personal

Autumn

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We have few “we-started-them” family traditions. Family traditions abound on both sides, but there are few we feel are our own. Apple/Pumpkin picking is one. Even that is fairly hazy in that everyone else has done it as well, but we try and do it every year which apparently counts for something somewhere, in some ledger of family tradition, or so I’m told, and leave me alone already etc.

Fruit off a tree is magical. It’s not from a bin in a store. It’s not handled by others. It’s not processed, folded, spindled, or mutilated as the post office is want to say. One second it’s part of tree and the next second it’s a snack, or a pie, or the promise of one. Magic I tell you.
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Noah agrees.

Railing away…

So say what you will about the value of your web framework of choice, but I and someone I work with (who never used this particular framework) built a useable section of an app and deployed to production in two weeks. Now we had some advantages. We had worked together before for about 8 months. My partner is really smart. I have some experience with the framework. Things that were working against us. We had very little time to produce the first useable bit of functionality. We don’t have our dev environment set up. We don’t have the proper test and QA structure in place yet and we were using a significantly advanced version of the framework since the last bit of development I had done with it.

Still, Ruby on Rails and it’s community is powerful stuff. A couple of plugins, a bit of spelunking via Google, and our own understanding of web frameworks made it possible to crank out some great stuff. Even now, as we start week 4, the code is getting tighter and more Ruby like. I can’t wait to see where we’re at in six months and beyond.

It’s been amazing.

Some common stuff we’re enjoying:

acts-as-taggable-on
newrelic_rpm
restful_authentication
rspec
rspec_on_rails
will_paginate

Thanks to the community for solving so many problems in advance.

Allez!

We’re looking forward to getting some of our solutions and ideas written up and coded for more general use. We have a public repository, and as soon as we can, we hope to start giving back.

Today’s ride…

Picture 1.png6:13am this morning I was already in Piermont, and starting my ride. Nasty for a weekend, but that’s the price I pay for having a full life. No real complaints… except it is seriously cold these days in the morning. And dark. Like, no going anywhere without lights dark. Fortunately traffic is light at that hour on Sunday. However, you can’t really relax, because the folks who are up at that hour seem generally annoyed that they have to be up at that hour on Sunday. Maybe surly would be a better description.

On a similar ride last week, I was feeling terrible. That is, I kept looking down at the speedo and seeing really low numbers. 9mph, 12mph and I felt I was working really hard. At first I chalked it up to the early hour. Then I got worried my ride partner would get annoyed at the pace and pick it up, and really I felt like I couldn’t really go a whole lot faster for very long. Strange I thought, that I have so little this day, but it happens sometimes (usually a mental thing) and since my ride partner was not complaining about the pace… who cares?

We get to the bottom of our loop and after a small climb we hit a gradual but long downhill section… one where we almost always enjoy gravity and push for whatever we’ve got. So off we go and I’m feeling like it should when we’re cruising at 24mph or so… except I look down at the speedo and 16.5, 17… Huh? not possible. There’s a permanent radar installation near a school we were just about to pass. I look up and sure enough 24 or so. Aha! Hey, Jenni! What does your speedo say? 23 or so Why? Tell ya later…

So here’s the payoff. After the last ride I commented to Jenni how slow the avg. speed had been on the ride. So she had tried hard to pay attention to the pace and keep things moving. (I, of course, thought I was going to collapse moving at what I thought was only 12mph.) Naturally, the speedo was set wrong for the previous ride also (the wheel size was set wrong). So she pushed because she wanted me to have a good ride, and I pushed the pace because I thought I was moving at a snails pace with the end result being one of the fastest rides of the year. Silly. And it leads me to this.

I often ride without any “data” like a speedo. I don’t have one on every bike. And there is something to be said for that. You trust your feelings entirely with no other gauge available. Now I enjoy seeing the numbers and having the data. Measurement is one of the few ways to ensure progress. But times like this make me want to ditch the thing entirely. All of us had a good chuckle about it though.

Busy, busy

Let’s see, where were we? I forget… it’s been too long. So here’s the brief: Noah started his new school, things have been really crazy at work, the holidays are coming, the morning weather has been freezing (from a bike riding perspective 45F is cold) but all in all, things are good. How’s by you? Technical stuff later…

Fat Tires

Fat Tires: The horrible roads don’t seem as bad, the bumps not quite so severe. I didn’t lose much in the form of performance, in many ways I’ve gained. In many situations the fatties handle better. [snip -ed] I don’t plan on riding skinny ever again.

Here’s another blog entry with a similar theme. [I can’t make such an emphatic statement. I love both for what they are. There’s a time and a place. At the moments my tires run from 2.35 (Schwalbe Big Apple) fatties to 35c and 33 middle of the roads, to 21/23c skinnies. They all have their place, and they’re all lovely. I will add that as the weather turns colder I spend more time on fatter tires. Seems like part of the cycle of life.]
Source: MnBicycleCommuter

Environmental Constraint = Better Quality

Environmental constraints, because they impel us to reduce waste and narrow our choices in raw materials and trims, also help us improve the business’s bottom line. When we reduce complexity, we allow ourselves to focus our efforts on greater innovations. We’ve learned that in reality, unlimited choice ultimately drives up costs. The ‘Live Simply’ mantra turns out to be more than a nice bumper-sticker slogan; it’s sound business advice. Time and again we’ve learned that when we do the right thing we end up doing well.[The project I’m working on is just starting to learn this lesson… I hope.]
Source: The Cleanest Line

Weapon of choice (winter division)

IMG_0129.jpgLittle steps on the way to the fall/winter season…

I have a new wheel. It’s got a blingy Chris King singlespeed hub in red. But wait you say, it looks like there’s gears on there? And Hmmm. 6 of them? Strange. The idea is to build a very strong and stiff wheel, so Jeff Jones reworks an cassette to create a 34 -17 set, designed around using a singlespeed hub so that there’s no offset. The wheel is built with equally tensioned spokes. It also makes it super easy to convert to a single speed should I desire. Nice. All part of the WOC(WD) (see the title).

Allez!
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Billykirk

123B_FRONT_OPEN1.jpg There’s a certain amount of synchronicity in my life. New things pop up in several places at once. In this case a friend with whom I often pass design ideas, sites, and writing sent me a link to the design of a token he liked, and another blog pointed me to Freeman Transport who making a fixie bike with S&S couplers and a bag to match. The bag looks like the work of Billykirk, which a few days I never would have known. There’s a link on the sidebar… cool.

Anyway, the designs are interesting, and I heard from Chris Bray when I wrote about a future product, and we’ve been passing design ideas back and forth. Cool. I love the understated simplicity coupled with handworked quality that seems to be the hallmark of their designs. Personally, I like the No. 123 Shoulder Pouch and from the Preview page, the item I wrote to Chris about the No. 206 ‘Green’ Giant Shopper. (Bergundy? Oh yeah…)

And to my biking friends, Freeman Transport will be selling the bag by itself.