgraded to 0.11.1 (the latest and greatest). I also optimized the main page and the article display page (the most often hit pages), reducing the number of database accesses necessary to render the pages. The database itself has had several new indexes and hints implemented to serve up the data more quickly. The query that lists all articles on the main page is still rather ugly, and I will continue to work on that one.

The biggest change, and the biggest performance gain, was that I’ve moved away from the Apache webserver working in CGI mode. This old method required a new process for every page access and loaded the entire code-base from scratch every time. Now we’re running on lighttpd, a very fast, lightweight webserver. It’s using FastCGI, a container that is built to optimize the caching of several instances of the code and re-use them for requests as they come in.

Overall, the benchmarking has shown that the improvement is impressive: over 25x faster after all is said and done. I think you’ll find that this is now the fastest version of the website I’ve ever had. Database accesses for the most intense page (the front page) are now well under .05 seconds even under moderate load. And that page is the one with the killer unoptimized query.

Here’s an example of how long it took to create the main page before the update: Completed in 1.794307 (0 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.257199 (14%) | DB: 1.632127 (90%)

And after: Completed in 0.112052 (8 reqs/sec) | Rendering: 0.052303 (46%) | DB: 0.000865 (0%)

While I don’t expect future improvements to be so dramatic, there are still plenty of things to do to make the app faster. As you can see, rendering the page (handled by the Rails framework) is the biggest bottleneck now that the database has been reasonably optimized. The newest version of Rails has several new caching schemes available that I intend to try out, so that will probably be the next bump in performance.

I do still host the app in a shared environment, so load from other users can affect things, but I think things should be much better from here on out. As always, please let me know about things that might have been broken by this update.

Remember how Beau, Alex and I were heading to Arizona for the Spring Fling? Well, it was a complete bust.

First, Beau canceled at the last minute. Rather than seeing that as a sign, Alex and I decided to go anyway. I got to work late Thu. morning, having had to prep the vehicle for the trip seeing as how I wasn’t expecting to drive. Work’s been amazingly busy for me since KC has been out of the office all week, and he has me filling in for him. That all adds up to us leaving for AZ at 2 PM instead of noon. 2 PM + 12 hour drive = 2am arrival in Phoenix. Shit.

Feeling the need to give Alex ammo to make fun of me, I proceeded to run out of gas on one of my shifts. The RX-8 isn’t an economy car on the best day, and it certainly isn’t with two bikes on the roof. That, plus a 100+ mile break with no gas stations ended up with us out of gas. So we watched a DVD for an hour before the roadside assistance guy showed up with a couple of gallons to get us to the next station. Add another hour behind schedule. :(

We got to Phoenix and remembered that Arizona is an hour ahead of us. That’s another hour gone. It was after 4 AM. We had to be on the trail at 9 AM, which of course didn’t happen. The alarm woke us up, but we were both too tired to pound out a long-ass hard ride, so we skipped it. On to Sedona, where we found that it was possibly going to rain. Then Alex got sick for a few hours, because we hadn’t had enough go wrong.

The forecast showed no rain until Sat. afternoon, so we figured we might get a ride in. Saturday morning rolled around and it was pouring. We decided to cut our losses and head home empty-handed. We ended up having to drive through rain and snow to get home, but arrived home without further incident. Oof!

Engadget has started a TiVo deathwatch page, with evidence of their decline. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

TiVo announced a standalone HD TiVo at CES today. It’s also planned to be CableCard-compatible, which means it can take the place of a cable box, eliminating the IR blaster and re-compression, just like DirecTiVo.

The downside? It’s not going to come out until early 2006. :(

I’ve been working on a new version of this site, but haven’t wanted to mention anything until I was close enough to a release (so as not to tease). I’ve been working with a new language I wanted to learn (Ruby), and a new web framework written in Ruby, and it’s been marvelous.

I’m looking into changing web hosts (the database problems are getting worse again), so I’ll try and release the new version at the same time I do the move. I’ll keep everyone posted. I’m planning to have it up in the next couple of weeks.

As most of you who’ve ridden there know, there is no legal singletrack at Lake Chabot. There is an initiative to open a stretch of singletrack on the Brandon Trail to bikes. Even though we don’t ride there much anymore, please write a quick email of support. It can just be a couple of sentences; they count votes, not length.

Here’s some more info about the issue.

For this fourth of July (aside from being Val’s birthday; happy birthday!), Beau, JoeEtta, Val and I hiked to one of the high points of Water Dog (where we ride bikes all the time) to see what we could see of the fireworks displays around the bay.

At first we thought the marine layer might prevent us from seeing much, but as the sun went down, the night cleared up pretty well. Foster City was the closest display to us, and was a good show. Redwood City timed their show so it began as Foster City’s ended, so we got two fairly close shows. We could see that there were many other shows, but none were close enough to really enjoy. Still, it was a good night, and crowd-free. The view from there is really nice, and it was a good way to celebrate the fourth, IMO.

I asked Val to marry me today, and she said “Yes!”

Obviously, plans aren’t firm yet, but we’re looking at doing it in Omaha mid-next year.

We met on Match two years ago, and decided to be “exclusive” on June 23, 2002. We’re looking forward to being a Match.com True Story. ;)