Beau, Alex, KC, Tony and I took our mountain biking trip to Fruita, CO and Moab, UT. Fruita was a great place to ride, but that’s about it. The trails were awesome (we rode Mary’s Loop/Horsethief Bench, the Perimeter ride in the Bookcliffs, and Moore Fun/Mary’s Loop on Fri., Sat. and Sun., respectively), and the weather was great. The food in Fruita pretty much sucks, and there’s not as much non-riding stuff to do as there is in Moab. Grand Junction is a bigger town, and only a few minutes drive away, so we ended up there a couple of times for meals and entertainment.

I bought a new Nikon D70 before I left, so I did take a few photos. Unfortunately, I didn’t take it on the most treacherous ride we went on (Moore Fun), and Beau ditched all of us with the only camera we had, so no pics of that area. >:(

We left for Moab on Monday, rode Bartlett Wash after settling in. We rode Slickrock on Tue. and Jeeped on Wed. After 5 straight days of riding, we were all pretty tired. Tony and KC flew out on Wed. afternoon (they had always planned to leave earlier than the rest of us), and Beau, Alex and I decided to pack up and head home early, by way of Vegas. ;)

A little sleep and a lot of poker later, we got back on Friday night. No injuries, some great trails, and a great trip all around.

I haven't written up any details of the bike trip that Beau and I just did to Arizona, but here are some pics :)

I am the proud owner of the new Turner 5 Spot. After a month of not owning a mountain bike, it’s good to have my own steed again. It’s a work of art. :D

It does have a shitty saddle, so I’ll yank that off ASAP. Otherwise, I couldn’t be happier. I’m looking forward to breaking it in this weekend.

After reading a lot about new bikes on the ‘Net, I kept reading about a bike from a fairly small manufacturer, Turner Bikes, called the 5-Spot. It’s a bit of a different bike than the Blur; the Blur is more cross-country (tight and light) and the 5-Spot has gobs of plush suspension for rocks and all-day rides.

There’s a bike shop in Santa Cruz that carries both, and Beau and I drove down on Sat. to check them out. Funny enough, they had a Blur very much like the one I ordered, sitting right on the floor. When I saw it (it was gorgeous), I figured I’d walk out with it, cancel my pending order at the other shop, and go riding. But I drove all the way down there to ride the 5-Spot.

Beau and I took the 5-Spot and the Blur out and pounded some curbs with them both, and I was amazed at how much better the 5-Spot felt than the Blur. I mean, I liked the Blur a lot, but the 5-Spot was just breathtaking. The Blur is a 4.5" bike (suspension travel) and the 5-Spot is a true 5" bike. The real difference is that the 5-Spot is an oil/coil suspension versus air. It feels like way more suspension. The main things the Blur had going for it was the weight (it was about 4 pounds lighter) and the looks (awesome).

So I did end up canceling the Blur order, but now I’ve got an order for a bright red, large Turner 5-Spot. :D I should be on it in 2 weeks. Of course, the bad part is that I’ve already been off the bike for 2 weeks waiting for the Blur. :( At least I’ve been doing a lot of rock climbing in the meantime. ;)

The components are pretty much the same as the Blur I ordered: SRAM X.0 (Grip Shift) shifters and rear, mostly XT everywhere else. The brakes will be either Hayes or Avid Juicys (both 6" disc brakes). Wheels are up in the air a bit. They’ll either be Mavic 3/717s or Bontrager substitutions. Onyx hubs. The tires will be huge Nokian 2.3s. I’ll know more about exactly what and when on Wednesday when the shop can get ahold of Santa Cruz (where they’re ordering the parts kit from) and check spec and availability.

They paid off their last debt and have over $4 billion in the bank!

TiVo CEO says that DirectTV helped them hit the million subscriber mark ahead of their schedule.

This past weekend, several of us from work (me, Beau, Steve, Alex, KC, Tony Allen and others) went to a bachelor’s party for another guy at work (Pete Frank). On Sat., we rode Tahoe’s famous Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

It was a blast, but very challenging. We started at 7265’, and climbed for almost 4 miles to 8977’. The altitude and technical quality of the climb (lots of large rocks) gave us plenty of reason to stop and catch our breath. Once at the top, the real fun began.

The descent, to 6410’, was a technical rock-fest. Almost the entire route seemed to be laden with everything from loose, small rocks to granite steps to small boulders. Sometimes very narrow, the trail was treacherous…and lots of fun.

Steve did well until about 3/4 the way down. Then he got a little too confident and crashed in the most spectacular way. He should have been hurt a lot worse, but is just bumped and bruised. Tony spread his falls more consistently over the mountain, but also ended up just scraped and sore. I think all of us were off the bike at some point, but no one else really took a major header.

Our final stats were 1755’ of climbing, 2610’ of descending over a 10.4 mile ride. It took on the order of 4.5 hours.

Here are some pics.

Short version: I now have working DSL that is faster than advertised, and it was the easiest installation I’ve ever experienced with any broadband I’ve ever had.

Longer version: I read about Britsys on DSLReports.com. They had almost completely glowing reviews, so I put in an order for the new place on Aug. 8. They waited until the following Monday to put the order in with the telco since it was a new phone line. I paid a $99 setup fee and no equipment fee. They FedExed a Cisco 678 router to me, preconfigured for their network, and it arrived by Friday the 15th. On Monday the 18th (today), they told me to plug it in. Voila! I’m on the network!

And, get this, it’s faster than they said it would be! They quoted me $45/mo. for 1500 down and 384 up. I just speed tested at 1267 down and 633 up! And I’ve got a static IP! :D

Since a server is the main reason I wanted a static IP in the first place, it goes without saying that I’m happy. 668 is the expected max, after overhead, of a 768 up line, and I’m super close to that. 1305 is the max for a 1500 line, so I’m sitting pretty there too. Very, very sweet.

While we’ve committed to a regular three-day ride schedule (Tue., Thu., and Sat. mornings), we’ve often added a fourth day. We decided to add Monday as a regular fourth day to our schedule. Today was our first day with the new schedule.

Alex, Steve, KC and I met up at the regular 7am start time to ride Waterdog, but we rode it backwards. It was a nice change of pace, and gave us a chance to see the trail in a new way. Riding it in reverse like this also added quite a bit of climbing to the ride, which was a nice bit of exercise. We climbed up 13 Switchbacks Trail, adding some nice technical climbing, as opposed to the mostly fireroad climbs we do going the normal direction. It was a good day.

Anyone who wants to join up with us is welcome. I’m happy to say that we’ve got a solid regular group, which makes riding much easier since most of us would probably stay in bed a lot of mornings if it weren’t for the rest of the group. We’ve all gotten into reasonably good shape (I’ve personally lost almost 20 pounds) on top of having fun starting the day in a beautiful setting.

For the first time ever, laptops have outsold desktops. Laptops accounted for “more than 54 percent” of computer sales in May. In a related note, LCDs accounted for more than half of all monitors sold for the first time as well.

Nice to see that trends that Apple started well over two years ago are getting mainstream. ;)

The rumors about the new Power Mac G5 were true. From $1999 to $2999, these things look great. The dual 2 GHz machine looks awesome. 1 GHz front-side bus (!), up to 8 GB of PC3200 RAM, independent custom-built bus controllers to reduce contention between subsystems, 64-bit chip with full native 32-bit application compatibility. Very sweet. New case is all-aluminum with a fancy cooling system: 9 independently controlled fans that cool independent parts of the new case design. Sounds like it’d be loud, but they’ve got it down below the latest G4 case design.

They showed off Mac OS X 10.3. This thing looks hot. They’ve focused a lot on performance, which is welcome. The hottest stuff, IMO, is the new navigation stuff, called Expose, which provides better navigation through open windows than the Dock. Fast user switching isn’t a big deal to me, but a lot of people seem to like it. I’m not crazy about the new Finder using the brushed metal look-and-feel, but I trust that the overall experience will be improved: people that have played with it seem to love it. Can’t wait for the new Mail.app. All-in-all looks good. It costs $129. If they keep pushing out hot new stuff, I’m happy to pay $129 a year for it.

They released a few things today. iChat AV Beta is an upgrade to iChat that leverages the AOL IM framework to add real-time, configuration-free video conferencing. It looks marvelous. I’ve downloaded it, and there are small, nice fixed to the regular IM capability, but I haven’t had time to really play with the new features. I’ll make another post about them. To go along with it, a stylish, high quality web conference camera with built-in noise-cancelling mic called iSight is also out today.

Safari is out of beta, at version 1.0. It includes the new WebKit framework for OS X, which allows programmers of third-party tools to use the Safari web rendering capabilities inside their programs. Very cool. It comes with API documentation and examples, so prepare to see every program with a need handling complex HTML and JS natively.

All great stuff. The only rumored item missing was the new 15" PowerBook. Maybe MacWorld next month will get that, since there were a lot of announcements already. If it’s a G5, /hooboy/, will that be news. We know they’re making new cases, so there’s got to be something in the works.

Normal 7 AM ride. This time, Steve joined us. He’s never really mountain biked before, and he did well considering. WD isn’t an easy course for someone just getting on a bike, and he managed to do the whole thing without biting it (no Crash Cam action today ;)).

Alex and Beau went ahead of us. They rode the new trail (I didn’t take Steve on it since he was in deep enough for a newbie) and Alex did his best Superman impression after hitting the logover wrong.

Weather started out cold and misty, but cleared up nicely by the end of the ride.

This past Sat., there was a ride and BBQ thrown by and for people who worked on the new trail at Water Dog. I went for that ride instead of our normal Sat. morning ride.

Boy, it was a lot of climbing. We started at the normal spot at the end of Carlmont, but instead of riding around to the top of the fire road, we started up the eastern slope, to the street above the park. We then rode up that street to another trailhead on the southeastern side of the park. There’s a singletrack I’d never ridden before that leads to the 13 switchbacks. We rode up those (actually not as hard as you’d think), and around until we connected to the new trail. We rode the new trail forward, and eventually ended back down at Carlmont again. We rode up the car trail (the singletrack we usually ride down) up to the point where we normally fork down, and instead took another option down, which is a pretty technical singletrack descent to the lake. At some point, we rode up culvert drop and down the CCC trail (that’s the one with the 3 steep singletrack climbs we usually do).

In any case, we rode every piece of singletrack in the park, sometimes twice, and did almost everything we usually do in the opposite direction we usually do it. There were at least 2 new singletracks I hadn’t seen before. Lots of fun, and my legs held out. Took 2-2.5 hours to do. We’ll have to get out for some exploring with these folks some time.

The BBQ after was pretty good. Turns out that the woman who I took an intermediate skills class from with Erik a few years back was there (she’s the former coach of the Stanford MTB team). Turns out she’s married to the guy who fitted me for my bike at Trail Head Cyclery (who also showed up to the BBQ). Small world.

Today’s ride was a blast. The weather was a complete contrast to Saturday’s ride; it was sunny and warm, with blue skies. What a good day to be on a bike. :)

Beau, KC and Penny met Alex and I at WD a little after 7am, and we hit the trail about 7:20 or so. This was Penny’s first mountain bike ride, and she only planned to ride the opening fireroad. She had a little spill, but no big deal.

There were plenty of firsts on this ride besides Penny’s first ride. Alex was riding his new Stumpjumper FSR on dirt for the first time. It was also his first ride on clipless pedals. While they didn’t cause a fall, he managed to get the bike good and dirty after auguring in on a corner (just after Mount Rajmore). First ride, first wreck, same day. ;)

KC, who normally cleans WD, took time to inspect the dirt on the hillside of Culvert Drop. He took another soil sample after going over-the-bars on the nice dip before the singletrack section. It’s a new bike, he’s still working out the kinks.

Why don’t I have pictures of all this, you might be asking? I left the Crash Cam at home (with my whole bag >:() this morning, and Beau’s pics came out really badly, so we’ll have to live with it in our memories only. ;)

No real injuries, though, and a good time had by all.

This was our first morning ride. We started about 6:45 or so. It was foggy, damp and cold. Once we got going, the cold wasn’t bad, but the damp kept us wet and muddy (not always a bad thing, but I wasn’t looking for that this morning).

Alex brought his beater bike along, and we had to pump his tires up along the way, and just after finishing, my bike pump broke.

Despite the negatives, the ride was good. Hardly anyone was out there, and the singletrack was nice, as usual.

We had to start from the top of the trailhead, since the lower parking lot area was all coned off. I found out later that the area was blocked off due to a big fire at a retirement home on that block caught fire through the night.

At least Water Dog didn’t burn. ;)